, , ,

The Pitfalls of SEO

Getting to the top of the Google rankings can be extremely difficult, especially in a competitive market. But, it is possible if you optimize your website in the right way. SEO or Search Engine Optimization is so ubiquitous at this point that it’s very meaning has become lost in the shuffle. This leads to much confusion about how a business should optimize its website.

organic traffic

This causes two problems for business owners:

  1. You either have to hire an SEO firm. Finding a good one can take a lot of expensive trial and error.
  2. You need to learn how to do SEO by yourself. This can take years, and the rules of the game constantly change. If you’re not a marketer or computer genius, mastering it alone is near impossible.

Backlinks3

You can make your digital marketing life much easier by knowing what to look for when hiring an SEO firm. If you’ve handed your site over to a pro, but aren’t getting results, see if they’re making any of these mistakes:

5 Common SEO Mistakes for Business Websites

  • Entering duplicate material on your site’s pages or blogs – identifying duplicate content is essential because most of the search engines do not accept duplicate material. This will crush your ranking. There are tons of solid tools and software available to check for duplicate content.
  • Using bad backlinks – links to unrelated pages or directories; or to spam websites- spam links coming into your site is a sure-fire way to kill your rankings.
  • Over-Optimization of required keywords – Although putting your target keywords as much as possible can be a good idea, blatantly over-optimizing will hurt your SEO strategy. Make sure your text sounds natural, and you aren’t stuffing in keywords to please Google. If a human would have trouble reading your text, Google will penalize you
  • Bad Page Titles – When someone searches for the target keywords, the search engine displays the title page in search results. Try to make your title page with limited characters, while hitting relevant key phrases (again, naturally)
  • Image Optimization and Poor Meta Description – A search engine can recognize images in text form only, so it’s best to optimize your image with target keywords or phrases. Imagine describing the image to a non-sighted person. Meta data may not directly help with rankings, but Google does display it on the results page, so it is useful for drawing in visitors and helping you stand out in the crowd of results.
/by
, , ,

Getting Your New Website Ranked

Promoting your new business website can be a daunting task and having your product or service found by potential clients is the number one priority of new businesses. There can be no cash flow, no earnings, and no profits without customers. Getting your website listed online is key to establishing a new customer base and brining in a steady flow of leads.

website

Getting Your New Business Website Listed

Organic Search Results

Organic search simply means a website being found through a non-paid search. If you type “pizza delivery Philadelphia” into google and wait, you’ll find 7 – 10 listings. The listings are ranked by google in order of importance to the customer and need.

Dominating organic search through search engine optimization (SEO) is a huge undertaking. It works best when left to a professional. There are a number of things you can do to get the ball rolling:

  1. Index Your Website

Check whether your website domain or URLs is listed on the Google by visiting google.com/addurl. If your site’s URL is not already listed, add it to Google. Many platforms, like WordPress, do this automatically for you, but it’s best to always check. This can speed up how fast Google finds out that your business exists.

re-purposed content 3

  1. Optimize Content

The next step is adding some relevant content to your website in order to make it more search-friendly. You should add text, images and video to your site. Focus on the keywords that people might use to search your products or services. The more relevant your website content is, the higher it will be listed in search results.

Optimizing it can be tricky but to start, just provide valuable information about your product or service, as well as ways to contact your or order from your website.

Paid Search

If you want more control over how quickly your business appears on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, you utilize paid-search advertising, also known as Search Engine Marketing (SEM). The most used is Google’s pay-per-click program that allows you to write ads that will drive customers to your website and unlike running ads in a magazine or newspaper, you only pay for these ads when someone clicks on it, taking them to your site. This can keep costs down, and allow you to keep track of what’s working, and what should get the ax.

crawling

Paid search can wreck your business’ bank account. Especially, if you aren’t’ familiar with how to do it. A professional should be utilized herald if you have the budget for it, paid ads are a great way to get people to your site from day one.

Long term, you should utilize a mix of paid and organic marketing. This way you will capture the biggest chuck of potential customers possible and maximize the return on your marketing investment.

