5 Basic Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website with Online Marketing

If your marketing well has run dry, try these basic ideas -- they still work like a charm to bring in more site visitors.



The following excerpt is from Robert W. Bly’s book The Digital Marketing Handbook. Buy it now from Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iBooks | IndieBound
Never depend on only one or two channels when driving web traffic to your site. Justin Bridegan of MarketingSherpa writes: "It's always best to have a variety of traffic sources. This minimizes the risk of your website being decimated if your main traffic source dries up."
With that in mind, let's dig into five ways you can drive traffic to your site.

Affiliate marketing

This doesn't just mean you should become an Amazon Associate or Click­Bank affiliate and use that status to drive traffic to your indepen­;dently owned website. Instead, you should start your own affiliate program, where you partner up with people who'll promote your product or service -- generating revenue for both of you and building your email list in the process.
How exactly do you go about finding an affiliate and convincing them to promote your product? All you need to do is set up a page on your website that explains the benefits of promoting your product. In addition to detailing how big of a cut they'll get from each sale, you'll also explain how they'll benefit from being associated with your brand. Include a sign-up form to make it simple for them to contact you. Then, promote the page to individuals and a wider audience in a targeted niche.

Co-registration

This traffic generation strategy has to do with online advertising. It's a process for collecting subscribers by co-advertising along with other site owners or companies collecting opt-in subscribers. Here's how it works: When the user opts in to receive an offer from the other participant(s), they're given the option to subscribe to your information as well.
Co-registration allows you to target a specific demographic or customer subset. Depending on whom you partner with, co-registration can be less expensive than other types of marketing. Also, with co-registration, building your email list doesn't depend on the amount of web traffic you're able to generate.
There are two major players in co-registration: Opt-Intelligence and CoregMedia, and many choose to work with them. But, there are also smaller companies worth looking at, such as AfterOffers and BirdDogMedia.

Email

Just a few years ago, the average ROI for email cam­paigns was 4,300 percent. That fact alone should inspire you to focus attention on email marketing.
Because 56 percent of customers are more likely to buy with a personalized experience, you want to personalize your email marketing messages. In fact, the average open rate for emails with a personalized message was 18.8 percent, as compared to 13.1 percent without any personalization, in 2016.
The goal of email marketing is to convert an interested customer into a paying customer by driving traffic to sales pages. You can increase clickthrough and conversion rates by making sure the email and the sales page it hyperlinks to are promoting the same offer.

Google and Bing pay-per-click advertising

Pay-per-click advertising (PPC) is a model of internet marketing in which advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked. Es­sentially, PPC gives you a way of "buying" visits to your site, instead of earning those visits organically.
Search engine advertising through Google or Bing is one of the most popular forms of PPC advertising. You'll bid for ad placement in a search engine's sponsored links when someone searches on a keyword that is related to the advertised offering. PPC success is achievable if you focus on:

• Keyword relevance. Develop PPC keyword lists of terms relevant to your audience. Use these lists to write keyword-driven ad text.
• Landing page quality. If you're sending people to a landing page, optimize it with persuasive, relevant con­tent and a clear CTA, tailored to specific search queries.
• Quality score. Both Bing and Google offer quality scores, which rate the quality and relevance of your keywords, land­ing pages and PPC campaigns. Advertisers with better quality scores get more ad clicks at lower costs.

Lead magnets

A lead magnet is a free content offer -- an ebook, white paper, case study, e-course or checklist. Your lead magnet should be so relevant to your prospect's needs or problems that they can't help but ex­change their contact information to get it.
Of all the possible offers -- ebooks, white papers, you name it -- which are the most effective lead magnets? Here are five:

1. The cheat sheet. The problem-based specificity of the cheat sheet, also called a tip sheet, makes it very appealing to pros­pects (and it's fairly easy to create).
2. Free templates. These are extremely popular and generate lots of leads, but make sure the template doesn't replace your service or product offering. Templates can be in Word, Excel or any other common program.
3. Free training videos, workbooks or a combination of the two, delivered through daily emails. Think about problems that require multiple steps for your customers to solve. These can make ideal step-by-step training products for your lead magnet.
4. The swipe file. This is a collection of tested and proven copywriting elements (such as headlines and email subject lines) or creative ideas the recipient can use to simplify a project.
5. Tool kits. These can be a little more complex to create, but because they're filled with resources, they can make excel­lent lead magnets. You can use existing resources, blog posts and other content to complete your tool kit. Common tool kits include a variety of content types, such as ebooks, worksheets, checklists and video.

Reference:https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/310513

Add SEO to the List of Everything Being Transformed by Artificial Intelligence

Search engines are leveraging artificial intelligence to create more relevant responses to search queries.



Understanding SEO is the first rule for being able to optimize your site and its content so that would-be customers can actually find your company online. When your SEO is on point, you are more likely appear in search engine results when someone looks for the type of products or services you sell. However, to be able to truly understand SEO, you need to comprehend how modern search engines work -- and that means understanding artificial intelligence, or AI.

What is AI?

