How Long Does It Take for SEO to Start Working?

One of the most frequent questions from clients of a digital marketing firm is “When will my search engine business rankings increase?”, or “How long does it take for SEO to start working?”

Business owners know the importance of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as part of their online marketing strategy. They also understand that SEO strategies make it easier for search engines to find them, rank them higher, thereby increasing traffic to their website.

So how long do you have to wait before you see results? The short answer is “it depends”.

There are many variables to optimizing your website, however three specific criteria play a significant role: competition, inbound links, and content.

Competition

Depending on your product or service, there will be varying degrees of demand. The more competing webpages you’re up against, the longer it will take to see results. Depending on how well your competition’s SEO strategies perform, the longer it will take for you to rise in rankings.

If you are spending a great deal of time and effort developing and implementing your SEO strategies, you can be sure your competitors are doing so as well. Every time you post a new blog, your competitor may be doing the same.

Inbound links

The volume of inbound links to your website play a huge role. The quality of those links, the speed in which you gain those links, and historically have gained them also has an effect. The speed at which you earn links should have a relatively stable growth pattern. A sudden increase in links looks unnatural. If your link-building follows Google’s guidelines, that should happen naturally.

A large number of high-quality, high-authority inbound links (also referred to as backlinks) will flag site-crawlers, indicating that your website is an authority in your particular field. It’s almost like gaining a referral from someone for your product or service.

Content

Quality content matters a lot. High-quality content is original, relevant, authoritative, factual, grammatically correct and engaging. Your web pages need have no minimum or even ideal length. They just have to answer the question or solve the user’s problem.

A business blog is a great way to become a resource for information in your field that you add to on a regular basis. Blogs are a great way to increase traffic to your website.

Keep in mind that newer pages don’t rank as well as older ones. This graph shows that the average top 10 ranking page is at least 2 ½ years old.

Despite this, new content should be added to your website on a regular publishing schedule.

This encourages search engine spiders to crawl your site more frequently and speed up your SEO efforts. Also, users will return to your site more frequently looking for new content, further sending signals to search engines of the popularity of your site. User engagement is built and gauged over time.

SEO is An Investment

Ultimately, you need to be prepared to invest several months to a year before seeing the results of your SEO efforts. Why?  Search engines take multiple factors into account when ranking webpages. For example, Google uses over 200 ranking factors in their search algorithm! The takeaway is this: SEO can have a significant impact on the success of your business, so it is worth the investment of time and money!

4 Reasons to Include Social Media Video in Your Business Marketing Strategy

No matter what size your business or what niche you’re in, you’ll need to take social media video marketing seriously. Though it’s not the only tool in your social media toolbox, it definitely is a major one. The ability for a business to tell its story and engage its audience is a powerful sales tool, and video is helping to tell better stories.

Video content can help businesses reach 4 specific goals:

1. Web Traffic

Social media video content is an effective way to drive traffic to your website. Video content continues to grow and drive the internet. It plays an integral part of the online social lifestyle. Demand for social media video content is continually growing on social channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and especially YouTube. A successful social media video campaign will include a CTA (Call to Action), the most popular being “Visit our Website”. Other CTAs include “Learn More”, “Sign Up Now”, “Book Now”, or “Shop Now”.

Gaia.com is an online resource that streams videos about alternative health, yoga and inspirational films and documentaries. This brand knows the benefits of using video on social. Their video on Facebook had 248 shares and 6.3 M views with a clear CTA to visit their website to learn more.

2. Engagement

When social media videos showcase your brand and tell your story effectively you connect and engage with your audience. When that video content is not only worth watching but also worth sharing, you increase your audience reach.

Canadian Tire™ successfully showed its support for the Canadian Olympic team during the summer 2017 Olympics with this inspirational video that only subtly shows its product: tires. It turned out to be one of the most viral videos of 2017. It just goes to show that your businesses’ story is not just about showcasing your product. It’s also about the things your company believes in and supports.

3. Brand Awareness

More and more brands use social media videos to tell their story and give their brand personality.  It’s that personality that followers want to see, and what makes your brand stand out from the crowd. Recognition is a key element to your product’s story.

Taking a similar marketing approach as Dove™, Always™ came out with this video as part of their “Like a Girl “campaign. They used a powerful message of empowerment for women to gain attention and respect for their brand. Their campaign went on to win numerous awards including an Emmy.

4. Generate Excitement and Educate

Leveraging the power of short social media video content by creating instructional how-to videos, showing off a new product from every angle, or simply using text to tell your product’s story creates interest and excitement while getting your message across. If you create content that’s both informative and useful, you’ll create trust in your brand, and a set of loyal customers.

Today’s Parent shows off an easy Ikea™ hack using one of their products in this cheerful video with a “Back -To-School” theme so relatable to families that want to avoid the common entryway clutter.

Are you looking to optimize your digital marketing strategies using video? Contact us today and let’s get started!

What are the Essentials of Image Optimization for SEO?

You’re a great writer. You can produce killer content that people connect with. What about pictures? Do you have them on your site, or blog? Are your images optimized for SEO? Or do you just throw up whatever you have on hand at the time?

Believe it or not, there is a technique to posting images that can affect your Search Engine Optimization strategy. Done improperly, it can be a detriment to how Google and other search engines view your website. Part science and part art form, correct image optimization is ultimately about two things:

• Making the user experience a good one
• Appeasing the SEO gods

Achieving the second item depends largely upon achieving the first item.

Whether you’re a seasoned blogger, or just wrote your first post, the following essentials in regard to image optimization for SEO will help your content rank better with search engines.

Do I Even Need an Image?

Um…yes. Always!

