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BY NICK ZVIADADZE 

Stop following SEO strategies that don’t work. Discover the five essential SEO tips you need to grow your small business.

Many small businesses often struggle to attract quality leads to their website. That’s because there’s a common misconception that you need a big budget for advertising, which leaves many entrepreneurs feeling trapped and unsure of how to improve their digital presence.

The truth is that search engine optimization (SEO) can help you get consistent leads without having to pay a ton of money for advertising. SEO is a great way for your content to rank well on search engines, thus establishing your authority and improving online visibility.

And yet — some business owners shy away from SEO because it seems complex, and they don’t have time to learn all about it. Luckily, you don’t have to.

In this article, I’ll tell you about the five most beneficial things you can do to leverage SEO to grow your business. Let’s dig in.

1. Create quality content

Your website is an information hub that search engines analyse to determine whether it’s relevant to users. This means that if you want to establish topical authority and secure a good ranking on search engines, you need to create quality content.

For example, if you run an accounting agency, your website should have a blog section covering the most important topics about accounting. That way, search engines see you as an authority in the industry, which increases your chances of ranking high for relevant keywords.

So, what does quality content look like?

Quality content should be relevant, addressing the questions and needs of your target audience. It should also be deep, offering insights and solutions that showcase your expertise and match user intent.

Your content should also be engaging and valuable. You can achieve that through user-friendly storytelling, recent and trustworthy data, interactive elements, good visuals or thought-provoking discussions.

Poor-quality content is a short wall of unstructured, uninformative text with excess keyword stuffing, no visual elements and a lack of any benefit to the reader. Publishing this type of content brings no value to your business.

2. Use guest blogging

Backlinks are crucial to your website’s authority and ranking because they help establish credibility with search engines.

When other factors like content quality and user-friendliness are equal, search engines perceive a website with a higher number of quality backlinks as more authoritative and trustworthy. Essentially, backlinks function as endorsements from other websites, signaling to search algorithms that your content is valuable and relevant.

So, how do you get backlinks?

One practice you can use to acquire backlinks to your website is guest posting. It allows you to contribute well-crafted, insightful content to reputable websites in your industry, giving you a chance to position yourself as an authority.

Guest blogging has multiple benefits: It allows you to showcase your expertise in front of more people and helps you build backlinks. That’s a perfect way to boost your online visibility, outrank your competitors and attract a broader audience to your digital domain.

3. Create service landing pages

Service landing pages are dedicated sections on a website that provide detailed and focused information about specific products or services a business offers. They help support targeted marketing efforts and improve overall user experience.

Each service page presents an opportunity to optimize for specific keywords related to that offering. That allows you to match the user’s search intent and contributes to your overall SEO strategy.

Navigating a website becomes easier when visitors can easily find detailed information about the services they are looking for. Service pages streamline the user journey, reducing bounce rates and increasing engagement. They guide potential customers from exploration to engagement.

What does a service landing page look like?

Let’s say you are a personal injury lawyer looking to boost your SEO. Your service landing pages should be about slip and fall injuries, automobile accidents and workplace injuries. That provides quick and valuable information to people looking for these services and improves your visibility on search engines.

4. Create location landing pages

Location landing pages are designed to provide specific and localized information about the products or services a business offers in a particular geographic area.

They are crucial for businesses serving multiple locations because they improve local SEO efforts, offering a tailored approach that caters to the unique needs and search intent of users in a specific area. Dedicated landing pages for each city or region improve online visibility in local search results and provide a more personalized experience for potential customers. This increases the likelihood of successful conversion.

For example, a small personal injury law firm based in Texas would benefit from having location landing pages for cities like Dallas, Fort Worth, Arlington, Plano and Irving. Creating these unique pages on the website tailored to the legal needs of residents in each city can significantly improve local SEO efforts.

5. Improve website experience

In 2023, user experience impacts how well your content ranks on search engines. That’s because Google and other search engines want to ensure their users are satisfied with search results, which is why they go for solutions that are simple, quick and accessible.