/by
, , , ,

4 Ways to Improve Your YouTube Rankings

YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine. only Google beats YouTube on the number of searches that occur on the platform each day. Many brands focus on optimizing their YouTube rankings, and the businesses that are respecting this search engine, are seeing double digit rewards. Retaliate1st has a team of video content marketers, that can help you dominate YouTube. Here are our 4 key recommendations on improving your rankings.

youtube-2

4 Ways to Improve Your YouTube Rankings

  1. Upload a Lot of Great Content

This seems obvious, but the number one step to getting your videos ranked on YouTube is to post great videos. We’re not talking about going “viral.” That occurs more from luck than planning, as it’s impossible to predict what will grab the public’s attention enough to cause a video to go viral.

Instead, you should focus on putting out informative, entertaining videos that will be useful to your customers. They can be funny. They can be straight-info. They can be a combination. Just don’t make them boring, or worse, uninformative.

  1. Beef-Up Your Profile

Make sure that your YouTube profile is not an afterthought. Load it with info about your company, and most importantly, how you can help your potential customers (viewers).

You should use this area to link to your other social media platforms, your website, blogs, and anywhere else your company has a presence.

youtube-3

Load your videos, and break them down into playlists. IF you are familiar with SEO or website building, you’ll recognize the concept of creating “silos” of content. Playlists are an easy way to silo (categorize) your videos. This helps your viewers find relevant videos, and helps your page rank because it is easier for YouTube to index your content.

  1. Choose Your Keywords Carefully

It’s amazing to watch a business agonize over which keywords and key phrases to use on their website, only to see them treat the keywords of their YouTube videos as meaningless.

YouTube Keyword Optimization & Targeting

If you’ve taken the time to create a video, take the extra step and:

  • Do keyword research – treat this as you would a main page or blog on your website. Analyze your competition, check for the overall draw of the keywords, etc.
  • Perform a search – check out the competition. See how the titles and descriptions of the most-watched related videos are worded

youtube

  1. Craft Killer Titles

Your video’s title is the make-or-break moment. Even if you manage to get it ranked, a boring title will keep users from clicking through.

Treat video titles the same as you would pages on your site, the subject of one of your email marketing campaigns, or the headline of a direct mail piece. Every word you write is marketing, Your video titles, if written properly, can help propel you past your competition.

youtube-4

Try to include keywords/phrases while engaging the audience and enticing them to click. Despite current trends for adverb-drenched hyperbole, the old standby headline architypes: questions, how-to, and bold statements still rule.

/by
, , , ,

3 Key On-Page SEO Ranking Factors

On-page SEO factors are fast becoming underrated and undervalued. But, their importance is actually increasing. If you implement these three factors on your site, you’ll leapfrog your completion. Let them deplete their budget on excessive link buying and the latest fads while you strengthen your on-site SEO and dominate them.

How Content can be the tip of your spear, with the other points being social and SEO

How Content can be the tip of your spear, with the other points being social and SEO

3 Key On-Page SEO Ranking Factors

  1. Title Tags

All of your SEO efforts are wasted if you don’t have good title tags. If you’ve outsourced the building of your site, or its digital marketing, do a quick search of your title tags to make sure they’re strong enough to grab Google’s attention.

Do your titles sound natural?

Do they describe what your service or product is about?

If you’re a local business, do they let potential customers know where you’re located?

A huge problem with small businesses is that when they farm out the building of their sites, the SEO firms either mis-title their pages, giving them generic names, or they only put effort into the site’s homepage.

off-page-seo

Every page, every article, every blog must have a strong title if you want to rise to the top of the rankings and stay there.

A good way to start is to make sure the keyword of that page is in the title.

Selling smart phone covers in San Diego? Start with:

“Smart phone covers stores in San Diego”

In general, the closer the keyword is to the beginning of your title, the more weight it will carry. But, make it sound natural.

You can build content, and great titles, many times over by repurposing

  1. Content

Better content means better rankings. And, good content meets Google’s criteria for being:

  • Uniquely valuable (pages that would be described by 80%+ of your visitors as being useful and high quality)
  • Sharable (remarkable videos, pictures, and text aid your shareability)
  • Naturally keyword optimized

Good content provides a breeding ground for your keywords and key phrases. It allows you to optimize your site without sounding unnatural, because you’re using your key phrases as a way of informing your audience.

on-page-seo

Note for pictures and video: don’t get lazy when it comes to optimizing images and video. Alt tags are extremely important for your media. Sometimes just optimizing your images can push you over the hump, and get your site on page one.

