SEO Strategies and Trends in 2019

We can see 2019 has become a big year for SEO and digital marketing, with new trends, updates, and tools that helped optimize our techniques and strategies and perform better overall. This helped boost SEO to new heights, leaves more room for growth in the near future.

Speaking of the near future, 2019 is coming in very soon, and like every other year, new trends, tools, and strategies abound. With companies like Google always looking ahead to improve their search services, it is best to ensure that we are able to keep up the pace and prepare for the impending changes that will come our way. Here are some SEO strategies and trends that are sure to become big in 2019.

The Continued Growth of Voice Search

Voice search has become an increasingly essential element in online search during the past few years, as AI Assistants and enhance voice recognition software helped it move further forward. Being user-friendly and accurate, voice search allows users to be able to look for instant search results, especially for question-based and exact search terms.

AI Assistants like Siri and Google Assistant have helped establish voice search as a viable option, along with enhancing its functionality beyond search and allowing more tasks to be automated. More and more search engines and companies are looking to capitalize and follow the trend, and 2019 could see voice search become more widespread. When it comes to optimizing your strategy, an increased focus on exact search terms and long-tail keywords would prove to be very beneficial when it comes to generating more traffic to your website.

Social Media and Live Video

Ever since the advent of live video features on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, the number of users and brands making use of it have increased exponentially. Along with social media platforms, streaming sites like Twitch and YouTube have added new features that enable users to interact and create a more social atmosphere.

With improved internet speeds all over the world, users now have the ability to take live video anywhere, allowing them to capture various events in real-time, and the ability to be able to interact with the audience instantly. These are the ingredients that make a live video successful on social media. With more and more users streaming videos about events like sports, podcasts, and even video games, this is another digital marketing technique that more brands should take advantage of, especially in 2019.

AI and Chatbots

AI Technology has been slowly but surely become much better in recent years, fuelled by AI assistants and chatbots that help companies connect to users during their off-hours. Companies like Google have been developing AI technology that can interact with people, with the ability to create their own speaking patterns and executing tasks without user assistance. Google’s new Duplex application enables this feature on Google Pixel smartphones, which somewhat serves as a test platform to see if the new technology is able to become effective in its current state.

Chatbots have become more frequent in various social media pages and company websites. With its ease of use and integration, chatbots provide 24/7 service, making sure that messages would be able to receive a quick and detailed response to their inquiries. This has also become a cost-effective measure as well, as it helps lessen the human workload to a certain extent.

When it comes to SEO and digital marketing, having AI technology allows more automation to a website, providing users with a guide that enables them to navigate in your website further, even guiding them to the Buyer’s journey that leads to conversions.

Authentic and Evergreen Content

The push for quality and evergreen content is almost always a similar message every year, but with SEO continuing to develop and evolve in the upcoming months, the recent algorithm updates clamp down on this idea further by ensuring that only quality content will be getting good search rankings. With the advent of fake news and privacy invasions, website security factual accuracy is now more important than ever before.

Creating authentic and trustworthy content is an important element in a successful SEO strategy and using the right tools and targeting the right market allows your website to receive substantial traffic. Content should always be informative and helpful to users and must contain the right keywords that will lead them to access the said content. With voice search becoming more relevant, creating content that answers questions and how-tos are now more relevant and appear on Google’s first page more often than not.

Share A Coke

Social media has influenced the growth of numerous websites and brands, helping them gain online presence and traffic in a similar way that search engines do. With more platforms linking to each other, it is common to see brands have multiple social media accounts to spread their presence and influence.

There are millions of active social media users at any given moment, and all of them have the ability to trigger viral marketing campaigns or distribute content at a very fast pace. Tapping into this audience helps generate more traffic, with content marketing being the main focus of most digital marketing strategies. Social media is helping people and brand become closer to one another, and the right strategy will help set a balance between the two.

Key Takeaway

SEO has come a long way during 2018, and with 2019 on the horizon, it would not be surprising to see new strategies and techniques being used and developed to continue optimizing our services. SEO is an ever-changing game, and it always pays to get ahead.

If you have questions and inquiries about SEO, leave a comment below and let’s talk.

SEO Plans for Higher Search Rankings in 2019

As marketers plan their content marketing strategy for  2019, SEO is top-of-mind — or at least it should be! For advanced marketers it looks something like this: you have an SEO plan and best practices in place, you have your list of premium keywords, you’re actively blogging and your website is optimized. You have an on-page and off-page plan. Your monitors are covered with dashboards from Google Analytics, an SEO ranking tool like ahrefs, Moz or SEMrush, reports from your CMS or marketing automation tool, and a few Google sheets keep your results organized to monitor your search engine rank positions.

For most marketers the process is not as complex. Time is an issue and weekly tracking makes you guess, second guess, pray, cross your fingers, and read a few blogs to get the latest SEO tips, tricks and trends. You need to increase leads and high quality website visits. Your content marketing plan needs help. And you’re sick of seeing your competitor’s name above yours when you search your best keywords on Google. Sound about right?

If you’re struggling to get to page one on Google or working tirelessly to stay there, you’re not alone. Very few businesses have an easy time achieving and keeping page one rankings, there are only ten spots after all. And with the addition of Google's longer meta description snippets, featured snippets, knowledge panels, image packs, videos, local packs and more, you've got your SEO hands full! If you’re one of the 99-percenters who struggle to get to or stay on page one — take these actionable steps, and let organic SEO take its course.

Understand SEO in its simplest form.

Strip out all the SEO tactics and think about why you’re doing what you’re doing, and more importantly, why Google is doing what it’s doing. 

When you search online, you’re seeking an accurate answer, item, detail, date, image, address, or definition. And you expect your answer in a split second. Sometimes you want Google to read your mind. Your prospects want this too. Google delivers this and it’s pretty good at it. Think about it — if Google served up ten links that didn’t provide what you’re looking for, you’d take your business elsewhere. This is the simple psychology behind user experience on SERPs. Google is looking to you to provide the data your prospects are looking for. If you provide it and you do it better than anyone else, your data and content will be promoted to a better position.

