Category: Contextual advertising

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What are the Benefits of Performing an SEO Audit in 2019?

SEO Audit

If your website is not found on page 1 of Google, you can lose up to 95% of potential clicks to your site, domains that slip down to Page 2 only attract 5 percent of search traffic.  With this in mind, before you start working on your website to determine which key words to compete for ranking in Google and Bing, and before you set out a strategy for digital marketing and your businesses online presence, there is one key task that must be performed to get a baseline understanding of your website, social media profiles, and how search engines view it.  This critical task is called an SEO Audit.   An SEO audit report determines about how well a website is doing and if it will be found easily on search engines, local directories and social media.  This is both an exercise in understanding the on-page technical issues you may face, how secure your website is, as well as the content challenges facing you.  It is also a discovery process by which you find out how other websites, directories and even local search engines link to you, as well as link to your most relevant local competitors that are situated in close geographic proximately to your store or service area.

There are many significant benefits of auditing your website’s SEO status.  This report provides comprehensive information about yours and your competitors’ websites and social profiles.   Just a few of the main benefits of an SEO audit report are:

  • Track your website’s programming for page speed and site security.
  • Learn if there are any technical problems that are negatively affecting how Google perceives your website, and if you are subject to any Google penalties
  • It gives you competitive intelligence to not only your site, but also your competitors sites and what they are doing well or poorly as opposed to your online marketing efforts, so you know if you should be focusing on local search to start or a more national level
  • It lets you know what specific steps you can take to improve your domain authority.
  • Provides a report on your top keywords and how high up on Google and Bing you rank as opposed to your top 3 competitors in your local area.
  • You will get a better understanding of how you can improve your website’s ranking on the popular search engines.
  • Provides the information you need to plan and execute the ideas of getting more people to click on your site from the search engine and increase traffic, thereby increasing sales.
  • You can improve your sales, conversions and leads through SEO audit report.

The bottom line is that without a proper SEO audit you do not know what you are doing well, and where your website and digital marketing efforts are falling short.  More importantly, a solid SEO audit report will give you specific action steps you can take to improve your online presence.  If you would like to learn more about search engine audits for your own company, you can follow the above mentioned steps or even easier, use a free SEO Audit Tool.

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Is your company listed correctly online?

retargetting customers

Many small business owners think that just because they have a website or Facebook page that their business is listed properly online. However, what many people don’t realize is that their business is not listed on many of the local directories that Google and Bing use to influence how high up someone is ranked, or even worse, that if a business has moved in the past, their correct address, phone number or even website is not listed.  Ensuring your name, address and phone are consistent on all major directories is one of the first things you should do when setting up a digital marketing plan.  Below is a free tool to use that will tell you how and if your your business is listed on the most important social media sites and search engines:

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What type of social media post will get the most likes

It is not a secret that to have an effective online marketing campaign you need to have an engaging social media presence that attracts Facebook likes and shares, Retweets, and thumbs up on YouTube. In fact, increasing the organic presence in social media timelines requires a higher interaction of followers and friends. With that said, recent studies have shown a decrease in engagement of many types of posts including text, large slow loading photos and links. However, many authoritative sites such as Buzzsumo.com have demonstrated that video posts are driving significantly higher shares than any other type of post on Facebook. In fact, according to their study, average shares have increased over 100% since last august for videos.

One of the key factors is that Facebook has an autopay feature with the sound turned off on a user’s timeline. So what happens is that a user sees a video starting to play, and the motion catches their eye. However, they cannot hear what is going on in the video unless they click on it. As the old adage goes, “curiosity killed the cat”, and the user clicks on the video to add sound and find out what going on. The point of this is, if you want more people to share your posts and “go viral”, video is a must.

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What Should Be Your First SEO Activities

Google report

When you launch a new website, or decide that it is time to optimize your current website for search engine ranking, you need to prioritize your steps. There is so much information out there about what factors Google, Bing and other search engines use in their ranking algorithms, especially SEO for start-ups.  Do you concentrate on on-site or off-site tactics? Do you concentrate on link building,  social signals, or do you simply focus on local search?  There really is no one size fits all answer, as each SEO program needs to be tailored to your specific goals. However, for the purpose of this article, we will presume a small business that needs people to find it and walk in the door such as a restaurant or retail location with a brand new website.

When you have a new site, we typically break the tasks down into 3 specific components, regardless of whether it is on-site or off-site activities. The first component is basic optimization and analysis to set up your site for success and then analyze monthly reports to track your progress. The second component is local search activities to ensure when someone searches for your city or town and your service, that you show up on the SERP map or Yelp reviews. The final component is based upon building content for long-tail terms and encourage new inbound links each month. This is not really a “secret sauce” that only those in the know use, but rather simply grouping your SEO practices into logical steps to help organize your process.

With the foregoing plan in mind, the first thing that we suggest for a new website is to determine the 10 – 20 keyword phrases that you believe your customers will search for to find a solution to their needs. Once you do that, go through your website to ensure that each page is targets one of these keyword phrases and then set up titles and Meta descriptions on each page. You also should create some sort of analytics package, such as Google webmaster tools.

Once you know the terms your website is going to try to attract and have a way to track your audience and new inbound links, you want to ensure that when someone searches for your keyword and location, you show up on the Google and Bing maps. This can be accomplished by submitting to and maintaining local directory citations such as Yelp, Foursquare and creating a Google and Bing business page. You may also want to create a Facebook fan page that contains your contact information.

Finally, you need to have a plan to build content and generate new links each month to grow your site and rank for lesser searched terms. The use of a blog and videos are a great way to do this. Often times, you can even take your original keyword list and use it to develop 20 – 40 blog topics that you can write about and then post to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc., as well as include a social signal button to promote others to share your content.

As we said earlier, this may not be the optimum solution for every business of every size and type, but is a pretty good game plan for most new sites and local businesses. For more information, please contact a reputable white hat SEO company to discuss your needs.