  1. Contact Info Consistency

This is a minor factor with Google, but a major one with customers.

Make sure that a potential customer could land on any page on your site and easily find your contact info. Don’t assume that just because your phone number or email is in your header, that this will be enough. Place your contact info (forms, email link, clickable phone number) throughout your content, as appropriate.

Remember that not everyone will discover your site through your home page. Many will land on deep pages. Give them a way to contact you and you’ll pull more leads. Plus, Google does reward this practice, and specifically penalizes sites that have less than optimal contact information listed.

/by
, , , ,

Building Your Brand With Content

Content is like water, marketers need it to survive. It is the life-force of all modern marketing engines, especially those that rely on in-bound traffic. Having built many high-speed content engines, we recommend building your brand strategy, content plan and then following these tips to optimize your content.

Simple Content Strategy Flow Diagram

Simple Content Strategy Flow Diagram

2 Ways To Build Your Brand With Content

  1. Focus on the Customer

Just like in sales, if you want to gain and keep your customer’s attention, you need to focus on them. While many businesses are now utilizing content marketing, most miss the mark by using their content to talk only about themselves.

Content --> SEO and Social Media

Content –> SEO and Social Media

Yes, you can use articles, videos, podcasts, pictures, and social media to tell your customers how great you are, how many awards your business has won, and how highly rated you are. But, you have to bend that info back, and let them know how all of that will benefit them.

  1. Storytelling

Telling stories is one of the oldest ways to hold someone’s attention. In sales and business, it’s no different. In fact, good storytelling in your content marketing can build your brand and increase leads and sales.

Tying in with focus on the customer, using stories about people “just like them” helps cement your brand as a solution in their mind.

content-marketing

So, rather than simply cutting-and-pasting a review from a client, use that testimonial to create a story.

Content Options

What’s more compelling:

“This service is great. 5-Stars.” – Mrs. Jones, Westchester, NY

Or

“Water was bursting out of the pipes, the water heater was rattling, and a small flood was forming in the basement. As if that wasn’t bad enough, when Mrs. Jones called us, she was in near-tears as she watched countless memories stored in irreplaceable photo albums float away.  We were able to get to Mrs. Jones’ home within the hour, patch the leak, drain the flood, and had her waterheater up and running again by morning. Here’s what Mrs. Jones had to say about her experience with us: This service is great! 5-Stars.”

In the latter case, you’re walking the potential customer through a situation we all have been through. The testimonial is fairly weak in both cases, as many are. Most of your customers are going to give a short review. They’re busy, and most people have a tendency to “not know what to say” when faced with a blank page. So, don’t expect effusive praise from everyone. However, even small testimonials, when embedded in the story of how it happened, will implant in the mind of your future customer as the go-to solution when they have a similar problem.

/by
, , , ,

Organic vs Pay Per Click Traffic

Which is better for small businesses, organic traffic driven by Search Engine Optimization (SEO), or pay per click advertising?

  • 70% of the time, searchers are clicking on organic links. Some surveys have shown that 70 – 80% of searchers purposely ignore the ad listings because they feel that paid ads = them being pressured to buy once they reach the site

This can be an advantage. If you are having a sale, an event, or you are running a weather or time-dependent service, then focusing on the 20 – 30% of users who happily click paid ads can eliminate most of the information seekers and tire-kickers.

organic traffic 2

Organic Traffic vs PPC

But, long term, relying solely on PPC can miss out on a huge portion of your potential customers.

  • In many businesses, the close rate for SEO traffic climbs as high as 15%, while ad-driven leads close at less than 2%.

This varies by industry, but the numbers speak overwhelmingly in favor of organic traffic. The situation can flip when it comes to “emergency” services, i.e., plumbers on sub-zero nights, roofers during heavy rain storms. In those cases, they numbers even out. But, the rest of the time, organic heavily outperforms PPC.

