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The Ultimate SEO Website Migration Checklist

May 5, 2022 No Comments

Website migration is more than just an update. It’s a process of substantial change in your website’s structure or tech stack. Migrating your site can be time-consuming, expensive, and risky. But sometimes, it’s either the best or the only option.

Migrations usually take place when:

You change your company’s name, so you have to move to a new domain
You begin implementing the HTTPS protocol, making your site more secure
You move to a new content management system (CMS), such as WordPress
You do a major website redesign
You change your site’s structure, to optimize for conversions or navigability

Nevertheless, if it’s not done properly, a website migration can have negative effects on your SEO. As a result, your ranking, traffic, and authority could drastically decrease.

What can you do to prevent SEO pitfalls? In this post, we’ll share 14 website migration best practices that will help you restructure or move your site without undermining your SEO efforts.

Let’s dive in.

Before you get started

To ensure a smooth transition, thorough planning and testing are key. This is why, before taking a look at SEO, we’d like to share some premises to get your website migration right.

Let Your Audience Know

Notify your users that your website will be moving. Migration is a challenging process. Therefore, there are chances of having some setbacks from time to time. Transparency is key and every large company does this. Tell your audience beforehand, so they can know what to expect, and plan accordingly.

Don’t Do It All at Once

A step-by-step approach makes changes easier to manage. Migrating the entire site in one morning might not be the best approach. Start by creating a staging site, and build your new website there. Once everything works smoothly, you can proceed to push the changes to your domain. This is especially useful if you are running multiple types of migration (e.g: URL, HTTPS, and CMS).

Do It When Traffic Is Low

Understanding your audience goes a long way. And, when it comes to migration, knowing when your traffic is low can be helpful. If you make major changes when just a handful of users are online, any hiccups will have a relatively small impact. Moreover, thanks to the lighter server load, your new site will be crawled and indexed more quickly.

Be Ready For Setbacks

Although website migration comes with great benefits, as aforementioned, it is quite challenging. Plan, test, and make the most out of your staging site. Don’t get discouraged if something turns out wrong, it’s part of the process.

Next, we’ll share a couple of tips that will help you minimize the chance of things going south.

SEO migration and why it matters

Search engines find your site, crawl it, and rank it over time. Google decides how to crawl and rank your site depending on certain data sources you provide. For example, your sitemaps or your site’s interlinking. When you modify your website, you modify that information as well. Consequently, applying an SEO migration strategy is crucial to not lose the visibility that took you so long to build.

Additionally, a poorly handled migration can turn your most linked-to pages into 404s. These changes would have an impact both on both SEO and UX.

With an SEO-focused strategy, you make sure you’re not losing visibility in the process of migrating your website.

How Long Does It Take?

On average, SEO migration takes approximately 3 months. However, the amount of time required for SEO migration will depend on how big your website is.

If your site has over 100 pages, it’s going to take way less than if your site has 3,000 pages. The duration of your SEO migration will depend on the amount of content you’re moving, along with any audits that may be necessary. Be patient and have all your resources ready.

Website migration checklist

The most effective way to migrate your website and protect your SEO efforts is to plan ahead. There are a couple of the steps you should follow to get it right:

Audit your existing site
Create a backup
Set up a staging site
Run a health check on your new domain
Crawl your site
Create a map of 301 redirects
Update all your links
Set up a custom 404 page
Set up an XML sitemap
Test on mobile
Set up your schemas
Update your robots.txt
Keep control of your old domain
Do a post-launch performance check

1. Audit your Existing Site

Before starting your migration, it’s important to conduct an SEO audit on your existing site. That way, you’ll understand which problems your current site has, and you will be able to fix them during your migration. Make sure you review:

Duplicate content
Content relevance
Broken links
Page structures
Mobile performance
Missing or duplicate meta tags

2. Have a Backup

It’s a good idea to back up your site before you start working on it. With a proper backup, you’ll be able to revert any site-breaking mistakes you may make.

3. Work with a Staging Site

A staging site is a private website that serves as a testing ground for new updates. We recommend you always work with a staging website. It’s extremely useful to test any new changes without affecting your live site. And, with the right SEO tools, you can even do SEO testing on staging.

4. Do a Health Check on your New Domain

If you’re moving to a new domain, you should check its organic health first. In other words, you should screen for past or current problems in the domain, so you can have a clear idea of what you might face in the future. These problems could be:

Past penalizations for spammy content or backlinks
Irrelevant or spammy current backlinks pointing to your website

By checking the metrics and the history of the new domain you can know what it used to contain (e.g: games, adult content, literature, etcetera), what Google relates it to, and see if it’s beneficial for your business or not.

5. Crawl Your Site

Crawl your site and create a URL and content inventory. With it, you’ll be able to:

Get a general look at your URLs
Detect problems and correct them on your staging website
Set 301 redirects and map old URLs to new URLs
Detect outdated internal links and update them to reflect the new URL structure
Set optimization priorities

Tools like ScreamingFrog and Moz are great for this task.

6. Set Permanent Redirects

Once you have listed all your URLs, you’ll notice which ones are working as intended and which ones aren’t. It’s time to fix that.

Every URL in your new website must take users somewhere. But it can be hard to ensure that after you’ve changed your URL structure.

That’s what 301 Redirect maps are helpful for. By using a 301 Redirect map you can redirect all your problematic URLs to new and better pages.

How you’ll set 301 redirects will depend on your CMS and your preferences. But, in most cases, it’s as simple as opening your .htaccess file (which you’ll find at the root of your domain), and adding this line:

Redirect 301 /old-page.html http://newsite.com/new-page/

Remember to replace “/old-page.html” and “http://newsite.com/new-page/” with your old and new URLs respectively. Do this for every new redirect.

For each of your missing pages, you need to find a destination on your new site. We urge you to be attentive and careful when setting up redirects. We recommend that you use Google Search Console to handle both redirects and the indexing of your new pages. You can manually submit your URLs into Search Console and ask Google to crawl them.

7. Protect your Links

Once you’ve updated your new URLs and know how they’ll be, it’s time to update internal links. Thus, you can prevent broken links or internal redirects. ScreamingFrog is useful for this.

The same applies to backlinks in other websites directing to your website. You can get a look at your backlinks with a tool such as Majestic, MozLink Explorer, or Ahrefs. If the URLs those sites are linking have been redirected, you shouldn’t need to contact them. But, if the content in question has been removed and you don’t want to set up a redirect, you can:

Create a new piece of content under that URL
Leave it as is (which makes you vulnerable to broken link building strategies)
Contact the editors of the sites that link to yours, and ask them to replace the link

8. Have a custom 404 page

Despite all your efforts, there might still be some broken links left on your site, after you launch. This is why it’s essential to have a custom 404 page to redirect users to navigate through your site. Otherwise, they will encounter a blank page and will likely leave.

Make sure your 404 is optimized to take users back to your website’s home. You can also lead them to pages that may be relevant for them. For instance, you can list your most visited pages on your 404.

9. XML Sitemap

Create a new XML sitemap and upload it to your Google Search Console. Thus, it will be easier for search engine bots to understand your website’s structure.

Most sites have two types of sitemaps:

An XML sitemap, made for bots
An HTML sitemap, made for humans

The HTML sitemap is usually found on the site’s footer. The XML sitemap, on the other hand, is accessible by adding /sitemap.xml to a website’s root domain. For instance, https://jeffbullas.com/sitemap.xml

Make sure both of these sitemaps reflect the new changes on your site. Depending on your CMS, you may be able to automatically create and update your sitemaps with a plugin.

10. Responsivity Matters

Before indexing your site, Google will evaluate your mobile experience. Consequently, building your new website with mobile UI in mind is vital.

Google has also shown a preference for sites that use Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). So, consider the possibility of delivering your content to mobile users in this format.

