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How to Get Your Site Featured in Google’s Snippet

How Do You Get Your Site Featured in Google’s Snippet?

Getting to the top of Google’s search pages is no longer enough to dominate your completion. While good SEO keeps your site on the first page, and well-written ads keep you atop the PPC results, there is a newcomer in the search world: Snippets

Snippets

Google wants to help searchers. It’s what launched them to become the dominant search engine that they are today. Anyone who remembers the frustrating search results on Yahoo, Lycos, or Dogpile will attest that Google simply delivers better search results.

With mobile and “question” searches rising, Google has changed the game again.

In almost any search you’re now bound to find a snippet of info, often enumerated, in a small box between the final PPC ad and the first organic listing. Below is the snippet that appears for the search “How to Get More Leads:”

Snippets Are Quick Answers

Google puts up snippets with the best info available. This allows users to get the answers they’re looking for without clicking the link. However, since the snippets tend to display only part of the info, the links inside of the snippet box tend to be clicked a lot.

  • Google can source simple, direct answers from their own knowledge base.
  • But, most business or product related queries are sourced from third party sites, i.e., your web site.

Imagine the potential traffic that would result in an SEO strategy that lands you in the top 3 of the PPC ads, with a featured snippet, and then the top organic search result.

How to Get a Featured Snippet

The problem is that getting your site featured isn’t easy. But, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. And, with snippet results being so new, we’re not even exactly sure how Google pulls the info. Or, if they will rotate results in the future.

But, we can speculate and improve our business sites so that we have the best possible chance of being featured. At worst, you’ll improve the content of your site and make your customers very happy. An informative, easy-to-read site will almost always bring in more leads, clients, and sales.

Step 1:

  • SearchEngineLand recommends the following tactic for your first step:

Identify a common, simple question related to your market area. Provide a clear and direct answer to the question. Offer value added info beyond the direct answer. Make it easy for users (and Google) to find the information

The advice is solid. Their answer is actually the featured snippet for the search “how to get a featured snippet.”

Step 2:

  • Answer Questions

Research the most asked questions about your product, service, or industry. Create pages and blog posts that answer this question.

Be direct

– title pages and blogs with the exact question wording. Then, answer the query with as much info as needed. Use numbered lists and bullet points.

Break up info to make it both easier for your customer to absorb (or skim), and for Google to pull the best bits.

Step 3

  • Make your snippet-worthy information easy to find

This requires some basic SEO housekeeping:

  • Giving each article or blog a strong title that uses the question
  • Using the question and its variation in the content
  • Adding pictures or video, with proper tagging, as needed
  • Over deliver on info. Don’t skimp on the answer. You can provide long copy while also using bullets and numbered lists.
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How To Use Instagram For Lead Generation

Instagram is still considered by many in the pay-per-click marketing word, to be the new kid on the block. With newness comes a bit of fear, so many small and medium businesses have been hesitant to stray from using only Google and Facebook PPC.

instagram

But, it can be a huge lead booster if utilized properly. Here’s why?

Using Instagram To Create Leads For Your Business

  1. Visual Marketing is a Dominant Force

Content marketing rules, and will continue to be the most useful form of marketing for years to come. As the internet becomes more available in non-PC forms, phones, tablets, watches, etc., the need to turn to non-text content will be essential.

You can do this with visual content, and Instagram is the perfect place to put your best visuals to work.

Simply, visual attractiveness in an ad or in any piece of content that has the goal of increasing conversions, leads to more opt-ins, engagement, leads, and sales.

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It will also get you more shares, and that increases each campaign’s reach exponentially at no cost to you.

Using high-quality, bright pictures, you draw the attention of your followers, and can help lead them on the path to purchase.

Instagram Videos

Now with videos in the Instagram feed, you can really skyrocket your leads and sales through the social media site. Video content on Instagram gets more views, shares, and likes. It stops scrollers in their path. Once you become known for putting out good video, you’ll be well on your wall to dominating your market online.

  1. Young, Money-Spending Graphics

In Television, for years the most coveted demographic was 18 – 54 year old males.

Now, it’s men and women 18 – 34 (with 18 – 54 being not far behind). Instagram is custom made, literally, for those in that demographic. Build a strong Instagram following, and you’ll be tapping into the most lucrative market in the world.