Some people would consider posting anything without at least one image. But why? Humans are innately visual creatures. In fact, for those of us who do not have severe visual impairment, sight isn’t just our primary sense involved with assimilating information from the world around us. It is used at a far greater rate than all the other senses combined. And pictures have been shown to be just as, if not more effective in relaying information in certain circumstances.

Including pictorial content with a post achieves several items for the user:

Provides visual appeal: opening a page that is a sheer wall of text causes a brain to immediately tune out. Many people won’t get past the first paragraph, and your websites bounce rate will increase. Spice up your post and break up the monotony with an image.

Visuals can help clarify a topic. There’s nothing like a graph, chart, or even an on-point meme to get a point across.

Besides the obvious visual appeal for readers, search engines not only like to see that you are providing pictures, but that your images are optimized for maximum effectiveness. The metadata and descriptions associated with your picture can help increase your chances of being found in an organic search.

Where Can I Find Images?

It is considered best practice to use your own, original photos. Decent cameras are reasonably priced. Heck, some people have gotten proficient enough with their smartphone’s camera that they use this as their primary picture taking device. The biggest obstacle many people find in providing their own pictures is time. It may take too long to gather the right objects and get the lighting just right, or to go out into the wild to locate that ideal scene.

If you need to gather your visuals more quickly there are online venues designed specifically for this purpose. They come in two flavours – free and paid.

Some of the free sites like pixabay have pictures that are truly free. What’s the difference between free, and truly free? Some “free” sites offer photos at no charge, but they have a watermark on them. You have to pay a subscription, or membership fee to use the photo without the watermark. Might be okay if the mark is generic, but they usually aren’t, which makes the pic kind of useless for posting on a blog.

Some have a two-tier system. There is a small selection of free (and sometimes lower resolution) pictures without watermarks, and then if you pay a membership/subscription fee, there is a greater selection of photos which include better resolution.

Then there is truly free. There are no watermarks. There are no membership fees, or tiers. Pictures are offered at varying resolutions. The selection may not be as wide or deep as some of the pay sites, however if you are creative you can find the free sites may be more than enough to supply your needs.

Off-Page Changes

After locating the perfect picture to go with your content, there are a couple of things you will need to do with the image.

• Change it up. When allowed to alter a pic, do it. Chances are you aren’t the only one using this picture, so by adding an effect, or overlaying some text, or cropping the image, you make it different from any other site where users may happen upon this visual. Canva is a great online tool that can help with basic alterations. If you want something a little more robust, gimp is a great picture manipulation program loaded with tons of options – and it is free! (truly free)
• Remove unnecessary metadata. This is the part of the image that the users won’t normally see; things like the title, tags, authors, date taken, etc. In all, there are about 25 attributes that should be removed whenever possible, to help with overall page performance and not get search engines bogged down with irrelevant information.
  
  

Off-Page Information

Image optimization for SEO isn’t just about removing irrelevant items. It is also about ensuring the correct attributes are present and correctly formatted. The following items won’t usually be seen by the user but make a big difference for image optimization.

1. File name: Never leave an image or photo file name with the default that was set by the camera or program (ie. DSC44553.png or img33224.jpg). Always change the file name to something that is relevant to the content, preferably the focus keyword. This not only helps indicate to search engines the relevance of the image to the text but can help with placing in organic searches.
2. File format: There are several file formats that will serve for a content image, with the two main types being .jpg (this has its small size going for it), and .png (which allows for background transparency). On occasion a .gif may even be desired for animations. Remember to keep the file sizes as low as possible; use compression if necessary.
3. Alt text: Most CMS’s media libraries will offer an extra field called alt text when uploading an image. Do not treat it as optional and leave it blank. Do not treat it as an extra field for more keywords. Instead, fill it in with a short description of what is in the picture. This field is used by programs for those who are sight impaired to give a verbal description of what the rest of us see when looking at the image. It can also help when a browser runs into problems downloading the image, by placing the alt text directly on the screen, allowing everyone to get some idea of what is supposed to be there, rather than just a blank image or file not found error.
   
   

On-Page Information

• Give credit where credit is due. Read the terms and conditions of each site where you procure your visuals. They all have varying rules and degrees to which a picture may be used, and the way credit should be given. This not only lets search engines know you have authorization to use a picture, it can also save your hide legally in case a photographer or graphic designer sees their image on your site and challenges your rights of usage.
• Picture size: as a general rule-of-thumb, ensure the picture is no wider than your content, and it does not fill the entire screen from top to bottom.
• Captions: people scan titles headings and image captions (no not words imposed over the text, but words underneath a pic – relevant to the article), so a short line of relevant text under the picture can help the reader understand something if it is unclear.
  
  

Bottom Line

The biggest thing to keep in mind when setting up a picture for your content is the user experience. Is it original? Is it relevant to the content? Is it clearly, and properly labeled? Is it correctly sized on the page? Does its file size allow for rapid loading? With proper image optimization your visuals will be useful for both the reader and for search engines.

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Quora for SEO: Is it Worth Your Time?

300 million active monthly users. Engagement with the world’s top thought leaders. Growth that could surpass Twitter and Reddit. Those are the claims Quora put forth to advertisers when it launched new targeting options earlier this year. If they’re right, then Quora must be fertile ground for SEO activity – right?

In reality, the intersection of Quora and SEO is a complex (and often controversial) topic.

Let’s investigate.

What is Quora, and Why Is It So Popular?

Quora isn’t the first question-and-answer site out there, but it might just be the last.

That is to say that Quora has so far managed to succeed in areas where similar sites have failed.

Yahoo Answers, one of the first major Q&A sites, was massively popular but poorly-moderated in terms of questions and answers alike. It never came close to a reputable source of information and was often the subject of ridicule.