Here’s how you can improve your website experience for your visitors:

  • Make your website mobile-friendly
  • Design a simple website bar for easy navigation
  • Increase page loading speed
  • Create strategic CTAs to guide users in their journey
  • Optimize content readability

In 2023, you don’t need a hefty advertising budget to grow your small business. All you need is to be strategic with your SEO efforts.

Creating quality content, service landing pages and location landing pages helps you set a good base for your SEO. Guest blogging and optimizing your website experience can help take your SEO to the next level.

Use these five strategies to transform your digital presence and grow your business.

BY NICK ZVIADADZE

ENTREPRENEUR LEADERSHIP NETWORK® CONTRIBUTOR

Founder at MintSEO. Nick Zviadadze is a growth marketing specialist with more than eight years of experience in SEO, copywriting and content marketing. He’s the founder of MintSEO, a fully-remote SEO and content marketing agency. He helps businesses drive growth by improving their search visibility. 

Sourced from Entrepreneur

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ChatGPT SEO: Can you really use this tool to boost your results in search engines? And how does SEMrush come into it? Let’s find out!

ChatGPT is an amazing tool that can understand and respond to queries just like a human, thanks to its AI-powered technology. On the other hand, SEMrush is an all-in-one marketing platform that offers various tools for SEO, social media, content marketing, and more.

The great news is that these two tools can be used together to supercharge your SEO efforts!

By combining ChatGPT’s natural language processing capabilities with SEMrush’s data analysis tools, you can get valuable insights and ideas to optimize your website and boost your search rankings. Sounds awesome, right? Let’s dive into how to do it!

TLDR: Want to give SEMrush a try? Check it out here!

What is ChatGPT SEO?

When it comes to SEO, ChatGPT can be a valuable tool for generating content ideas and optimizing your website. You can use ChatGPT to create SEO-friendly content by providing it with relevant topics or keywords, and it will generate high-quality content that is optimized for search engines.

ChatGPT can also be used for answering common customer queries on your website, which can improve user experience and help boost your search rankings.

With ChatGPT’s advanced natural language processing capabilities, it can understand the intent behind a user’s query and provide relevant and accurate responses.

What is SEMrush?

SEMrush is a comprehensive marketing platform that provides a variety of tools for businesses to improve their online presence. It is used by SEO professionals, digital marketers, and content creators to analyse data, optimize websites, and improve their marketing strategies. SEMrush’s capabilities are vast, and include keyword research, backlink analysis, site audit, competitor analysis, social media management, and more.

One of SEMrush’s primary uses is for SEO. The platform offers a suite of SEO tools that can help you conduct keyword research, track your rankings, and analyse your competitors.

By using SEMrush’s keyword research tool, you can discover high-ranking keywords that are relevant to your business and optimize your content around those keywords. The site audit tool helps you identify technical SEO issues on your website and provides recommendations on how to fix them.

You can also track your rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs) and monitor your competitors’ SEO strategies to stay ahead of the game. Overall, SEMrush is a powerful tool for any business looking to improve their SEO efforts and stay competitive in the digital landscape.

How can you use SEMrush and ChatGPT for SEO?

Start by heading over to ChatGPT and asking it to generate a list of keywords. For this example, we’re going to ask ChatGPT for keywords that a social media marketer might want to rank for.

So you’ll literally type in ‘Give me a list of keywords that a social media marketer should be targeting in blog content etc’

Let’s see what ChatGPT came up with.

chatgpt seo

Now that ChatGPT has given us our list, we can pick one of these keywords and take it over to SEMrush. For this example, let’s go with “Audience targeting”.

Once on SEMrush, toggle over to the Keyword Magic Tool and paste in your chosen keyword. Hit enter. Next, you want to look at the search volume and the keyword difficulty. Now obviously “Audience targeting” is a very broad term, so we’ll want to find a related keyword that isn’t as difficult to rank for with our content.

semrush seo

You can toggle the results in SEMrush to find easier keywords to rank for, you’ll want to make sure that there is a decent amount of search volume too and that the keyword is relevant to your target audience.

semrush chatgpt seo

In the screenshot above we can see that the keywords ‘target audience analysis and ‘audience targeting tools’ are reasonably easy to rank for at the moment, but the search volume is very low, so these keywords may not be worth creating content around.