First step: Put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. Run a search query on Google using your best keywords and most common questions. Make a note of who’s on the first page. Do you see the same organizations showing up in these prime spots? Make a note of any direct competitors who are claiming top rankings. It’s important to understand what your prospects are experiencing.

Quick trick: Take three minutes to listen to Matt Cutts explain what happens when you do a web search. This video is dated, but most of the material is still relevant today. Join the 2.5 million viewers who invested three minutes. 

Advanced tactic: Take a deep dive into how search engines work. Get an inside view of how Google determines its ranking and algorithm changes directly from Google pros, Gary Illyes, Webmaster Trends Analyst & Paul Haahr, Software Engineer. Watch time: 30 well-spent minutes.

Listen to how your customers speak, then speak their language.

Understand what questions they’re asking, how they’re asking, what their needs are, and what keeps them up at night. Your company is already solving their problems and fulfilling their needs or you wouldn’t be in business, right? Translate this on your website.

First step: Understand your customer and prospect needs, start a list. This is an essential step. You can’t focus on improving rankings if you don’t understand what your prospects and customers are looking for. Then, transfer this knowledge to your website. Translate the products and services that make your business a success in a clear format using the natural language understood by your industry. Become a resource for your clients and Google will reward you.

Quick trick: To find out what the most popular search terms are, type your keywords and prospect questions into Google’s search bar. Google will show you a list of related searches. Use these terms to update your copy and inform blog topics. Free and easy!

Advanced tactic: Use one of the top SEO tools to research keyword alternatives and search volume. At Stream Creative, our favorites are Moz and SEMrush, both offer free trials. Moz’s Keyword Explorer is a great place to start. You’ll get keyword suggestions and monthly search volume. Select a mix of the most searched terms to use within your copy. Remember to do so in a natural voice — this will make content consumable and shareable, while keeping Google happy at the same time.

Provide insanely useful content.

Content means more than just your blog. Content covers video, articles, webinars, live chat, lists, how-to guides, and much more.  Content should be provided on your site and across the web on channels where your prospects hang out. Use different content types to answer your client questions and understand their obtacles and provide solutions.

According to Ann Handley, “...be sure you know the purpose or mission or objective of every piece of content that you write. What are you trying to achieve? What information, exactly, are you trying to communicate? And why should your audience care?” Provide answers. Be helpful. Solve their problems. Make your content relevant and rich. And when possible provide narrowed, niched content. Ensure your content has sharing value and gives your highest quality visitors what they’re asking for.

First step: Seek out the thought leaders in your company and make friends with them. You might find them in the executive suite, in a biz dev cube, working remotely, in the lab or in the manufacturing plant. If they have answers to your hottest industry questions, sit down with them, ask them the questions, record their answers and turn it into a post. This is about progress not perfection. Get the information out there. Remember it’s digital so you can always revisit and refine. 

Those who know me best know I'm a Rand Fishkin fanatic. In a Whiteboard Friday that focuses on SEO best practices Rand says, "Have the most credible, amplifiable person or team available create content that's going to serve the searcher's goal and solve their task better than anyone else on page one." 

Quick trick: Ask these internal thought leaders to forward their emails to you that show the types of questions they receive from prospects and customers, and their helpful responses. Use these to formulate new content.

Advanced tactic: Consider sharing your expertise through video. According to Content Marketing Institute’s Joe Pulizzi, video is a top content format. And Mark Zuckerberg states, "...if you go back ten years ago on the internet, most of what people shared and consumed was text. Now a lot of it is photos. I think, going forward, a lot of it is going to be videos, getting richer and richer.”  Take it to heart. With users accepting videos delivered in an every-day quality/natural presentation format, making video part of the plan is a reality for many marketers.

Give your website a check-up.

Look under the hood. If you don’t have your page titles, URLs, image tags (alt-tags), and meta descriptions (yes, they matter) in place, you’re doing your SEO a disservice. These on-page SEO factors affect your individual page rank in search results. 

First step: Locate your most popular web pages in search results. Review your meta description and compare to competitors on the page. Does your title accurately describe the content of your page? Does your description encourage clicks? Consider upgrading your meta content using best practices.

Quick trick: Use HubSpot’s Marketing Grader to get a quick snapshot of your website. Marketing Grader will uncover on-site issues and advise on next steps. 

Advanced tactic: Download and run ScreamingFrog on your site. This is a free tool that will scan up to 500 pages. If you have a larger site a paid version is available. This tool scans your website and shows what on-page data needs your attention.

On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. On-page refers to both the content and HTML source code of a page that can be optimized, as opposed to off-page SEO which refers to links and other external signals.

Check out who’s linking back to you.

If no one is linking to you, why should Google? Backlinks (links from other sites back to yours) can be golden, especially if they’re from sites that Google respects. On the other hand, links that Google recognizes as blackhat (unscrupulous search engine optimization tactics) can negatively affect your search engine rankings. A research study by Moz shows that there’s a direct relationship between quality backlinks and Google search rankings. The higher the quality of your backlinks, the higher your search rankings. Watch this edition of Whiteboard Friday to learn how to build a good process for link acquisition:

First step: Check your backlinks. You can easily run a report using the SEMrush Backlink Checker or Moz Open Site Explorer. Download your data and take a look at who’s referring to your site.

Quick Trick: Keep track of your social reputation and track your brand with a social monitoring tool. Receive mentions of your brand helps build relationships, a great place to start is Mention.

Advanced tactic: Check out your competitors' backlinks. See who’s linking to them and explore backlink opportunities. And don't stop there - backlinking is just one tactic covered by off-page SEO.

Off-page SEO embodies all marketing techniques that happen outside of a website (i.e. off-page) with the potential to positively impact search engine rankings. “Link building” and exposure of your product/brand to relevant audiences are the two main building blocks of off-page SEO.

Get listed!

Company listings (called citations) on local, national and niche directory websites let Google and your prospects know where to find you. Consistent, authoritative, and up-to-date citations create more exposure for your business and improve Google rankings.

Doing business locally? SEO is critical to local business. Google serves results differently depending on your location. With the solid growth of mobile engagement, getting found means mobile searchers become your buyers. To positively affect Google rankings right in your hometown, there are a number of essential steps you can take to outrank your local competitors.