Google Answers surpassed Yahoo Answers in the quality of its content, but it failed to strike a chord with internet users at large; and like many Google products (see: Google+), Google Answers was closed due to ailing popularity.

The respective downfalls of Yahoo Answers and Google Answers illustrate the challenge of managing an informational site built on user-submitted content. To grow, the site must continuously attract more users who are willing to submit questions and answers; however, there’s a delicate balance between encouraging user participation and maintaining quality standards.

Set the bar for quality too high and few people will participate; set it too low and the site will attract poor-quality content, spam and trolls.

To date, Quora has managed to strike this balance through a combination of a quality-ranking algorithm and human moderators who monitor the feeds. Quora was originally moderated by volunteers from its user community, but the company has since switched to paid moderators and content reviewers who remove questions and answers as needed.

It’s easy to contribute to, but it’s not a free-for-all, either. This balance has been vital to the site’s popularity so far. Quora has even garnered attention from world leaders like Justin Trudeau and Barack Obama.

What is the Value of Quora for SEO?

Another key to Quora’s success is its powerful presence on Google’s search engine results page.

Google’s RankBrain algorithm strives to deliver the highest-quality answers relevant to searchers’ queries. Quora’s upvote-driven Q&A format, which favours the most precise and comprehensive answers to specific questions, is practically tailor-made for it.

These days, whenever you make a search query in the form of a question, there’s a high likelihood of finding Quora on the first page of the results.

This trend has motivated people, brands and SEOs to try and leverage Quora to drive site traffic.

But there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it. Using Quora for SEO is not as simple as plopping links into questions and answers – and in fact, that’s a good way to get banned from Quora for life.

Ways to Use Quora for SEO

Here’s the truth: Quora’s prominence on page 1 of Google’s search engine results has made it a magnet for SEO-related spam.

By that we mean users posting low-quality answers solely for the purpose of driving traffic to their (or their client’s) site.

Spammers aside, there are legitimately useful and effective ways to leverage Quora’s popularity and SERP presence to your advantage.

1. Answer Questions to Drive Qualified Traffic to Your Site

All external links placed by Quora users are no-follow links. This means that if you post a link to your website on Quora, it doesn’t pass any authority onto your site.

In other words, Quora isn’t useful for backlinking.

However, when done properly, posting links to Quora can be a way to drive good, qualified traffic to your site. That’s because the questions people pose to Quora tend to be specific, with clear intent on the part of the questioner.

For example, the person asking “What are the best tennis shoes?” is likely to be interested in buying a pair of tennis shoes. The same goes for anyone who comes across the question in a Google search. If you happen to sell tennis shoes, these are exactly the people you want visiting your website – so it would be great if you could get a link on that page.

However, Quora is picky about how and when a question or answer can include external links.

According to Quora’s rules on questions and answers containing external links:

• Helpful answers are clear and credible, and sincerely address the question asked. External links to sources can help demonstrate credibility when the answer depends on third-party facts and analysis rather than the poster’s personal experience.
• Answers containing external links must answer the question and summarize how the reference answers the question. They cannot just point users to the link for answers.
• Answers that drive traffic to external sites for promotional or commercial purposes and do not sufficiently answer the question are considered spam.

In sum, if a page on your site is a good source of information for a user’s question, it can be helpful and appropriate to include a link to that page in an answer. When the question is one that your ideal visitors are asking, it can be well worth your time to answer it.

2. Answer Questions to Build Credibility and Authority in Your Industry

One of the reasons why Quora has been popular among tech influencers is how it readily showcases users’ qualifications and achievements.

Right below each user’s name and portrait is their Quora credentials, intended as a way to show the world why your post is worth reading (and an implicit answer to the question, “Says who?”). It can include your education, location, life experience and other personal information. Well-known figures can even earn a verification checkmark next to their name.

This system makes Quora an excellent platform for personal and brand authority-building. It’s a fast and completely free way to publicly demonstrate expertise in your industry.

3. Use Quora to Optimize Your Site Content

Popular answers on Quora can tell you a lot about how to write great content.

The answers that rank best among users tend to be those that provide comprehensive, useful information in a way that’s easy to read and understand. When the question relates to your industry, it can give valuable clues about the information your customers are looking for and how they prefer to receive it.

Think about a question your customers or clients regularly ask. Has anyone asked and answered the question on Quora?

Does your website provide all the information contained in the top answer?

If not, that could indicate an area of your site that needs improvement.

4. Use Quora for Keyword Research

If someone is asking a question about your industry on Quora, chances are some of your customers are searching the same thing.

Quora is an excellent place to explore how people discuss your business in everyday, unfiltered language.

Questions and answers can reveal keywords and phrasing you might not have thought of yet. Plus, with a free Quora Ads account, you can see exactly how many views a question receives each week, which can help you decide if a particular keyword is worth pursuing.

5. Use Quora to Brainstorm Blog Topics

Not sure what to write about? Find an unanswered (or inadequately-answered) question that relates to your business and answer it in a comprehensive blog post.

Freshly-posted questions can be a goldmine for novel blog content ideas. The same goes for a new FAQ page, a customer knowledge base, or a glossary of industry terms.

Better yet, there are several ways find these topics without any work on your part. Add a subject or keyword to your Quora feed to have new questions delivered as they’re published. Or, follow another user who answers questions in your industry to get notified when they post – then, add your two cents.

Quora has been around for almost ten years, but it’s still fertile ground when it comes to growing your online reach and driving traffic to your website. There’s plenty of room for experimentation.

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Optimizing Your LinkedIn Company Page to Hook Leads & Drive Traffic

LinkedIn has become an incredible marketing tool, especially for businesses who know how to optimize their LinkedIn company page.

