SEO Plan To Rank Higher on Google’s First Page & Double Your Income
An SEO plan (also referred to as the “SEO approach” or “search engine optimization strategy”) is the process of planning, outlining, and implementing steps designed to improve search engine rankings. In other words: an SEO strategy or plan is the process that you follow when you want to get more organic traffic & ranking on the Google first page. In this post, you will get a complete SEO plan & common marketing strategy that you can implement for your business or you can hire our expert marketing team to do this for your website or app to make at least a double profit as the current. So read it now to know the details.
SEO Plan To Rank Higher on Google’s First Page & Double Your Income
Please consider as your website ( The below plan is considering your website is already created with a basic structure )
1st Month 1st Week:
Targeted KW’s / Website Research, Targeted Competitor Research, Competitor KW’s Research, KW’s Finalisation for the next 6 Months
1st Month 2nd & 3rd Week:
- Change Title tag at your home & Other pages:
- Change Meta-description tag at your home & Other pages:
- Implement 301 redirects for homepage duplicates SEO: ( If Necessary ) Add to robots.txt file following directives:
Disallow: /register*
Sitemap: https://xyzxyz.com/sitemap.xml
- Improve your website speed (configure caching, compression, image optimization).
- For desktop:
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
- For mobile:
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
- Add relevant ALT text attributes to images without it: –
- Add unique and relevant SEO text to your homepage. A good SEO text consists of 300-500 words with 5-6 main keywords.
More features of a good SEO text:
- headings wrapped in H1 / H2 / H3 tags with SEO keywords inside
- use of bulleted / numbered lists
- texts without keyword spamming
- good formatting
- use of internal links to useful pages of your site inside the SEO text
- Solve additional issues with important On-page elements:
- add optimized Description tags for all the pages without them:
( Need to be added )
or / or
Write your own success story with us! Here you find our success story: who was our client, how we helped to solve issues, the main challenges, and our solutions.
https://https://xyzxyz.com/.com/terms-and-conditions/
These Terms and Conditions apply to all users of the domain https://nitex.com. Please read the Terms & Conditions carefully before placing any orders.
- leave only one H1 tag on each page from the list:
https:///success-stories/
<H1> Success stories with xyzxyz Inc
<H1> Bring values to your customers xyzxyz Inc → <H2>
- Generate a fresh and actual sitemap.xml file after fixing all errors.
- Add Organization structured data to your site. (Schema)
<script type=”application/ld+json”>
{ “@context” : “https://schema.org”,
“@type” : “Organization”,
“url” : “https://xyzxyz.com/”,
“name”: “xyzxyz Consulting Inc”,
“description”: ” “,
“contactPoint” : [
{ “@type” : “ContactPoint”,
“telephone” : “+1 000 000 0000”,
“email”: “info@xyzxyz.com”,
“contactType” : “For sales inquiries”
} ] }
“address”: {
“@type”: “PostalAddress”,
“addressLocality”: “USA”,
“postalCode”: “00000”,
“streetAddress”: “000 NE 3rd Ave. Fort Lauderdale, FL 00000”
},
</script>
- We recommend creating a profile in Google My Business (https://www.google.com/business/) as it’s high priority local ranking factor. Make sure you are using your real contact information (NAP – name/address/phone) in your Google Business profile and that the contact information is the same as on your website. More information – https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/google-my-business.
- And other social media company pages creation & Placing social media button on the website for social media signal improvements.
1st Month 4th Week:
- AMP Version of The Website
- Local Citation on the Following Websites:
More Backlink Source We will Follow: https://mahbubosmane.com/backlink-source
2nd Month 1st Week:
- 6 new Blog Writing & Posting with on-page SEO & Images. ( Image & Content will be provided by you or we may provide if you allow us)
- New 600 Link Building
- New Article Marketing Using all social media for new traffic generation
2nd Month 2nd Week:
- 6 new Blog Writing & Posting with on-page SEO & Images. ( Image & Content will be provided by you or we may provide if you allow us)
- New 600 Link Building
- New Article Marketing Using all social media for new traffic generation
2nd Month 3rd Week:
- 6 new Blog Writing & Posting with on-page SEO & Images. ( Image & Content will be provided by you or we may provide if you allow us)
- New 600 Link Building
- New Article Marketing Using all social media for new traffic generation
2nd Month 4th Week:
- 6 new Blog Writing & Posting with on-page SEO & Images. ( Image & Content will be provided by you or we may provide if you allow us)
- New 600 Link Building
- New Article Marketing Using all social media for new traffic generation
3rd Month 1st Week:
- 6 new Blog Writing & Posting with on-page SEO & Images. ( Image & Content will be provided by you or we may provide if you allow us)
- New 600 Link Building
- New Article Marketing Using all social media for new traffic generation
3rd Month 2nd Week:
- 6 new Blog Writing & Posting with on-page SEO & Images. ( Image & Content will be provided by you or we may provide if you allow us)
- New 600 Link Building
- New Article Marketing Using all social media for new traffic generation
3rd Month 3rd Week:
- 6 new Blog Writing & Posting with on-page SEO & Images. ( Image & Content will be provided by you or we may provide if you allow us)
- New 600 Link Building
- New Article Marketing Using all social media for new traffic generation
3rd Month 4th Week:
- 6 new Blog Writing & Posting with on-page SEO & Images. ( Image & Content will be provided by you or we may provide if you allow us)
- New 600 Link Building
- New Article Marketing Using all social media for new traffic generation
4th Month 1st Week:
- 6 new Blog Posting with on-page SEO & Images. ( Image & Content will be provided by you or we may provide if you allow us)
- New 600 Link Building
- New Article Marketing Using all social media for new traffic generation
4th Month 2nd Week:
- 6 new Blog Writing & Posting with on-page SEO & Images. ( Image & Content will be provided by you or we may provide if you allow us)
- New 600 Link Building
- New Article Marketing Using all social media for new traffic generation
4th Month 3rd Week:
- 6 new Blog Writing & Posting with on-page SEO & Images. ( Image & Content will be provided by you or we may provide if you allow us)
- New 600 Link Building
- New Article Marketing Using all social media for new traffic generation
4th Month 4th Week:
- 6 new Blog Writing & Posting with on-page SEO & Images. ( Image & Content will be provided by you or we may provide if you allow us)
- New 600 Link Building
- New Article Marketing Using all social media for new traffic generation
- Total 72 new articles will be posted & 7200 links will be built in 4 Months. Traffic will be doubled, and you will start to get high ranking & clients.
- You will get a performance/KPI report after every 15 days
5th Month 1st Week:
- Paid Ad Campaign on Google 1. Paid Ad 2 hours
- Email Marketing Campaign 2. Email Marketing 2 Hours
- 1 Video/Podcast Campaign 3. Video Making 7-8 hours
- Image/ infographic or others Creative Design / Data Campaign.
- FB Business Manager Campaign & Chatbot
- New 100 Link Building ( Veri Targeted, Niche Relevant, Maximum Guest Post if possible )
5th Month 2nd Week:
- Paid Ad Campaign on Google
- Email Marketing Campaign
- 1 Video/Podcast Campaign
- Image/ infographic or others Creative Design / Data Campaign.
- FB Business Manager Campaign & Chatbot
- 2 new Blog Writing & Posting with on-page SEO & Images. ( Image & Content will be provided by you or we may provide if you allow us)
- New 100 Link Building ( Targeted, Niche Relevant, Maximum Guest Post if possible )
5th Month 3rd Week:
- Paid Ad Campaign on Google
- Email Marketing Campaign
- 1 Video/Podcast Campaign
- Image/ infographic or others Creative Design / Data Campaign.
- FB Business Manager Campaign & Chatbot
- 2 new Blog Writing & Posting with on-page SEO & Images. ( Image & Content will be provided by you or we may provide if you allow us)
- New 100 Link Building ( Veri Targeted, Niche Relevant, Maximum Guest Post if possible )
5th Month 4th Week:
- Paid Ad Campaign on Google
- Email Marketing Campaign
- 1 Video/Podcast Campaign
- Image/ infographic or others Creative Design / Data Campaign.
- FB Business Manager Campaign & Chatbot
- 2 new Blog Writing & Posting with on-page SEO & Images. ( Image & Content will be provided by you or we may provide if you allow us)
- New 100 Link Building ( Veri Targeted, Niche Relevant, Maximum Guest Post if possible )
- New 100 Link Building ( Veri Targeted, Niche Relevant, Maximum Guest Post if possible )
6th Month 1st Week:
- Influencer Outreach Campaign
- Linkedin Campaign
- Medium Campaign
- Tracking competition and competitor websites
- Again Analyze The website & Fixing on-page issues ( broken link, Google Penalty, link juice )
- 2 new Blog Writing & Posting with on-page SEO & Images. ( Image & Content will be provided by you or we may provide if you allow us)
- New 100 Link Building ( Veri Targeted, Niche Relevant, Maximum Guest Post if possible )
6th Month 2nd Week:
- Influencer Outreach Campaign
- Linkedin Campaign
- Medium Campaign
- Collect and analyze data to identify trends and insights
- Again Analyze The website & Fixing on-page issues ( broken link, Google Penalty, link juice )
- 2 new Blog Writing & Posting with on-page SEO & Images. ( Image & Content will be provided by you or we may provide if you allow us)
- New 100 Link Building ( Veri Targeted, Niche Relevant, Maximum Guest Post if possible )
6th Month 3rd Week:
- Influencer Outreach Campaign
- Linkedin Campaign
- Medium Campaign
- Collect and analyze data to identify trends and insights
- 2 new Blog Writing & Posting with on-page SEO & Images. ( Image & Content will be provided by you or we may provide if you allow us)
- New 100 Link Building ( Veri Targeted, Niche Relevant, Maximum Guest Post if possible )
6th Month 4th Week:
- Influencer Outreach Campaign
- Linkedin Campaign
- Medium Campaign
- 2 new Blog Writing & Posting with on-page SEO & Images. ( Image & Content will be provided by you or we may provide if you allow us)
- New 100 Link Building ( Veri Targeted, Niche Relevant, Maximum Guest Post if possible )
- Setup the next 6 Month Marketing Strategy.