Want the Most Leads and Sales? Use Both PPC and SEO

While organic out performs PPC in most cases, there are times when you need PPC ads to survive. The problem usually arises when small companies treat PPC as the holy grail, throwing money at it, hoping for the best.

organic traffic 3

The truth is that pay per click ads must be:

  • Highly focused – use them during the best times, then get out of the market. If you’re having a sale, launching a new product or event, or you are offering a product or service that tie-in with the weather, time of year, or new-event, use PPC to leap-frog your competitors.
  • Well written – most PPC ads are awful; poorly written and playing follow-the-leader. Would you send out a mailer that looks exactly like your competitor’s mailing? OF course not. Don’t waste capital on PPC ads if you’re unwilling to stand out
  • Used to boost organic traffic – when you’re first starting, it can take a while to get the SEO/organic search ball rolling. PPC is very useful during this time because it brings in much needed traffic.

Combining focused, well written ads with a strong SEO platform will have your business accessing 100% of your potential customers, driving in new traffic and leads year-round.

/by
, , ,

How to Improve Your Site’s Crawling Ability and Increase Rankings

Has your site been stuck on page 2 or 3 of Google’s search engine results pages (SERP)? Or, worse yet is it foundering in the great beyond of pages 4 through oblivion? Well that could be based on how Google is crawling your site.

Maybe you’ve managed to tweak your site and get it onto page 1, but you can never seem to nudge it into the top 5 results.

In all of these cases, a quick focus on both your on-page search engine optimization (SEO), content, and your site’s craw-ability will boost your rankings, and may even push you into the top three spots on page 1.

What is Crawling?

Crawling is a term for how search engines read a website. They send out bots that search or “crawl” through the content, internally, of every site on the web. The exact pathways are unknown, as Google never reveals all, but the basics are well established.

The good news is that many of the ways your site is crawled by Google are similar to how it’s read by your human visitors.

The bad news is that technical issues need to be turned over to a professional because they are complicated.

crawling 2

Internal Links

If you build a site that is easy for humans to read, Google will favor your website. In the early days of Google domination, a common theme was that Google liked to give a site the Grandma Test. Could the average grandmother navigate your website without becoming confused and frustrated.

This is still a good measure. And one of the ways to make your business’ site more Grandma ready is to increase interlinking.

  • Link internally on your site, from page to page
  • Make sure your home page is easy to find no matter where on the site the user is – no more than two clicks, one is preferable
  • Link to all email, phone numbers, and contact methods

Think of interlinks like tiny bridges. If your site is a huge park with lots of paths, small streams, islands of grassy land, it can become easy for someone to get lost. But, if you install enough bridges with good directions, it will be easier to find one’s way home.

The easier it is for Google Bot to crawl your site with well-placed interlinks, the higher it will rank your site. Good interlink pathways increases the number of pages the bot will crawl, increasing your Page Rank.

crawling 3

Detours Wreck Rankings

Do you hate driving through traffic then being forced into a detour without much direction for an alternate route? So does Google Bot.

Broken Links, 404 Errors (page not found) and dead-end links frustrate the bot, and your users. If you have 404’s fix them with good re-directs. Use Google Webmaster Tools to scan your site for broken links. Find them and either delete them or have them fixed with a re-direct.

/by
, , , ,

Using Re-Purposed Content To Boost Your SEO

Even business owners who’ve bought into the concept of content marketing often complain that creating all that content is a lot of work. Yes, it pays off, but even the most dedicated content marketing gurus can go through lulls. These are the lulls where fresh content is hard to come by. This is why re-purposed content can be critical to your content marketing strategy.

re-purposed content 1

If you’re in a lull, don’t worry. Learn how to easily re-purpose your blogs, videos, and articles. You’ll have a never-ending stream of content for your site and your social media campaigns.

Here are three ways to easily re-use content without getting duplicate content penalties from Google:

  1. Transcribe Videos

Transcription of your videos: long or short, self-generated or professionally made, gives you a great piece of SEO friendly content that would normally be lost.

If you have review videos, having them transcribed gives you a double dose of credibility and status.