  1. Build Brand Awareness

Instagram allows you to use visual content to reach more customers. Facebook is similar in this respect, but Instagram actually gets more shares.

Post a good video or picture, and promote it. Your target audience sees the cool content, wants to show their friends, so they like and share it. Now, for the price to reach your target audience, you’ve reached them plus the friends they’ve shared with. It extends the life of your ads, exposes your products, services, and your brand to a large, warm-audience. This is key for growing your business, especially if you don’t have an unlimited ad-buy budget.

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The Three Reasons Your Landing Pages Don’t Convert

Landing pages are still the most important pages on your website. They are the funnel that allows you to convert your ad traffic and social media traffic into paying customers. landing pages are the pages that showcase your value proposition, your product and close your leads. These landing pages are the life blood of your business. At Retaliate1st, we specialize in developing landing pages that convert, that achieve their goal. We want to showcase the landing page mistakes we continually see, so that your business can thrive.

Why Your Landing Pages Don’t Convert

  1. Too Many Options

Barry Schwartz wrote about the paralysis that sets in in many shopping situations in his book the Paradox of Choice. He uses the example of a man shopping for shampoo at a grocery store. He is faced with hundreds of choices – for dry hair, for brittle hair, for oily hair; olive oil base, coconut oil base; flower scented; and just about every color imaginable. This leads to frustration, and often people with either simply leave the store, or buy the closest option and later be unhappy with it.

landing pages

Now, take a look at your landing pages. Are they leaving your customer in the isle frustrated because there are so many options they’re not sure which to choose?

If so, narrow it down to one choice (two, maximum).

What’s the goal of your landing page?

Email opt-in? Make sure the opt-in form is easily accessible, easy to read, and has a strong, clear call to action.

Do you want phone calls? Make your number big and visible and clickable.

landing-pages-2

Would you take either a phone call or a web form opt-in? Make it clear that either option gets them the same result: contact, free estimate, discount, services, etc.

  1. Too Many Visual Distractions

It can be tempting to overwhelm your visitor with slick graphics. You may think you’re helping them find their way to your CTA.
But, there is a point where the graphics cause confusion.

When using infographics, pictures, video, or graphics, make sure they are absolutely essential to achieving the page’s goal. If they’re not, cut them. You can use them elsewhere (Thank You page, in email marketing, on blogs or pages).

Customer Centric Landing Pages

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. They’re asking “What am I supposed to look at?”

If your landing page is littered with graphics, it will confuse them. This includes going overboard with exotic background colors, text colors and fonts, and headline sizes. Keep it simple… white background with black text is still the best option because it’s easiest to read.

  1. Entry Pop Ups

Pop up windows upon entry are, unfortunately, overused. Some sites will display the pop-up every time you refresh the page, visit a new page on the site, and every time you vist the landing page, even if you’ve already opted in. IT can be frustrating for your user, especially if they’re viewing your content on mobile.

Responsive landing page development vector template illustration

Your better option is to use an exit pop-up. At this point, on a true landing page that you’ve driven traffic to, if they’re leaving, they’re gone. An exit pop-up is a last-ditch effort to salvage the lead. It can work fairly well, and will increase your leads significantly over time.

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5 Steps to Dominating Google Local

Google Local is a great way for start-ups and small businesses to grab a foot hold in their industry. It allows marketers to target local customers and consumers to search for local businesses and products. Here we list our 5 keys to dominating Google Local.

5 Steps to Dominating Google Local

  1. Consistency in NAP

Consistency in branding is important. It’s even more important when it comes to your listing on Google MyBusiness (Google Local) and across the internet on local sites. If you want to crack the top 3 in map listings, your business’ info must be on point.

Make sure that your business’ name, address, and phone number is the same on all sites. This can get tricky if you are using local numbers for different offices, but if you can manage to use an 800 number as your go-to, then add the locals as secondary points of contact, that’s a safe bet.

While it may seem trivial, make sure your address is the same on all sites that list your business. Sometimes this can be daunting because dozens of new sites pop up every day, and many of them simply scrape your info and post it. They make mistakes.

  • If your office is on 100 Third street, and one of them lists it as 100 3rd street, you will run into problems.

Your business name should be consistent as well. Keep it simple! If you’re Joe’s Plumbing, don’t get cute with Joe’s Plumbing Brooklyn, Joe’s Plumbing Staten Island, Joe’s Plumbing and Hot Tubs. Pick one, and stick to it.