First step: Ensure your Google My Business profile is complete. Don’t just submit the minimum, take advantage of all the opportunities to promote your business through this profile. Google is looking for images, hours of operation, and more. Take the time to get this done!

Quick trick: Create a local landing page for each physical location for your organization. Remember to optimize the page with your city, state and zip/postal code.

Advanced tactic: Quality directory listings have an impact on your score and there are many quality directories waiting for your submission. Check out tools like BrightLocal and Yext to get listed on hundreds of recommended directories for a reasonable price.  

Take care of business:

SSL certificate: Google wants everything on the web to be travelling over a secure channel (https). That’s why in the future your browser will flag unencrypted websites as unsecure. The good news is that this is a pretty easy fix! It only takes a few hours to get an SSL Certificate and get everything up and running on your site.

Page speed: Best-in-class webpages should load within 3 seconds. Any slower and visitors will abandon their journey to your site. Google uses this information in their algorithm.  Use HubSpot’s Marketing Grader to check your page speed. if it’s loading slowly, check out this article for tips, then have a face-to-face with your tech lead.

Create less, promote more.

According to Salma Jafri (and I agree), “Spend 20% of your time creating. Spend the other 80% of your time expanding your reach in different formats and to more channels to reach a wider audience. See who it can help. Reach out to them. Share it on all your networks.” Don’t expect organic SEO to do all the heavy lifting. Let others know you have valuable content to share. Be creative in spreading the word. And remember, Google is watching.

First step: Make it easy for your visitors to share content by including social sharing icons on every post. In addition, make sure to include the most relevant social channels for your industry. Lastly, consistently post your content on your social channels. If you’re active in your social communities you’ll pick up a few shares. Thank people for sharing and always respond to comments.

Quick trick: Save time by using a social media management tool to manage posting for you. There are great free and paid versions - find a social media tool that works best for you. If you’re using a marketing automation tool like HubSpot or Act-On, you already have this covered.

Advanced tactic: Mobilize your internal team and ask them to share your content with their social networks. Your business development team should be excited to help spread the word. If they’re doing social right, they’re connected to the people who will eat up your posts and insights.

Track your progress.

Time to evaluate all your hard work. Tracking your progress will inform your SEO strategy and marketing tactics for ongoing strategy iterations. Remember to track with a purpose. Not every number matters. These metrics, or KPIs, should be based on your specific business goals. Here are a few of our favorite and most relevant metrics that point specifically to search engine optimization:

Tracking Quick Tip - Use Free Dashboards like this Google Search Console Basics one from Databox to track your progress. (We are a proud Databox partner and affiliate) The Search Console Basics dashboard reveals which pages are most visible on SERPs and which ones actually drive organic traffic.

Keyword rankings - Check your rankings for the premium keywords selected for your business as a whole and the specific keywords that you’re targeting with each blog topic. There are free options available like serpfox and paid keyword tracking tools like Rank Tracker from Moz. Word of caution - track only your most valuable keywords or you’ll get lost in the minutia.

Organic search traffic - this can be measured using Google Analytics or your CMS. HubSpot’s SEO tools make it easy to quickly track your organic search traffic with just a couple clicks.

Page visits (from organic search): Tracking your best converting website page visits is a key metric. Understanding which blog topics are most viewed will provide insights and direction for future blog posts and topics. Your audience may respond best to “how to” type posts, comparison posts (“Type A vs. Type B”), in-depth articles, lists, or short copy with images assisting in telling your story. To measure this, list your top pages, then note your monthly traffic. If you’re not seeing improvement month over month, revisit your SEO strategy and tune up the pages that are struggling to provide results.  

Time on page - Clicks to your page are great but mean nothing if those visitors aren’t spending time on your page. Content engagement measured by average time on page is a key metric that can be measured using Google Analytics. If you want to get a deeper look into user behavior, check out HotJar’s recording tool.

Backlinks: Quality and quantity - backlinks are among the most important factors that affect your search engine rankings. Track the root domains linking back to your site.  Tools like SEMrush Backlinks Checker, Moz Open Site Explorer, and MajesticSEO Bulk Backlink Checker allow you to input your domain in order to track the number of backlinks you’ve gained over a certain period of time. You should see an upward trend if you’re doing things right.

Visits: pages per session: This might not sound like an SEO metric, but ensuring that your content is on topic and relevant to your site should mean that visitors are interested in more than one page of your website. Adding internal links to your content will encourage your visitors to learn more and increase time on site! Use Google Analytics for this metric.

Returning users: For the same reason as pages per session, if your visitors aren’t returning then you’re either not providing relevant and useful content or you’re reaching the wrong audience. You’re getting clicks to your site, make sure you’re delivering on what visitors are craving so you become the authority they’re looking for.

Page load speed score: This is important to Google. They want to deliver quality. Your site needs to display quickly and appropriately. Check your speed score monthly with HubSpot’s free marketing grader.

Mobile bounce rate: Over 50% of web traffic coming from mobile devices. Make sure your pages load quickly and you're giving your visitors all the information they came for. Then, keep an eye on your mobile bounce rate to make sure you're not missing out on potential business.

Conversions: One of the most valuable SEO metrics. Increased conversions means your SEO strategy is working! You’re finding high quality visitors and delivering the right content that successfully encouraged them to take a next step.  

Keyword rankings: Understanding which keywords are most relevant to your business, then keeping track of SERP rankings will let you know where you stand with the competition. Word of advice: track changes using a three-month rolling calendar. Focusing on week-to-week changes will (in most cases) cause unnecessary anxiety with the natural ebb and flow of search results.

Blog visits (from organic search): Understanding which blog topics are most viewed will provide insights and direction for future blog posts and topics. Your audience may respond best to “how to” type posts, comparison posts (“Type A vs. Type B”), in-depth articles, lists, or short copy with images assisting in telling your story.

Domain Authority and Page Authority. Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA) are scores (on a 100-point scale) that predict how well a website will rank on search engines. These scores can be increased by improving overall SEO and providing excellent content. Tracking this score is easy with this free MozBar tool from Moz. Mark your baseline then check in on your score monthly, and compare to competitor websites. This score changes very slowly so be patient!