11. Mind About Schema

Schema is a set of data vocabulary that helps search engines understand your content. While implementing it doesn’t directly translate into better rankings, it can help you get rich snippets and lead to more clicks.

If you don’t use it yet, give it a go. And if you already do, don’t forget to consider it for your migration.

12. Update Robots.txt

You can use robots.txt files to offer suggestions to search engine robots about how they should crawl your site. Your robots.txt should always include:

Files and directories that search engine robots aren’t allowed to crawl
Your sitemap’s URL

Create a robots.txt for your new website, and update it on Google Search Console. That way, you can prevent Google from crawling sensitive directories. For instance, if you’re migrating to WordPress, you may want to disallow robots on the /wp-admin/ directory. In that case, you’d include the following in your robots.txt file:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /wp-admin/

13. Don’t Let Your Old Domain Expire

If you let your old domain expire, someone else may buy it and take advantage of your backlinks. On the other hand, by staying in control of your domain, you can:

Maintain control of your online reputation
Make sure all backlinks are properly redirected

14. Post- Launch: Check Performance

Once your new website is live, you’ll have to check if it meets your performance standards.

Chances are that, after a change (however large), your position in the SERPs won’t be instantly affected. A couple of weeks after your new website has gone live, conduct an audit and check:

Engagement metrics
Speed across different devices and browsers
Average SERP positioning
Organic traffic
Backlinks

SEO isn’t a one-off project. It’s a consistent effort. And, the longer you invest in SEO, the better the result you’ll get. After migrating your site, use technical SEO tools regularly. That way, you can stay on top of any new changes that may impact your position in the SERPs.

Key takeaways

Migrating your website is a big challenge that should be taken only if it is worth the effort. You can protect your SEO wins by working with the right tools and implementing best practices.

If you don’t have the expertise to face these challenges in-house, don’t hesitate to reach out to a professional. It’ll be worth it.

By Clay Kramer

Clay Kramer is the Head of Product at SEORadar, an SEO disaster prevention tool used by thousands of people worldwide.

Sourced from JeffBullas.com

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How To Decide Where Your Site Needs SEO Investment The Most

April 22, 2022 No Comments

By Rodney Laws

Budgeting is a key concern for every business, regardless of its size or nature. “What of giant companies with remarkable cash reserves?”, you might ask. Well, they only have such resources because they budget so efficiently. Everyone faces the same balancing act: on one hand, trying to invest in the future, and on the other hand, trying to keep expenses down.

This certainly applies to SEO, because it’s something that can be pursued indefinitely. There’s no such thing as a perfect page. Even if there were, a simple regular update to the ranking algorithm would once again leave it short of perfection. You need to know when to stop your efforts and move on — and for that, you need to know what you stand to gain by doing more.

Any page on your website that you want indexed could deserve SEO investment, depending on what you’ve already done. Due to this, you must carry out some analysis to determine where to focus your attention. In this post, we’re going to identify some tips that can help you figure out which pages on your website are most worthy of search optimization. Let’s begin.

Look for straightforward technical issues

When something isn’t working the way you want it to and there are numerous potential causes, you should check the simplest ones first. This isn’t just because they’re far more common. It’s also because they’re relatively easy to resolve. In the SEO world, there are basic technical issues that can completely ruin rankings, so look out for those.

The most obvious example involves discovering that a page you meant to index has been rejecting crawlers. No crawlers means no rankings. Another example is slow loading. Maybe the page that’s doing the worst in the rankings is loading several times more slowly than others on your site, causing it to be penalised. Google prefers speedy websites for obvious reasons.

PageSpeed Insights is great for finding slow pages.

Line up these basic issues and make a priority of fixing them as soon as possible. If there’s one page riddled with them, that should be your focus until they’re all resolved. You’ll never get more impactful results in SEO (and more ROI) than when you fix simple technical issues: making progress after that gets a lot trickier.

You may be able to improve performance sufficiently through tweaking, but it’s possible that you’ll need an infrastructure upgrade. If you created your site through a free or low-cost website builder and invested minimally in hosting, for instance, it’s time to scale things up. This doesn’t mean you need to give up the freedom of open source ecommerce, though. There are managed hosting providers (such as Cloud ways) that give users the freedom to choose which systems they use and make whatever modifications suit their goals.

Shoring up your technical foundation and achieving strong reliability doesn’t mean you can stop, though. SEO fully justifies consistent budgeting, and should remain a priority for years to come. It’s just a matter of ordering. Get the easy wins first, and face the tougher challenges later.

Consider what a page may one day become

Next, you should think not only about what a page is for now but also what it might be in the future. High-value pages should adapt to visitor preferences and SEO standards, but you may also want to expand them to do more with the visits they receive.

Take something like a roundup page listing the best pizza places in Winnipeg. If it got enough traffic, you could make the content more detailed to include more places. This would allow you to add more affiliate links and make some more money. It would also make the page feel more credible and authoritative.

You could even start linking out to other pieces of content like the best curry places in Winnipeg or the best pizza ovens for making pizza at home. Searches like that are extremely actionable, and valuable as a result. It could eventually become one of your most important pages, driving a lot of affiliate revenue and earning you myriad links.

This kind of affiliate page can be very lucrative.

If you can look at a page on your site and see that kind of potential, start investing in SEO for it immediately. That way, it will be ranking relatively well when you start broadening the content. Conversely, if you see a page that’s never going to be more complex than it already is, then is there much value in trying to get it ranking better?

Carefully review your page analytics

The problem that a lot of people have with reviewing analytics is that they expect arduous work. They imagine poring through spreadsheets and tables for hours on end. What’s more, they suspect that it might never meaningfully pay off. Why go through such strain if that’s the case?

Thankfully, that isn’t an accurate conception of what this process involves. This is due to the proliferation of convenient analytics tools: even Google Analytics is reasonably intuitive when you get to grips with it. Using such a tool, you can easily follow all the stats that matter. The result? Enhanced data aggregation and a drastic reduction in time spent on manual review. That’s a huge victory.

When you follow your on-page analytics, pay close attention to any metrics that represent general success for you. Look at things like average time on site and number of unique visits. This will help you understand which pages are performing well and which aren’t. As a result, you’ll find it easier to allocate resources effectively.

Keep in mind that you’ll need to factor in the broader context when you’re dealing with pages that aren’t destination pages (or at least aren’t solely destination pages). Category pages and homepages are good examples. A homepage should be a good landing page, set up to rank well for relevant keywords, but it must do something with that ranking success: pass it on to more actionable pages (namely product pages).

For each page, root through all the links leading to or away from it, and think carefully about what role it plays in your website overall, as well as what role it could play if improved. Remember that there must always be a purpose beyond promotion (boasting about your brand might feel good, but it won’t earn traffic, nor will it convince people to invest in you).

Use competitors’ websites for comparison

Let’s say that one of your pages — not one of your most important, but not insignificant — is fairly mediocre when it comes to SEO. Does that mean you should invest in it? Well, before you decide, do some searches for relevant terms and find rival pages to analyse. How do they compare to yours? Are they better? Worse? Similar?

Beyond that, take a close look at what those pages offer because that’s extremely important here. Imagine that your website sells hats, and you have a page that sells top hats specifically. If it isn’t ranking very highly but none of the pages outranking it sell anything, that lowers the need to invest in the page.

You should still work on getting the ranking up at some point, but it isn’t particularly urgent. Anyone who wants to order a top hat will probably make their way down to your site at some point if it’s the highest-ranking sales page. Consequently, you won’t lose any customers to other stores. Only some thought leadership and brand credibility through not being top.

If your page were ranking more highly in general but under another store page, that would be a bigger reason to invest in SEO. A searcher who just wanted to go ahead and buy might just order through the first viable store result. It’s all about understanding context. What do you stand to gain or lose by putting time into SEO?