- Thus your positive links will be in the first 5 pages of google, bad links or competitors’ links will be down, it’s 100% white hat organic, lifetime profitable bulletproof method.
- Total 72+16 = 88 articles will be posted & 7200 + 800 = 8000 links will be built in 6 Months Period. Traffic will be increased day by day, and you will start to get higher rankings, Traffics & clients/profits.
- You will get a performance/KPI report after every 15 days.
Technical Advance SEO plan for www.XYZXYZ.com includes (in order of implementation):
- Research on target keywords
- Audit of your website and fixing the internal errors (indexing optimizations).
- Developing an SEO optimized content for each target page (if you don’t want to change the visible layout, we can place that content hidden but in a way, Google won’t penalize you for hiding the content).
- Manual backlinking campaign (we will improve the number of mentions of your website with target keywords).
Have a look to our Complete Full SEO Work Checklist:
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14. For Websites with Local Services |
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As per the current Google algorithm, relevancy is the most important thing when it comes to backlinks. When the backlinks are relevant and are placed on high authority niche related websites your positions will grow. We use our partner network of approximately 200,000 websites for placing the backlinks and the manual process allows us to pick the best and relative domains and pages for you.
As we constantly monitor this network, that allows us to place only good backlinks. In case the donor website drops its rankings, we replace it with another high-authority donor.
That was about what we do.
Here’s what we don’t do (because this only drops website positions):
- We don’t place irrelevant backlinks
- We don’t use spam
- We don’t use any black-hat techniques
Our goal is to push you on top and keep you on top. We are targeted on long-term cooperation and the success of our clients is our success (but you don’t have to mention this to any other person or company unless you want to).
Time estimates: based on our experience and constant research, we can push your website to the first page (TOP10) on the most important keywords in 2-3 months. We can’t go faster since we make a campaign to be as close to organic per Google. If we go faster you’ll just be penalized for spam and won’t appear in search results again.
As you continue with us, we keep pushing you to TOP5, then to TOP3, and finally to TOP1. The higher you get, the more aggressive is the competition and the harder is to gain each additional step in rankings.
Road Map:
1) First-page internal optimization Fixing all the code errors, meta tags, interlinking, content, page speed optimization, searching for and eliminating broken links, etc on the first page only.
2) Backlinking campaign – Niche related websites-donors from our huge base of 60 thousand websites. A unique algorithm based on the improved concept of link building with a trusted link mass
3) Content writing – Content is one of the most crucial parts of doing SEO and let me tell you with unique content rankings will go twice as much as we expect.
Eventually, it will result in:
Month #1-2 – Impulse in moving of the positions ( keywords previously having no positions – will have them, the ones that do have some – will increase their rankings more)
Month #2-3 – Significant growth of the keywords positions, smooth entering to the Top 10.
Month #4-5 – The beginning of organic traffic growth, point of payback investments.
Months #5-6 – Moving all the keywords as close to the Top 1 as possible. Competing for the biggest part of organic traffic monthly searching for your services.
Also, as your account manager, I will be sending you the reports with your rankings comparison for the first day of the campaign and the most recent. You can access this data anytime in your Semalt dashboard.
Please check the attached file to find out why Semalt Full SEO is better than others and what makes it the best Package on the Market.
Common Marketing & SEO Checklist
SEO best practices and guidance to help chevinmedicalpractice.com perform online. Check off your top priorities as you achieve them!
Develop & Track Site KPIs & ROI To Optimize Marketing
Why it’s important:
It’s essential to know what visitors to your website are responding to. Although some CMS systems contain rudimentary analytics, dedicated service will show the root to sales or business lead conversions. Even if you’re not going into detailed reports now, that data will be collected and available from the time the analytics package is installed.
Getting it done
Set up your analytics software to track specific goals – e.g. making a purchase or signing up for an email list – and the conversion point for each goal. If your analytics can’t do this, get one that can.
To create a goal in Google Analytics:
- Open Analytics and go into one of your profiles.
- Click Admin in the top navigation. It’s next to the Customization tab.
- Open Goals in the View column.
- Click New Goal and enter a goal name and goal destination URL. You can edit existing goals here by clicking the name of your goal.
- Specify match type depending on how you handle your confirmation page.
- Assign a monetary value to your goal, even if you’re not measuring purchases. This will allow Analytics to calculate a value for channel, landing page, and visitor.
Set up conversion funnels in your analytics suite as well so you can track progress step-by-step and identify points of friction for customers:
- Go into your goal by clicking the name on the Goals page.
- Click on Goals Details.
- Turn on the Funnel.
- Enter the URLs of the pages people visit to go through the conversion process. This will be different for every website.
- If you don’t have a predetermined path, go to the Reverse Goal Path report under Conversions to see the three pages visited for each goal conversion.
Install a heat map on your pages so you can monitor design and content elements that drive user engagement. Use these metrics to prioritize design, content, and marketing efforts that will impact your business most, and deprioritize efforts that don’t move the needle.
External resources
Optimize your landing pages towards conversion
Why it’s important
Landing pages are the first introduction many of your visitors have to your site, usually through a marketing channel of one form or another.
People form an opinion of your site, and your business, within just a second or two of seeing your page, so they have to be good.
Optimize your design, content, and offer to naturally guide your users through your sales funnel, encouraging as many users as possible to convert.
Getting it done
Monitor user behavior on your landing pages by measuring time on page, bounce rate, and events. You can sync your Google Analytics account on the “Settings” page of your Project to see all of this information in your Page Reviews.
Make sure your landing pages have clear and compelling messaging and CTAs. The landing page is often the first step in the conversion process, so users should be able to fill out a form or add a product to the shopping cart right on the page.
Reduce the number of steps required to complete a conversion, and minimize the amount of information you ask for.
When creating your landing pages, design every element to direct visitors toward the CTA. Remove unnecessary images, links, and text that aren’t related to the conversion to limit confusion and clutter.
External resources
Constantly Monitor Short & Long Term Performance
Why it’s important
Site performance won’t remain static. User expectations and behaviors change constantly due to market trends, pop culture, and technology disruptions.
Are the optimizations you’ve made still impacting your goals? How has the shift to mobile changed user engagement and site conversion rate? Are your target keywords still relevant to your audience?
Getting it done
Compare performance on a wider matrix than just daily or weekly. Compare your KPIs week to week, month to month, and year to year. This will allow you to see any short and long-term trends, and whether or not changes in performance were isolated blips or signs of changing trends.
Chart your metrics together so you can compare how each one impacts the others – a new keyword could bring in tons of new traffic that doesn’t convert, but this won’t help you achieve your conversion rate goal.
Research industry benchmarks and conducts competitor analysis to learn where you stand compared to your competition, where you need to improve, and to find gaps in the market that you can exploit to outmaneuver your rivals.
External resources
Create Usefully, unique Content That is Valuable for Audience
Why it’s important
The page content is the backbone of your website and SEO. In order to get the most out of your site, though, you will need to create content that is unique, valuable, and useful for your audience.
Google likes content that answers a question, solves a problem, or provides a new perspective on an old topic. Fail in this and you’ll find it hard to rank well for your target keywords, you’ll struggle to build a strong audience for your website and the visitors you do get likely won’t convert very well.
Neither search engines nor human users are really interested in reading an article that doesn’t tell them anything they didn’t know already.
Getting it done
Writing quality copy that ranks at the top of search engines, while moving prospects through the conversion funnel at the same time is one of the more difficult tasks for a marketer. Create a workflow to organize your content creation efforts:
- Follow the conversation: Find the content in your niche that has the most shares. People share things they find to be entertaining, useful, valuable, or all three. Use a tool that will show you the most shared articles on a particular topic. Tap into what people are saying about your business and industry using Twitter custom feeds or a paid tool like Mention.
- Learn your audience’s search behavior: Build your content around the words and phrases your potential customers use in search engines. Ideally, you covered this ground during the keyword research phase of your SEO strategy. If you haven’t already, create buyer personas to represent your different types of customers based on their needs and uses of your products. This will allow you to tailor messaging for a diverse audience.
- Make it quick and easy: You start to lose visitors after about seven minutes, so get your point across quickly. And make it easy: 79% of people only scan a page to pick out keywords and phrases. Lists are one of the best ways to achieve this: they reduce the mental work required to categorize and process information and by their very nature are highly structured, which makes it easier for search engines to interpret. Plus, they have lots of opportunities to use keywords in headers and subheads.
- Bond with your user: People tend to base decisions, especially purchasing decisions, on emotion. Your buyer personas are very helpful with this: the better you know your audience the better you can tap into their psyche to show how your business will make their lives better, make them successful or just bring them happiness. Create a sense of urgency and exclusivity by creating limited time offers, or unique offers aimed at certain user segments.
- Make them trust you: One of the best ways to build trust is to allow product reviews on your site and to publish testimonials or other social proof. However, you can also build trust through your blog posts and articles. Publish purchase and product guides, telling users what they should look for, what questions they should ask, and what they should know about the industry in general. Making decisions easy for customers improves new sales and customer retention.
External resources
- Free Infographic Tools
- How to Successfully Promote Your Infographics
- Quick Guide to Creating and Sharing Videos Online
Research Competitors’ Ke’s/SEO Strategy
Why it’s important
Knowing what the competition is up to is valuable information for any business. It can help you identify your own product and marketing weaknesses. You may even see some features and/or messaging that could resonate with your own audience.
By analyzing where they focus their energy and resources you can get an idea of their current priorities and future concerns. You don’t need to compete with every competitor for every keyword – just the ones that end up making sense for your business.
Getting it done
Approach competitor analysis from two directions using a tool such as KeywordSpy or SpyFu (both of these are free): Discover which keywords your competitors rank for, and discover who your competition is for your target keywords.