AI is a technological advancement that enables a combination of hardware and software to function like a human brain -- minus the inherent flaws in logic and the relatively small memory capacity. It makes it possible to not only analyze large amounts of data but to draw meaningful insights about the information. In some cases, these AI-enabled insights are more insightful, quicker or on a much larger scale than would be possible with human involvement -- usually all three.
Related: Dear Young, Future Entrepreneurs: Here's Why You Shouldn't Fear Automation
And those insights can help build better search engine results. "If you feed enough photos of a platypus into a neural net, it can learn to identify a platypus," writes Cade Metz, formerly of Wired. "If you show it enough computer malware code, it can learn to recognize a virus. If you give it enough raw language -- words or phrases that people might type into a search engine -- it can learn to understand search queries and help respond to them." In other words, AI learns over time.
In general, there are three types of artificial intelligence:

1. Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI): This type of AI focuses on one function (e.g. chess, spam filters).
2. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI): When AI has a general, overall function. Usually, this is equated to the ability of a single human.
3. Artificial Superintelligence (ASI): This is AI that is beyond Artificial General Intelligence. The neural network operates at a much higher capability than AGI.

Google's RankBrain is a type of ANI. Specifically, it is a connection-based system that mimics the way people learn. Also called deep learning, connectionist ANI uses back-propagation to identify flaws in the output of the system (e.g. misidentifying a duck as a platypus) and uses that information to inform future query results.

Google RankBrain (and how it differs from previous updates).

Google RankBrain is the current leader. The rollout of RankBrain began in 2015. It is a search engine system that uses artificial intelligence to create more relevant responses to search engine queries. Previously, Google's focus had been on algorithms designed by humans.
It took time, but RankBrain slowly started to replace the use of algorithm-based technologies. Today, it is the prevailing search engine technology, and it is changing everything.

Marketing is already shifting directions.

Already, RankBrain has changed SEO, but the result has not been linear. The algorithms that Google used before still exist. What has changed is the way those methods are applied. RankBrain uses deep learning to figure out which combination of those algorithms will produce the best search engine results.
Related: How Machine Learning Is Changing the World -- and Your Everyday Life
"For instance, in certain search results, RankBrain might learn that the most important signal is the META title. Adding more significance to the META title matching algorithm might lead to a better searcher experience," explains John Rampton, founder of the online invoicing company Due. "But in another search result, this very same signal might have a horrible correlation with a good searcher experience. So in that other vertical, another algorithm, maybe PageRank, might be promoted more."
The exact algorithm mixture varies considerably each time. RankBrain isn't trying to figure out which combination is best, per se. It is determining which sites are good and bad.

What makes a site good.

RankBrain learns which sites answer search engine queries best and analyzes them for common features. This includes the keywords used and the density of those words, but that's just scratching the surface. RankBrain also looks at the structure of the site. For instance, if a website is overly generalized, it could flag as "bad" and be ranked lower than a more niche site. RankBrain also looks at the backlinks. For example, a shoe website linking to a clothing website is perfectly normal but linking to a computer website? Not so much.
To avoid misclassification, you need to follow the parameters that RankBrain has found to identify "good" sites.

Adapting to the new normal.

Good sites are becoming the new normal, and that fact is changing the way we SEO. Sticking to a niche and using quality backlinks helps, and that's just the beginning. You can adapt to the new normal in SEO marketing by understanding how RankBrain works.

Prioritizing quality.

Start by prioritizing quality. Whether the issue is graphics or content, quality matters. It creates more engagements amongst users and earns more links amongst your peers. RankBrain pays attention to this information and adjusts your search engine ranking accordingly.

User experience.

User experience also matters. Ease of navigation, quality graphics and overall usability make a real difference. RankBrain isn't going to rank a "crummy" site very high. Having a similar structure to the sites that leaders in your industry have helps.
Related: 6 Effective SEO Techniques to Boost Your Site Traffic

Relevant content experience.

Content relevance counts too. When someone comes to your site to buy a sweater, you shouldn't send them to a blog post about Fall trends. Likewise, links should be anchored in relevant keywords and connect to sites that make sense with those anchors.
SEO is becoming a game of cat and mouse, with Google constantly changing the game. AI and, by extension, big data is a huge part of that. Help your company stay on top by adapting to the new normal in SEO.

Reference:https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/311988

10 QUESTIONS TO BRILLIANTLY AVOID SEO ANALYSIS PARALYSIS

The Paralysis of Possibility is a trap and no one, trust us on this, no one would want to fall into it! The fact that you are bound and unable to take a step forward leaves every professional man bewildered. And this scenario is most commonly faced when you have a vast source of information/data. The information overload, especially in the field of web designing and marketing (the digital realm), puts great stress over the marketers and developers. Knowing that more than 55% of all the websites developers use analytics, it is easy to decipher that most of them must be facing the analysis paralysis phenomenon. It is a position where the marketer has so much information that he is unable to decide what action to take.

And when search engine optimization is the target, the professionals face this issue quite often. With search engine optimization it is hard to decide how far to dig and what to discover, the field is so vast and the targets so profound that picking or prioritizing them one by one becomes difficult. Thus, to help you surpass this tough stage, here are the 10 questions that you need to ask yourself to break the analysis paralysis:

• How many times have you stressed upon the fact whether the analysis is boosting your SEO presence on the web or not?

Well, this one is a bit philosophical approach but what’s life without a little meaning in it! The more options you have the more you find yourself in a difficult place to deal with the situation. Getting loads and loads of information can be stressful; when you have no idea where, how and when you are going to implement it. The key here is to devise a plan to boost your website SEO, prioritize your goals and see which efforts would help you achieve your desired goals.