Once you’ve found a good keyword using SEMrush, head back over to ChatGPT to decide on the topic of your article. For example, you might ask ChatGPT, ‘What are some topic ideas for an article targeting the keyword ‘audience targeting tools’?

From there you can pick a topic, ask ChatGPT to create an outline and then write your whole article for you using SEO best practices!

Best practices for SEMrush and ChatGPT SEO

When using ChatGPT with SEMrush for SEO, there are a few best practices to keep in mind to ensure that you are getting the most out of these powerful tools.

Set clear goals and objectives

Setting clear goals and objectives is essential for any SEO campaign. Before using ChatGPT and SEMrush, it’s important to have a clear understanding of what you want to achieve. Whether it’s improving your search rankings, generating more traffic to your website, or boosting your online visibility, having a clear goal will help you focus your efforts and measure your progress.

Provide detailed information

Providing detailed information and context to ChatGPT is also important. While ChatGPT is capable of generating high-quality content and insights, it still needs detailed information and context to provide accurate and relevant results. When providing ChatGPT with information, it’s important to be specific and clear about your objectives and requirements.

Review and refine results

Reviewing and refining results is crucial when using ChatGPT with SEMrush. While ChatGPT can provide valuable insights and ideas, it’s important to review and refine the results to ensure that they are accurate and relevant to your needs. This can involve editing the content generated by ChatGPT, fine-tuning your keyword research, or adjusting your optimization strategies based on SEMrush data.

Check accuracy and relevance

Ensuring accuracy and relevance of information is also critical when using ChatGPT with SEMrush. While these tools can provide valuable insights and ideas, it’s important to ensure that the information is accurate and relevant to your specific needs. This can involve cross-checking the results with other sources, verifying the accuracy of SEMrush data, and ensuring that the content generated by ChatGPT is optimized for your specific target audience.

By following these best practices, you can effectively use ChatGPT with SEMrush to improve your SEO efforts and achieve your goals. With a clear focus on your objectives, detailed information and context provided to ChatGPT, and a commitment to reviewing and refining the results, you can ensure that you are getting accurate and relevant insights that will help you optimize your website and improve your search rankings.

Wrapping it up

Using ChatGPT with SEMrush can provide a powerful combination of tools for improving your SEO efforts. By leveraging ChatGPT’s natural language processing capabilities and SEMrush’s robust data analysis tools, you can gain valuable insights and ideas for optimizing your website and improving your search rankings.

These tools can help with various SEO tasks such as keyword research, content creation, on-page optimization, link building, and competitor analysis.

So, if you’re looking to improve your SEO efforts and stay ahead of the competition, we encourage you to give ChatGPT and SEMrush a try together. You might be surprised at how much these tools can help you achieve your SEO goals!

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Sourced from Jeff Bullas

By Manu Gupta

The raison d’être of a website is to draw potential customers and help generate leads. This can be achieved by an intelligent mix of strategies that include paid advertising, SEO, social media, and email marketing.

Website traffic is the lifeline of every business. More visitors to the website mean greater number of prospective customers coming across one’s products or services, which, in turn, will generate more sales. Hence, driving larger traffic to a website is really a no-brainer for businesses looking to make a name for themselves in the market.
For small- and mid-sized business owners, a website is an essential extension of their business itself, and for some, such as the online stores, it is the actual business. After achieving a pixel-perfect website, it’s important for businesses to divert their attention to drive substantial traffic to it.
Here are the five most effective ways of bringing traffic to one’s website:

1. Leverage paid advertising

Most of the strategies to drive traffic are free, requiring dedicated and consistent efforts and time. Towards this end, a strategy that can be more effective, easily measurable and provide quick results comparatively will be investing in paid ads. These include pay-per-click ads, social media ads, display ads and video ads. Pay-per-click ad campaigns will allow one’s brand to be at the top of Google search results whenever a search towards that end is carried out.
Social media ads such as Facebook ads are cheaper and allow brands to set highly-specific parameters like demographics, age, behaviour, location and interests so that ads are shown to the intended audiences. Display and video ads are visual ads that can be shown on third-party websites.