Re-Purposed Content vs Fresh Content

Not only does the text from your videos give you fresh content, but it gives those with slow internet connections, or those who simply don’t like video content, a chance to read what your video was all about. You can add on to this, tying-in a strong call to action, or boosting thin areas with helpful explanations, or you can simply have the video transcribed, give it an SEO-solid title, and post it as a new blog, page, or article.

Having this done may seem like a lot of time-consuming work, however you can have the task performed on sites like Fiverr or Upwork. It will only cost a few dollars per video and leave you freed up to do more important tasks.

re-purposed content 3

  1. Turn Blogs Into Social Media Posts

Taking the best lines from your blogs and using them as text-content on Social Media is a great way to re-purpose content. You can generate several good posts from a single blog post.

You could also create a small graphic of the quote and then post a picture and text. Graphic “quotes” tend to be very sharable on Facebook and can give your new content even more life.

  1. Use Blog or Video Content for Infographics

Infographics are popular because they deliver bite-sized chunks of info in a striking, visual package.

This helps you catch the attention of those who only scan information, rather than read it. This makes infographics ideal for your mobile marketing efforts.

re-purposed content 2

Users seem to engage with infographics more frequently than text. This makes them very sharable and highly engaging. This will help your social media marketing efforts, and can help get your blogs and articles get shared more often, giving your SEO a boost as well.

/by
,

Are Backlinks Still Important For Business SEO

content marketing

With the whirlwind of changes at Google, many businesses are confused about how to boost their site’s rankings without being penalized. Yes, Google has changed its algorithm (scoring system for how it ranks websites in their search results). But, the truth is that Google is always changing its scoring system. We only hear about the major updates. No matter what changes Google implements, one thing it has never, and probably will never, tolerate is using spammy, paid backlinks to boost a site’s rankings. This is actually good news for most businesses. If you play by the rules, you’ll dominate your competition.

We want to lay out our recommendations on how to use backlinks to boost your business through dominating the SERPs and driving organic traffic to your website.

Example of strong incoming backlinks

Example of strong incoming backlinks

The Truth About Backlinks

In the old days, simply purchasing large batches of back links and pointing them to your site’s home page would get you ranked on page one quickly.

Google caught up with the schemes and began penalizing those companies that attempted to game the system.

Unfortunately, most SEO firms threw the baby out with the bathwater. They railed against all back-linking strategies, fearful that they’d be on the business-end of a Google-slap.

 

Bad Back Links Are Spam

If you can buy several thousand links for a few dollars, you can be sure that they’re coming from spam sites. Utilizing these links will give your company a momentary boost in the search rankings.

However, Google will catch up and penalize your site.

 

Should You Avoid Back Links for Your Business Site?

No. You just have to get the right kind of links. The good news is that if you back link properly, your site will rank high and stay high, dominating your market.

The bad news is that this process is time-consuming, and will require a real effort in content marketing. Quality back linking involves writing articles, making videos, sharing content to social media, cooperating with other businesses through guest postings, and overall, building a ton of content that is interesting and useful to your customers.

  • It is difficult, time consuming and requires a specific skill set to do so. Therefore, most of the fly-by-night SEO firms want nothing to do with it.
  • However, content marketing, and back-links generated from quality content will boost your search rankings, and help convert traffic into leads.

 

Remember that SEO needs to be one part of an overall content strategy and that joining your social and SEO/ SEM teams under your content team, will allow for you to find efficiencies and lower CAC and CPL in your business. We frequently see paid cost drop, while organic growth occurs which is ideal for any start-up or emerging business.

How Content can be the tip of your spear, with the other points being social and SEO

How Content can be the tip of your spear, with the other points being social and SEO

/by

Contact

Get in touch

This contact form is deactivated because you refused to accept Google reCaptcha service which is necessary to validate any messages sent by the form.

Address

Retaliate First LLC
1412 Broadway, 21st Floor
10018 New York

Get in touch

hi@retaliate1st.com
+1 (917) 733-0978

Sitemap:

Our Services
Blog
Clients
Our Team

© 2019 Retaliate First LLC / Privacy / Terms of Use