• How does the data at hand help overcome the shortcomings you face while serving the customers?

Keep on asking yourself what will benefit the customers. The whole digital world is dependent on the visitors and customers. Discover ways through which you can utilize the data you have, to improve the customer’s experience. For example, the trend of voice search and AI is on the rise and the data you have collected must have proven this. Thus, this calls for implementing these trends in your web services! The real idea is to make the online journey for the visitors cheerful. Hence, first jot down all the things that would positively affect it and then work on it.

• Oh wait, did you give yourself a deadline to analyze it?

Tada! Here’s the golden rule that will help you a lot to escape the paralysis by analysis!

Whatever goal you have in mind and no matter on what project you are working, make sure you have given yourself and your team a deadline. Working within a specific time frame gives you the boost that is actually required to finish the task at hand. It allows you to plan the task and divide it into days which are required to achieve the end result.

• Did you give priority to understanding the visitor’s behavior?

This is more or less the continuation of question number two. In order to overcome the shortcomings you face while dealing with the customers, you need to understand their behavior. So, did you try to do that? The main things you need to look into include how the visitor found your website, the pages they visited and how much time did they spend there along with the action they took.

• Have you decided on your main key performance indicators?

With so many KPIs to analyze the digital efforts, it is hard to take actions to improve them all. Therefore, you need to pick a few best ones that would directly reflect the performance of your business and analyze them to produce more effective results.

• Are you in the process of learning how to test a hypothesis?

Ask yourself this question and measure how far you have come in the journey of breaking the analysis paralysis. The real barrier that we face is the concern of whether our idea is going to work or not. In this regard, Ross Simmonds in 2017 in his keynote at Webbdagarna discussed the benefits of testing a hypothesis and how experimentation simplifies the whole process. All you have to do is build, ship, learn and decide. He says, “By embracing this very lean and straightforward model, it allows me to come up with ideas quickly, but kill them even quicker. It allows me to experiment without fear.”

• Have you considered using the Google Analytics dashboard?

This is another simple way of managing the data to break the analysis paralysis. The Google analytics dashboard offers a productive report of the main metrics that you are following. It carves your path and helps you focus in the right direction. The main metrics on the dashboard include users, number of pages viewed, bounce rate, audience distribution, the most popular content and a lot of other things.

• Do you majorly rely on the ‘page visits’ to measure the output of your business?

Many beginner e-commerce owners make this mistake of relying on the number of page visits that the customers make. Instead, they must be looking into the leads and conversions made and the number of clicks on the purchase button to measure the success of the online shopping project. The whole idea of using the analytics is to see whether the business is making progress or not and for this you need to look at the right place.

• Shouldn’t you process with the approach of ‘you should solve problems when they actually become the problem’?

The Google analytic program strictly conducts its function of analyzing every data and all the business efforts made every now and then. Thus, providing an ocean of information but, not all of it needs instant attention. Some problems can be dealt with after some time and so you should focus only on the ones that need immediate attention.

• Have you considered viewing the analytics in a visual presentation?

The visual presentation of the data rather than the numerical one influences the worker to take action. The stats are right in front and the visualization keeps the mind’s attention intact. The graph bars and the charts make it easy to understand the logistics and you can then take action accordingly.

Final thoughts

Google analytics is a blessing for the digital experts and specialists and by keeping these ten questions in the plan, the curse of analytic paralysis can be easily broken.

Reference:https://www.resultfirst.com/knowledgecenter/10-questions-to-brilliantly-avoid-seo-analysis-paralysis/

Why Developing Right Content Should Come First For Start-up Branding

Investing in content has the same importance as enhancing the qualities of products/services.



Tinder profiles without a bio (description) are less likely to get a match. Same goes for your start-up. Without proper branding your enterprise is very less likely to earn a name in the market. Branding is something you can’t ignore while you are planning to set up your own business.
Gone are the days when simply spreading the word like “Guys my mom makes some really good cupcakes, come and have some at a really great price” did the job. Even these days having a cool name and a unique logo also won’t help. These are already in use by leaders in the market and competing with them in this aspect is really a difficult task.
According to Subhasis Chatterjee, a Web Journalist, a Content Architect and Content Analyst, this calls for proper branding, specifically ‘developing content’ about your enterprise, and its products and services. “This is the ‘X factor’ that can create a difference between you and others in the market. Content is something that works in transforming your start-up from just an enterprise to a ‘reflection of trust’ for your customers,” he emphasized.