The premiere professional networking platform is a great place to scout talent, network, and nurture sales prospects. But that’s not the only way to leverage it.

LinkedIn also has powerful search engine optimization benefits. Creating a LinkedIn company page is of the fastest ways to rank for branded keywords, and it sends strong signals to Google’s ranking algorithm.

Want to quickly and effectively optimize your LinkedIn company page? Focus on these key areas.

Why LinkedIn is Worth Your Time

LinkedIn is home to over 500 million users from 200 different countries. And those users are impressively active, with over half of them visiting the site at least once a month.

Having a dedicated company page gives you direct access to customers, clients, and talent in your industry. It’s a free platform for showcasing products and services and promoting important news.

Company pages also unlock valuable engagement assets, like how many people see your posts and what they’re saying about your company.

LinkedIn’s not only popular with professionals – Google’s ranking algorithm loves it, too. LinkedIn company pages quickly climb the rankings for branded key phrases, giving companies a free and easy opportunity to get their content in front of more searchers.

Optimizing a LinkedIn Company Page

When we talk about optimizing a LinkedIn company page, we usually have three broad goals in mind:

1. Increasing LinkedIn user engagement with the company page;
2. Helping the company page rank for relevant queries in search engine results; and
3. Helping the company page rank in LinkedIn’s native search engine results.

Each of these goals can be refined and targeted to a company’s specific key performance indicators; if the company is looking for sales leads, for example, the focus will be on user engagement at specific points in the marketing funnel.

Whether you’re focusing on organic engagement or plan to boost your LinkedIn strategy with sponsored content, optimizing a LinkedIn company page should begin with these basic steps:

1. Fill out the company profile completely.
2. Write a keyword-rich company description.
3. Upload high-quality photos.
4. Link back to the company website and other social profiles.
5. Post-industry-relevant content.
6. Have employees connect to the page.
   
   

1. Complete Your Company Profile

Start by filling in the blanks.

When a user first enters a company on their profile, LinkedIn generates a bare-bones page for that company to serve as a hub for employees; however, the information that automatically populates the page is far from complete and not necessarily accurate.

Enter all the information someone would need to find and identify your company: its address, phone number, website URL, etc. Make sure it matches what appears on the company’s website and Google My Business page

This step increases the page’s legitimacy in the eyes of users and search engines.

2. Write a Compelling Company Description

What does your company do? What makes it unique? Boil it down into 156 characters.

The first 156 characters of a company’s description appears as the page’s meta description, or the summary that appears below the link on both Google and LinkedIn’s the search engine results page.

It helps to think of the description as an elevator pitch: a concise summary that tells people what your company is all about and entices them to learn more.

The company description can be longer than 156 characters, of course, but it’s important to make those initial words count. Be sure to include keywords and key phrases that people use to find companies in your industry.

3. Upload High-Quality Photos

The profile picture is the first impression people have of your company on LinkedIn. It appears in the LinkedIn search results, on employees’ profile pages, and above everything your company posts.

Company pages with profile pictures also get six times as many visits as those without one.

The best profile picture for a company on LinkedIn is a clear, high-quality image of its logo. LinkedIn recommends a minimum profile image size of 400px by 400px and a max of 7680px by 4320px.

You should also personalize the page with an eye-catching header image (recommended 1584px by 396 px). It can be a simple banner, a photo collage, or an image with call-to-action text. Since it always appears alongside the profile image, the header doesn’t need to include a logo; however, it should reinforce brand recognition using relevant imagery and colours.

If your ideal logo or header image doesn’t quite fit LinkedIn’s dimensions, Sprout Social’s Landscape Resizer tool is a quickly modify it.

4. Link to Other Sites and Profiles

Social media pages are most effective when they’re interconnected.

Add links to the company’s other social profiles so LinkedIn users can easily find and follow your company across the web.

In turn, add a LinkedIn button to your company website.

5. Post-Industry-Relevant Content

LinkedIn isn’t just another company listing; it’s a platform from which companies can broadcast their best content to clients, customers and industry colleagues.

Posts are one of the most direct ways to engage with viewers and followers since posts appear both on its page and the home page of each of the company’s followers.

What to post depends on the company’s goals for the social network. LinkedIn posts can be used to:

• Showcase an awesome company culture
• Share company news and updates
• Publish original blog, video and image content
• Spread the word about timely industry issues

Always include some form of visual content – those posts get 98% more engagement than text-only posts.

6. Get Employees on Board

If your business is new to LinkedIn, but your employees aren’t, chances are they’ll have already named the company in the Experience section of their profiles.

But that doesn’t always mean they are connected to the same page.

For example, the user who entered “Company Inc.” may be linked to a different page than the one who simply put “Company.”

Ironing out these inconsistencies is an important step in increasing the company page’s reach, especially for smaller businesses. The more employees who connect, the greater your reach.

About LinkedIn Sponsored Content

Once you’ve done all the above, it’s time to consider furthering your reach with sponsored content.

Sponsoring content puts your company’s posts in people’s LinkedIn feeds, appearing almost exactly like an organic (non-sponsored) post. It’s a great way to reach clients and customers, especially for B2B businesses.

LinkedIn’s advertising tools enable highly specific targeting, allowing you to aim content at specific people, companies, or positions within a company. Insight tags help to define further your audience based on who visits your site and their actions on the page, detailed conversion tracking gives a clear understanding of the value of leads through LinkedIn.

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Blog Optimization Checklist: 10 Clear-Cut Ways to Boost SEO

When you’ve poured time and energy into a great blog post, you want it to reach as much of your audience as possible. Small changes matter when it comes to boosting blog SEO. Take a run through this blog optimization checklist before you post — it won’t take long, and it’ll help your blog get seen by the right people.