Conclusion

SEO is a vital part of running a business with an online presence (which should be almost every business these days). Unfortunately, it’s complicated and costly to carry out thoroughly. To work more efficiently, you need to pick out the pages that most warrant that level of investment.

Try these tips to give you a strong indication of where to spend. You should be able to come up with a shortlist of pages that you can optimise without breaking the bank. The result? Stronger rankings, lower spend, and less work. Good luck.

Feature Image credit: Pixabay

By Rodney Laws

Editor at Ecommerce Platforms

In News

Content Consistency Is The Key To a Successful SEO Strategy

March 31, 2022 No Comments

By George Philip

Starting a website is a positive endeavour, but most marketers forget to keep the blog section running. A blog section is imperative for your SEO. Having an updated blog means you are taking efforts to regularly update the content, which would further increase the credibility and draw more traffic towards your website.

The catch here is – your content is as important as any other element of your digital marketing strategy. This brings us all to one real question – Can we maintain consistency in the website blog? The answer is a simple yes. Consistency in posting informative content is the key to success.

Regular blogging improves Google ranking.
As per the Google algorithm rule, consistency in posting regular content will get you a push on the chain in the SEO world. SEO requirements keep changing and today, the content should be not only new and fresh but also has to be informative and appealing for the users. However, there is no hard and fast rule such as you must only post your content according to your offerings.

For instance, if you are a brand dealing with kitchen appliances, your blog posts can have ‘how-to’ articles or new recipes to keep your audience glued to your website.
Not only should you keep your blog updated, but you must also update the links. The more updated the content is, the more response it will get. Let us sum up the importance of blogging in the following points.

A blog makes it easy to get internal linking and backlinks

With your blog, you can easily create internal links and backlinks.

Check the content posted in your industry, write on the topics that others have written, and create a link to the topic to reach out to your audience. Plenty of authentic backlink tools are available for SEO experts to ease the creation of internal linking. The entire process helps the website to go higher in ranks and improve its search hierarchy.

Creating brand awareness
How does an individual know your brand? It is only through the content you post on the website. With more and more products, you need to post more information. It is this updated information, which will help you glue your audience to your products.
We know blogging daily is difficult, but you can keep a schedule of posting at least 2 blogs a week. Be sure to fill in your blog with information like product guides, new launches, the latest industry information, and so on. You can write about several things to keep your audience informed. It just needs a few minutes of brainstorming in the right direction.

Start blogging for better SEO in Kelowna with us.

Developing rapport and relationships with readers
Fostering a relationship with readers is vital not only for your SEO success but also for the success of your digital marketing efforts. You never know when a good reader will turn into a valuable customer.

When you retain consistency in your style of writing and the way you add information to the blog, it creates a feeling of familiarity; bringing more readers to your website. There is another prominent reason to blogpost regularly. It helps to gain REO (Referral Engine Optimization), which means gaining word-of-mouth referrals through regularly updating the posts. The more you write, the more opportunities will be opened to you.
Keep you at par in competition

One of the inevitable reasons to post regular content is to stay at the edge of the competition. Generating regular content will keep a sweet spot for you among the competition. Your competitors are investing in blog and SEO services in Kelowna, you cannot take a back seat here.

Studies have suggested that around 80% of the marketers around the world are leveraging powerful content to improve their SEO efforts.

Besides, 96% of the marketers depend upon customized content to strike a conversation with their customers; blogging being the best medium.
Not to mention that more and more customers are taking out time to read about the products or services they are going to spend online. So, keep updating your blog and achieve success.

Generate Leads
When your blog is being updated with fresh content regularly, the clients will be allured by new product and service offerings from your brand. With these blogs, you are building relationships. Strategically placed call-to-action words will bring leads to your marketing team. A well-linked blog encourages the users to click on the link and complete the purchase.

Final Word
An ample amount of data suggests the importance of regular blog posts and their positive impact on SEO efforts. With each piece of content created, you interact with your brand to boost brand awareness and improve leads.

A professional agency offering SEO services in Kelowna is your go-to place to schedule your blog content and boost your overall online marketing efforts. If you are looking for a reliable partner for SEO in Kelowna, we are here to help.

Jamie Barton is the author of this article. To Know more information about SEO Kelowna please visit the website.

By George Philip

George Philip https://www.betechwise.com

George is a technology content writer with years of experience. Specialized in mobile devices, personal computers and consumer technology, as well as software and applications. He explains all technological concepts so that users with less knowledge can understand them. If not writing, you may find him engrossed playing action games on his smartphone. Just so you know, he loves Xiaomi products a lot. You may contact him via his email – [email protected]

Sourced from Betechwise

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Where to Learn SEO: The Best SEO Blogs

March 4, 2022 No Comments

By AJ Condez

The best SEO blogs provide the latest trends and insights in the world of digital marketing. They offer SEO tutorials where you can learn the best practices and tools to boost your technical skills and knowledge.

The topic of search engine optimization is varied and complex, so it’s important to read reliable blogs written by industry experts. SEO is continuously changing, it’s best to stay updated so you don’t fall behind the curve. Follow this guide to find out where to learn SEO and which blogs to follow to keep your SEO skill up to date.

How to Stay Informed About SEO Updates

When you’re just starting out in SEO, a great way to learn about updates is to find dependable sources and blogs and bookmark them to your web browser. You can also curate your feeds on social media and follow SEO experts or a digital marketing agency that provides free information to stay informed about important SEO updates.

Furthermore, you can use a site like Feedly, an application that aggregates reliable and informative sites and places them inside a highly optimized newsfeed. It’s a powerful application that lets you catalogue streams of information on your topics of interest while filtering out irrelevant information.

Success Lessons From the Top SEO Blogs

Success doesn’t come overnight, it takes time and a great plan to ensure you get the success that you want to see. These lessons provide a succinct explanation of key topics in SEO that you should know about.

Content is King

Content is the backbone of every great digital marketing strategy. Whether it’s in the form of video, audio, or written form, content is always teeming in the digital realm. Great and insightful content is one of the secret ingredients in developing your reach in SEO.

If you can create content that’s beneficial, informative, and interactive to your audience, not only will Google reward your content, but your audience will as well through shares and comments. Content is still the name of the game. Anyone who creates engaging content, whether it be to entertain or inform, has the upper hand in building their SEO.

Get a Niche

Your SEO strategy development will be easier if you find a niche. Specialization helps in optimizing your content to cater to a specific audience. This will allow you to cluster and segregate necessary keywords to fill your content with.

Finding a niche will also allow you to build brand authority and customer trust over your chosen topic. By positioning yourself to serve a target market, it makes your SEO efforts simpler by providing a clear-cut picture of what your intended audience wants to learn about.

Digital Marketing is Not Just SEO

SEO is an important factor in digital marketing but it’s not the only thing that makes up your digital marketing efforts. There are different factors like quality of content, user experience, and market reach that need to be taken into consideration.

A seamless user interface that boosts the overall experience of a website can benefit your SEO. Interactive content that engages your users and provides useful information can boost your SEO endeavours. Look beyond SEO for your digital marketing strategies, and understand that it’s not the only thing that’s going to bring in engagement and organic search traffic.

Best of the Blogosphere: Top Blogs About SEO

Ahrefs
Neil Patel’s Blog
Yoast SEO
Backlinko
The Moz Blog
Search Engine Journal
Content Marketing Institute
Marie Haynes Consulting
Practical Ecommerce
Gotch SEO

Best SEO Blogs: Where to Find SEO Support and SEO Tutorials

This essential reading list of SEO blogs targets key topics like domain authority, organic search traffic, and SEO ranking. These are some of the favourite SEO blogs by digital marketing readers.