Google Local Guidelines

From Google’s guidelines regarding business names:

Any additional information, when relevant, can be included in other sections of your business information (e.g., “Address“, “Categories“). Adding unnecessary information to your name (e.g., “Google Inc. – Mountain View Corporate Headquarters” instead of “Google”) by including marketing taglines, store codes, special characters, hours or closed/open status, phone numbers, website URLs, service/product information, location/address or directions, or containment information (e.g. “Chase ATM in Duane Reade”) is not permitted.

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  1. Choose the Best Categories

Don’t “category stuff.” Google views this in the same way they view keyword stuffing, ie, they’ll hit you for it. Pick out the minimal number of categories that fit your business.

Content Drives Google Local

  1. Add Content

Add as much relevant, helpful info as possible on your Google+ local page. IT’s possible to add video, photos, and long-form text. It’s no secret that Google thrives on content, and rewards content marketing. If you have videos of your product or service, add them. Link to your YouTube page.

  • Have pictures of your product? Social media-driven photos of your customers? Add them.
  • Go into detail (benefit-driven detail) about your products, services, staff, awards you’ve won, and what you can do for the customer.

google-local-3

  1. Cultivate Customer Reviews

This is good practice in general, as user reviews are crucial to the health of your business. Having customers review you on your Google listing is important to both your business’ reputation, and your local ranking. Well-reviewed businesses have a leg up on the competition.

  1. Build High Quality Links

Links to your business site help with SEO. The stronger your main site is, the stronger your local listing will be. Links from quality sites helps build domain authority, which in turn boosts your local ranking.

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6 Key Questions to Ask an SEO Firm

Despite the insider blogs that proclaim that SEO is Dead, the reality is that as long as Google exists and dominates the market, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) will be a huge part of the success of your business. Most people cannot perform SEO elements themselves and the key decision is which SEO firm they should hire. Here Retaliate1st list the questions you should ask any SEO form you are considering hiring.

Offsite SEO Factors

Offsite SEO Factors

6 Key Questions to Ask an SEO Firm Before Hiring Them

Even those who scream that paid traffic is superior miss the fact that unless your site is optimized, you’ll pay more for clicks and lose visitors, leads, and sales because your site is confusing to use, doesn’t have good content, or is poorly written. At its base SEO is taking great copywriting and optimizing it slightly for the search engines.

It is an art and a science, and should be done by a professional. But, the SEO field is rich with scammers, fly-by-night companies, and fraudulent freelancers.

Before you make the wise decision to invest in professional services, ask the SEO firm these questions:

  1. What’s Your Method?

How an SEO firm plans to get your business to the top of the rankings heap can tell you a lot about how successful they are.

Everyone has their own methods, and some are better suited for your business than others, but some are just plain terrible.

The SEO Firm Should Have a Method

For example, link building is still a key to getting your site ranked. It’s old-school, time-consuming, and requires an investment of cash. But, it works.

However, if you do a quick search and find that most links in your industry cost between 20 and 50-dollars, and the firm is pitching you on getting 10,000 links for $19.99, you can be sure they’re involved with spam tactics.

2. How Good is Your Content?

Content --> SEO and Social Media

Content –> SEO and Social Media

Not all SEO firms will provide content, but they should. Content is the future of digital marketing. Without relevant, useful, well-written content, your site (and yoru sales) will suffer.

The easiest way tot get a handle on their skills is to ask for samples. Even if they’re new, they can mock up an article or two for you.

If the text reads like it was written by a foreigner, or by a computer program, they’re trying to scam you. Google hates garbage content and will penalize your business.

  1. Who Have Your Worked With?

It doesn’t matter if they’ve worked with Fortune 500 companies, or a mom-and-pop shoe store, everyone outside of a complete newbie will have reviews. If not, don’t be shy about asking for references from past clients.

Don’t neglect this step! It can tell you a lot about the service you’re about to invest in. Even if they’re inexperienced, every SEO expert has done some free work to build their portfolio, so they should absolutely have a handful of references and reviews.