Not Just Content But Strong Content

Chatterjee also believes that investing in writing a good content has the same importance as enhancing the qualities of products/services. “The history behind the start-up idea, the journey from present to past, stories behind the products etc - are some of the content that can create a strong connection between you and your customers. Using proper SEO methods, you can top the search list of a potential customer who will read the content and decide to connect with your enterprise,” he opined.
By now you must have understood the point that not only developing content, but developing a strong content will make the bond between you and your customers stronger. 
Shounak Pal Shounak Pal, founder, Papyrofix, a content development platform, firmly believes that a brand name is the promise made to the customer about the quality of the product or service. “It gives them a clear picture of what kind of services they can expect from you, the quality of the services and it differentiates your brand from other competitors. ‘Your Brand Name is derived from what you do,’” explained Pal.
Content Creates Connect
This is where Content comes into play. Content paves the way for how your audience will connect with you and what sets your company apart. “It is what helps your brand to reach out to the target customers in such a huge market. They receive all the required information directly from you rather than via any third party media outlets,” elaborated the expert in content writing.
Also if you start by creating a blog for your company with all the details along with those of the Founders and Co-Founders, it gives you an edge over your competitors. Once your story reaches out to the target audience by proper SEO, it will bring in good number of organic traffic to your site and provide good rankings.
There are several small companies who ignore their content. But, Pal warned that ignoring content is like creating a matrimony profile without any information, and just with a picture. “If your market cannot connect with you through your content, even if you provide top quality services, you may never get a chance to showcase that,” he cautioned.
You can have a brand or a service for which you are confident to have a lot of potential customers. However, mere existence of such customers will not help, you need to reach out to them. For Sruti Kanta Mishra, founder, Maiestas Technologies Pvt. Ltd, drafting a robust content is the answer.
“The exercise begins with complete comprehension of what to write and also where to share. Posting your content on definite places and platforms will not only help you organise the content but will also assist in reaching out and having a fair idea about the target customers,” she notified.
However, before writing the first draft of your content, Mishra wants you to keep these in mind - know the customer well and analyze his/her requirements. These, she feels, will help in creating better selling strategies through the content. “Do proper homework on the places frequented by your potential customers including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. These exercises will enable you to structure the content for brand building.
So all the aspiring brand-enthusiasts out these start with your content if you want to build your brand!

Reference:https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/315170

Follow the Local SEO Leaders: A Guide to Our Industry’s Best Publications

Change is the only constant in local SEO. As your local brand or local search marketing agency grows, you’ll be onboarding new hires. Whether they’re novices or adepts, they’ll need to keep up with continuous industry developments in order to make agile contributions to team strategy. Particularly if local SEO is new to someone, it saves training time if you can fast-track them on who to follow for the best news and analysis. This guide serves as a blueprint for that very purpose.
And even if you’re an old hand in the local SEM industry, you may find some sources here you’ve been overlooking that could add richness and depth to your ongoing education.

Two quick notes on what and how I’ve chosen:

1. As the author of both of Moz’s newsletters (the Moz Top 10 and the Moz Local Top 7), I read an inordinate amount of SEO and local SEO content, but I could have missed your work. The list that follows represents my own, personal slate of the resources that have taught me the most. If you publish great local SEO information but you’re not on this list, my apologies, and if you write something truly awesome in future, you’re welcome to tweet at me. I’m always on the lookout for fresh and enlightening voices. My personal criteria for the publications I trust is that they are typically groundbreaking, thoughtful, investigative, and respectful of readers and subjects.
2. Following the leaders is a useful practice, but not a stopping point. Even experts aren’t infallible. Rather than take industry advice at face value, do your own testing. Some of the most interesting local SEO discussions I’ve ever participated in have stemmed from people questioning standard best practices. So, while it’s smart to absorb the wisdom of experts, it’s even smarter to do your own experiments.

The best of local SEO news

Who reports fastest on Google updates, Knowledge Panel tweaks, and industry business?
Sterling Sky’s Timeline of Local SEO Changes is the industry’s premiere log of developments that impact local businesses and is continuously updated by Joy Hawkins + team.
Search Engine Roundtable has a proven track record of being among the first to report news that affects both local and digital businesses, thanks to the ongoing dedication of Barry Schwartz.
Street Fight is the best place on the web to read about mergers, acquisitions, the release of new technology, and other major happenings on the business side of local. I’m categorizing Street Fight under news, but they also offer good commentary, particularly the joint contributions of David Mihm and Mike Blumenthal.
LocalU’s Last Week in Local video and podcast series highlights Mike Blumenthal and Mary Bowling’s top picks of industry coverage most worthy of your attention. Comes with the bonus of expert commentary as they share their list.
TechCrunch also keeps a finger on the pulse of technology and business dealings that point to the future of local.
Search Engine Land’s local category is consistently swift in getting the word out about breaking industry news, with the help of multiple authors.
Adweek is a good source for reportage on retail and brand news, but there’s a limit to the number of articles you can read without a subscription. I often find them covering quirky stories that are absent from other publications I read.
The SEMPost’s local tab is another good place to check for local developments, chiefly covered by Jennifer Slegg.
Search Engine Journal’s local column also gets my vote for speedy delivery of breaking local stories.
Google’s main blog and the ThinkWithGoogle blog are musts to keep tabs on the search engine’s own developments, bearing in mind, of course, that these publications can be highly promotional of their products and worldview.