Ahrefs Blog

Great for: SEO Strategies, Organic Search Traffic, and Online Tools
Posts Per Month: 12 articles

The Ahrefs blog is an SEO and online marketing blog operated by digital marketing professionals. The blog offers an extensive reading list on organic search traffic, search engine optimization, and digital marketing efforts like affiliate marketing.

Neil Patel

Great for: Content Strategies, SEO Insights, and Digital Marketing Industry News
Posts Per Month: 24 articles

Neil Patel is an SEO professional and an expert in the digital marketing industry. His articles on topics that tackle online marketing offer actionable content and act as a fantastic resource for your journey. The blog is an authoritative guide to the latest SEO topics and updates on a regular basis.

Yoast SEO Blog

Great for: SEO Resources, Content Creation, and Current SEO Trends
Posts Per Month: 4 articles

The Yoast SEO blog is perfect for people who want to start their journey in SEO. It has a dedicated section for the basics of SEO to begin your path towards becoming an SEO expert. The blog teaches you how to increase organic traffic and optimize content creation.

The Backlinko Blog

Great for: Online Marketing, Content Marketing Strategies, and Search Engine Marketing
Posts Per Month: 3 articles

The Backlinko blog offers comprehensive guides to search engine optimization strategies. Created by Brian Dean, Backlinko gives updated blog posts about SEO topics, search rankings, and deep insights to maximize your SEO knowledge.

The Moz Blog

Great for: SEO Industry Insight, SEO Trends, and SEO News
Posts Per Month: 4 articles

The Moz Blog offers how-to guides in optimizing your content and becoming an SEO master. It’s an amazing SEO blog that caters to advanced topics like domain authority, user search intent, and organic search traffic. Moreover, the posts are written by industry experts that are brought up to date on a constant basis.

Search Engine Journal

Great for: Google Search Optimization, Content SEO, and Search Marketing Industry Insight
Posts Per Month: 72 articles

Search Engine Journal provides in-depth guides to SEO insights and organic search traffic. This amazing blog offers a wide variety of articles that tackle different aspects of SEO, mainly SEO ranking, domain rating, and improved content creation. These topics help drive up organic traffic to websites.

Content Marketing Institute

Great for: Content Writing, SEO Tools, and Organic Search Traffic Updates
Posts Per Month: 16 articles

» MORE: Where to Learn Data Science: The Best Data Science Blogs

The Content Marketing Institute blog curates its information to give you the best insights on search engine optimization, domain authority, organic search traffic. The blog posts offer regular updates on the latest news and relevant information on SEO and content writing.

Marie Haynes Consulting

Great for: Google Search News, Organic Search Traffic, and Domain Authority
Posts Per Month: 1 article

Marie Haynes is an international SEO consultant that specializes in SEO services such as actionable insights in domain authority and in-depth articles in Google algorithm updates. The blog focuses mainly on Google to offer informative articles on organic traffic, search engine optimization, and advanced user experience.

Practical Ecommerce

Great for: Online Marketing, SEO News, and SEO Ranking
Posts Per Month: 32 articles

Practical Ecommerce offers SEO solutions using a competitive research tool like Google Analytics to boost organic search traffic for businesses. Its blog showcases regular updates on domain authority, ecommerce metrics, and niche categories like Amazon SEO.

Gotch SEO

Great for: Digital Marketing, Social Media Marketing, and SEO News
Posts Per Month: 4 articles

Founded by Nathan Gotch, Gotch SEO specializes in complicated topics like SEO ranking and domain authority. Furthermore, it also tackles various SEO tools to enhance your skills and expertise in the digital marketing industry.

Where to Learn SEO

SEO resources and training can be learned through various online courses, both free and paid. Online learning platforms like Coursera and Udemy offer paid SEO courses that provide extensive training and information. You can also go to sites like HubSpot and ClickMinded for free SEO crash courses at your disposal.

There are also YouTube channels dedicated to SEO and digital marketing. Ahrefs and Neil Patel both have videos that give great insight into the topic. Moreover, there are also SEO podcasts for you to listen to like the Search Engine Journal Show or Voices of Search. There are different learning approaches to SEO, you just have to look for them in the right places.

Can You Learn SEO in a Coding Bootcamp?

Yes, there are numerous SEO bootcamps for you to enrol in. If you want to become an SEO specialist, then you can enrol in a boot camp to jumpstart your career and expand your understanding of SEO.

Bootcamps are training programs that teach extensive knowledge to students in a short amount of time. They are a great way to learn because they give students hands-on projects to build their own SEO portfolios and develop their SEO network.

SEO Support

Below are the best online forums for diving into the online SEO community. They have tons of users and active threads for you to read on a daily basis. If you want to read on a topic like domain authority, then you can do so in one of these forums.

Google Webmaster Help Community

This is the one-stop source for any questions related to Google products or services. The site is a very active forum with new threads coming in on a daily basis. It offers four categories for you to choose from.

Crawling, Indexing, and Ranking – Questions about SEO and algorithms inspecting overall website content for rankings on Google.
Security, Malware, and Hacked Sites – Inquiries on website safety measures, protective actions, and troubleshooting externally caused problems.
Structured Data – Queries on Google Analytics and how to properly optimize content for maximum search engine reach.
Google Search Console – Discussions on possible methods and tools in increasing a website’s Google Search performance.

Warrior Forum

Warrior Forum is a digital marketing forum that tackles everything and anything about online and virtual advertising. It has multiple categories for you to choose from, a beginner’s section, ecommerce, social media marketing, copywriting, and a whole lot more.

The Moz Community

The Moz Community is an online forum that engages in online marketing and Moz-related products. It provides the latest discussions and questions about SEO and offers tons of categories to choose from, like keyword research, affiliate marketing, and conversion rate optimization.

What Should You Do Next to Advance Your SEO Knowledge?

The most logical step for you is to dedicate time to study and see if you want to learn more about SEO. On the other hand, if you want to fully commit to becoming an SEO specialist, you can enrol in an online SEO course. Furthermore, understand that building knowledge about SEO takes time and consistency. Start with the fundamentals of SEO and slowly increase the depth and complexity of the SEO topics you want to study.

Best SEO Blogs FAQ

Why is SEO important?

SEO is important because there are millions of people who use search engines in their daily lives. In turn, businesses and organizations have to use the search engine algorithm to make it works in their favour.

They use keywords to drive organic search traffic and establish domain authority. Moreover, when companies create engaging and relevant content, search engines will rank the website higher in the results feed. These SEO efforts improve a company’s brand visibility and market reach.

Are SEO jobs in demand?

Yes, SEO jobs are in demand. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, market research analysts are expected to grow in demand by about 22 percent between 2020 and 2030. The median wage is around $65,810 and there are about 740,900 job openings for this position.

What do SEO specialists do?

SEO specialists optimize and create content, improve landing pages and conversion rates, perform keyword research, and audit websites. These responsibilities involve a high level of knowledge in SEO and digital marketing.

Are SEO courses worth it?

Yes, SEO courses are worth it. You don’t necessarily have to spend money in learning SEO, there are free resources and blogs for you to try before committing to a paid SEO course. Check the reviews of paid SEO courses to ensure that they’re worth your hard-earned money.

By AJ Condez

AJ, from Manila, Philippines, started writing for Career Karma in December 2021. He has a Bachelor’s Degree in Accountancy from AMA Computer College. Previously, AJ worked as a content manager for New Wave Media, handling WordPress websites, publishing SEO-friendly content, and supervising teams of writers and editors. He has also ghost-written content for SEO sites and his personal website. In his free time, AJ enjoys reading and journaling.