2. Implement good SEO strategies

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of increasing the number of visitors to a specific website by ensuring a higher visibility for the site on the list of results given out by a search engine. Both on-page and off-page is an essential aspect of a successful website.
Backlinks, or creating links to other websites that can lead visitors to one’s website, especially are quite valuable for SEO as they represent ‘vote of confidence’ for search engine giants like Google. For SEO that drives positive results it’s important to ensure that the website and content are updated and relevant to those seeking one’s products or services. Appropriate keywords, captivating meta descriptions and valuable, catchy content are the deal-breakers in SEO. Sign up for our exclusive newsletters. Subscribe to check out our popular newsletters.

3. Be social

In the current digital era, a business can’t afford to not be on social media platforms. Globally, the usage of social media for marketing has doubled. One needs to be on social networks like Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter to reach out to their target audience.
No matter who the target audience is for a business, they are bound to be on a social network somewhere. The right way of connecting with them is through creating content specific to one’s industry or products so that it can draw followers in. Even for a niche market, one can find a following with consistency and premier quality content.
Also, using the right hashtags is equally important. People have become very selective about the content they consume and hence, they are resorting to hashtags as a way to filter and streamline the influx. Using hashtags smartly will enable businesses to target the right audience so that they are directed to their websites.

4. Invest in affiliate marketing

Affiliate programs allow brands to attract more traffic by tapping into other people’s users. Companies can publish their content on other websites and pay a commission on the sales generated. This way they can earn positive word-of-mouth for themselves. The pay-outs are made only when a genuine sale is made, which means there’s minimal risk involved. An affiliate program, once set up, can be left to go on autopilot so that one can focus on other aspects of their business. To get started, one must draw up a list of the best affiliate programs and then decide which can be appropriate for the purpose.

5. Use email marketing

Email marketing continues to be an effective channel for driving traffic to a website. It’s come a long way since the times of promotional blasts that were quite pesky for many customers. However, now email marketing involves building a well-thought-out sequence of newsletters or blogposts that can lead to more sign-ups that can forge long-lasting relationships.
In fact, even the basic and most primal welcome email is much improved than the old-school transactional kind. In its simplest form, email-marketing is a great option for showing off one’s latest blog post or for informing customers about an upcoming sale.
Summing it up Just creating an attractive website and waiting for the right audience to chance upon it won’t suffice. The competition is tough. Businesses need to adopt strategies to grow traffic on their websites. It’s important to focus on one’s target audience and quality of content to drive relevant traffic and get amazing results.
(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of YourStory.)

By Manu Gupta

Sourced from YOURSTORY

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You’ve probably heard of link building, but you might not know what it really is or how to do it effectively. Sure, you can go ahead and hire a digital marketing agency, but unless you know the ins and outs, you won’t be successful.

What if they use PBNs?

What if they have a bad linking strategy?

What if they waste all your budget and don’t deliver any results?

It’s important to understand link building practices and how Google can change your website — especially with Google’s recent updates.

While working with clients through my agency, Taco, I come across a few common mistakes website owners make as they build links. And even though there are fantastic guides talking about link building, I see these mistakes over and over again. 

Here are six link building strategies that hurt your SEO efforts and how to fix them.

1. Building links to home page links

It seems logical to send all of your SEO power to your homepage because that’s where you want everyone to start. But, it’s wrong. In fact, it’s probably one of the biggest SEO myths. The homepage shouldn’t be used for your top phrases.

I know you’re asking right now, “But then how do I target the key phrases I want to rank for?”