Social likes and shares: Like blog post views, your customers and prospects will let you know what they like by sharing it with their individual networks. You'll know you've selected the right topics and keywords to resonate with your audience. With this data you can be sure to give them more of what they want.

And if you’re ready to dive into deeper measurement, these metrics will help you knock it out with your CXOs:

ROI: Depending on the length of your sales cycle this number may take time to track, but it’s necessary. Evaluating which tactics are converting to marketing qualified leads, then to sales qualified leads, and on to customers is what it’s all about. Measuring results from specific tactics will help you improve the bottom line and make your CEO happy!

Customer Retention Rate: New customer acquisition costs more than retaining your current customers. And if you like your current customers, this is a metric for you! Not only does marketing have a role to play in customer retention, your job is much harder if you have to keep replacing the relationships previously solidified. 

Don’t dawdle.

Improvements don’t happen overnight, so the sooner you start the better off you’ll be. Put a plan in place, and use our SEO Checklist and SEO Tracking Spreadsheet to shine a light on your path. Need more help with your SEO or Inbound Marketing? Give us a shout. 

How to Convert Your Benchmarked Keyword Ideas into A Kickass Content

A person that wants to rule out in its content writing, it can only be possible with his kickass content, his strategies, planning and how well he or she can stick to it. The content marketing is really a tough job and can be really rewarding if performed in the right way.

You must keep in mind, quality content is of great importance and one must never compromise on it. The careful analysis is equally important and you should follow a strategic plan for the creation of inbound content marketing. This is essential for all the businesses as one has to focus equally on the keywords findings or research and its addition in the content.

Once you have benchmarked all your keyword ideas, the time comes for the creation of kickass content. You must be aware as to how to use them for getting better rankings in search engines. You can find many of the website owners as well that publish quality content and keeps on adding an epic post on their blogs.

It takes a lot of time and efforts for the creation of a smart content but can be really attractive and pleasing if it catches the reader’s attention in the right way. To get started, there are some smart ways for keeping up with the trend. It includes,

1. Defining Target audience

You must define your target audience and then only start up your content creation on their basis. Decide on them so that you know where you have to focus in actual. This step is easy and it needs some time. Scroll your social media pages for getting the answer and don’t deviate from them.

Don’t try capturing everyone as this may result in poor results. Focus on the quality audience so that you can earn more shares, comments and appreciation.

For example, you can see in the above picture there are different factors that need to be kept in mind while identifying and defining the target audience. Consider all of them as age, their interests, location, gender, occupation, income and others.

2. Selection of content format and topic

This is really very important as on this thing only everything depends. Take out your good time and plan on which topic you want to start jotting down the content. Collect ideas from different people, have a real-time conversation with clients and make sure your content is related to potential customers.

Think of the ideas and content which can stand out in the market and can be helpful for all the readers. For example, buying guide is something valuable for the customers and attracts multiple numbers of readers. The delivery of helpful information in the right way is also important equally for quality content.

3. Planning of content

Moreover, while doing all these things, you should be clear enough as of whether you are going to outsource the content for your blogs or will be planning up an in-house content. This depends on your resources and staff. If you are having a good marketing team, then you can have an in-house content.

As you can see in the image above, on left side there is only one man army, thus they can go for a third party for outsourcing content while on the right-hand side, there are three people in a team, they can plan their own content if they want because they have enough resources and manpower.

If you are the one who is not having many resources, then it is necessary for you to put in some of your hard efforts and try keeping your business on a good run and decide on outsourcing the content from a reputed third party. You can also hire an expert for turning your research in visual media like videos or infographics.

4. Implementation of keyword ideas

Although when you have benchmarked your keyword ideas, make sure that you have selected the long tail keywords. This shows the volumes and considered as cheap, easy in use and quick for all. It is important to find the best SEO keywords for all. Look out for the associated keywords as per your topic.

You can make use of keyword search; ignore the ones which hold the score above 40. These keywords are really competitive in nature and one must spend long hours of research in finding them as this can only make good efforts for a true worth.

5. Analysis of headlines

The headlines are equally the most important thing for all blog post and for kickass content. It has been reported that only 15 percent of the people that click on reading the posts, read it fully. Moreover, the articles with good headline score a higher number of shares and clicks.

One must research as what kind of the content really works and how well it can appeal to the audience. If you are the one who is basically trying to impress a large number of audience, then the chances are better than an attractive headline can fetch better results.

In the above post, quality headlines are given to the posts. If in case, any person will search current political news, he or she will get all the latest posts that are having headlines with the synonyms of current or related words.

6. Search engine optimization

As earlier said, this is really very important for all the content development strategies, its marketing and promotion. For a good content creation, make sure that your readers must see it for which it is developed. This can only make a first impression. As you want your brand or company to grow, make sure you optimize your content on search engines.

It should be easily found in the organic search and optimized well for great shareability so that people can stumble on it while checking out Facebook, Twitter and more.

Similarly, a good headline and search engine optimization go hand in hand to be on top ranking of search engine. In the above image, you can see, the user has typed “seo services reading”, all the posts that had this title and optimized content got first ranking but the most optimized and correctly used formatted content got the first ranking.

No matter, how great your keyword ideas or content strategies are, until and unless you will implement them in the right way with good and quality rated content, it will not help. So make sure you combine the keyword ideas with the high quality of content, filled with graphics and videos, attractive headlines and get them optimized.

Focus on the target audience and work on them only for a great appreciation in the field of blogging and content marketing.

Author Bio:

Aella Johns is an SEO executive working with Ranking By SEO. She has been writing articles on many topics related to SEO, link-building, social media marketing, and many more.

Useful Ways to Do SEO Ranking

Everyone is interested in improving their visibility on the web. Many are looking for shortcuts.

The fact of the matter is that SEO is more of a long game and anyone promising quick results should be greeted with a high level of skepticism

This post will break down the steps needed to boost your visibility in the Google search engine result pages (SERPs).

That said, I know you are equally interested in knowing one thing.

How Long Does It Take to Improve Google Rankings?

We are going out on a limb to give you the definitive answer to how long SEO takes: it depends.

While we recognize this is frustrating and seems like a copout, it’s the truth.

SEO doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Every situation offers a unique set of variables.