1. Keywords

Keywords are words or short phrases that encompass what the blog post is about (see our blog: What Are Keywords and Why Do They Matter?). When you use them well, keywords can help the post rank for search queries that include those words.

Why Blog Keywords Matter for SEO

Search engine algorithms use repeated words and phrases as clues to what a webpage is about. Placing relevant, natural-sounding keywords in the blog content, title, meta description, and URL can contribute to a blog post’s search engine ranking.

How to Optimize for Keywords

Incorporate your chosen keywords into the blog:

• Title
• Headings (one or more)
• First paragraph
• Meta description
• URL
  
  

2. Length

There’s no perfect word count for SEO, but the length of a blog can factor into its ranking.

Why Blog Length Matters for SEO

Search engine algorithms often deem pages with less than 300 words inadequate to rank in the search engine results. However, longer isn’t necessarily better; a 3,000-word post stuffed with irrelevant content will fare just as poorly as a short one.

Optimizing Length for SEO

Aim to write at least 500 words per blog post. Beyond that, the ideal blog length will depend on your audience. Pay attention to how your blogs perform and look for trends related to page length.

3. Readability

It’s in the writer’s interest to make a blog post as easy to read as possible. Spacing, formatting, and writing style all weigh on a blog’s readability.

Why Readability Matters for SEO

Making your content easy to digest will increase the time people spend reading it and encourage them to share it with others. It can also increase the likelihood the content will rank in Featured Snippets, which is a huge boost to blog SEO.

How to Optimize Blog Readability

• Add informative headings and subheadings to make the post easier to skim.
• Format lists or step-by-step instructions as numbered or bulleted lists.
• Break large paragraphs into shorter chunks. Single-sentence paragraphs are common in the blog world.
  
  

4. Title

The title is your chance to convince the reader to click in 50-60 characters or less. A good title:

1. Is short (search engines cut off titles longer than 60 characters);
2. Is compelling (but not clickbait); and
3. Promises readers something of value if they click.
   
   

Why Blog Titles Matter for SEO

A great title will drive more traffic to the blog, which significantly impacts its rankings. As mentioned above, the title should also include relevant keywords.

How to Optimize Blog Titles

Craft your title around keywords and the value readers receive from the blog. Shorten it 50 characters or less and add compelling adjectives to make it pop.

5. Call to Action

The title succeeds in persuading readers to click on your blog post. What do you want them to do once they’re there? Whatever the goal, readers are more likely to do it if you guide them in the right direction with a clear call to action.

Why a Call to Action Matters for SEO

An effective call to action keeps people on your site and discourages them from bouncing back to the search engine results page (see our blog: Understanding Bounce Rate, Long Clicks and Pogo-Sticking).

How to Optimize Call to Action

Place the call to action prominently on the blog post (the best spot will vary audience-to-audience, so consider testing different placements). It should be relevant to the subject matter of the article and the user’s pain points.

6. Internal and External Links

Internal links are links to content that is within the same domain as your content: other blog posts, product pages, contact pages, and so on. External links are the opposite: they point to other websites.

Why Internal and External Linking Matters for SEO

Interlinking helps search engine algorithms to understand the website’s structure. Links to credible, authoritative external sources help build your site’s credibility within the eyes of the all-seeing search algorithm. Both are an important part of boosting blog SEO.

How to Optimize Links

Be picky about the links you include! Credible external sites will bolster your blog’s credibility, but poor sites will do the opposite. Insert internal links should in a logical way that benefits the reader.

7. Anchor Text

Anchor text refers to the clickable text of an internal or external link. On most sites, anchor text is underlined and highlighted in blue.

Why Anchor Text Matters for SEO

Search engine algorithms use anchor text another clue to what a web page is about, both regarding your blog and the page you’re linking to.

How to Optimize Anchor Text

Good anchor text is succinct, informative, and relevant to the target page. Incorporate keywords where it sounds natural to do so.

8. Images

Images are a necessity in any blog post, no matter the length or the topic. Along with their visual appeal, original images can help boost your blog’s SEO.

Why Images Are Good for SEO

Images make the blog easier to read, increasing the chance people will share it and explore the rest of your site. Keywords in image titles and file names can help give the algorithm context on your blog’s topic. Images also allow the site to rank in image searches.

Optimizing Images for SEO

Upload high-quality images with keyword-rich titles and file names. Avoid adding overly-large images, as they can bog down your site’s loading speed (see our blog: Why Page Speed Matters.

9. Meta Description

The meta description is a 160-character summary of the blog that can display below the headline on the search engine results page.

Why Meta Descriptions Matter for SEO

The meta description can be a huge factor in a reader’s decision to click through to your blog from the search engine results page. Like blog titles, meta descriptions are a chance to pique the reader’s curiosity and promise something worth clicking for.

How to Optimize Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions that exceed 160 words will be cut off, so be sure to include the good stuff in the first 160.

10. Proofreading

Spelling and grammar checkers have come a long way, but they’re still not perfect! Take time to proofread your blog before posting it.

Why Spelling and Grammar Matters for SEO

Poor spelling and grammar will stop some readers in their tracks. Few people will share an error-ridden blog with their friends, let alone peruse the rest of the site. Proofreading keeps readers on the page and preserves your credibility.First, give the blog a once-over yourself. Then, pass it to a colleague for a second look. If no one’s available to help, a free proofreading tool like Grammarly or Hemingway Editor beats no proofreading at all.

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7 Universal Content Strategies to Increase Audience Engagement

Content is a contest. Whether you’re writing blog posts or cutting videos, there’s always someone else out there who wants to win over your audience as bad as you do. These content strategies can help increase audience engagement across a variety of mediums to help get your message out there.