You can also use PPC competitor analysis tools to learn who’s bidding on keywords for your industry.
Don’t base your own keyword strategy entirely on what the competition is doing, but use it to inform yourself of audience preferences and market trends.
External resources
Register Your Business on GMB
Why it’s important
Google My Business is the search engine’s a free local business directory. Claiming your Google My Business listing allows you to control the business information (address, phone number, website, opening hours, etc.) and reviews that are shown in rich snippets in Google search results and on Google Maps.
Google My Business is a big local ranking factor and helps you maintain consistencies in name, address, and phone (NAP) information, which is perhaps the strongest local ranking signal.
Getting it done
Signing up with Google My Business is easy: Go to https://www.google.com/business, click Start Now and enter your business information. If you have a service area, be sure to check “yes” under “I deliver goods and services to my customers at their location”. When adding your name, choose the one people would use to search for you in Google. So, for example, you’d want to use UPS instead of United Parcel Service.
External resources
Build External Links
Why it’s important
Great content is of little value if it’s impossible to find. Therefore it’s important to generate traffic to your website articles, and this can also generate links that pass search engine ranking value.
Your research should highlight popular and relevant websites for your customers as locations from which to try and get relevant and quality visitors. You should also include references to your website which do not currently include relevant links, and coverage or links obtained by your competitors. If a website mentions or covers your competitor, there’s a high chance they’ll mention you.
Getting it done
Look for relevant and quality websites within your industry. If they already link to you, can this be repeated or improved for relevance? If they link to competitors, is this something that can be leveraged for your own website?
Target content types that appeal to industry websites. Do they tend to feature research, infographics, advice, etc.?
Use journalism tools such as Help A Reporter Out to respond to inquiries for experts within your industry. Responses often include your bio and a site or social media profile link.
You should have a mix of backlinks to your site that supply traffic and popularity for your search engine rankings. Avoid focusing solely on one or the other.
External resources
Research Competitors’ Content Marketing
Why it’s important
Competitor analysis for content marketing takes a lot of time and effort but provides you with valuable insights into how best to position yourself in the market and what opportunities exist for you to gain an advantage over your competition.
You can learn what sort of messaging, tone, voice, and media type works best for your shared audience. Plus, auditing other site’s content will give you clues about what keywords they target with various types of content. Focus on your most successful competitors and leverage what’s working for them.
Getting it done
Step One: Create an inventory of your competitor’s’ content. Visit their site and review their navigation for pages/categories that indicate the content: About Us, learning center, blog, and webinars. Be sure to check the footer as links to content are often hidden here. You can use a crawler at this point to compile a list of title tags, meta descriptions, and HTML headers to determine target keywords for each piece of content.
Step Two: Evaluate the content.
- Quantity: How much of each media type do they produce? Does the tone of voice shift between media?
- Frequency: How often do they publish new content? Does it change by the topic? Content-type?
- Topics: What sort of topics do they write about? This is very important as it indicates what areas they regard as being valuable to their business.
- Engagement: How successful is its content? Check the page’s comments section and backlinks. Content that gets a lot of on page engagement and links indicates that the topics, style, or highlighted features are important to customers. Use this information when planning your own content strategy.
- Quality: How well is it written? Content that has a lot of spelling and grammar issues won’t be successful and could make you look unprofessional. If your competitor is publishing a lot of low-quality content on a certain topic, this is your opportunity to excel by fixing their errors and using it for yourself.
External resources
- How Do I Find My Competitors’ Keywords?
- 12 Competitor Analysis Tools That Will Improve Your Traffic
- 10 Vital Components For Effective SEO Competitor Analysis
- Free online survey tools include SurveyMonkey or Crowdsignal
Audit & Analyze Your Existing Links
Why it’s important
Conducting periodical link audits will help you in two ways:
- Thanks to Google’s Penguin algorithm, it’s absolutely necessary for you to find and remove low-quality links to your site. A profile full of links from low-quality websites or links with overly optimized, keyword-rich anchor text can make your page look bad to Google. It could even result in a manual penalty or, for the worst offenders, deindexing. Keep on top of your backlinks to avoid any possible bad outcomes.
- Knowing who already finds your site and/or content worth linking to is very valuable when planning your future content and link building efforts. Focus on content types and topics that have proven popular with your audience to maximize your link baiting abilities. People who have already linked to you represent some of the best targets when building your outreach lists.
Getting it done
You can export your links yourself from Google Search Console in the Search Traffic section, or you can use a tool like Majestic or Ahrefs to find and export your links. Some people use all three and then dedupe the list to make sure they are using the most robust data set possible.
When analyzing your links, again, you can do it manually by looking at anchor text, IP address, page content and Trust and Citation Flows (if you’re using Majestic) or upload your links to a tool such as Kerboo that will score your links for you. While evaluating your links, take this opportunity to note any patterns with anchor text and page content.
While rare, negative SEO does happen and usually appears as repeated anchor text and content. Once you’ve evaluated your links, attempt to have the low-quality links removed or, failing that, use the disavow tool in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
External resources
- Dedicated link monitoring tools: Link Explorer, Majestic, Ahrefs
- Google Disavow Tool
Optimize Your Video & Images
Why it’s important
Images (including gifs) and videos are important to your site’s user experience: no one wants to click through to a large, unbroken wall of text.
Photos, illustrations, infographics and other graphics make your page look nice and give readers a break while consuming your content.
Quality graphics can improve your time on site and bounce rate, which are good for SEO. You can also optimize them to appear in image search results, which will open up a new traffic channel for your site.
Getting it done
Even though search engines can’t see images or watch videos, they can still crawl their HTML tags. There are two places you can use this to your advantage to optimize your images:
- Filename: Use filenames like you would a URL. Use your keyword at the beginning, be descriptive, and use hyphens instead of underscores as word separators.
- Alternative attribute: Also called alt text, the alt attribute lets you give a short description for users that can’t load the media or can’t see it. It’s used by screen readers to visually impaired users as well as search engines. When writing your alt attribute, describe the subject of the image and what it’s doing (if it’s a candid shot). Approach it as if you’re describing it to someone who can’t see it – because that’s just what you’re doing.
In order to appear in image and video search results, your assets have to be crawled and indexed by search engines. Ensure this is happening properly by using <image> and <video> tags in your XML sitemap. If you’ve got a lot of images/videos, create a sitemap index file for your site.
External resources
Optimize Meta Tags
Why it’s important
Search engines use your metadata (title tag and description) to display the search snippet for your site in search results. Optimize your meta tags so your site stands out from competitors in search results and entices users to click on your link.
Engaging meta tags will help boost your click-through rate and time on site while minimizing bounce rate, which will all help your SEO.
Getting it done
Your title tag goes in the <head> of your page. Use your page’s target keyword at the beginning and keep it under 65 characters – any longer and it will get cut off. When added correctly it looks like this: <title>This Is the Page Title</title>.
Meta descriptions are just that – descriptions of what the user will find on the page. Keywords appear in bold so use them here. Descriptions don’t affect ranking, but they can affect CTR, time on site, and bounce rate. The meta tag looks like this: <meta name=”description” content=”A short description of your page, around 160 characters.”/>
External resources
Upload a Robots.txt File
Why it’s important
A robots.txt file is a plain text file that specifies whether or not a search engine crawler should access a particular page, folder, or document type. It’s one of the first files accessed by a search engine crawler when it lands on your site.
Robots.txt files are useful to block crawling and indexing of duplicate content during a site redesign or as a result of URL parameters. By disallowing unimportant pages on your site you can help maximize search engine crawl budgets to ensure your most important content is being found. You can also block user-agents from search engines that don’t send you any traffic to save some bandwidth.
If you’re redesigning or migrating your site, don’t forget to unblock your new site so it can be crawled and indexed. Remember that even if a page is disallowed in your robots.txt file, search engines can still find it via links, so add a meta robots tag to any page you don’t want to be indexed.
Getting it done
Robots.txt files are made up of blocks of code that contain two basic parts: user-agent and directive. Every block can have multiple directives, but only one user-agent.
You can use a tool to create your robots.txt file or you can write one yourself, depending on how many directives you need to write. Beware of using a tool: if you use a different one to create your XML sitemap, you could wind up with a discrepancy that could block a page you want to get crawled.
Submit and test your file in Google Search Console before adding it to your site’s root directory. This will help you prevent errors that could keep your site out of the search results.
External resources
Develop a link building plan for your website
Why it’s important
Internal links are an important SEO factor as they tend to enhance the usability and conversion rates for your website. Doing this correctly guides users and search engines to your most valuable pages, and also ensures that they are seen as relevant for the correct terms.
You also have far more control over your internal linking to ensure that your website doesn’t become over-optimized and become seen as a spam site by search engines.
Getting it done
Try to make your website hierarchy as flat as possible – your pages should be accessible in as few clicks as possible. Don’t try to link to every page though, best practice is 100 links or less per page, internal and external combined. Don’t optimize links to your homepage as you should have a home button or linked logo on each page.
To optimize the flow of link juice to your conversion pages, use in-text links (also known as editorial links). Use keywords in the anchor text, but not every time – over-optimization can be just as bad as under-optimization. Add links to your most important pages near the top of your content so they are crawled and weighted appropriately.
Finally, if you don’t do so already, regularly crawl your site to find internal links to broken pages or redirects so you can reclaim these links. Be sure to make outbound links nofollow if you don’t want to pass any link juice onto those sites.
External resources
- Check your internal & external links with Google Search Console in the Links section
Track & Monitor Your Mentions
Why it’s important
Keeping track of where your brand or website is mentioned online serves three purposes:
- Knowing what people are saying about you will help you craft effective messaging. Play up the features people compliment and/or the problems you’ve helped them solve. Once you’ve addressed any complaints, promote your “new and improved” product.