Sourced from Career Karma

In News

Doing SEO for a Brand New Site

February 11, 2022 No Comments

By Faith Walls

Online visibility is crucial for effective marketing strategies. Every business needs a clear and concise website in order to rank high on search engines. This web platform serves as a landing page for your target audience and search query visitors. If your website is outdated, lacks business information, or simply does not exist, your business is sure to feel the effects. Of course, simply having a website is not enough to drive traffic. You want your business site to be easily navigable and comprehensive. When it comes to SEO (search engine optimization), the little details don’t just matter, they are the priority. These tips are sure to help you utilize the best SEO practices to position your page effectively in the digital space.

Verify Your Web Host

For starters, you want your website to be easy to find. Pay for the domain name that you want (‘BobJonesElectrical.com’ looks a lot better than the free ‘Bob_Jones2000Electrical.com’). Generally, web domains charge a monthly or annual fee to secure your site name of choice. Create something concise and comprehensive that clearly articulates your brand labeling. Once you have your brand name established, find a reliable web domain to host. Platforms such as GoDaddy, DreamHost, and Hostinger are well-known and verified web hosting services.

Organize Your Sitemap

Believe it or not, your website layout crucially impacts your search ranking. Page navigability and consistent messaging don’t just reduce bounce rates, but they also affect how search engines rank them. Google SEO largely favors a user-friendly setup and clean site layout. Start with a skeleton outline of the general concepts within your site. Add the essential elements of a website, such as an about page, contact page, an engaging home page, and a blog section for future articles.

Conduct Keyword Research

Keyword usage is another element of Google SEO analytics. It is also just good practice to utilize your designated keywords frequently within your web content. Of course, to do this, you must first have your keywords denoted. Conduct keyword research surrounding your brand and target market to determine which words are a top priority. Also, work to include your brand name liberally within your site copy. Keywords are another reason why hosting a blog section on your website is important. Publishing relevant articles ensure you can organically pepper in your desired keywords throughout your site.

Learn About Tracking & Analytics

Before you hit “publish” on your brand new site, take the time to learn how tracking and analytics work in the digital space. If you are new to the world of SEO, let Google Analytics help you get your bearings. Once you create an account via Google Analytics, you have access to valuable information regarding customer behaviour, conversions, and geo-locations. This platform allows you to track and view key metrics across your web platform to help influence future ads and alterations.

Create Content Before Launch

Though this may seem unnecessary to note, it is important to ensure that your website is fully completed before publishing and promoting. Unfinished pages, inaccurate information, and broken links only increase the bounce rate on your website. Work to maintain a visually appealing and aesthetically consistent layout on each page, with ample copy brimming with keywords. Videos are another great way to offer a comprehensive message while keeping the audience’s attention.

By Faith Walls

Sourced from HEY SOCAL

In News

17 SEO Copywriting Tips To Help Your Rankings

February 11, 2022 No Comments

By Manick Bhan

Wondering how to increase your keyword rankings through content? These SEO copywriting tips can get you started.

Writing is already hard enough, but writing with the goal of ranking in Google requires even more strategic planning.

Successful SEO copywriters consider what users want, and how search engines actually work, throughout their writing process.

For those site owners who want to grow their visibility through content, understanding SEO copywriting is the right place to start.

What Is SEO Copywriting?

SEO copywriting is the process of creating content with the goal of ranking in search engines for relevant keywords.

The process can be applied to your homepage, product pages, blog posts, or even your profiles on review sites.

When done well, SEO copywriting can increase the total number of keywords that your content ranks for.

Why Does SEO Copywriting Matter To Ranking?

Google relies on natural language processing to understand what users are searching for and what our content is about.

Over the years, NLP models have gotten far more advanced.

If you want to learn more about NLP technology, put some of your own website content into Google’s Natural Language API Demo.

Then, see how Google works to understand it.

Screenshot from Google’s Natural Language Processing API Demo Tool, December 2021

Screenshot from Google’s Natural Language Processing API Demo Tool, December 2021

Because of Google’s advancements in NLP, SEO copywriting has evolved to be far less about quick tricks and far more about creating informative and valuable content for users.

But as seen above, Google is still a robot.

SEO copywriters should consider how search engine technology actually works and leverage that knowledge when writing their content.

SEO Copywriting Tips For Better Rankings

The best content will always be created with users in mind.

But, there are strategic choices copywriters can make to help crawlers better understand their content and promote it accordingly.

Here are some SEO copywriting tips for creating content that is loved by both users and search engines alike.

Research And Prewriting

1. Choose A Realistic Keyword Goal

Before you start writing, you should have a clear keyword target in mind. But make sure you set your content up for success by setting realistic and achievable keyword goals.

Keyword research is the foundation of the SEO copywriting process.

You might be tempted to choose industry keywords that have higher search volume, but those keywords are often extremely competitive.

If you are a website with less authority, you’re unlikely to rank on page one for those terms, no matter how high-quality your content is.

So how do you know if your content stands a chance of ranking?

Keyword difficulty scores can serve as a benchmark for your keyword goals.

Keyword difficulty score in the SearchAtlas keyword researcher tool

Screenshot from SearchAtlas, December 2021

Screenshot from Ahrefs, December 2021

I suggest finding relevant keywords with difficulty scores that are less than or equal to your site’s DA.

These keywords might be long-tail or have more informational search intent, but they can present real opportunities for your content to rank quickly and start driving clicks.

2. Analyze The Top-Ranking Content

Want to know what it will take to rank? Look at the content that is already on page one.

Review the top-ranking pieces of content and use them as models for your own content creation.

How long is the content? What are the page titles and meta descriptions that are enticing the users to click?

Screenshot from SearchAtlas, December 2021

The goal here is not to create a carbon copy of your competitors, but to better understand what content, authority, and page experience signals that Google crawlers are responding to.

3. Understand And Write For Search Intent

Search intent is often narrowed down into four categories: Navigational, Informational, Transactional, and Commercial.

The search intent of your target keyword determines what type of content you should create.

For transactional keywords, Google is more likely to promote product or service pages knowing that the user wants to make a purchase.

For informational queries, Google more often ranks blogs, top-ten lists, how-to articles, and resource-driven content types.

Most likely, your keyword can be categorized in the above four categories, so strive to meet that intent with your content.

4. Outline Your Structure

Not all content outlines will look exactly alike, but the idea is to determine the overall topic, subtopics, headings, and main points the content will include.

If you’re optimizing properly, your keyword targets will have a prominent place in these structural components.

Not all copywriters like to work from outlines, but they can be very useful in ensuring proper on-page SEO practices.

5. Prioritize Quality Over Everything Else

Google wants to rank quality content for its users.

But what is quality in the eyes of crawlers? Relevance, load times, backlinks, and referring domains, to name just a few.

In terms of the quality signals that are communicated through the writing, Google is looking for:

Comprehensive, in-depth content.
Original reporting and analysis.
Expert authorship and sourcing.
Proper grammar and spelling.

Do your best to meet these signals, and Google is more likely to see your website as high-quality.

The SEO Copywriting Process

6. Explore Your Topic In-depth

Although content length is not a ranking factor, there is a strong correlation between longer content and top rankings.

That’s because long content is more likely to display the quality signals listed in tip #5. Additional studies have shown that longer content also earns more backlinks and social engagements.

So do your best to be comprehensive and explore your content in-depth.

7. Write For Passage Ranking

Google’s Passage Ranking update went live in early 2021. As a result, Google no longer just indexes and ranks web pages, but specific passages of content.

For example, the below content provides a thorough answer to the search query, [What is an SEO assistant?].

When the user clicks on the SERP result, Google has indexed the exact part of the web page that answers that question and highlights it for users.

Screenshot from ZipRecruiter, December 2021

Passage Ranking means that your content has so many opportunities to rank for multiple queries.

Strategic use of structure, headlines, and questions is key to helping passages of your content rank well in search.

8. Use A Content Optimization Tool

Leveraging AI and NLP tools can result in major boosts in keyword rankings.