1. Gauge the Competition

Who’s winning the race for your important keywords?

Finding ways to outrank those competitors will help bolster your share of the audience.

One important step in increasing engagement is finding (and fixing) gaps in your current keyword strategy.

You could be falling behind in areas where your competitors already have plenty of content. There could also be high-volume keywords the competition hasn’t covered yet, leaving an opportunity for your site to fill in the gap.

Conducting a keyword gap analysis requires a strong grasp of your site’s current standing and where you want to improve: how people are finding your site now, which keywords are most valuable to you now, and what your competitors are doing better.

Tools like SEMRush’s Keyword Gap Analysis can help, but it’s only useful if you understand what keywords are and which keywords matter to your business.

2. Optimize Metadata

To most people, metadata is an afterthought.

For anyone with a website, it shouldn’t be.

Metadata refers to two types of information: basic descriptions of digital files (file author, date crated, file size, etc.) and descriptions of webpage content. Both types of metadata play a role in your content’s search engine visibility.

Search algorithms use metadata to help determine what a webpage is about. When metadata contains relevant keywords, it gives the page a better shot of ranking for those search queries.

Optimized metadata may not increase audience engagement alone, but it can help give well-crafted content the boost it needs.

3. Increase Page Speed

Slow loading speed is one of the biggest barriers to audience engagement.

Nearly half of all internet users will not wait longer than three seconds for a page to load. It doesn’t matter how great a blog or video is if it’s dragged down by a slow-loading site.

If you’re not sure of your site’s speed (or can’t figure out why it’s slow), Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool can give answers. Beyond that, there are lots of big and small fixes to increase page speed.

4. Boost Presentation

Looks matter, at least when it comes to boosting audience engagement.

The nicer the page presentation, the more likely people are to view the content, share it with others, and link back to it — all important ingredients of attracting and engaging an audience

Overall site design plays a big part in this (which is one reason to redesign your site periodically). But there are also many smaller steps you can take to make your content easier and more enjoyable to consume.

• Break blog posts into short paragraphs with a logical flow, adding bullet points and lists where applicable.
• Add relevant images. Blog posts with images get an average of 94% more views than those without.
• Embed a video. Video increases the average time people spend on a site by 105%.

If you do add supplementary videos and images, be sure to optimize them with keyword-rich metadata.

Speaking of different mediums…

5. Use a Variety of Content Mediums

Radio didn’t bring an end to libraries. Film wasn’t the death knell for radio.  And the Internet hasn’t dampened the popularity of video (only changed how we see it).

Why? Because different people like to consume information in different ways.

Some of your audience will always prefer a long-form blog post or whitepaper to a video; others won’t give text the time of day when there’s a visual alternative.

Using a variety of content broadens the appeal of your site to a wider audience. Blogs, eBooks, videos, case studies, infographics, and podcasts can all help to build different segment of an engaged following.

6. Be an Authority

Authority is one of the biggest factors in how search engine algorithms choose which sites make the front page. To increase audience engagement, you’ll have to show that you’re an authority in your industry.

Being an authority doesn’t mean you’re the be-all and end-all for your industry. Rather, it means you have a take on the topic that is more in-depth, more authentic, and more current than the competition.

For future content, focus on quality and relevance over quantity. As for older content that still performs well? Keep it current!

7. Send the Right Content to the Right Audience

Instead of blasting all your content to everyone at once, take a precision approach. Aim for where you know it’ll connect.

There are lots of ways to make sure your content reaches the right people and get them to engage with it:

• Starting an email list is a great initiative for anyone looking to build an army of loyal followers.
• A/B testing provides guidance when it comes to making the best possible first impression on visitors.
• Retargeting visitors with content you know matches their interests brings wayward audiences back into your sights.

The point is, different content will resonate best at different points in the marketing funnel. Once you’ve figured out your funnel, you can begin to weave it into your content strategy.

Getting Audiences to Engage with Your Content

No content creator can produce a viral masterpiece every time, but these steps will help put it on the screens of audiences that matter.

It all starts with strategy. We’d love to help you find yours.

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5 Reasons Why Voice Search is Relevant to Local SEO in 2018

Voice search is set to become one of the top ways people find local products and services online. ComScore predicts that by 2020, 50% of all searches will be made using voice assistants like Alexa and Google Assistant. With the majority of voice searches being local queries, there are tons of reasons why voice search is relevant to local SEO.

These are some of the voice search trends in 2018 we’re eager to explore:

1. Use of voice search is increasing in all age groups, including seniors.
2. The hospitality industry is experimenting with voice-enabled devices in hotel rooms, which is a boon to retailers and restaurants who invest in local SEO.
3. Voice-enabled devices are becoming more common in college dorms, giving local businesses another route to the lucrative student market.
4. All signs point to pay-by-voice as a major e-commerce force in coming years.
5. New schema markup can tell Google that your website’s text is perfect for voice search queries.

Let’s look at why these rising voice search trends are relevant to local SEO and discuss how to prepare for them

1. Voice Search is Not Only for Millennials

Millennials were the first generation to adopt voice assistant tech, and they’re still the biggest age group of voice search users. But voice search is increasingly used by people across age demographics.

In 2017, nearly half of U.S. adults (46%) used a voice-assisted device at least once.

One of the most surprising aspects of this increase is the number of adults over 65 who are eagerly purchasing and using voice assistant technology. Seniors aren’t usually early adopters of new tech, but voice search is different: it comes onboard familiar devices like thermostats and takes barriers like small text and complicated user interfaces out of the equation.