The best of local search marketing analysis

Who can you trust most to analyze the present and predict the future?
LocalU’s Deep Dive video series features what I consider to be the our industry’s most consistently insightful analysis of a variety of local marketing topics, discussed by learned faculty and guests.
The Moz Blog’s local category hosts a slate of gifted bloggers and professional editorial standards that result in truly in-depth treatment of local topics, presented with care and attention. As a veteran contributor to this publication, I can attest to how Moz inspires authors to aim high, and one of the nicest things that happened to our team in 2018 was being voted the #2 local SEO blog by BrightLocal’s survey respondents.
The Local Search Association’s Insider blog is one I turn to again and again, particularly for their excellent studies and quotable statistics.
Mike Blumenthal’s blog has earned a place of honor over many years as a key destination for breaking local developments and one-of-a-kind analysis. When Blumenthal talks, local people listen. One of the things I’ve prized for well over a decade in Mike’s writing is his ability to see things from a small business perspective, as opposed to simply standing in awe of big business and technology.
BrightLocal’s surveys and studies are some of the industry’s most cited and I look eagerly forward to their annual publication.
Whitespark’s blog doesn’t publish as frequently as I wish it did, but their posts by Darren Shaw and crew are always on extremely relevant topics and of high quality.
Sterling Sky’s blog is a relative newcomer, but the expertise Joy Hawkins and Colan Nielsen bring to their agency’s publication is making it a go-to resource for advice on some of the toughest aspects of local SEO.
Local Visibility System’s blog continues to please, with the thoughtful voice of Phil Rozek exploring themes you likely encounter in your day-to-day work as a local SEO.
The Local Search Forum is, hands down, the best free forum on the web to take your local mysteries and musings to. Founded by Linda Buquet, the ethos of the platform is approachable, friendly, and often fun, and high-level local SEOs frequently weigh in on hot topics.
Pro tip: In addition to the above tried-and-true resources, I frequently scan the online versions of city newspapers across the country for interesting local stories that add perspective to my vision of the challenges and successes of local businesses. Sometimes, too, publications like The Atlantic, Forbes, or Business Insider will publish pieces of a high journalistic quality with relevance to our industry. Check them out!

The best for specific local marketing disciplines

Here, I’ll break this down by subject or industry for easy scanning:

Reviews

• GatherUp (formerly GetFiveStars) can’t be beat for insight into online reputation management, with Aaron Weiche and team delivering amazing case studies and memorable statistics. I literally have a document of quotes from their work that I refer to on a regular basis in my own writing.
• Grade.us is my other ORM favorite for bright and lively coverage from authors like Garrett Sussman and Andrew McDermott.

Email marketing

• Tidings' vault contains a tiny but growing treasure trove of email marketing wisdom from David Mihm, whose former glory days spent in the trenches of local SEO make him especially attuned to our industry.

SABs

• Tom Waddington’s blog is the must-read publication for service area businesses whose livelihoods are being impacted by Google’s Local Service Ads program in an increasing number of categories and cities.

Automotive marketing

• DealerOn’s blog is the real deal when it comes to automotive local SEO, with Greg Gifford teaching memorable lessons in an enjoyable way.

Legal marketing

• JurisDigital brings the the educated voices of Casey Meraz and team to the highly-specialized field of attorney marketing.

Hospitality marketing

• Acorn Internet Services’ blog speaks directly to those in the competitive hospitality field, offering blog posts, webinars and more.

Independent businesses

• The Institute for Local Self Reliance publishes great videos, reports, and podcasts for independently owned businesses and their marketers.
• American Independent Business Alliance runs a Twitter profile I follow for its highlights of Main Street revitalization and the Buy Local movement. Inspiring for independent businesses and their marketers.

Link building

• Nifty Marketing’s blog has earned my trust for its nifty local link building ideas and case studies.
• ZipSprout belongs here, too, because of their focus on local sponsorships, which are a favorite local link building methodology. Check them out for blog posts and podcasts.

Schema + other markup

• Touchpoint Digital Marketing doesn’t publish much on their own website, but look anywhere you can for David Deering’s writings on markup. LocalU and Moz are good places to search for his expertise.

Patents

• SEO by the Sea has proffered years of matchless analysis of Google patents that frequently impact local businesses or point to future possible developments.

Best local search industry newsletters

Get the latest news and tips delivered right to your inbox by signing up for these fine free newsletters:

• Streetfight newsletter
• Moz Local Top 7
• Tidings Minutive
• Local Search Association newsletter
• SterlingSky newsletter
• Phil Rozek's newsletter
• Whitespark Local Pulse newsletter

Follow the local SEO leaders on Twitter

What an easy way to track what industry adepts are thinking and sharing, up-to-the-minute! Following this list of professionals (alphabetized by first name) will fill up your social calendar with juicy local tidbits. Keep in mind that many of these folks either own or work for agencies or publishers you can follow, too.
Aaron Weiche
Adam Dorfman
Andrew Shotland
Ben Fisher
Bernadette Coleman
Bill Slawski
Brian Barwig
Carrie Hill
Casey Meraz
Cindy Krum
Colan Nielsen
DJ Baxter
Dan Leibson
Dana DiTomaso
Dani Owens
Darren Shaw
Dave DiGreggorio
David Mihm
Don Campbell
Garrett Sussman
Glenn Gabe
Greg Gifford
Greg Sterling
Jennifer Slegg
Joel Headley
Joy Hawkins
Mary Bowling
Mike Blumenthal
Mike Ramsey
Miriam Ellis
Phil Rozek
Sherry Bonelli
Thibault Adda
Tim Capper
Tom Waddington

Share what you learn

How about your voice? How do you get it heard in the local SEO industry? The answer is simple: share what you learn with others. Each of the people and publications on my list has earned a place there because, at one time or another, they have taught me something they learned from their own work. Some tips:

• Our industry has become a sizeable niche, but there is always room for new, interesting voices
• Experiment and publish — consistent publication of your findings is the best way I know of to become a trusted source of information
• Don’t be afraid of making mistakes, so long as you are willing to own them
• Socialize — attend events, amplify the work of colleagues you admire, reach out in real ways to others to share your common work interest while also respecting busy schedules

Local SEO is a little bit like jazz, in which we’re all riffing off the same chord progressions created by Google, Facebook, Yelp, other major platforms, and the needs of clients. Mike Blumenthal plays a note about a jeweler whose WOMM is driving the majority of her customers. You take that note and turn it around for someone in the auto industry, yielding an unexpected insight. Someone else takes your insight and creates a print handout to bolster a loyalty program.
Everyone ends up learning in this virtuous, democratic cycle, so go ahead — start sharing! A zest for contribution is a step towards leadership and your observations could be music to the industry’s ears.