- Addressing complaints online can be a powerful customer service tactic. Monitoring your mentions online will allow you to stay on top of any negative feedback from customers so your brand doesn’t suffer.
- People who mention you positively are the most likely to link to you. Maintain a list of your positive mentions to target during a link building campaign.
Getting it done
Use Google Alerts to track your mentions in news stories, reviews, and blog posts.
Set up a Twitter custom feed to monitor conversations on that platform for mentions of your company, products, industry, and keywords.
Look for people talking about you on other sites with a tool such as Buzzsumo, Mention or PinAlerts (if you allow users to pin your content on Pinterest).
When you record your mentions, be sure to note any specific products or features, whether it was positive and negative and any contact information you can find for link building outreach.
External resources
- Free Media Monitoring Tools: Google Alerts, Twitter Search, Social Searcher
Create a mobile Friendly Version of your site.
Why it’s important
Mobile is the way of the future. Google now processes more searches from mobile devices than from desktop and have developed mobile-first indexing, which means that Google will create and rank search listings based on the mobile version of the content, even for listings that are produced for desktop users.
Whether or not your site is mobile friendly is a major ranking signal for mobile search results. It’s incredibly important for your users as well: The majority of mobile users will abandon a site that isn’t mobile-friendly for a competitor’s that is.
Designing your site to display on all screen sizes, using the right font size, and making buttons touch screen ready are all part of making your site ready for mobile users.
Getting it done
The first part of a mobile-friendly page is load time. Google’s criteria for a mobile-friendly page is to load above the fold content in one second or less. After taking the normal process of loading a webpage into account, you’ve actually only got about 400 milliseconds that you can do anything about. Optimize your page speed by:
- Minimizing image size: Don’t rely on HTML to resize your images – that just change their dimensions. Use an image editor like Photoshop to reduce the size of your image files.
- Use browser caching: Reduce the number of HTTP requests with caching. Use expires headers and cache-control headers to tell browsers that images, stylesheets, and CSS are cacheable.
- Reduce/eliminate redirects: Some redirects are unavoidable. But remember, every redirect is a new HTTP request, which adds to users’ wait time.
- Render in the first connection: New TCP connections are unable to use the full bandwidth of the connection, so the server is limited to 10 or fewer packets. This means your ATF content needs to be 14Kb or less. Keep your server fully up to date or you could be limited to 3 or 4 packets!
- Accelerated Mobile Pages: Consider using the AMP protocol. Developed by Google, AMP uses special HTML and a dedicated cache to load pages nearly instantly.
Make sure your site is also optimized for mobile user experience:
- Avoid Flash, Silverlight, and other plugins. They look nice, but mobile browsers don’t support them. Use HTML5 for special effects instead.
- Make your base font size 16. Any smaller and users will struggle to read your body text without zooming – a major source of frustration. Stick with mobile-friendly fonts like Arial, Helvetica, Times/Times New Roman, or Verdana.
- Keep touchscreens in mind. Missed or accidental clicks enrage users, so make your tap targets big enough with at least 48 pixels on all sides as a cushion.
- Structure your site so it’s easy to get around and consume content. 40% of mobile users will leave your site if they can’t navigate easily. Limit the amount of information on your landing page to your CTA and messaging encouraging them to convert. Remember, the point of a mobile search is to immediately complete a goal on the landing page.
External resources
Create an SEO Strategy
Why it’s important
Your website is one of your most powerful, and prominent, marketing tools. Many website owners fall into the trap of trying to bring in as much traffic as they can. However, digital marketing is more about attracting the right user at the right time to achieve your business goal.
Creating an SEO strategy will give your organic marketing campaigns direction and clearly defined criteria with which to determine success. Clearly defined goals, and plans to achieve those goals, will help bring about buy-in from business and technical stakeholders.
Getting it done
First, define your campaign goal and identify your target audience. Create a generalized, rough outline of your customers, called buyer personas. Dig into your site analytics to gather information like age, gender, and interest segments – some software will even tell you what your users are in-market for when they visit your site. For more specific information, use customer interviews or a form on your website to capture user information: job title, location, industry, communication preferences, family background, and status.
Use this information to inform your keyword research. What information are your buyer personas searching for, and what is the search intent behind their keywords? What problem does your business solve for them? Optimize your landing pages and content marketing to appeal to your various types of users at each step of the purchase process. The goals you established in step one will help you track your campaign and optimize keywords and content.
Before executing your SEO campaigns, establish KPIs so you can make informed choices when evaluating performance. Some good SEO metrics to track include:
- Indexed pages: Making sure your site is getting crawled by search engines is the first step to ensuring you are reaching your audience. Check for Crawl Errors in Google Search Console regularly.
- Keyword ranking: Once you’ve completed your keyword research and know which keywords your audience uses, track your site’s position to ensure that people are finding you.
- Search traffic and/or CTR: Ranking is important, but doesn’t mean much if you’re ranking for keywords that have no volume, or if your listing gets no clicks
External resources
Conduct KW’s Research
Why it’s important
Picking the right keywords is the most important part of creating a successful SEO campaign. Ranking well for the wrong keywords won’t help your business goals much and will cost you a lot of wasted time and effort. Keyword research will identify the best opportunities for you to reach your audience.
Getting it done
Create a list of topics for your website – start with your product or categories or by answering “what does my business do?” Use natural language and industry-specific terms, since that’s what people will use in search engines.
Check your analytics or Google Search Console account to uncover the keywords that people already use to find your site. Use tools like Ubersuggest and Google’s Keyword Planner to find more potential keywords.
Enter your potential keywords into the Ubersuggest Keyword Tool to see the average monthly search volume. Don’t target just the keywords with the highest volumes – those are generally highly competitive and hard to rank for. Use a mixture of head and long-tail keywords to drive both volume and conversions.
External resources
Optimize Your Site’s Local Signal
Why it’s important
If you have a local business or a local branch of a larger business chain, you obviously want to target an audience that is looking for your product/service in your area.
Optimizing local signals will ensure that your website shows up in searches specific to your area so you can reach your customers when they are most likely to convert.
Even if you are a brick and mortar store, local SEO is important for you: half of the local searches result in a store visit in the next day.
Getting it done
Optimize your on-page content to target keywords with local intent. Choose keywords that are relevant to your business location as well as industry, products, etc. Create locally-focused content around your keywords. Local “best of” lists, local guides, local employee profiles, local customer success stories, and seasonal guides are good content to post on your site.
When optimizing your pages’ meta tags, add your keyword along with your business name and your target location, using the pipe character as a separator. Use location in URLs and image alt text, when possible.
Add the LocalBusiness Schema markup to your contact page. Making sure your site is mobile-friendly will also improve your local SEO, as the majority of searches on mobile devices have local intent.
External resources
Establish & Measure site KPI’s and conversions for each channel
Why it’s important
Your users’ goals and behavior will change depending on which channel they use to visit your site.
Local visitors will use both desktop and mobile and likely visit your physical location.
Mobile visitors are looking to immediately answer a question or complete an action.
Visitors from social media are more likely looking for information or doing research on your products, and are unlikely to convert immediately (unless they are referred through a remarketing campaign).
Landing pages and conversion funnels should be tailored to the types of users that visit them.
Getting it done
Use your analytics to segment traffic by location, device, and referrer to find your most successful landing pages for each channel. Then, optimize your landing pages to maximize your reach for each audience:
Prominently display your name, address, and phone (NAP) information on your contact page, and include it in the page’s title tag.
Make use of semantic markup to get your information into local search packs and knowledge graph rich snippets, which you can then track in Ubersuggest’s Keyword Tool.
For mobile landing pages, avoid interstitials, pop-ups, and splash pages. Reduce your reliance on forms and increase the size of your CTAs to make clicking on a touchscreen easier.
Set goals and KPIs for individual social media platforms – it’s unlikely Facebook users will convert as well as Pinterest visitors.
Use Google’s Campaign URL builder to create custom tracking parameters to track external campaigns for each channel and set up events to evaluate the effectiveness of internal messaging and CTAs.
External resources
Optimize Your site content for SEO & Link Building
Why it’s important
Publishing high-quality content is a necessary part of ranking in search results – maybe even the most important part. If you’ve been around digital marketing long you’ve likely heard “Content is king” enough times.
However, good content on its own isn’t going to rank for your target keywords or earn enough links to impact your rankings, especially if you’re in a competitive industry. Digital marketing is about making sure your audience finds your content when they’re looking for an answer or solution that you can provide. If you don’t optimize your content for search engines and links, that’s not going to happen.
Getting it done
Optimization these days is all about natural language and semantics – your content should be written for human readability first, with keywords used strategically for SEO. Important places to use your keywords to optimize your content are:
- URL: Search engines look at URLs to tell them what to expect on the page. The best practice for optimizing URLs is to use the keyword at the beginning (similar to your page title), use hyphens as word separators (search engines don’t recognize underscores), and keep them to the point.
- Title tag – Title tags are one of the most important pages ranking signals. Like with URLs, use your keyword at the beginning. This is a spot that’s really easy to over-optimize, so be very careful about adding more than one keyword. Do it if it works naturally and they’re very closely related. Never repeat a keyword more than once – that’s a really great way to look like spam.
- HTML headers – <H1> through <H6> tags give your content structure, which makes it easier for search engines to interpret it and humans to consume it. <H1> tags, or header tags, are the most important for SEO and work like the article or post title. Note that it’s not necessarily the same thing as the page title. Using your keywords in your HTML headers will tell readers, both human and robot, what they’ll read in each section.
- Body text – Don’t worry about using keywords a certain number of times, or a certain density. What’s important is using it naturally at the beginning, middle, and end of the article. This is why writing long, in-depth content pays off: you’ll naturally use keywords and semantically-related words all over the place.