Clearscope, SearchAtlas, SEMrush, and others all have content optimization software that eliminates some of the guesswork of the SEO copywriting process.

These tools identify common words and topics used in top-ranking content and suggest similar terms for you to include in yours. As long as you incorporate them naturally, the results can be significant.

Screenshot of Google Search Console, December 2021

I’ve seen content tools have an almost immediate impact on the total number of keywords, impressions, and average positions that web pages earn.

More SEO copywriters should be using them.

9. Offer Answers To Related Questions

Another way to improve keyword rankings is to answer common questions that users are asking in relation to your target keyword.

There are a couple of ways you can find out what these questions are: Google Search and a keyword tool.

Look to People Also Ask and autocomplete to see what common questions people are asking about the topic. Then, make sure you include those questions and their answers in your content.

Screenshot from search for [how to fix garbage disposal], Google, December 2021

Similarly, some keyword tools can tell you the common questions that searchers are asking.

Screenshot from search for [how to fix garbage disposal], Google, December 2021

10. Include Synonyms And Keywords In Your Headings

It’s important to include your keywords in your h1s and h2s, but Google is now smart enough to understand synonyms and other related terms.

Choose words that have a semantic relationship with your primary keyword target.

Google’s NLP algorithms use them to understand your content more deeply.

Adding these terms into your headings can help you signal strong relevance but without keyword stuffing.

11. Avoid Long Sentences, Long Paragraphs, And Misspellings

In terms of readability, you want your content to be easily understood by a variety of people. If your content is too academic or technical, some may choose to bounce back to the SERPs.

Similarly, content that is poorly written or full of typos will deter readers.

Aim for shorter sentences and paragraphs to improve the reading experience.

Some SEO tools suggest a grade level, but the idea is to keep the language simple and accessible to as many people as possible.

Copywriting Extras

12. Break Up Your Content With Rich Media

Although long-form text is important to ranking, your content should have other non-textual elements that help readers stay engaged.

Make sure you include images, videos, or infographics in your content, particularly to break up long passages of text.

Google likes to see content that incorporates rich media, so leverage it to your advantage.

If that rich media slows down the performance of your pages though, it can work against you. So make sure any rich media is optimized for speed and performance.

13. Include Relevant Links With Contextual Anchor Text

Your internal and external links, as well as the anchor text of those links, are also important quality signals to Google.

Make sure you link to relevant, authoritative sources. Also, make sure you utilize anchor text best practices:

Anchor text should be relevant to the destination page.
Don’t use too much exact match anchor text.
Avoid generic anchor text (e.g. “click here”).
Use contextual anchor text as often as possible.

14. Make Your Content Easy To Navigate

Features like a table of contents and jumplinks make your content more user-friendly.

This is particularly true for longer articles or resource pages.

Screenshot from WordPress, December 2021

Google crawlers like to see these navigational elements on the page that improve UX. Make sure you incorporate them whenever you can.

After The Writing

15. Make Sure That Google Understands Your Content

A week or so after you publish your content, login into your Google Search Console account to confirm that Google is understanding it correctly.

See what keywords you are earning impressions for.

If they are close to or relevant to your original keyword goal, great. If not, you may need to revise the content.

Higher positions and clicks will come with time and authority building, but impressions are a good early sign that Google understands your content and knows when to promote it.

16. Optimize And Test Your Meta Tags

Google now rewrites page titles and meta descriptions when it sees fit, but this only happens about 20% of the time.

It is still important to write optimized meta tags so Google understands your content and users are enticed to click.

However, you don’t have to take a one-and-done approach to meta tag optimization.

If after several months, your content gets to page one but still has a low click-through rate, test out page titles and meta descriptions to see which produce the best results.

17. Revise And Update Accordingly

Over time, your content will eventually become outdated.

New information may become available, keywords may grow more competitive, links may break, and more.

So make sure to revisit old or underperforming content to see if more attention is needed.

Your most important content assets should be updated at least once a year, particularly if they are discussing industry trends or analysis.

Final Thoughts On SEO Copywriting

The reality is, SEO copywriting doesn’t end after the content is published on your website.

The internet changes, algorithms evolve, and your content needs to be updated accordingly.

If you deploy this final tip, you can increase the shelf-life of your content so it maintains top keyword rankings for years to come.

By Manick Bhan

Manick Bhan is the Founder and CTO of LinkGraph, an award-winning SEO and digital marketing agency. Through his agency work, thought leadership, and speaking engagements, he helps brands of all sizes grow their digital presence.

Sourced from Search Engine Journal

In News

Everything You Need to Know About SEO

January 11, 2022 No Comments

By Kristel Staci

The world of search engine optimization is changing all the time. Here are the latest SEO trends to be aware of.

When it comes to online marketing, there are a variety of different tools that businesses can take advantage of. Pay-per-click, social media, review websites such as Yelp, and search engines are just some of the online ways that consumers come across websites of all sorts.

Search engines are one of the best ways to get clients of all types. Hair and makeup product customers, storage facility customers, personal injury clients, and so many other consumers can be found through businesses utilizing these search engines properly.

With such a promising market future, it’s no wonder that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is utilized by an abundance of different businesses. This system creates great results, is cost-effective, and can easily be implemented and maintained. Unfortunately, many website owners aren’t as familiar with the industry of SEO.

The Search Engine Optimization Market

SEO is a growing industry thanks to its proven success and usage. Businesses all over the country and world are participating in this market, contributing to its high potential in the future. Understanding how this industry is stable and growing is important for businesses looking into utilizing SEO.

It is estimated that businesses are spending more than $80 billion on SEO services just this year. This is much higher than in 2018 when the estimated business spending for SEO was around $72 billion. Within just three years, the Search Engine Optimization market has grown substantially, and we can expect more of this in the future.

68% of online experiences begin with a search engine, representing a large portion of online traffic. In fact, 92.96% of all global traffic comes from Google search, Google Images, and Google Maps. With such high usage and acknowledgment, it’s no surprise that most businesses take advantage of this tool.

Why SEO is Important for Business

Such a large market means ample opportunities for businesses. Businesses who utilize SEO can sometimes expect 1000%+ more traffic than they would from organic social media. Of this traffic, SEO leads can have a 14.6% close rate.

Search Engine Optimization is one of the most effective forms of online marketing. It has great success rates and doesn’t cost an abundance of money to use. Even businesses with small marketing budgets can use SEO to their advantage.

Since search engines are so commonly used, SEO best practices are essential for businesses when it comes to making these engines work in their favor. Without SEO usage, websites are highly unlikely to get search engine exposure. 90.63% of websites get no organic search traffic on google, meaning their traffic relies almost entirely on SEO.

Find an SEO Agency Specializing in Your Niche

Effective SEO services such as the legal SEO agency Rankings, help websites ensure they are one of the first results within a search engine. This high ranking is the key to getting the most traffic that you can through search engines. Studies have shown that 0.78% of online users click on Google results that are on the second page. It’s advised you find an agency that specializes in your specific niche as they will be the experts in understanding your competitive landscape and how to implement an advantageous strategy for your business.

Businesses that successfully implement this type of marketing can reap the benefits this approach provides. SEO is one of the most effective ways to reach high-quality leads online and convert them into customers in the future.

Learning how to implement SEO on your own or having a professional assist you are two easy ways to make search engines work to your advantage.

Keeping up with SEO is highly recommended for businesses. Whether you are looking to maintain or increase your current customer volume, SEO is one of the best ways to do so.

Feature Image Credit: Photo by janjf93 on Pixabay

By Kristel Staci

Sourced from Influencive

In News

3 Reasons Why You Must Hire an Experienced SEO Expert For Your Business

December 27, 2021 No Comments

Sourced from Boss Magazine

As a small business owner, you might be tempted to take matters into your own hands when it comes to increasing your website’s organic reach. It may seem like finding the right keywords using some popular tools and stuffing your pages with loads of content because “content is king”.