Reference:https://moz.com/blog/follow-the-local-seo-leaders

The Questions You Should Be Asking When Looking at Your SEO and Social Media Strategy

To build -- and keep -- an audience, digital marketing is a must. But investing too heavily in a single platform can cost you money, customers and plenty of opportunity. 
Q: When looking at our marketing spend, what’s more important for digital growth: SEO or social media?
-- Chris G., Minnesota
Before consulting, I made my living as an editor in media. Each job I held taught me the same lesson: Digital growth is not about manipulating tools like search engine optimization (SEO) and social media. It’s about using them to reach customers. Then it’s your job to create a sustainable relationship off of those platforms.
I’ll give you two examples of how those tools can go wrong. My first big job was fitness editor at a men’s magazine. Facebook was relatively new, and we aggressively built our following. The result was lots of “likes” but little direct revenue we could track. That audience eventually drove significant traffic to the website -- and that was traffic we could monetize. After I left, Facebook changed its algorithm, and posts drove only a small fraction of the clicks they once did. Traffic shrank. So did revenue.

My next gig was as at a health website that had mastered SEO. Higher search results led to more traffic, which led to higher advertising revenue. Then came the infamous Google “Panda update,” a change to its algorithm that penalized content trying to game SEO by using hacks like keyword stuffing. Those changes sent us into a tailspin. We had to review the site’s 500,000-plus articles, remove more than 150,000, and reinvent the editorial approach. It took 18 months to fully recover.
Chris, I don’t share these stories to suggest that social media and SEO aren’t important. They are. But dependency on any platform you can’t control is dangerous.

I like to look at businesses in pieces, so let’s consider your marketing needs. What is going to help customer acquisition and retention? What is the cost and ROI? SEO and social media are effective components of an acquisition strategy, and social media can also help with retention. Rather than thinking about which is better, think about how you can use each to support your core business.
For SEO, how are people discovering you? What questions would they ask Google that could lead them to you? Let’s say you own a car dealership and want to own “best car dealership in Minnesota.” Yes, you could go to Google Adwords and spend money on a search term. But buying your way into SEO popularity can be expensive. (And most consumers ignore obvious ads.)

Instead, consider what questions potential customers may have about, say, a specific car you sell. Win traffic by answering those questions on your site. We’ve seen clients earn hundreds of thousands of dollars of free search engine marketing by creating and owning valuable content. Google wants to reward that value, so if you build something that actually helps the end user, you will -- over time -- climb the ranks on the search engine’s results pages. And it will be more than worth what it cost to create that content.

Social media, on the other hand, is driven by engagement. You need to have an emotional pulse on what people care about -- enough to make them spread your brand’s message. Likes, shares and comments are the by-products of an ongoing conversation. Those virtual interactions can result in real-life customers and help keep them.

The bottom line, Chris, is that no one tool will help you thrive. Google and Facebook can help. Email lists, apps and member communities can, too -- and they’re even better, because you control them in a way you’ll never control giant platforms. But any great business must build an ecosystem that routinely engages its customers -- and that should be your main focus.

Reference:https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/315129

Why PPC and SEO need to work together

Search spend now accounts for almost a third of advertising spend in the UK, and has grown consistently since 2001. Balancing the marketing mix is a huge challenge facing any CMO or marketer, and it’s no different in the world of search. It can be difficult for brands to find the right blend of PPC and SEO, ensuring that marketers are getting the most out of both. It’s one of the more nuanced choices marketers have to make.
Too much of one or too little of the other and marketers could be in the position of unnecessarily wasting valuable budget or, on the flip side, marketers could be in the position where they are not delivering the results search could be yielding for their brand.
Forward3D’s application and understanding of data has helped to advise clients on their best strategy for success. By having using an integrated approach to strategy, appropriate recommendations can be made to allow marketers to balance activity. For one major airline client, aggregated performance data enabled us to make the recommendation to turn off PPC for brand keywords meaning they could deploy that significant marketing budget for acquisition purposes elsewhere.
So, with this in mind, how do you approach the seemingly complicated relationship between PPC and SEO to yield the best results?

Setting up for success

Without aligning PPC and SEO teams, it’s difficult to implement an appropriate strategy. Although it may seem obvious, many companies still report on search as two separate channels when an aggregated view can add a much greater value. This visibility into integrated search performance is crucial to understanding what impact individual channels have on the overall performance mix.
For example, if paid search click-through rates (CTR) increase then organic traffic might well be expected to drop. However, if marketers report this at search engine marketing (SEM) level, they’ll find that total brand traffic is likely to be flat, as it’s the proportions (and costs) per channel that are actually shifting. Teams need to have visibility and understand how changes in performance at this granular level can impact the entire business as this information is critical when planning budgets or future activity.