Skill, budget, the level of competition, and how your website stacks up against the competition can all play a role in how quickly one can move the dial.

So, bearing that in mind, let’s break it down in a more quantifiable sense and review what you can do to make things happen sooner, rather than later.

Continuous Improvement Is Critical

During a Google Webmaster Central Office Hours Hangout last March 2018, the question of how long it takes to see ranking improvement came up.

John Mueller, a Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, underscored that it takes some time. In short, because the search engine’s algorithm has to carry out a re-evaluation of your entire site after changes have been implemented.

Due to the number of factors in play, rapid changes in SERPs should not be expected.

Mueller also confirmed that even if you make drastic changes to your website’s design and functionality, it could still take a couple of months or even a year to have an impact.

He also cautioned that you should not just sit and wait for results after you upgrade your site. It’s better to keep working on your website with continuous improvement being the ultimate goal.

Continuous improvement is important, as it can have a positive impact on how your site is crawled and indexed. Low-quality URLs are crawled less often by Googlebot which could, theoretically, extend the re-evaluation time.

That said, it’s not a good idea to automatically remove infrequently crawled pages. Some of those pages could be ranking for valuable key phrases and removal may negatively affect your rankings and traffic.

That risk is a primary reason for Google advising consistent improvement over the removal of pages.

How Long It Takes to Rank on Google
A study by Ahrefs turned up some interesting information, in terms of how long it takes to rank on Google.

Among the main takeaways:

- On average, a page that ranked in the top 10 was over 2 years old. Moreover, the average age of pages that ranked first was nearly 3 years old.
- Among the pages that ranked in the top 10, only 22 percent of them were less than 1-year-old.
Of all pages in the study, only about 6 percent appeared in the top 10 search engine results for at least one keyword within one year.
- Zooming into the top 6 percent pages, most of them were able to get to the top 10 from nowhere in 2 to 6 months.

So, based on their findings, about 94 percent of the pages in the study never made it to the top 10 search engine rankings within a year.

How to Improve Your Google Rankings

As you can see, to reach the top 10 SERPs in less than 1 year, takes lots of hard work, skill, and sometimes luck. And this takes us back to the topic of today’s discussion on how to improve your Google ranking.

So, if you want to boost sales and conversions by taking your website to the first page of Google, here are five steps you should take.

1. Start with a Sound Foundation

Poor website structure and information architecture can doom even the best SEO campaigns.

If your website is difficult for users to navigate and Google to crawl, your rankings are likely to suffer.

Think about “usability first” on a mobile platform. That is the pathway to success.

Perform a Technical SEO Audit

The Google algorithm incorporates hundreds (if not thousands) of signals, plus machine learning to determine search rankings.

That said, tending to the SEO basics will give you an advantage over many competitors.

Here’s a step by step process to follow.

Fix Duplicate Content

Duplicate content issues are often related to technical issues. The most common being multiple versions of the same page.

For example, http://www.yousite.com, https://www.yousite.com, http://yousite.com, and https://yousite.com would be considered by Google as four different pages with identical content.

This can be resolved by setting the proper redirect rules in your .htaccess file

2. Optimize for Mobile

With Google rolling out the mobile-first index, your website needs to pass the Mobile-Friendly Test.

According to Google:

“… our crawling, indexing, and ranking systems have typically used the desktop version of a page’s content… Mobile-first indexing means that we’ll use the mobile version of the page for indexing and ranking…”

In order to avoid a mobile ranking meltdown, you should double down on mobile tasks and performance.

Tasks

Think about what users want to do on your site, once they land on it. They need to be able to perform those basic tasks smoothly and without difficulties, even while multi-tasking.

What are the first three to five objectives of your site’s visitors? Ensure they can be accomplished on your mobile site effortlessly.

Performance

Do your visitors find themselves scrolling endlessly to access the services or products that you offer?

Build a 5-star Reputation for Your Business

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Do images bog down loading times on your website?

Did you know that Google will be using page speed as a mobile search ranking factor, starting in July?

Loading time is a huge factor on mobile devices, particularly since most of the connections on mobile tend to be slower than those of PCs.

3. Optimize for Speed

For both mobile or desktop, you must continuously monitor the speed and keep improving it.

Use the Google PageSpeed tool to benchmark performance.

Here’s how you can execute page speed optimization:

Image File Size

Use your favorite image editing program.

Before uploading, you can further optimize your image by using an image compression and optimizer tool.

Lastly, always confirm that the dimensions of the image fit into the reserved image space to retain a clean, structured look on your live webpage

Browser Caching

When a web browser loads a page, it loads a number of resources. Browser caching stores these resource files locally on the users’ computer. That way, when a user navigates to a new page, those resources need not be loaded again.

For most sites, the best way to enable browser caching is by adding code to the web host/server .htaccess file.

For WordPress, there are plugins available to accomplish this.

Script Handling

Before loading countless JS and CSS files to enhance your site, make sure that you actually need those extra augmentations as they end up slowing down your website.

You can also minify your files by stripping comments, for instance, to keep things running fast.

If it’s possible to merge several scripts into a single file, go for it. That way, there will only be one retrieving call to the server to load all the scripts.

4. Work on the Links

Both internal and external links continue to have a huge influence on how your website ranks.

Here are a few tips for polishing up your link game:

Fix Broken Links

Many website owners have a habit of ignoring broken links. This can create a less than ideal user experience.

By running a crawl on your site with tools like W3C Link Checker, you can easily spot the 404 errors and fix them.

Exact Match Anchor Text

Abuse of exact match anchor text can be poison as an external linking strategy but still plays a big role when selecting internal anchor text.

As with anything, don’t be spammy, but if it’s relevant – use it.

Turn Site Mentions into Links

Get notice of mentions of your site by setting a Google Alert.

This will help you keep track of your brand mentions across the web.

In cases where the mentions are unlinked, contact the webmaster and request they turn the mention into a link.

5. On-Page Optimization

Google wants to help you out here. They have produced a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide meant for anyone interested in promoting online content via Google search.

As with website architecture, just doing the basics, as explained in this guide, will put you head and shoulders above many of your competitors.

Best Practices

- Tell Google What Your Pages Are About

Do this by adding structured data throughout your site. That way, Google can easily understand what each page is about.