External resources
- Guide to Duplicate Content
- On-page SEO Checklist
- Plagiarism Checker Tool: Copyscape
Verify Your Pages’ HTTP Status
Why it’s important
HTTP status codes are the response from your server when a person or search engine crawler tries to load a page. They say whether the request was successful (200), if it was redirected (301 or 302), if there was a server error (500) or if the page requested does not exist (404). Having a high number of error response codes is bad, both for SEO and usability. Your page isn’t much use to anyone if people can’t access your pages.
Check your pages in Google Search Console’s Site Crawl to make sure your pages are loading correctly and returning the appropriate HTTP status.
Getting it done
The quickest way to check your pages’ HTTP status is in Google Search Console’s Site Crawl. That will crawl your site and return any issue impacts your site’s usability, accessibility, and visibility.
Check response codes in Google Search Console in Crawl Errors and fix the pages that appear in the URL Errors section. You can also use a tool such as Screaming Frog to crawl your website and return the HTTP status for each URL.
Search engines are looking to provide the best sites to their users, so following their guidelines will generally result in the best user experience for your visitors.
External resources
Create a Content Plan
Why it’s important
The page content is the backbone of your site: It powers SEO, user experience, and conversion rate. Search engines and humans both respond best to fresh, unique, and high-quality content.
Properly planning your content is essential to getting the most out of your hard work. Establish a schedule for each content type: social media, blog posts, and articles, videos, and images. This will allow you to properly track the effectiveness of each channel and optimize your content for traffic and conversions.
Getting it done
The first step is to determine your brand’s tone of voice. This will vary depending on your industry, products, and business, and should remain consistent across media types and channels. Experiment with different language to establish the best fit for your audience. A typical rule of thumb is to adopt a professional tone for B2B services and a more relaxed and personal tone of voice for B2C industries.
Next, create a content calendar. It doesn’t necessarily need to be exact, but use guidelines for how frequently you will publish new content on each channel. Be sure to include special occasions like holidays, special offers, and seasonal changes.
Finally, segment your content and messaging by the audience in order to target customers at every point of the conversion funnel.
External resources
Ensure Your site is Compatible with All Browsers
Why it’s important
Although desktop browser standards and compatibility have become more manageable, many websites are not optimized for the huge numbers of mobile and tablet users.
This means you can lose potential customers simply by not enabling and optimizing websites for effective mobile display. Desktop websites are often impossible to use on smaller mobile touchscreens.
Getting it done
Measure your current mobile audience in Google Analytics under Audience > Mobile Overview and Devices, and Internet browsers under Technology > Browser &OS. You can also check Operating Systems, Screen Resolutions, and more.
Ensure your website is checked across Screen Resolutions and Mobile Devices whenever design changes are made to ensure both compatibility and usability. Virtual emulators allow you to check devices you do not own.
Use Segmentation to reference Device and Screen Resolution with conversions to prioritize further optimization. Do certain settings indicate higher conversion rates or bigger purchases?
External resources
Establish canonical URLs
Why it’s important
URL canonicalization is the specification of the original version of page content and using the rel=”canonical” tag to point copies of that content back to the original.
URL canonicalization helps you avoid duplicate content issues, since it tells search engines where to find the original content (which search engines prefer), and helps you consolidate ranking factors such as link juice on one page (rel=”canonical” tag tells search engines where to send link juice, trust, and authority).
Getting it done
When you have pages with duplicate content, or content similar enough to be considered copies, add <link rel=” canonical” href=”http://example.com” /> to the <head> of the duplicate page with the URL of the original page. Search engines try to honor this link, but it’s not a directive, so don’t use it in place of 301 or 302 redirects.
URLs in the canonical link tag must be 100% matches to the actual canonical URL, so decide ahead of time if your URLs will use www., HTTP/HTTPS, trailing slashes, or not. Tell Google how to handle the www resolve by setting a preferred URL in Google Search Console.
Each page can have only one rel=”canonical” tag – using more than one will cause search engines to ignore them all. And while you may think that your web pages are all unique, there are a number of common circumstances that can cause duplicate pages, so it’s often best to include self-referencing canonical tags on all pages.
External resources
Use Consistent Hierarchy for site Architecture
Why it’s important
A well-organized site is easier to use for both humans and search engines. Using a clear, uniform, logical structure for your site will make it easier for users to move between pages, which means it’s easier for them to convert. It will also help search engines crawl your site more efficiently and intelligently, so you can make the most of their crawl budget.
If your site is poorly laid out, there is a chance crawlers could miss important pages.
Getting it done
Use common, industry-specific naming conventions that are popular with your audience for your folders and subfolders – those are the words they are most likely to use when performing a search.
Category and sub-category pages should be optimized landing pages for their keywords. Remember: Site hierarchy influences what site links are shown in search results. So a disorganized or illogical hierarchy could lead to a confusing and unoptimized search snippet.
Finally, create categories and subcategories that are clearly defined and mutually exclusive to avoid duplicate content issues.
Optimize Internal Linking
Why it’s important
Links have been an integral part of SEO from day one: using links to establish a page’s authority was one of Google’s defining assets that allowed them to dominate the search market. Therefore, link building is one of the most valuable jobs in the SEO process.
Don’t be scared off by claims of “link earning”, which is the idea that quality content will build links on its own. There’s little to no correlation between highly shared content and highly linked content. So, you need strategic, manual promotion to the right audience to build a quality, natural backlink portfolio.
If you’re still doubting the necessity of link building, the fact that Google’s Penguin update was incorporated into the core algorithm is proof of the importance of building good links.
Getting it done
The most important part of link building is to create content that’s worth sharing. The best, and easiest, way to do this is to use content that’s already successful as a model.
Use a tool like Buzzsumo or Ahrefs that lets you search articles by topic to find highly-shared pages. Content that has a lot of links tells you there’s the demand for content on that topic, which makes building links much easier. You should also identify the content on your site people is already linking to, so you know what your audience finds most useful.
Once you’ve identified your most-linked articles, improve them by updating, expanding, and/or redesigning them. You could also rewrite them with a new perspective. Blogs are usually the best place to publish this content, but they don’t make sense for everyone. If you don’t have the time or resources to consistently maintain a blog for your site, focus instead of writing a few evergreen articles that will stay relevant for months or years.
Next, build a list of sites and/or authors to reach out to. Sites that have linked to you or your competitors in the past are a good place to start – you know they’re interested in your topic. There are other platforms out there, like BlogDash and AuthorCrawl, that will help you identify bloggers covering topics relevant to your site.
Once you’ve built your list, reach out to each blogger individually. Write your emails yourself – automation is obvious and will land your emails in the trash if they even make it past the spam filter. You can use a general template to get started, but tailor each email to the recipient and the content you’re pitching. And add your content info at the end, it will add credibility. You might struggle at the start, but that’s ok. Outreach is about building a relationship as much as a specific link – and a few high-quality links are better than a lot of low-quality links.
External resources
Optimize your international sites for multilingual Audiences
Why it’s important
The internet is global – people can access your website from anywhere. However, many search engines use CCTLDs, so ranking at the top in the US doesn’t mean you’re going to rank well in other countries, or even in another language at home. If you do decide that you want to attract an international and/or multilingual audience, you will need to optimize each version of your landing pages for the right audience
Getting it done
Decide which sort of international site structure works best for you: a subdomain, CCTLD, or subfolders (generally the recommended method).
Avoid duplicate content issues by using the hreflang tag to identify each version of the page. The hreflang tag for an English language page looks like this: <rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en” href=”https://www.example.com/en”>. If you have a global landing page, like a splash page, use hreflang=”x-default”.
Add the hreflang link to the page’s head, HTTP header or XML sitemap. Each page must include an hreflang tag for every language version available, including a link to itself. So www.example.com/en must include an hreflang tag designating www.example.com/en as the English version of that page.
Decide how you will handle multilingual page content. The best thing to do is to hire a native speaker to create your content. They’ll know how words and phrases will translate and how the language is used in search engines. Use a native speaker to help with outreach during link building. They will be much more authoritative and trustworthy and can possibly help you identify influencers in your niche.
If you don’t have an international site and only want to appear in search results for one country, use Google Search Console to geotarget specific countries if you want your site to appear in search results for just one country.
External resources
Optimize Your Presence in local directories and Listings
Why it’s important
Consistent name, address, and phone (NAP) information across citations is one of the most important, if not the most important, the ranking signal for local search results. Plus, while local directories likely won’t pass your site much link juice, they are an important channel for your customers to find your information. And, you can piggyback on their high authority pages to maybe rank for keywords you usually can’t compete on.
So it’s absolutely vital that you track your local citations to make sure that your NAP information is current and consistent across all instances.
Getting it done
Record and track all of your local citations in a spreadsheet. Make note of the name, address, phone number, and website URL listed in each citation. Contact any of the directories that have inconsistent or outdated information listed. When possible, encourage your customers to leave reviews.
External resources
Create a custom 404 Page
Why it’s important
Your 404 error page is displayed when a server returns the 404 (Page Not Found) HTTP error code, meaning the server received a request for a page that doesn’t exist.
If your user is seeing your 404 page, that means something has gone wrong and they are unable to achieve the goal that brought them to your site. This can be a major source of user frustration, and default 404 pages only compound that frustration by giving them very limited options for how to proceed.
Create a custom 404 page so you can help get your users back on track as quickly and easily as possible. Make it easy for your user to renavigate to the home page if the page they were trying to find no longer exists. You should also see your 404 page as an opportunity to add personality to your site – amusing, entertaining, and interesting pages go a long way to reducing user frustration. Plus, they can even earn you shares and links when people discuss examples of good 404 pages.
Getting it done
Replace the default 404 page with one that reflects your site design, brand identity, and company personality. Make it humorous, interesting, or entertaining to build goodwill and reduce frustration.
Add items like a more prominent site search, contact form, customer service live chat, a sitemap, or some other tool to help your users find what they’re looking for. Provide links to multiple pages on your site, particularly your most important and most popular pages so your users aren’t stranded.
Review your links – internal and external – to fix broken links that send users to the 404 page in the first place. You can find many of your pages returning a 404 error in Google Search Console’s Site Crawl, instantly.
