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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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How to Use YouTube to Generate Leads for Your Business

YouTube is a fantastic marketing tool and is the second largest search engine in the world. It is behind only Google and tops Bing. Many savvy marketers have found ways to exploit YouTube to build their brands. Here we lay out two tactics to use YouTube to grow your business and sell product:

Create How To Youtube Videos

No matter what you sell, or which services you offer – YouTube can help. Having your videos rank on YouTube can bring in a significant amount of traffic, leads, and sales into your business.

YouTube

One of the easiest ways to get your videos ranked (and watched) is to create a series of “How To” videos.

  • How To content is being watched more than ever. A recent study showing searches for this type of video increased by over 70% in 2016.
  • Many of these searches coming from millennials (nearly three-quarters). The same research shows that 1-in-3 millennials will purchase a product after watching a How To video tied to that product.

This can be tricky for service businesses. Educating a customer on how to do a job that you offer seems counter-intuitive. But, if you follow the methods of the Home Depot , they often post How To videos of DIY jobs. More complicated projects may get a video too. These companies are quick to point out that the jobs are difficult, costly to do alone, or dangerous, and that a professional should be called in for help.

YouTube 2

This allows you to give your customers a great deal of free content, creating a positive feeling toward your services. When the time comes to call in a pro, you’ll be top of mind.

Just about any product would benefit from a How To series. Never underestimate how little your customers know about your product. Or how to use it. You may love your product, and know it’s every detail. But consumers are blasted with ads for hundreds of products and services every day.

Ask for the Lead

Just because content is free doesn’t mean it comes without a price tag. Most web users know this, so asking them outright for something in return for their free video is well accepted. Don’t be shy about asking for the lead at the end of your How To content:

  • A “subscribe” to your channel
  • Comments, shares, and likes
  • Their email or contact info
  • Them to contact you for help (call, comment, or email)
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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.

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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.

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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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