Schema is the format preferred by Google.

Schema types include recipes, businesses, products, authors, and more.

- Create Unique, Brief & Descriptive Titles

Create a title that is natural and descriptive as opposed to a series of keywords.

Every page needs a unique title.

- Craft ‘Clickable’ Meta Descriptions

Even though meta descriptions don’t have a direct impact on your website’s ranking, they play a significant role in CTR. This, in turn, can increase your traffic.

So, make sure all descriptions are both unique and irresistible to click. If you don’t use a description or if Google doesn’t like your description, they will auto-generate one.

Conclusion

As Google continues to close the door on spammy techniques and schemes, anyone serious about digital marketing needs to take a long view.

The strategies mentioned above aren’t sexy or new. They do, however, require work and a continual investment of resources.

6 Strategic SEO Tips From the Experts to Get Massive Traffic

Are you up to date with the latest search engine optimization (SEO) tips?

If not, that’s a big problem.

SEO means optimizing your content so it shows up more often in search results.

Get it wrong, and your content might as well be invisible.

But if you get it right, you can reap the benefits of increased traffic, which can lead to more conversions, improve lead generation, and boost sales.

And every business wants more traffic, leads and sales, right?

The trouble is that SEO ranking factors have changed a lot over the years (find out how in our keyword research guide). That means the search engine optimization techniques that worked 5 years ago won’t fly today.

That’s why we’ve recruited some expert help so you can make sure you’re using the best SEO strategy for the coming year.

Our six experts share their favorite SEO tips and tactics for building big traffic in 2018. As you’ll see, if there’s one theme that unifies them all, it’s creating better content, but some of our experts take their own unique approaches.

Recommended Resource: Need more website traffic? Learn how to rank #1 on Google with our Ultimate Guide to SEO in 2018.

1. Improve the “Almost” Posts
Andy Crestodina: Rewrite the posts that almost rank high. There may be lots of them. Look for them in Analytics in the Acquisition » Search Console » Queries report. Set an advanced filter to show just the phases for which the average position (rank) is greater than 10 (on page two). Eureka!

Now give those articles an overhaul. Add details, examples, answers, statistics, images, contributor quotes and anything else that pages it a better piece.

If you go big on quality, you’re very likely to add length and keyphrase usage naturally. Make it a page that you’re so proud of, you want to print it and frame it on the wall.

Here are three ways to make this tactic even more effective:

- Check all the rankings of the page, so you’re sure not to hurt the relevance for an even better phrase
- As you rewrite, work in the semantically connected subtopics, which are visible on the search results page in the answer boxes and in the “related searches” at the bottom of the page.
- Do this as a regular, quarterly content marketing audit.

2. Tap the Potential of Video
Shilpa Shah: One of the best SEO tips is quality over quantity. If you have a large number of indexed pages, it doesn’t always mean your site will attract more organic traffic.

Get rid of shallow posts on your blog that have either low word count or superficial content.

Focus instead on meaningful content that is truly engaging and makes each visitor want to read through the complete article.

Also, videos have a lot of untapped potential – great for SEO and make for good user engagement. Chances are, that your user might quickly run through a 1-minute video but may not have the patience to read your 100-word article.

3. Build Something Useful
Ian Cleary: We are doing outreach to build links and have focussed on brand mention links.  When a brand mention us and doesn’t link to us we reach out to them and generally get a link.  We get a lot of mentions online so we have an opportunity to really grow our link profile and generate substantially more traffic.

The other approach we are taking is building useful utilities.  This is pieces of software that provide significant value to our audience but we make available for free.  We then do a 301 redirect from the site with the utility back to our site and generate a lot of links.  We also do a lot of outreach to promote these tools.

4. Optimize, Amplify, Distribute
Heidi Cohen: To maximize 2018 SEO results, marketers will continue moving away from disposable, once and done content. To accomplish this, tap into the 4Cs of content: Conditions, Creation and Circulation to build your Community.

Create content based on your business’s conditions (business goals, audience needs and content context) to achieve your 2018 SEO goals. Focus your content on strategic keyword silos.

Support your 2018 search objectives with 3 content types:

- Renovate existing content: Audit existing content. Then update and re-promote it.
- Develop new content: Based on your content gaps and keyword needs, create the 5 core content types (foundational, FAQ, cyclical, crowd pleaser and long-playing content) to meet audience and business needs.
- Transform new content: Extend content longevity by converting content into other formats (images, video and audio) and related pieces of content to live on owned, social and third party media.
- Recommended Resource: Do social media shares count the same as backlinks? Google says no, but are they telling the whole story? Find out the truth in our guide to Social Media and SEO: Do Social Shares Really Matter for Ranking?
- Optimize your content. Make your content work for customers, social media, search, influencers and your business. Create off-ramps to collect email addresses.
- Amplify your content. Focus your first 3 days of promotion to maximize reach. Use amplification platforms, influencers and paid advertising (especially Facebook).
- Distribute your content. Continue promoting your content on free and paid media. Publish your transformed content over time to maximize results.
Lastly measure your results and support your growing community.

5. Maximize User Engagement
Max DesMarais: Focus on user engagement. Whether it is updating an existing post, or creating an entirely new one, the page should be created in such a way to maximize engagement. The page should:

- Be easy to read. Content utilizes whitespace, headings, short paragraphs, and relevant images to make the page easier to absorb, and increasing the user’s time on the page.
- Include highly relevant links and offers on the page. Offering relevant internal links that will answer a reader’s question. This often can significantly decrease bounce rates, and get users further into your site.
- Use LSI keywords, and answer additional questions that users may think of after viewing the content. Simply offering only the content that a user searches for is no longer enough. Pages need to supply additional information a user may be seeking. Providing additional information will help retain the user, and tell search engines that the page’s content is not only answering the search query, but providing additional value that other pieces of content may not be.
- Contain multiple ways for users to absorb the content. Include images, infographics, video, and text. This will capture readers’ attention, and keep them more engaged on the content.
- Employing these tactics will ensure that your pages are highly valuable to the readers, and search engines will mark these pages as high quality content.