Is Your SEO Firm Producing Results

  1. How Will I Know It’s Working?

If your business site is new, it can take a while to show up on Page 1. Sometimes you’ll see your site climb slowly, going from page 25 to 20 to 16 to 15 to 8, and so on until it reaches number one. Sometimes, it will be lost in space then suddenly pop up on the top of page 2 before climbing to the first page.

In between, there are several ways to measure progress. Ask them what analytics they’ll share with you so that you can track progress together. If they’re unwilling to share data, or give you vague answers rife with meaningless buzzwords, don’t do business with them.

  1. Which Type of SEO Do Your Perform?

SEO can be broken down into:

  • On-page – optimizing text, photos, video, landing pages, and all content for your search terms. If they provide content, this should be done along with content creation as well as helping you optimize any self-generated content.
  • Off-Page – Link building either through paid links or building links by creating articles, guest postings, and blogs. Both should be used for best results.
  • Internal – Working on coding so that Google’s bots can “Crawl” your site.

Your best bet is to hire a firm that does all three.

on-page-seo

  1. Do You Guarantee Your Work

Few SEO firms guarantee their work. IF they don’t, they’re probably not very good. Yes, SEO is mercurial, but the best firms keep in step with Google’s temeprmental changes, and keep pushing yoru site to the top no matter what updates hit.

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Why Your Pay Per Click Campaigns are Tanking

For many businesses, Pay Per Click advertising is their go to tactic for paid media. Pay Per Click has been the largest spend for over 85% of online advertisers since its inception. However, with the market being saturated, it can be difficult to market your ads to maximize your clicks. The first thing any advertising team must do is to eliminate the mistakes. Here we list 3 of the biggest mistakes that PPC advertisers make:

3 Reasons Your Pay Per Click Campaigns are Tanking

  1. Your Ad Stinks

Listen, no matter how many metrics you can drown yourself in… no matter what new analytic buzzword is being written about on the digital marketing blogs… no matter what new secret trick is being spewed by the experts, one truth remains about pay per click ads:

  • They mustn’t suck

Look at your PPC ads. Are you proud of them? Would you run them in a magazine? If you were handed budget to run that on page 3 of the NY Times, would you use that ad?

Granted, print ads have a different structure, but, the content of the ad is key.

Frankly, most PPC ads are nothing more than follow-the-leader, me-too marketing pieces that are written with weak wording, and yawn-inducing calls to action.

Your headline must be strong. If it wouldn’t pull in a newspaper, sales letter, magazine, billboard, or direct mail piece, then it won’t pull on Google, either.

You can take a different approach. You can get more creative since the feedback loop is faster. But, if the headline is weak, forget about sales.

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You literally have to drag someone by the eyeballs from the white, black, and blue jungle of the SERP to your ad. To do that, you need a strong headline.

You get very limited space in the body, so make it count. If you’re giving something away for free, say it now or lose the sale. PPC ads are nothing more than headline/subhead/CTA. Don’t waste even one character of space.

  1. Your Landing Page Stinks

You wrote a great ad. Congrats.

Now, go make sure your landing page matches the content of your ad, represents the product or service that you sell, and is written with a strong headline, strong benefit-rich copy, and a benefit-rich call to action.

Where most businesses fail with their Pay Per Click Ads

Where most businesses get into trouble is trying to send 100+ keyword-driven ads to the same (or a few) landing pages. Using broad match over a litany of keywords is fine… if you can match the content to the keyword. We all use the internet in a similar way. We are multitasking, multi-windowing, and listening to Adele’s new album while shopping for running shoes. And our phones are buzzing with texts, SnapChats, and Whatsapps.

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In that chaos, you can not expect your customer to make the subtle (but really profound) leap between what they searched for, what they saw in your ad, and what they’re now reading on your page. It’s kinda close but not exactly what I’m looking for… lemme go back to Google and keep looking.

  1. Your Bids are Too Low

In the early stages, it pays to overbid. The number of clicks your ad gets plays into how much a click costs, where the ad is displayed, and the overall adrank.

Early on, it’s better to pay extra and get those clicks so you can:

  • Get a better adrank
  • Formulate data about which keywords are working, which landing pages are testing the best, and which headlines are pulling leads

After you gather this info, you can begin to scale back, underbid, then work your way up.

But, this only works if the first two rules are followed. No matter what your bid, bad ads produce no leads. Check out Retaliate1st and our PPC services to optimize your campaigns and save you time and money.

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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

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