Understanding the problem

Creating a joint strategy can allow you to more effectively tackle particular problems a business is trying to solve. While it’s still possible to do effective paid search with a sub-optimal website, it’s much more straightforward when site performance is being guided and prioritized by SEO. This is because it benefits from the site speed, conversion rates, and relevancy being driven by tech and content which paid teams can’t usually influence.
For example, an advertiser in a highly competitive paid search auction might be able to achieve some incremental gains from keyword, ad copy, and bid optimization but working with SEO could give them a greater competitive edge. For example, prioritizing page optimization—either from a technical or content standpoint—can ultimately improve both user experience and landing page relevance which not only benefits conversion rates but can lower CPCs too.
Likewise working with content teams helps paid search marketers think more about planning and executing around events rather than reacting to traffic changes. It can also lead to a more collaborative testing strategy whereby Organic teams work with Paid to prioritize long term keyword and ranking opportunities based on first party or performance data to indicate higher profitability or lifetime value rather than relying on traffic. Through ongoing testing and adjusting traffic across these terms it may end up that Paid activity becomes an evolving test bed for high value terms which over time get transitioned to organic.

Taking a long-term view

Ultimately, finding the balance required to run strong search campaigns is largely impacted by planning, budgeting and investment. Long term investment in SEO is more likely to benefit all channels, but short to medium term there may be spikes in interest or particular products that suit a paid search investment. Brands need to correctly identify this balance and budget accordingly, which ultimately determines search success.
By hiring the right talent or working with the right partners who understand the data and nuance around both organic and paid search, businesses can start identifying where investment is best placed. By understanding this process, the teams can produce meaningful, actionable insights, which benefit customers and businesses alike.

Reference:https://searchenginewatch.com/why-ppc-seo-need-to-work-together

The Questions You Should Be Asking When Looking at Your SEO and Social Media Strategy

To build -- and keep -- an audience, digital marketing is a must. But investing too heavily in a single platform can cost you money, customers and plenty of opportunity.




Q: When looking at our marketing spend, what’s more important for digital growth: SEO or social media?
-- Chris G., Minnesota
Before consulting, I made my living as an editor in media. Each job I held taught me the same lesson: Digital growth is not about manipulating tools like search engine optimization (SEO) and social media. It’s about using them to reach customers. Then it’s your job to create a sustainable relationship off of those platforms.
I’ll give you two examples of how those tools can go wrong. My first big job was fitness editor at a men’s magazine. Facebook was relatively new, and we aggressively built our following. The result was lots of “likes” but little direct revenue we could track. That audience eventually drove significant traffic to the website -- and that was traffic we could monetize. After I left, Facebook changed its algorithm, and posts drove only a small fraction of the clicks they once did. Traffic shrank. So did revenue.
My next gig was as at a health website that had mastered SEO. Higher search results led to more traffic, which led to higher advertising revenue. Then came the infamous Google “Panda update,” a change to its algorithm that penalized content trying to game SEO by using hacks like keyword stuffing. Those changes sent us into a tailspin. We had to review the site’s 500,000-plus articles, remove more than 150,000, and reinvent the editorial approach. It took 18 months to fully recover.
Chris, I don’t share these stories to suggest that social media and SEO aren’t important. They are. But dependency on any platform you can’t control is dangerous.
I like to look at businesses in pieces, so let’s consider your marketing needs. What is going to help customer acquisition and retention? What is the cost and ROI? SEO and social media are effective components of an acquisition strategy, and social media can also help with retention. Rather than thinking about which is better, think about how you can use each to support your core business.
For SEO, how are people discovering you? What questions would they ask Google that could lead them to you? Let’s say you own a car dealership and want to own “best car dealership in Minnesota.” Yes, you could go to Google Adwords and spend money on a search term. But buying your way into SEO popularity can be expensive. (And most consumers ignore obvious ads.)
Instead, consider what questions potential customers may have about, say, a specific car you sell. Win traffic by answering those questions on your site. We’ve seen clients earn hundreds of thousands of dollars of free search engine marketing by creating and owning valuable content. Google wants to reward that value, so if you build something that actually helps the end user, you will -- over time -- climb the ranks on the search engine’s results pages. And it will be more than worth what it cost to create that content.
Social media, on the other hand, is driven by engagement. You need to have an emotional pulse on what people care about -- enough to make them spread your brand’s message. Likes, shares and comments are the by-products of an ongoing conversation. Those virtual interactions can result in real-life customers and help keep them.
The bottom line, Chris, is that no one tool will help you thrive. Google and Facebook can help. Email lists, apps and member communities can, too -- and they’re even better, because you control them in a way you’ll never control giant platforms. But any great business must build an ecosystem that routinely engages its customers -- and that should be your main focus.
Reference:https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/315129

Balancing Creativity and SEO in Content Writing

In the realm of search engine optimization (SEO), content is king. Be it website copy, blog posts or guest posting, content is an integral part of effective SEO. However, not all content you create brings glory to your business. Unique, high-quality content blended with creativity supports SEO efforts.
If you're not creative in your writing process, you will be creating content like many of your competitors, reducing the chances of standing out from the crowd. In this article, I’m going to share six SEO content writing tips that will help you balance creativity in your work. Let’s dive in.
Related: 4 Content Assets You Can Publish on Your Website to Attract Attention

1. Search for important keywords.

The first step to creating useful content is to find important keywords and phrases that your audience uses to search on Google. Use Google Keyword Planner, a free tool, to find out terms that your audience uses to conduct online searches. Once you have made a list of keywords, you should include them in your content.
Naturally incorporate keywords into your content. Stuffing keywords in your content will do more harm than good to your business. The more long tail keywords you use, the better it will be for your content to rank on Google. 