6. Make Old Blog Posts New Again
With SEO in mind, you should now routinely go through old blog posts and do the following:

- Update any information that’s no longer accurate or relevant.
- Add new stock photos and remove any old ones that looked dated.
- Write/optimize title and alt text for all images.
- Rework old titles to be more SEO-friendly.
- Add subheads to posts that have none, using keywords when possible.
- Review title tags and meta descriptions for keywords and relevance.
- Weave additional keywords into posts that seem lacking.
- Check existing links to make sure they still work and add links to newer pages that are relevant.
- Lengthen posts by adding more detailed content as Google now favors longer, information-rich pages.
- Proofread for mistakes. It’s amazing what you can catch with fresh eyes.
- Susan Greene has been a professional copywriter for over 25 years. She has a deep understanding of Internet marketing and a conversational writing style that converts prospects into customers. 

That’s the end of our roundup on search engine optimization tips and tricks.

Over to you to put these SEO tips into practice. When you’re done, make sure your new strategy is working by checking out our guide to measuring content marketing ROI.

Why Your Business Needs A Technical SEO Audit?

In today’s evolving digital ecosystem, it’s important to keep your website aligned with the current best practices and industry standards. The goal of a comprehensive SEO technical audit is just that to analyze your site’s architecture, evaluate its current standing, and provide recommendations to bring your site in line with current standards. Objectively, this will yield recovery and growth of your site’s organic traffic, achieve quick wins, establish healthy fundamentals, create a baseline, and uncover obstructions to conversion.

A technical SEO audit will allow for the identification of issues that could work against future SEO initiatives, and as a result, hinder business growth.

Each of these dimensions are evaluated and scored based on a statistical model where scores are weighted for overall importance and potential negative impact, then an overall score for each section is calculated.

Once the audit is complete, we deliver a summarized presentation of our insights and analysis, with actionable and prioritized next steps. This deliverable serves as a great starting point for creating a holistic digital strategy, yet also serves as a great tool for routine maintenance checks on your website by dissecting the innermost layers of your business’ online presence.

CONTENT QUALITY
Good, quality content is key to building a website with strong SEO. Making sure a site’s content is rich and valuable for users plays a strong role in your overall rankings and website health. Additional factors include your meta descriptions, and keyword structure. Keywords can have a negative impact if overused or used too loosely, and the difference between rich and thin content can rely on keyword use. Combing through content with a strong editorial eye can set your site up for continued future success.

TECHNICAL AND UX QUALITY
Apart from the content, it’s important that your website is technically sound and can deliver a good user experience, while still maintaining search engine crawlability. This dimension looks for how technically optimized a website is, as well as for any manual penalties on the site. Diving into sitemaps, proper redirects, canonical tags, and many other factors can uncover how strong the technical quality of a website is.

LINK ANALYSIS
What kind of websites does your site have linking to it? Is it a healthy, colorful gamut of different links across your vertical, or is it filled with spam and poor quality links? Links play such a vital role in search engine rankings and overall site authority, it’s important to take a thorough, deep look at links to see if there’s any that may be dragging your site down.

SOCIAL QUALITY
Your brand’s place in social media can offer good signals as to the total health of your site. Making sure your Facebook, Twitter and other channels are up-to-date, and engaging with your audience is important to maintaining a quality web presence. Ensuring every social platform matches your website and brand creates a more thorough, diverse space for people to find and interact with you.

ANALYTICS
How much do you really know about how your site is performing if you’re not using Google Analytics to track every detail of your site? Diving into your analytics can help find weak points and track trends, which can help bolster a strong SEO strategy. Seeing historical data can show growth, and find areas of improvement on your site, so future campaigns can fully realize expectations.

LOCAL SEARCH
If your business has physical locations, showing up in local search results makes it easier to be found, and for people nearby to use your services. Ensuring your address is in the map pack, and taking a close look on what your local profile and engagement looks like can really drive new and recurring business.

MOBILE DESIGN
Now that over half of searches occur from smartphones, auditing website responsiveness and mobile-readiness can help take a detailed look at how people are viewing your site on the go. Making sure that a site is designed for mobile first is a tell-tale indicator that a site is prepared for the future in our rapidly mobilizing search world.

Through deep-diving into these seven key areas, a technical SEO audit can help find where your website is succeeding, what areas can be improved, and find new campaigns and opportunities for future growth.

Source: https://www.geekpoweredstudios.com/

Top 10 Useful SEO Analysis Tools

In a previous post, we presented a massive list of free SEO tools that can help you accomplish various SEO tasks (e.g., backlink investigation, keyword research, etc.). We received a lot of positive feedback about that list, but people consistently requested more SEO analysis tools.

Since we are SEO Agency, this post is completely dedicated to SEO analysis tools. For each tool, we’ve provided a brief overview of its functionality, and we’ve also included helpful screenshots along the way. After you finish this post, your SEO analysis toolbox should be overflowing with goodness!

Now, let’s get started…

#1 WooRank

WooRank is a freemium tool that provides an “instant website review.” Without a premium account, you are only allowed to generate a limited number of free reports, but you are able to view previously generated reports. Also, the tool currently offers a 7-day unlimited free trial, which gives you access to unlimited reviews. If you’re interested in purchasing a plan, the cheapest one is $49/month.

#2 SEO Site Checkup

SEO Site Checkup is a free SEO analyzer that analyzes your site (and an optional competitor) using 45 individual checks in 6 different categories. Based on the results of those checks, the tool generates a summary, which includes a numerical score for the site and a count of the failed checks.

#3 Site Auditor

Site Auditor is one of the SEO tools provided by Raven Tools as part of their Internet marketing solution. After you run Site Auditor on your website, the tool presents a report that summarizes its findings.

Currently, Raven Tools offers a 30-day free trial for Site Auditor (and all of their other tools). Once your free trial expires, the least expensive premium plan is $99/month.

#4 HubSpot’s Marketing Grader

Unlike many of the other SEO analysis tools on this list, which focus primarily on your site’s SEO activities, Marketing Grader digs a little deeper into your company’s online marketing strategy.

#5 Site Analyzer

Site Analyzer is another free SEO analyzer, and it presents 71 data points, which are organized into 5 groups. After you perform an analysis on your site, the tool presents an overview, which includes a global score as well as accessibility, design, texts, multimedia, and networking scores.