External resources
Show the right page version for each device
Why it’s important
Mobile devices are only getting more popular, with new devices entering the market all the time. That means your site needs to be optimized to properly display on a variety of devices and screen sizes.
Getting it done
The best way to optimize your site for all screen sizes is to use responsive design. This will serve the same HTML on the same URLs and use CSS to change how the page appears on each device. To make your page responsive, set the meta viewport to the device length like this: <meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0″>.
You could also create separate mobile pages using a subdomain, or serve different HTML based on user-agent. However, these methods take more development and marketing resources to implement and optimize, so they’re generally not recommended for mobile SEO.
External resources
Show the same page to human and bots
Why it’s important
Cloaking, the practice of showing content that’s different for search engines and users, is a common trick used by spammers and black hat SEOs. It’s well known by search engines and a violation of their webmaster guidelines. Avoid doing it at all costs – tricking search engines can lead to some quick gains, but they’re generally short term as getting caught can have long-lasting repercussions, including having your site deindexed.
Getting it done
Search engines are looking to provide the best sites to their users, so following their guidelines will generally result in the best user experience for your visitors.
External resources
Use clear and easy to navigate Option
Why it’s important
Websites that are hard to navigate frustrate users and frustrated users don’t convert. In fact, the poor user experience could cause them to view your entire brand negatively, which will result in bad reviews and fewer repeat customers. Instead, use clear navigation options that help guide users (and search engine crawlers) around your website and through the conversion process.
Your landing pages should be optimized to solve the problem or answer the question that caused the user to use the search engine in the first place. Completing the conversion should never be more than a click away.
Getting it done
Clear titles, headings, and breadcrumbs help visitors know where they are in relation to the rest of your site and tell them how to get to any other information they might want. An HTML sitemap outlining the taxonomy of your site can be helpful if you have a lot of categories, subcategories, and/or products. Site search and live help options should be clearly available on all pages (if relevant for your business).
Monitor your site search – the most common searches can give you clues to problems with your navigation and site structure. When naming your categories, use established conventions and natural words. This will help your users understand what your site is about and will tell search engines that it’s relevant to search queries. Use your 404 pages as an opportunity to get users back on track quickly.
External resources
- What Is Website Architecture?
- Website Architecture and Internal Links
- Breadcrumb Navigation: a Guide to Types, Benefits and Best Practices
Use HTML5 Over Flash whenever possible
Why it’s important
Flash was widely used to display animations, games, and vector images. Google can crawl text in Flash content, but not images or buttons, so there’s a good chance your Flash content isn’t going to get indexed properly.
Plus, most mobile devices don’t support Flash, so your pages won’t be as mobile-friendly and won’t render correctly for your mobile users.
Getting it done
Avoid using Flash whenever possible. Fortunately, you can use HTML5 for special effects, images, and videos that were previously created in Flash.
External resources
Develop an overall SMM Marketing Plan
Why it’s important
Social media is seen as free marketing but it takes time, effort, and resources to get results. Plus, marketers are increasingly reliant on paid promotion to get results.
Without goals and a plan to achieve those goals and measure progress, your social media marketing is doomed to failure. Determine which platforms are best for your business (and where your ideal audience is spending their time) and which type of posts perform the best on each one.
Getting it done
Plan your posts in advance so you can build your audience and momentum over time. If you find yourself struggling to reach your audience, consider giving yourself a helping hand via paid promotion.
There are various marketing tools you can use that allow you to schedule posts in advance, so you can reach your audience outside of traditional office hours.
Keep track of engagement and click-through by day and time to discover the optimal times to post on each platform. Monitor likes and shares by media type so you can customize your presence for each social media channel – not all post types perform equally across all channels. This is an ongoing process – user behavior is constantly changing and evolving.
Create guidelines for employees interacting with the public – even if they aren’t controlling the brand’s account, they still represent the company when they are active on social media. Respond quickly to any feedback so you can turn complaints into positive customer experiences.
External resources
Refine Your Social Media Marketing Based on Performance
Why it’s important
The social media landscape is constantly in flux. New players disrupt the market while the big established companies work to expand their user base.
New products and features change the way users engage with and react to content on the platform. Just think about it: Facebook looked a lot different five years ago, Instagram was its own company and most people didn’t know how to use a hashtag.
Getting it done
Familiarize yourself with the analytics platform provided by each social network. Take particular care to really understand the terminology of each one – “click” can mean different things in different contexts.
Use these tools to optimize your social media posts to drive engagement – video views, likes, and shares, as well as clicks. Is there a particular type of media or tone that works best? Does your audience seem to like emojis, or are they reacting to your more “no-nonsense” posts?
Use your site analytics to track how well each social media channel performs when referring users to your website – low time on site and high bounce rates indicate there’s a disconnect between your social media marketing and your landing pages. Conversely, monitor what’s successful for each channel so you can take advantage of that elsewhere.
External resources
- 5 Facebook Marketing Ideas for Small Businesses
- 5 Ways Top Brands Use Facebook
- Facebook Page Promotion Tips
Use Semantic Markup to enhance your site’s rich snippets
Why it’s important
Semantic markup, like Schema.org markup, tells search engines what the content and information on the page means. It’s how Google knows that a review is a review, what a business’s location and opening hours are, or how high a product is rated.
Semantic markup isn’t a ranking signal, but it does help search engines interpret your content, and anything that helps them read the page better is a good thing. It’s also used when creating rich snippets for search results and the Knowledge Graph.
Create an XML sitemap
Why it’s important
XML sitemaps are text files stored in your website’s root directory that list and provide details of every URL on your website. These details include last change date, change frequency, importance, and alternate versions of the page accessible at other URLs. You can also include details for videos and images. If you have more than 1,000 images, you can create sitemaps dedicated to just those files.
Like robots.txt files, sitemaps aren’t ranking factors. But they do help search engines find, crawl and index your pages. They also tell search engines how important your pages are, relative to the rest of your site, so the bots can make the most of their crawl budget and crawl your site more intelligently and efficiently.
If you have an international or multilingual site, you can include hreflang tags to help search engines serve the right version to users based on location and/or language.
Getting it done
You can write your XML sitemap yourself if you have the time, or use a tool to do it for you. There are several free tools available online and many web services will create a sitemap for you as part of your subscription.
When creating your sitemap you must first decide which pages you want to include, and which pages you want to disallow via robots.txt and the meta robots tag. Then, you must decide what your canonical URL will look like (protocol, www resolve, capital letters, etc.). This is essential because you have to use absolute URLs in your sitemap; they can’t lead to redirects.
After you’ve created your sitemap, make sure it’s not too big. You’re limited to 50,000 URLs and 10MB. If it’s too big, break it up into smaller sitemaps and create a sitemap index (a sort of sitemap of sitemaps) file for your site. Ensure that the URLs in your sitemap don’t have parameters like session IDs and that special characters are properly escaped.
Before adding your sitemap to your site, ease the load on your server by compressing it. Use gzip to compress your sitemaps as search engines struggle to access .zip files.
The last step before adding your sitemap to your site is to test it using Google Search Console’s Add/Test Sitemap tool. Fix any errors it finds and add your sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing (via Bing Webmaster Tools). Add your sitemap location to your robots.txt files to make it easier for search engines to find.
External resources
Optimize Pagination
Why it’s important
Splitting content over multiple pages can cause issues for SEO and usability. Search engines like content to be accessible with the least number of clicks possible, so large pagination chains may fail to get crawled and indexed.
Splitting content by pagination can also cause duplicate and thin content issues, particularly for eCommerce product listings that use sorting and filtering.
Getting it done
For large paginated listings, adding further sub-categories will help indexing and user conversions. And it’s far better than trying to link to every piece of paginated content from one page.
Check for duplicate page titles and meta descriptions.
The preferred choice for most issues is to create a separate ‘View All’ page and canonicalize to that from each paginated option.
Where this is impractical, use Rel=”prev”/”next” HTML attributes to create a chain through your pages.
The last option would be to remove paginated content with no value from the search engine index by using a Meta Robots NoIndex, Follow tag on those pages.
Try to benchmark how paginated content is currently performing via your server logs to judge the success of your work, and double-check the implementation, particularly rel=”prev”/”next”.
External resources
Encourage Customers to Leave Business Reviews
Why it’s important
Business and product reviews are great for both SEO and marketing in general. In fact, 80% of online shoppers regard online reviews as trustworthy as a personal recommendation (although there is always a concern about fake reviews).
Business reviews work as citations for your website. You don’t get link juice from review sites because most of their links are nofollow. But they can help your site look more trustworthy to potential buyers. Plus, many review sites have a lot of ranking power, so adding your business can get your name at the top of search results you normally don’t have a chance to rank for.
Getting it done
Start by claiming your business on popular review sites such as Yelp, Angie’s List, Google My Business and TripAdvisor. Of course, there are other review sites that might make more sense for your business depending on your industry. Then, incentivize your customers to leave a review.
The best places to do this is on the order confirmation page, emails and in your store, if you have a physical location. It’s also a good idea to send a follow-up email after completing a customer’s order encouraging them to leave a review.
External resources
- Building links from Unlinked Mentions
- Free Media Monitoring Tools: Google Alerts
- 88% Of Consumers Trust Online Reviews As Personal Recommendations
Reclaim inks & Convert Mentions into Links
Why it’s important
When building links, don’t focus solely on earning new links. Undertaking link reclamation will achieve some quick wins that will help link juice flow more efficiently throughout your site.
Link reclamation is the process of finding and fixing broken links pointed at your site and converting mentions into backlinks. It also has the added benefit of being more under your control or have a higher chance of success than traditional outreach link building. Plus, you get to maintain your relationships with your most valuable linkers.