This trend presents a novel opportunity for businesses to speak to a demographic that has historically been tough to reach online.

2. Amazon Wants Alexa in Hotel Rooms

Until recently, the hospitality industry has struggled to integrate voice assistant devices into the guest experience. Many hotels have existing automation systems that don’t interface with new crop of smart home devices, while others lacked the information infrastructure to support them.

But as voice assistants have become ubiquitous, more brands are testing out voice-enabled tech in hotel rooms. The latest experiment comes from a collaboration between Amazon and Marriot. The companies plan to place Echo devices with specialized Alexa for Hospitality software in hotels, vacation rental spaces, and other hospitality locations.

Why is this exciting for Local SEO? Because tourists spend more than natives in local categories like restaurants and retail, and 33% of local search business comes from tourists.

When visitors land in an unfamiliar place, they turn to the internet for recommendations on where to eat and where to shop. In a future where voice-enabled devices are a hotel room standard, more and more of those valuable local queries are going to arrive via voice search.

3. Voice Assistants Are Becoming a Part of College Life

Today, smart speakers are still primarily used for entertainment purposes: playing music, reading audiobooks, and so on. But there’s a huge marketing push underway to frame voice-enabled smart speakers as a tool for college and university success.

Last year, Amazon partnered with four major universities to provide free Amazon Echo Dots to students, along with funding for schools to develop Alexa-related curriculums. Other schools are experimenting with smart speakers in dorm rooms to help students transition to college life.

Regardless of whether students will actually use their devices to keep track of class schedules and due dates, voice-enabled devices on campus are good news for local businesses.

Off-campus student spending accounts for as much as $17.5 billion in local economic activity. If voice assistants become a part of college life, businesses who invest in local SEO for voice search can reap even more of those benefits.

4. You Will Soon Be Able to Pay By Voice

In 2018, just about every major payment platform is working on enabling transactions through voice commands with voice-enabled devices.

Mastercard is looking to bring its Masterpass online payment platform into Amazon and Google’s voice systems. Google recently enabled peer-to-peer transactions through voice commands to Google Assistant, and Amazon has announced plans to let users make purchases with Amazon Pay directly through Alexa.

Once people can easily pay-by-voice, businesses who claim top local listings for voice search queries could see their conversions soar. It would also make calculating the return on investment for Local SEO easier and more accurate than ever.

5. Google Has Started Looking for ‘Speakable’ Text on Websites

Google recently announced a new form of markup called Speakable, which web publishers can use to indicate bits of text that are ideal for text-to-speech conversion.

To briefly summarize, schema markup is code on a website that speaks directly to search algorithms. It’s designed to provide information that helps search engines deliver better results to searchers. Speakable is a new kind of schema code that is meant to tell the algorithm which parts of a web page (if any) might be good answers to voice searches.

Essentially, Google wants to know which parts of your site are perfect for voice queries. That’s a huge opportunity for local businesses.

Speakable is still brand-new, and Google is currently only using it for news-related searches in the US. But its relevance is likely to expand over time, and it could become an important piece of the local SEO puzzle for businesses who want to rank in voice searches.

Preparing for Voice Search in Local SEO

The rise of voice search presents a world of opportunity for businesses who invest in local SEO.

Voice search optimization is still in its infancy. As voice search trends evolve, so will the tactics for optimizing a site for voice queries. However, there are steps you can take now to prepare for rising voice search trends in 2018 and beyond:

• Optimize your site for mobile. 20% of voice search queries come from mobile devices. Many users will follow up a voice search with a trip to the site that comes up in the answer. If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, it’s time to change that.
• Start paying attention to While Google is the leading search engine overall, Bing owns a huge share of the voice search market thanks to Amazon’s Alexa. Make sure your site has a complete and accurate Bing Places page and a strong presence in its rankings.
• Focus on long-tail keywords. The biggest difference between voice and text search is the tone, phrasing and words used in searches. Voice queries use natural language and a more conversational tone. They’re also usually phrased as questions. Keep this in mind when targeting long-tail keywords.
  

For more on voice search optimization, read our post on the key differences between voice search and text search.

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How Local SEO Services Can Increase Inquiries and Drive Foot Traffic to Local Businesses

Local search engine optimization refers to tactics that increase a website’s visibility in local search queries. Search engines have become the primary directory people use to shop local (64% of customers use search engines as their main way to find local businesses), and Local SEO services are meant to ensure a business ranks in the search engine results for localized inquiries.

The bare basics of local SEO are things most business owner can do on their own: creating a complete and current Google My Business profile, encouraging customers to write positive reviews, and writing timely Google My Business posts. However, outranking competitors in a crowded local market requires a deeper optimization strategy.

How Google Determines Local Rankings

Search engine algorithm are built to recognize when a user is searching for results specific to a certain geographical location. These queries often include the name of a city or town (“donuts in Guelph”) or another geographical marker (“donuts near me”).

When someone makes a local query in Google, the search engine algorithm tailors its results to the specified location. In 93% of local queries, the top of the results page includes a box called the Local Pack, which highlights three local results for the query.

The Local Pack is a coveted spot in the rankings. It’s the first thing people see on the page, placing above even the top-ranking search result, which bolsters the business’s visibility and credibility.

Whether the query produces a local pack or not, local SEO is essential for businesses that want to reach new potential customers through search. On average, only the top three search results have a clickthrough rate above 10%.

Local search results are based primarily on relevance, distance, and prominence. Distance is just as it sounds how far away the potential results are from the location specified in the search. Relevance refers to how well: a local listing matches the search query, drawing from information the business provides in its Google My Business profile. Prominence is more complex.