#6 SEO Workers

This SEO analysis tool has been around for quite some time, and although it’s not the prettiest tool on the list, it’s still incredibly useful. After you evaluate a URL, the tool presents an analysis report, which is broken down into the 8 sections.

#7 Lipperhey

Lipperhey is not as popular as some of the other SEO analysis tools, but it still presents a lot of important information. Similar to previous tools, Lipperhey generates an SEO analysis report based on the URL you provide.

#8 UpCity Free SEO Report Card

UpCity offers a free website grader that analyzes a site and presents its findings in an SEO report card. This report card displays a numerical score, which is generated based on the site’s adherence to 18 best practices in 6 categories.

#9 Seoptimer

Seoptimer is a free SEO analysis tool that investigates a given URL’s on-page SEO ranking factors. After you analyze a URL, the tool presents a summary of the most important action items. Then, it displays its analysis results, which are broken down into 7 categories.

#10 Free SEO Analysis by Web Gnomes

Our free SEO analysis tool provides a small subset of the information we provide in our industry-leading SEO audit. The tool investigates a URL’s adherence to 20 important on-page SEO best practices, and then, it presents the results in a report, which is divided into 5 categories.

Which of these tools is your favorite? What other SEO analysis tools should everyone be using? We would love to hear from you in the comments.

SEO Analysis

One of the very first things we do when we start working with a client on a search engine optimization project is perform a head to toe site analysis. In fact, more often than not, we will not actually even quote a price for SEO unless we have already done an analysis. A search engine optimization (SEO) analysis is a report that details how a website owner can improve his or her ranking on popular search engines. Below are some important factors of SEO Analysis:

Statistical Data - The biggest part of an SEO analysis is the research.  Research results in statistical data. This is not just information you have in your web stats program, but other information you may not have access to, such as how many people do a search every day on your particular keyword, or what your competition is doing, and how they are doing it.  There can be endless reports and data that an SEO could provide, so be aware you can easily be overwhelmed by the sheer numbers provided. An SEO might consider creating the analysis as an overview, with the statistical data in addenda or reports to back up the information.

Explanations of Terminology - You may end up with a huge analysis with lots of data, findings, and reports, but if you can’t make heads or tails of it, then it may not do you much good. Some SEO firms put the analysis on paper for you, and then offer a free consultation with it to go over anything you may not understand.  This is a good idea if the SEO firm doesn’t explain the results in the analysis directly.

Specific Keyword Research - Unless you are a site with thousands of backlinks because of branding or other link popularity reasons, you are just not going to rank highly for broad keywords. A good SEO analysis will gear its keyword research to keywords and key phrases that are appropriate for your site and its pages, and make recommendations for keywords or key phrases to consider optimizing for.

Detailed Findings - It is not enough just to show you what your meta tags say. You can find that information out yourself, so why would you need someone else to do that for you? You need specific research customized to your site that digs pretty deep. You will want to look for a search engine simulation (what a search engine would see if it were to crawl your site), a list of broken links, site structure, navigation crawlability, which pages and how many of them are being indexed, when the last search engine crawl was, and so on.

Current Search Engine Rankings - Here we do not just mean the top ten or even top 40 results, because chances are you can do all of this yourself. Look for a company or individual who can access 500 to 1000 or more results in more than just one search engine.

Site Recommendations - If you pay for an analysis, you should be able to take that analysis and change some of your site elements yourself with that SEO’s recommendation. Now obviously an SEO wants your business, and wants to do the work for you, so they aren’t going to reveal all of the little secrets they have about your site, but there should still be a good portion of step by step instructions for you to work with. If there is a consultation included, it’s even better.

Possible Futuristic Events or Predictions - There is absolutely no one that can predict what a search engine may or may not do, and as a result there is not an SEO firm in the world that can make predictions about how your site will do in a search engine. This is a sticky subject because it gets into the area of guaranteed results. I’ve seen countless firms out there that offer Top Ten results guarantees, or number one results. I shake my head every single time. 

It’s difficult to imagine trying to do all of the above mentioned things manually, especially if you are a do-it-yourself type of person. In fact, it would be ridiculous to try to do some of them that way, like current search engine rankings. The very first step in great SEO work is the analysis; it is also useful continuously throughout the optimization process, and you cannot do well without it. If you want to perform the analysis yourself, then go for it. Self analysis is sometimes the best thing you can do for your own website, because no one knows your website like you do.

SEORapidly

Email: SEORapidly@gmail.com

Phone number: +1 646-948-9882

Website: https://seorapidly.blogspot.com/

Tips to Improve Your Site’s SEO Ranking

How to rank on first top google or other search engines? Follow these suggestions, and watch your website rise the ranks to the top of search engine results.

Public Relevant Content

Quality content is the number one driver of your search engine rankings and there is no substitute for great content. Quality content created via Guest Postspecifically for your intended user increases site traffic, which improves your site’s authority and relevance.

Update Your Content Regularly

You’ve probably noticed that we feel pretty strongly about content. Search engines do, too. Regularly updated content is viewed as one of the best indicators of a site’s relevancy, so be sure to keep it fresh.

Have Worthy Links

Focus on creating relevant links within the text. Instead of having “click here” links, try writing out the name of the destination. “Click here” has no search engine value beyond the attached URL, whereas using a specific keyword is rich and will improve your search engine rankings as well as the ranking of the page you are linking to.

Metadata

When designing your website, each page contains a space between the <head> tags to insert metadata, or information about the contents of your page.

- Meta Title is responsible for the page titles displayed at the top of a browser window.

- Meta Description is the textual description that a browser will use in your page search return. Think of it as your site’s window display a concise and appealing description of what is contained within, with the goal of encouraging people to enter.

- Meta Keywords are the search phrases that people type when they want to find your page. You’ll want to include a variety of phrases. However, don’t get greedy: if your list becomes excessive, the browser may completely ignore the data. As a general rule, try to keep it to about 6-8 phrases with each phrase consisting of 1-4 words.

These are only a few of the many methods for improving your search engine ranking. If you want to learn more tips to improve your SEO ranking, please visit SEORapidlyright today.