Getting it done
The first step is the easiest: fix your broken internal links. Crawl your site to find URLs to pages that return 404 errors (broken or nonexistent pages). You can fix these links via 301 redirects, but that’s not necessarily the best way. Usually, you’re better off just fixing the page (or link). If reclaiming your internal links resulted in you fixing a lot of broken pages, there’s a good chance you’ve fixed a lot of broken backlinks as well.
Find your links using a tool like Majestic or Ahrefs and export the list. Then, you can crawl them to find broken links, or map them to your list of 404 errors using VLOOKUP in Excel. Fixing any remaining broken links should now be a matter of emailing the linking sites’ owners with updated/corrected URLs. These should have a high success rate – they don’t want broken links on their site either.
You can also work to convert any (positive!) mentions of your site into links. There are two ways to go about this. First, find instances of people “borrowing” your content. This isn’t about finding people plagiarizing your content, although plagiarism detection tools will help you here. It might be people quoting you, or using a statistic from the research you’ve published. Think of the Content Marketing Institute; their definition of content marketing is published across the Web, and not everyone using it links back to them.
Second, set up a tool for tracking mentions, so you’re notified whenever someone is talking about your brand, site, products, etc. Be sure to use specific keywords to avoid overwhelming yourself with alerts. Unlinked mentions should have higher than average success rates when doing outreach since they’re good for their own sites’ user experience.
Finally, Do a reverse image search to find instances of people using your infographics, illustrations, photos, and other images without attribution. Unless someone is trying to blatantly plagiarize you, most people will happily drop a link for attribution.
External resources
Establish Guest Blogging Relationships with Relevant Industry Blogs
Why it’s important
Writing for large, established sites can help you increase your reach and help associate your brand with quality publishers.
By publishing your content, they are endorsing not only your messaging but also your authority on the subject. This will make your company and products/services more trustworthy to your audience.
Getting it done
Research which sites in your niche has a large audience, good reputation, and quality content. Look around the site or do a Google search for any writing or guest blogging guidelines. If the site functions primarily as a publisher, they likely have some. Do a quick content audit of their most recent articles. Make a spreadsheet to track topic, content type, date published, engagement (likes, shares, comments), and links.
When writing content to pitch for guest blogging, avoid topics that they’ve covered recently or frequently, or offer a new angle or analysis to stand out. Pick keywords that are relevant to you and the publisher; this shouldn’t be too hard because ideally, you have a very similar audience. Use this opportunity to build a relationship with these publishers to increase the likelihood of future content and link opportunities.
If you do put links back to your site in your guest content, make sure you’ve optimized your landing page – publishers don’t want to recommend bad user experiences to their visitors. Finally, promote your guest blog post as if it were published on your own site. Link to it on your site and share it via social media. When appropriate, respond to comments to keep the audience engaged.
External resources
Research Competitors Link building
Why it’s important
Obtaining links from other websites is a very strong ranking signal and a major part of SEO. Building links from high-quality, relevant websites is necessary to improve your search rankings.
Researching your competitor’s backlinks will help you compile a list of websites that are relevant to your niche and, theoretically, very likely to link to you (since they’ve already linked to a site similar to yours).
Use any broken or out of date links to the competition as an opportunity to claim those links for your own.
Getting it done
Use an SEO crawler or backlinking tool to conduct a link audit of your competitors. Create three lists, one for their most valuable links, another for dead links, and the third for their most linked content.
Start by going after the low-hanging fruit: “reclaiming” the broken links. Send an email to the website owner offering your site as an alternative to the dead pages to improve their site’s user experience and SEO.
Next, do a quick analysis of the type of content that gets the most links and the most valuable links. Build on and improve this content, if you don’t have better, similar content already. Use this content for a link building campaign targeting the competition’s most valuable links.
External resources
Cover Local and/or Industry Events.
Why it’s important
Events are a great way to raise your profile, grow and engage your audience, and attract links to your website. If you attend seminars, conferences, webinars, or other industry events, write about them on your blog and post about them on social media. This will usually attract shares from event organizers and other attendees. You could also “live Tweet” any talks you attend – the speaker may even retweet you to his or her audience.
If you’re a local business, community engagement is a powerful technique for gaining valuable local links and shares. So get involved in local events – sports, schools, parades, festivals, markets, etc. – and then cover them on your website. These events will strengthen your local signals and can get you especially beneficial links from authoritative .gov and .edu domains.
Getting it done
Look for local and/or industry groups to join. If one doesn’t exist, consider starting one. Hosting online events via Google Hangouts, Zoom, YouTube, Facebook or other live streaming services make it especially easy to share that content later. Quality matters, though, so don’t get cheap with your webcam and/or microphone.
When attending community and industry events, write about it on your website before and after, and post on social media during the event, and tag people you meet or speakers you listen to. Take pictures and invite people to visit your booth, if you’ve got one. Video and image posts tend to do better on social media than regular text posts.
External resources
Track Assisted Conversions
Why it’s important
The traditional method of tracking and attributing conversions, known as last-click attribution, records the entire value of a conversion to the marketing channel that brought the user to your site when they converted, their “last click”. This attribution model is simple and easy to track but doesn’t record how different channels, such as organic search, social media, and paid search, work together.
Use “assisted conversions” to assign value to each marketing channel that brings a user to your site before they convert. You could have a marketing campaign that doesn’t result in many last-click conversions but still assists in a high percentage of sales, making it a valuable marketing channel.
Getting it done
Once you have set up your goals, multi-channel reports will be available for all goals in Google Analytics. To view assisted conversions, open Google Analytics, and click on the View you wish to use. In the Conversions reports, click on Multi-Channel Funnels. You can view data about assisted conversions in this section:
- Overview: This overview report provides the number of total conversions and the total number of assisted conversions. It also has a data visualization tool that allows you to see the percentage of total conversions each channel assisted in, as well as the percentage of conversions that were assisted by various channel combinations.
- Assisted Conversions: This report compares the number of conversions the channel assisted in with the number of last-click conversions the channel brought to your website. It displays this ratio as a number: the lower the number, the more often this channel served as the last customer interaction before conversion. The higher the number, the more often the channel served as an assistant for conversions. A value of 1 means the channel had as many assisted conversions as direct conversions.
- Top Conversion Paths: This report lists the various combinations of channels that resulted in a conversion on your site.
- Time Lag: This report shows how many conversions your site receives based on the number of days after a user first arrives on your site. For example, a user who arrives on your site and converts that day will have a Time Lag of 0. A user who visits your site, leaves, and then comes back to convert the next will have a Time Lag of 7.
- Path Length: This report tracks the number of conversions based on the number of marketing channel interactions (the conversion path length). For example, a user who visits your site from search results, and then later clicks on a display ad before converting will have a path length of 2.
External resources
Add a conversion form to maximize customer retention
Why it’s important
Converting visitors into prospects/clients is probably the most important goal for your website. One of the most common ways to do this is by adding a conversion form to your website. It might be a call to action to sign up for your newsletter, register for a class, trial your product or download a free ebook. Whatever it is, having contact information from your site visitors means that you can follow up by email (or phone) with your potential customers.
Getting it done
First, choose your conversion goal and call to action (CTA). Think about who your ideal customer is and what they are looking for on your site. Create a CTA that fits their needs: are they looking for a first purchase discount code, a how-to ebook, or a “stay up-to-date” newsletter?
Second, decide which information you need. It’s generally best practice to ask for as little information as possible in order to make the process quick and easy for your site visitor.
Third, choose a way to create your form and insert it on your site. You might use a form creation tool provided by your email marketing campaign software, a form service, or a specialized conversion tool, or ask your development team to customize one for your needs.
Basic Tips:
- If you choose to include a long form, try dividing it into two parts.
- If you’re offering a product or service, consider creating a pop-up form on your homepage that offers a first purchase discount by filling it out.
- Assure your visitors that they won’t be spammed and their information won’t be shared.
- Make it clear which information you want in each field.
- Create a clear CTA for your form’s button, such as “Download the Free E-book”.
- Set up an autoresponder mailing system. Check if your country requires double opt-in.
- Autofill information from the IP address.
- Optimize your forms for mobile.
External resources
Identify industry influencers and Build Relationships
Why it’s important
Influencer marketing can be a powerful tool to build social proof and trust with your audience. “Influencer” can refer to prominent individuals in your industry that have a significant following. This can also refer to popular websites, magazines, and other online publications.
Cultivating visibility with your market’s influencers will help you build awareness and trust for your brand and links for your site.
Getting it done
Use a tool like BuzzSumo to find industry influencers.
Don’t focus solely on reach – audience engagement is just as important as total followers. In fact, someone with more audience engagement will be more influential than someone with a larger audience.
Make sure they publish and link to content that’s relevant to your business and/or products, and that their site ranks well in search results.
Start building the relationship by engaging with their posts and participating in relevant conversations with them – individual tweets and links aren’t the long-term goals here – you’re looking for something more valuable.
When reaching out, don’t pitch your content to them right away. Instead, tell them how much you enjoyed a recent article, congratulate them on an award, or thank them for sharing some of your content (if they have, of course!). When you do finally pitch them your brand, offer to collaborate on a piece of content. This will give them a sense of control and ownership, which will make them more invested.
External resources
Identify Drop Off Points in your Conversion Funnel
Why it’s important
Identifying pain points in your conversion funnel that cause customer abandonment is critical to maximizing your conversion rate.
Don’t just measure total conversions or conversion rate – track every step of the process. Use this to pinpoint the steps in your funnel that cause customers to drop off. Once you’ve isolated the problem pages, dig deeper to figure out what the problem is. Is your form too long? Do you ask for too much information? Your goal is to reduce or eliminate every pain point for your customers.
Getting it done
Don’t just track total conversions or conversion rates. To set up a conversion funnel in Google Analytics, first create a goal:
- Open Analytics and click “Admin” in the top navigation. It’s next to the Customization tab.
- Choose the Property then the View that you want to track and then click “Goals”
- There are many types of goals to choose from, including duration-based goals and goals triggered by events. For this example, click “New Goal” and enter a goal name and goal destination URL (for example, the /thank-you page that users see after signing up for an account). You can edit existing goals here by clicking the name of the goal.