You should build out content-rich subpages in your site to target those phrases, then build backlinks to those pages. By following this method, you will have links going to many pages on your site, not just your home page. This is a much more natural way to build links to your website.

Related: Why You Want ‘Backlinks’ to Your Website

2. Too much keyword anchor text

As I mentioned in the previous section, your homepage is not the place to target all of your important key phrases. Use it instead for building the brand and creating trust with the search engines.

So, when you are building links to your home page, the majority of the anchors should come from your brand or some form of your URL.

Most SEO strategies want to build links that have their important phrases as the anchor, but according to the research done by SEOJet, only 3 percent of your links should have an exact match as an anchor text.

This principle of building branded links also applies to subpages, if you want your link profile to look really natural, you need to have some anchor texts that have no key phrase at all, some links with the URL as the anchor, and some with your brand as the anchor.

This is how other website owners would link to you naturally. It is unreasonable to think that anyone who ever linked to you because they loved your site would use your main key phrase as the anchor. So, you can’t do it either.

3. Not enough nofollow links

There is a misconception about nofollow links and whether or not you should get any as you build links for your site. If you look at it from a real-world perspective, the nofollow attribute was created so we as website owners could let Google know that certain links were advertisements and they shouldn’t be counted in the SEO algorithm.

In other words, Google expects that real businesses will have nofollow links because real businesses advertise. So, how do you expect Google to recognize you as a real business if you aren’t getting any nofollow links through advertising?

This is further supported by the fact that on average over 30 percent of links pointing to top-ranked websites are nofollow links. It is good to get nofollow links.

Related: How to Promote a Website Through Link Building in 10 Easy Ways

4. Not enough high-content pages

If you want people to link to your website naturally, then you should create amazing content ever written so people will link to it.

In fact, in order to build a lot of links to a page, you need good, in-depth content. If you’re not doing that then getting a lot of links pointing to a page of yours will not look natural.

Google would never believe that a post with 500 words would naturally get 100 links pointing to it. But, the ultimate guide on a certain topic with 5000+ words could bring in hundreds of links naturally. That is where you need to focus your content marketing efforts.

5. Bad blogger outreach practices

One of the best ways to get links from high-authority websites is to write a guest blog post for them. There are a ton of blogs that will accept your guest post, but the reality is most guest posts never get approved.

This happens for two reasons.

Your pitch email is a template that could apply to any blog in the world or your writing isn’t good enough. When you pitch a potential blog, don’t think of it as a one-time thing but as if you are building a relationship with a colleague. Reach out to your new business colleague and talk to them about their site and their needs.

Then pitch your guest article that helps solve those needs. After that, make sure you write an amazing article. If writing isn’t your greatest talent, then find someone who is a stellar writer and get them to help you.

If you are looking for a good outreach email to copy, check out this one in SEMRush.

Related: 5 Strategies for Better ‘Link Building’ and Improving Your SEO

6. No link building plan

This is the most common mistake almost all marketers make. They think that if they create amazing content, either people will naturally link to you (good luck with that to anyone who doesn’t already have a following) or you just need to go build links to that page and it will rank.

That is a vague SEO strategy. You might as well say, “Just go do stuff and you will rank.”

For some reason, people don’t treat links as they should — like money. Links are money. Links help you get on page one of Google search results. Page one equals money.

With your own personal money, you create a budget (read: plan) and then tell your money what to do. So, if you treat links like money, then you will have a plan in place and can tell your links what to do. You will plan out which anchor texts you need to get and how many so that you can keep a natural link profile. Using this SEO tactic, you will be able to get better SEO results with fewer links.

You would be surprised how much of an impact these things can have on your rankings, so give yourself a leg up on your competition by fixing these link building miscues.

Image credit: annebaek | Getty Images

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Chirag Kulkarni is a serial entrepreneur and advisor. He is the CEO of Insightfully, which is using AI to discover what employees skills and passions are to reallocate human capital within the enterprise. He has also spoken at Accenture, In…

Sourced from Entrepreneur