Although Google has not released the full details on how its algorithm determines prominence in local results, we know it includes:

• How well-known the business is in the “real world” (famous landmarks or well-known store brands are likely to be prominent)
• Backlinks to the business’ website
• Number of Google Reviews
• Overall star-rating in Google Reviews
• Business’s ranking in web results (Google states that, “SEO best practices also apply to local search optimization”)
  
  

Return on Investment of Local SEO Services

Local SEO services provide a high return on investment for businesses focused on dominating a specific geographical market. No other advertising channel is as successful in targeting the most people who are currently looking for your product or service.

Local SEO is:

• Highly Targeted
  Local SEO tactics are designed to increase exposure to people who are already searching for the business’s products or services and thus more likely to convert. Unlike traditional advertising channels, there is little exposure wasted on people who aren’t interested.
• Able to Reach Massive Potential Audience
  Google says that 46% of the 3.5 billion searches it processes each day are local queries. Local SEO is increasingly important as more and more people embrace search engines as their primary business directories.
• In the Moment
  Local search tactics position a business to reaching local customers who are looking for that product or service right now. Half of all local queries from mobile devices are searching for basic information like a company’s hours, address or phone number; 78% of those result in an offline purchase. No other advertising channel is as effective at capturing customers at the exact moment they’re ready to make a purchase.
  
  

Local search tactics and strategies are particularly effective in reaching prospective customers in the middle of the marketing funnel. They have already decided they want a certain product or service; all businesses have to do is help them choose between local options.

Landing Page Optimization: How to Create a Landing Page that Converts

Driving traffic is only half the battle. Once people have landed on your website, it’s time to turn those curious web users into clients or customers. That’s where landing page optimization comes in.

What is a Landing Page?

A landing page is the first page people see after arriving to your site from a web ad, social media post, or search engine results page. But unlike your home page, which gives a general overview of your products or services, a landing page is tailor-made to motivate visitors into acting on a specific call to action, like: 

• Signing up
• Making a purchase
• Downloading a software trial
• Filling out a form
• Sharing your content on social media

…And so on.

A landing page can serve one-time events, like weekly promotions, or “evergreen” offers designed to generate ongoing leads, like a newsletters or email lists.

In either case, the landing page is optimized to achieve a single conversion goal.

While the term ‘landing page’ may be new to you, chances are you’ve seen one before. For a visual reference, check out this landing page round-up by Hubspot — this will help you along as we cover the ins and outs of landing page optimization.

Why Create a Landing Page?

Landing pages are designed to respond to nudge curious visitors towards becoming paying clients or customers. The power of landing pages is their versatility: different landing pages can be crafted and optimized to cater to buyers at all different stages of the marketing funnel or buyer journey.

Take cold prospects who are only just learning of your business for the first time. Instead of pitching your products or services outright, you could optimize a landing page to encourage those prospects to sign up for your email newsletter; later, you can direct that person to another landing page designed to nurture warmer leads. 

Beyond lead generation, landing pages can be used to gain tons of useful information about your prospective customers:

• By analyzing the performance of your landing pages, you can learn more about the types of offers most interest your customers.
• You can create separate landing pages for the same campaign and audience to A/B test different offers, images and copy.
• With a Facebook Pixel, you can retarget landing page visitors with highly relevant Facebook ad campaigns.

Landing pages are also a valuable part of the search engine optimization equation.

Relationship Between Landing Pages and SEO

Each landing page is another opportunity for your site to rank for relevant, desirable keywords. Although they may be somewhat separate from your main site, search engine crawlers will pore through landing pages the same as any other page on your site, and they have an impact on your search engine ranking.

The relationship between landing pages and SEO is another reason why it’s important to optimize your landing pages to convert; if visitors who land there are quickly closing the window or bouncing back to the search engine results page, it reflects poorly on your site as a whole.

So, how do you convince people to share, sign up, download, or buy?

Using Lead Magnets

One of the most tried-and-true landing page tactics is the lead magnet: a freebie offered to landing page visitors in exchange for their contact information. You can then utilize that contact information to build an effective, highly-targeted email marketing list.

In the words of digital marketing geek Russ Henneberry, lead magnets are designed to be an “irresistible bribe.” It’s something that makes prospective customers feel like they are getting the better end of the bargain.

What makes a lead magnet irresistible? The specifics will depend on your industry and your customers, but in most cases, successful lead magnets are: 

• Highly relevant and specific, answering a specific customer need and tailored to a specific buyer persona.
• Polished, effective, and well worth giving up one’s contact information.
• Immediately useful or gratifying.

Popular items given away as lead magnets include eBooks, reports, case studies, templates, checklists, and coupons.

Landing Page Optimization: What Makes a Great Landing Page?

The purpose of landing page is to entice visitors to complete a specific conversion goal, like signing up for an email list. One of the best ways to do this is to offer something in exchange for that action. An effective landing pages are concisely and fine-tuned towards achieving that goal, with:

• Clear, action-based headline that tells visitors exactly what you want them to do.
• Subheadings that provide a bit more information to generate further interest.
• Eye-catching but minimal visual elements, like a single gorgeous photo or catchy graphic.
• Concise but keyword-rich copy that explains the lead magnet, answers potential questions and tears down any barriers that might stop customers from converting.
• Prominent, impossible-to-miss action button that completes the exchange between you and the customer.
  
  

Creating Landing Pages That Convert

There are a lot of ingredients that go into creating a landing page that works: copywriting, coding, graphic design, advertising, and more. But when it all comes together and leads start coming in, it is well worth the effort it took to plan and execute. Don’t leave landing pages as an afterthought — a well-designed and optimized landing page is an essential part of a winning digital marketing strategy.

Contact TrafficSoda to Help Optimize Your Landing Page!

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