However, the game of SEO extends over keyword research and content creation. It is an extensive and full-time job that can be best left for an expert to handle.

Still not convinced? Here are three main reasons why you must consider SEO consultant service for your website’s growth.

Take a look.

Off-Site SEO & Content Marketing Strategy

If you speak with one of the SEO experts, you’ll realize that it’s more than just optimizing your site. The most effective SEO practices employ a comprehensive approach and offer a wide range of solutions to boost your website’s visibility.

What is the significance of this?

Numerous things should occur “off-page” to boost your SEO. This includes strategic link building and building citations. It would be helpful to have other trustworthy websites that could link back to your website as authoritative votes (hence the word “backlink “).

A skilled SEO consultant will ensure that your Google My Business account is authentic and optimized for search. It is particularly beneficial to find a consultant who has a deep understanding of the local market and the latest trends. For instance, an SEO company that is specialized in Silicon Valley businesses.

Free up Your Time & Money

If you’re beginning to feel overwhelmed by the plethora of talk of SEO, it’s normal. SEO can be fun; however, make no mistake: SEO is a full-time job. Trying to tackle it yourself can only distract you from the essential aspects of running your business.

SEO is a constant process that requires hours of testing, failures and research. It can consume time for working business people. In the worst case, you’ll be spinning your wheels with outdated methods which won’t benefit (or might even hurt) the SEO of your business.

When you weigh in all these reasons, hiring an experienced SEO consultant will make sense. They’re experts and know the ins and outs of their field, leaving you free to concentrate on your work.

What happens to the money you invest in SEO services? You’ll more than get the money back with a high ROI. Organic search (the core purpose of SEO) generates 51% of the web traffic – over five times the money spent on other advertising methods.

An expert can bring fresh insight to your marketing and website initiatives. Their prior experience coupled with an outsider’s viewpoint of your company can result in exciting and lucrative fresh marketing strategies.

Bring in the Right Kind of Website Visitors

Bettering your SEO efforts involves more than just bringing more visitors to your site. For instance, if you’re trying to attract customers within or around South Carolina, it won’t help draw customers from Miami or New York.

SEO experts concentrate on bringing suitable visitors to your website rather than just increasing the number of people who visit your site. This requires extensive analysis to find out what users are looking for and then altering your web content to satisfy those who have that requirement.

A part of this is identifying the appropriate intention-based keywords that you can use for your website. This can help drive visitors to your website looking for the exact type of product or services and are often eager to buy and not only people who are just browsing to gather data.

They also know (and can utilize) the analytics on your site to find out what is working and what’s not. By constantly updating your website’s content and marketing activities, an SEO consultant can increase your sales, not just your visitors.

Final Word

Learning SEO is a full-time task and one that you might lack the energy or the desire to devote yourself to. It would be beneficial to concentrate on running your primary business and let an experienced SEO expert handle your website’s organic growth.

Sourced from Boss Magazine

In News

5 Signs You Should Start Using Paid SEO Tools

December 7, 2021 No Comments

By Aashirvad Kumar

I expect that you are using Free SEO tools but facing some problems in ranking your website. There are chances that you can make a brand of your online business, but these chances are pretty low with Free SEO tools.

If you are struggling to mark your online presence, you must start using paid SEO tools instead of free ones because Paid SEO tools will give you a more detailed report of your competitor’s website.

With proper analysis, you will be able to replace your competitor on every search engine.

In this article, I’ll be discussing five signs of your website that indicate that you should start using paid SEO tools now. But, first, let’s Optimize for SEO to get more and more engagements.

5 Signs Indicating you to use Paid SEO tools

#1 Conversion Rate is low

You are getting enough impressions to attract many visitors/customers, but you are getting enough CTR, so eventually, you aren’t getting enough people on your website. This is a problem because your website lacks some crucial aspects that search engines require.

Generally, free SEO tools don’t have enough data to analyse the flows of a website; to thoroughly analyse your website and understand what is stopping your website from converting your impressions into visits; you should use paid SEO tools.

Paid SEO tools will give you detailed and correct information about your website’s optimization. In addition, paid SEO tools will help you optimize your website according to search engines.

#2 Not getting enough Sales

There are situations where you are getting visitors, but your website cannot convert them into your customers. If you are struggling with this problem and free SEO tools aren’t helping you. So, now it’s time to switch to paid SEO tools so that you can understand what is wrong with your content and your website’s layout.

You have enough backlinks and good off-page SEO to attract visitors, but your content has some problems. Once someone lands on your website, then it’s your content that can convert the visitor into your customer.

Paid SEO tools like Grammarly can help enhance your website’s content.

#3 Unable to generate quality content

This is somewhere similar to the above situation, but here you have neither visitors nor the content to upgrade. So here you are struggling with the essential requirement of a website that is content, Right? And Free SEO tools aren’t effective in helping with content quality.

Only paid SEO tools can help you in such situations because they will make the content creation process much easier for you.

For example, Grammarly will analyse each sentence you write and find errors, if any. If it finds any errors, it will highlight the particular word/phrase where the error is present.

Apart from this, Grammarly will suggest possible corrections that will undoubtedly help you generate better content relatively quickly.

#4 Unable to find worthy keywords

Keyword Research is the most important aspect of SEO. You can’t rank on search engines without proper keywords, and without keywords, you can’t even make your SEO strategy. But, on the other hand, if you pick the wrong keywords, you will waste your effort and time.

You have to be very careful while picking your keywords to work on. However, I discovered that most of them aren’t accurate enough to rely on while using Free SEO tools. Thus, for me, Paid SEO tools like SEMRUSH, AHREFS work perfectly fine.

These tools are regularly maintained and upgraded by a bunch of professionals, and these are entirely reliable.

#5 Email Marketing isn’t working

If you are facing problems with email marketing, then you are pretty much sorted with the website’s optimization and content-related issues; if you aren’t, then before email marketing, you should concentrate on them. Then, once you are satisfied with your content, you can use Email marketing to grab some extra visitors.

If you are already generating quality content and your website is also well-optimized. Still, emails aren’t working for you, then it may be because of a wrong template, or your mails are piling into the receiver’s spam folder.

You need to pick a reliable tool for email marketing because most of the free email marketing tools aren’t very effective. So you have to keep on shuffling with some paid SEO or email marketing tools and need to analyse which one is working for you.

Final Verdict

Using paid SEO tools for your business, you can also generate income and increase your online presence through some free SEO tools. But, again, as mentioned above, the chances are pretty low. However, many Digital Marketing Companies, such as an SEO Company in India, SEO Company In the USA, SEO services in Vietnam, etc. are started using many tools for their clients.

If you are using some paid SEO tools, then no doubt they will give a good ROI. It is mainly because most of the paid SEO tools are accurate and precise. This makes them reliable to use.

To get faster results and you want to make your website/business a brand, then I think it is entirely worth it to invest in some good Paid SEO tools.

Feature Image credit:- freepik.com

By Aashirvad Kumar

Aashirvad Kumar is a Writer at Tele Trick Mania and SEO Executive at Optimize For SEO. He has been blogging since 2016 in the technology niche. He has experience of more than 5+ years in Digital Marketing.

Sourced from readwrite

In News

5 Simple Tips for SEO + Email Marketing Flywheels

December 6, 2021 No Comments

By Cyrus Shepard

If you haven’t been using email marketing tactics to support your SEO efforts, now is the time to start. In today’s episode of Whiteboard Friday, Cyrus explains how to use the complementary powers of these strategies over and over again, so that each becomes bigger and more powerful the more you do it.