- Click on “Goals Details”
- Assign a monetary value to your goal if you know how much the goal is worth, even if you’re not measuring purchases (currency can be updated in the View Settings). This will allow Analytics to calculate the value for channel, landing page, and visitor.
Now, set up your funnel:
- Turn on the Funnel.
- Enter the URLs of the pages people visit to go through the conversion process. This will be different for every website. If you don’t have a predetermined path, go to the Reverse Goal Path report under Conversions to see the three pages visited for each goal conversion.
- Click “Verify this Goal” to see how often the Goal would have converted based on your data from the past 7 days – if this reads 0% check that there are no errors.
- Give the funnel a chance to gather data, then head over to the Reporting tab and click “Conversions” from the bottom of the left menu, then “Goals”, and finally “Funnel Visualization”.
- Choose the goal you want to analyze and set the date range. Now you can see which steps in your conversion funnel cause users to drop off, with details of the pages they divert to (or simply where they exit), along with how many users make it through the funnel to convert.
External resources
- Page-Analytics Chrome extension (Heat mapping code)
Extend Your Domain Registration and Buy CCTLDs
Why it’s important
Though Google has downplayed its importance, domain age is used as a ranking signal. Investing in registering your domain for several years is an additional signal that you’ve got a serious, legitimate business and are dedicated to providing a positive user experience.
It’s also a good idea to buy misspelled versions of your domain and redirect them to your correct domain to reduce the risk of copycat websites stealing your customers or damaging your brand.
Purchase country code top-level domains (CCTLDs) to give yourself the future option of expanding your business to new markets and prevent foreign competition from confusing your audience.
Getting it done
Use 301 redirects to send visitors to your homepage from alternate versions of your domain.
Registering your domain for multiple years normally results in a discount, so there’s really no downside.
External resources
Use Meta Robots Tag on Individual Pages
Why it’s important
The meta robots tag lets you control link following and indexing for individual pages. Setting the robots meta tag to “noindex, nofollow” will tell search engines to not index the page or follow any of the links on it.
This gives you an extra layer of protection after your robots.txt file since search engines can still find, crawl and index disallowed pages via external links.
Getting it done
The meta robots tag, like the title and meta description tags, goes in the page <head>. To tell search engines not to index a page or follow any of its links, use this meta robots tag: <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow”/>.
You can use a combination of “noindex”, “nofollow”, “index” and “follow”, depending on how you want search engines to handle indexing and links for individual pages.
External resources
Keep Your Layout Consistent
Why it’s important
Inconsistent layout and design will make your site look less trustworthy, make it harder for users to navigate around your site, and can confuse users as to whether they are still even on the same site.
Put navigation options in the same space on every page and use colors and images consistently. Confused and frustrated users will leave your site without converting, and likely won’t come back.
Getting it done
Establish the brand identity of your company, including colors and other visual elements.
When laying out your pages, try to use a grid structure to help with a consistent layout. Desktop and mobile versions of your site should use the same color scheme and design elements, even when the layout changes by screen size. Your navigation buttons should be the same across the site, and they should be clear and accessible on each page.
External resources
Optimize interstitials and Splash Pages
Why it’s important
Splash pages and interstitials are images or pages that appear before the expected content on a page. Google doesn’t like when you put ads on your pages as interstitials, but they’re still useful for age restrictions and subscription/paywall information.
Use them carefully as they can slow down your page load time and adding an extra click will inevitably cost you, visitors.
Getting it done
Make sure interstitials and splash pages aren’t indexed over your regular page content by having them load asynchronously or by using JavaScript.
Use cookies to control when and how often users see interstitial pages. Many sites use splash pages for international pages, but that’s not optimal. Instead, use hreflang or IP detection to serve the right page.
External resources
Clean Your Site HTML
Why it’s important
Your website is faster, less buggy, and more easily crawled and indexed by search engines when your code is clean. Subsequently, you can be displayed and rank higher in search engines.
Getting it done
Validate your code with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) tests. Although this won’t directly impact your rankings, it does ensure that your website is accessible to search engines and visitors, including those who may be visually impaired or have other accessibility issues.
100% compliance is difficult to achieve, and most modern browsers can deal with some minor broken code, so prioritize when it comes to fixing issues.
External resources
Use Social Media to Engange Your Audience
Why it’s important
Having a presence on social media is no longer just a recommendation – it’s truly necessary. Your audience, especially the younger generation, will expect your business to have a presence on social media.
Social media is one of the best tools to engage your audience (which is valuable to your business), build brand loyalty, monitor relevant conversations, and respond to feedback (both positive and negative). Optimize your Facebook presence using the Facebook Insights analytics platform to analyze which posts drive the most likes, views, impressions, and traffic to your website.
Respond to comments and messages as quickly as you can – Facebook and Twitter are two of your most important customer service channels.
Getting it done
How you optimize your social media presence for audience engagement will depend on the platform, industry, and audience. The good news is that you can use analytics to figure out what works best for each social network.
You can use the built-in analytics (Facebook Insights and Twitter Dashboard), or invest in a social media marketing analytics platform like Sprout Social. Image and video posts generally tend to do better from an engagement standpoint. Experiment with dayparting (the day and time you post) to find the optimal times to promote yourself via social media to drive more traffic back to your site.
Track social media traffic in your analytics platform to see which sites are best for conversions, which are best for shares, and which are best for other engagements (likes, comments, customer service, etc.).
Try the technique known as newsjacking: find a news story related to your business or industry and give an opinion or even just a witty quip. Staying current will keep you in front of people’s minds.
External resources
Submit Your Business to local directories
Why it’s important
Submitting your business to local directories helps associate your site with not only your niche but also your target location(s). Being verified and listed by trustworthy local websites, or by allowing reviews, can also help improve trust with your audience.
Getting it done
Search for directories for your area. Start with the big names: Yelp, Foursquare, Yellow Pages, and the Better Business Bureau.
Make sure your NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) is consistent to avoid hurting your off-page SEO. Look to join local community groups as well, such as your chamber of commerce, relevant business locations, charities, educational organizations, and tourism websites (both government and private).
External resources
Interact with relevant online Communities
Why it’s important
Online communities provide great opportunities to grow your audience and engage with potential customers. Answering questions, clarifying misconceptions, or otherwise contributing to a discussion will also help you build trust and authority with your audience. Establishing your company as a thought leader in your niche will make you look good, not only to potential customers but search engines as well.
Consider joining communities for people working in your industry so you can learn about market trends and pick up new tips and tricks for your business. This can also lead to guest blogging opportunities and links.
Getting it done
Make a note of what communities your influencers are a part of and hang out there. Focus on quality, not quantity – choose websites that have consistent, valuable interaction instead of just joining as many as you can. Don’t bother with forums that have a lot of spam – associating with “bad neighborhoods” online will actually make you look bad in Google’s eyes.
When you do participate in discussions, make sure you are actually contributing something of value by answering a question or solving a problem – if you don’t you’ll just get lost in the noise. And don’t risk your credibility – only contribute when you know what you’re talking about. Don’t view these interactions as link building; the goal here is not to slyly insert as many links as you can into a conversation on Quora or Reddit. Anyway, most online communities are automatically nofollow links.
External resources
Add Social Share Buttons to your sites
Why it’s important
Social media is a huge source of traffic and brand awareness and a great way for you to engage with your audience.
The most effective form of marketing, though, is when your customers share your content. Make it easy for them by adding share buttons to your site so your visitors can share your content with their friends without ever leaving your page.
Getting it done
Add your buttons in a prominent location on the page, but be careful not to distract from the content or any CTAs. Social media networks often use metadata when linking to a page, so make sure your title tag and descriptions are compelling and accurate.
Optimize your pages for rich media posts like Twitter Cards and Pinterest Rich Pins. You can check your site is optimized for Twitter Cards in the Structured Data section of our Review.
Set up your analytics platform to track clicks to your share buttons so you can track what content drives the most shares, and to which channels. Content can then be optimized to ensure higher rates of traffic and conversions.
External resources
Secure Your Site Against Hacking & Spam
Why it’s important
It’s much cheaper to prevent hacking than it is to recover from a hack. If you operate a website that handles sensitive personal or financial information, a security breach could be devastating to your customers, business and reputation.
Websites that are hijacked to spread malicious software or manipulate search results can also see themselves removed from search engine indexes and placed on antivirus blacklists. Finally, Google uses HTTPS status as a ranking signal and gives a ranking boost to sites that are HTTPS secure.
Getting it done
Keep your website and server software up to date – old versions are one of the prime targets for hackers. Make sure all employees use password security best practices and regularly monitor antivirus blacklists to make sure you haven’t been unknowingly compromised.
External resources
Promote Your Site on Social media.
Why it’s important
Social networks have been an important marketing channel for years now. In fact, the majority of millennials now expect brands to have a presence on multiple platforms. Almost everyone expects you to have at least a Facebook page.
Social media allows you to promote your business and engage with your audience, while simultaneously increasing brand awareness and loyalty. You should also optimize your social pages for your branded keywords. Ideally, it should be your site appearing first in the SERP for branded keywords, followed by your various social media profiles. This way, even if someone skips your homepage, they’ll still stay within your ecosystem.
Getting it done
Optimize your social media profiles to rank for your branded keywords. Use the name that people most search for (Recreational Equipment, Inc. vs. REI) as your page title and vanity URL. Put your name first (that’s the keyword you’re really optimizing for), since it’s the most important part in Google’s eyes.
Fill out the About Us section fully and include your most important keywords – Google uses the page titles and descriptions to form search snippets. Optimize your statuses and updates by including a comment: The first 18 characters of your updates act as titles and descriptions in SERPs. Always add a call to action to your Facebook page.
Be sure to optimize your Twitter Cards on your website, as Google displays Twitter cards for branded keywords.
External resources
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