Photo of the ROI of SEO. — Click on the whiteboard image above to open a larger version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I’m Cyrus Shepard. I hope you’re enjoying this video no matter which day of the week you’re watching it on. Today I want to talk about SEO and email marketing, specifically five simple tips for SEO and email marketing flywheels.

What is a flywheel?

So when I talk about SEO and email marketing flywheels, what do we mean by flywheel? Well, that’s where we’re using the power of SEO to grow our email marketing list and conversely using our email marketing list to grow our SEO for more website traffic. There are actual ways you can do that and doing it over and over and over again so that each becomes bigger and more powerful the more you do it.

So it’s like a flywheel. It’s really hard to get started. But as you get going, it gets easier and easier and easier, and everything grows a little bit more effectively. So if you’re an experienced SEO and email marketer, this video may not be for you. But if you primarily do SEO and you’re looking for ways to improve your mail marketing, or you’re primarily an email marketer and you’re looking for ways to grow your SEO, these are the tips for you.

Set goals

So let’s talk about our goals. What are we trying to accomplish with this email SEO marketing flywheel? First of all is simply more visitors, more visitors to your website content, because more visitors usually leads to more links, sharing, and things like that. The links and sharing can be positive SEO signals to Google, which actually lead to higher rankings.

So if we can get more people to our content through our email, the downstream effect of that could be higher rankings and more traffic generally naturally generated through Google search results. But also we want bigger and more powerful email marketing lists because your marketing list is one of your best marketing channels, especially if you segment users, which we’re going to talk about in just a little bit.

Ultimately, we want more conversions and sales. Whatever your marketing and business goals are, that’s what we want to achieve with this flywheel effect.

How to achieve those goals

1. Incentivize sign-ups

So let’s talk about the specifics, how are we going to get into it. First of all, we want to get more sign-ups from our content, from our website material. So we want to incentivize sign-ups.

Now the important thing to realize is you don’t have to incentivize sign-ups just through SEO. You can do it through any marketing traffic channel. That’s direct traffic, social media traffic, and referral traffic. Any way that people are visiting your content, you want to target those to incentivize for sign-ups to your email marketing list. So one of the ways I like to do this through SEO is through what a lot of people call content power-ups.

That’s where you’re incentivizing sign-ups by offering bonus or exclusive content in exchange for people to sign up for your list. For example, this is “5 Simple Tips for SEO and Email Marketing.” What if at the end of this post I would offer five additional bonus tips in exchange for signing up for exclusive content? The idea is that you want to offer something that they can’t find on the website. That could be a tool, some additional content, downloads, any sort of free bonus, a coupon, whatever you can think of, something exclusive to incentivize those sign-ups from your content.

2. Segmentation

Second tip, we don’t want to dump everything onto the same large email list. We want to make sure that we’re segmenting those sign-ups by topic and interest.

Unless your site is very narrowly focused, you generally want to segment your list among different topics. For example, here at Moz, we cover SEO, but we cover many, many different types of SEO based on user interest. So there’s local SEO, there’s technical SEO, there’s copywriting, there’s link building, all these niche interests that we want to segment users by.

So there’s a couple different ways to segment. One is self-segmentation, where people can check a box and say I’m interested in this and this and this. But a little bit easier is automatic segmentation based on the type of content that people are visiting. So on your technical SEO pages, if that’s what you were doing, you would put people onto a technical SEO sign-up list and make it clear that they’re receiving technical SEO tips.

Always make it clear what they’re receiving. But this segmentation is going to come in useful in just a little bit.

3. Content promotion

So the third thing, the third tip, and this is where we’re getting into the meat of it, is content promotion. This is where we’re using our email list to send traffic back to our website. When people think about SEO and email marketing flywheels, this is what they typically think about.

They think about the content promotion aspect. Now the important thing is we’re not trying to promote all of our content. No, we want to promote our best content, because your website, your visitors are coming, they’re doing a Google search. They’re not necessarily aware of what your best content is, and that’s why you want to deliver your best content. Importantly, you want to personalize it with the segmentation.

You’re not promoting all your content to all your visitors. You’re personalizing it based on their interests because you already segmented them out based on the type of content that they consumed. So if we’re sending out a technical SEO newsletter, we’re sending the best of our technical SEO content to those people who have already indicated an interest in technical SEO.

One of the most important things to remember, you don’t have to just promote your new content. It’s okay to promote the best of your old content as well, because again your users aren’t aware of what that is. So oftentimes in an introductory email, maybe the first email they receive in a series, you can promote and highlight old posts or even do it in a series.

“This is our best content over the last five years. Make sure you don’t miss this.” That old content, if it’s truly the best, will oftentimes outperform your newer content. So that’s how you can personalize and segment and send out your best content to get more promotion and more eyeballs on your best SEO content and hopefully more links, sharing, and all that to keep the flywheel going.

4. Incentivize sharing

So not only did we incentivize sign-ups, now that we’re in the email part and sending emails out, we want to incentivize sharing. That’s my fourth tip, incentivize sharing, because we don’t only want people to visit and read the content, we’re hoping that they’ll share it with their audience as well. One of the ways I like to do that is to segment my best sharers.

Now what do I mean by this? I’m not only segmenting by interest, but I’m segmenting by influence. So I might put together a list of influencers or people I know in my particular industry that have signed up. Maybe I’ve targeted them. Just like I offer people exclusive content to sign up for the email list, I’m offering my sharers exclusive content before I share it with the rest of the world.

So I might email my sharing segment and say, “Hey, we just published a post. We haven’t told anybody. We’re going to announce it on social tomorrow. But I wanted to let you know about it ahead of time if you want to share it with your followers.” Because we made it exclusive, we haven’t shared it with our followers, it gives our influencers something to share and it makes them feel special and sharing it out with their own audience.

There are different strategies that you can use to do that. But it is often an effective tactic to segment your best sharers. It’s a little advanced, but that can incentivize sharing and hopefully help out your SEO.

5. Keyword research

Finally, when we talk about SEO, we talk about keyword research. Keyword research is one of those SEO areas that works really well in incorporating into email.

Now, here at Moz, we have a tool called Keyword Explorer. There are other tools out there. But millions of keywords suggestions. Traditionally, in SEO, you use keyword research to determine your content, targeting keywords that your audience has interest in. We have lots of guides here at Moz on how to do that, how to target content around keywords.

But you can also use that keyword research in your emails. One of the most important places to use them is your email subject line. If you know the interest that your audience is interested in, through your segmentation, you can start to understand the keywords that drove them to their content, and using those same keywords in your email subject lines can improve your open rates. But that’s not the only place.

One of my favourite places to use keywords is in the sign-up CTA. So when you have a sign-up form on your website, you can use a generic sign-up form, like, hey, sign up for our newsletter. Okay, that’s not very effective. But if you use the keywords, the targeted keywords sign up for our technical SEO tips or our local SEO or our best dog food recipes, the keywords that people use to find your website are going to be the best keywords to incorporate into your CTAs to get them to sign up. You use keywords in your email subject lines to get them back to your content and so on and so forth. It’s another part of the effective flywheel.

Bonus: turn your best emails into content

So finally, bonus tip, I want to make sure that you don’t forget to turn your best emails into content. Your content doesn’t have to live exclusively in separated channels. If you’re writing killer emails to your audience, that get a lot of engagement, that have super high open rates, those are emails that you can turn into content for your website.

Or if you have a popular newsletter, you can simply archive all your emails into HTML so people can search. You may not want to do that for certain reasons if the quality isn’t very good. But if the emails are actually good, go ahead and turn them into content, because that’s going to help your SEO as well.

All right. I hope you enjoyed these tips. If you have any questions about email or SEO, please reach out to the team here at Moz. We’re here to help. Hope you enjoyed it, everybody, and please share this video. All right, thanks.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com.