2. Solve your audience’s problems.

Writing content that solves pain points of your prospects and customers is a surefire way to ensure the success of your SEO efforts. People tend to share content that they find useful, increasing the reach of content. The more people who read your content, the more Google will like your content. Therefore, you should make sure your SEO content strategy revolves around your audience’s problems.

3. Organize content for skimmers.

Humans have a shorter attention span than goldfish -- and the notoriously ill-focused goldfish has an attention span of nine seconds -- meaning that your visitors might leave your web pages without reading your content completely. Even if they stay, most of them are not going to read between the lines.
That said, be sure you organize your content for skimmers. Use bullet points, subheads and italics to highlight important information. Write short sentences and short paragraphs. Place important information in the beginning, the middle and the end of your content pieces. 
Related: Consumers Don't Have an Attention Problem. It's Just That Your Advertising Isn't Very Good.

4. Include facts and figures.

Facts and figures are essential to persuasive writing. They support your hypothesis and argument in your content. If you make your SEO content writing rich with supporting data, you will create persuasive, inspiring content. However, you should engagingly present data so that your content doesn’t look like a boring report painted with numbers. Also, make sure that the data you are using make sense easily. If your audience struggles to get the meaning of the numbers you mentioned in your content, they will lose interest, no matter how useful your content is.

5. Use enticing, relevant images.

It is true that a picture is worth a thousand words -- and eyesome images help you get noticed. Always use engaging, relevant images in your SEO content. There are several good ways to include images in your content. Product images, blog images and infographics are ways to enrich your content. Whenever you are using an image in your content, don’t forget to add an ALT tag to make it search engine friendly. Sometimes, it is difficult to find/create suitable images. The benefits a good image can offer is worth your time.

6. Write for humans.

While writing SEO content, consider the following questions:

1. Is this the way a normal person will say things?
2. How will someone feel hearing what I have written?
3. Am I making my points clear enough?

If you throw away all the big marketing words and write in the tone and language of your audience, your content will make a lasting impression. 

Conclusion.

Unique content is vital for the success of your SEO efforts. If you write content based on important keywords, organize it for skimmers, include data to add credibility and complement it with relevant images, there is no reason why your audience wouldn't love to read your content. Remember, if people love your content, Google will love your content.

Reference:https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/317033

How to Evaluate & Improve Your SEO Strategy

What you learned about SEO years ago probably won’t help you much today.
Google and other search engines are constantly making adjustments to their ranking algorithms in an effort to improve the quality of the results they serve to their users.
Because traffic is the key to growth for any online business, ranking on the first page is critical to success… and that number one spot has long been the Holy Grail of SEO.
No matter whether your website has been up for months or years, there’s always room for some kind of improvement to your SEO approach.
Before you can identify areas for improvement, you must first evaluate your current status.

Evaluating Your SEO Strategy

Start with a Link Audit

Where are the links to your site coming from?
Are they all good quality? If not, it could be hurting your ranking.
You can disavow links with Google, so they no longer count against you.

Look at the Technical Side

After you finish the link audit, look at the technical aspects of the website.

• Can the search engines crawl your website?
• Does it load quickly?
• Is the content well organized?
• Are you prepared for the mobile-first index? Making mistakes in preparing your site for mobile-first can harm your ranking.
• Are crawl errors showing in the Google Search Console?
• Do you have title tags and meta descriptions on all of your pages?
• Do all images have appropriate alt tags?

Dive Deep into Your Content & Social Media Strategies

Revamping your content strategy is about more than writing a bunch of new content and scheduling it for publishing.
While adding new content can certainly be helpful, it’s important to go back and look at your existing content.
Make sure that:

• Everything is written with proper spelling and grammar.
• It provides value to the intended audience – and if it doesn’t, edit it to include more value.
• The content is strategically segmented and includes appropriate internal linking.

Next, look at your social media strategy, and how you can integrate that into your overall approach.
Your social media activity should work alongside your content strategy to help you build authority, trust, inbound links, more website traffic, and brand awareness.

Make Sure You Can Answer Questions

To have a decent idea as to how well your current strategy is working, answer the following questions:

• How much traffic comes from organic search?
• How much traffic comes from referrals?
• Are there any pages that aren’t getting traffic?
• How have rankings changed over time?
• How many new links has the site earned since the last audit?
• What is my best performing content? Least performing?
• How many visitors are converting?
• How has the site grown and changed since launch?

Having the answers to these questions ensures you’re focusing on making improvements where they are most needed.

Improving Your SEO Strategy

Aim for Better Quality Content

Long gone are the days when you could write a 500-word blog post and consider it quality.
The longer your content is, the deeper you can dive into a topic to provide more value to your readers.
Remember, Google’s customer is the searcher – and if you provide the searcher with what they are looking for, then Google will love you.
Research shows long-form content ranks higher on Google, with the average word count of a first-page result coming in at 1,890 words.
Long-form content also gives you the chance to provide more related keywords, through keyword and topic modeling. This way, you’re not keyword stuffing, but you’re still able to increase the chances of improving your ranking on those core keywords.
Beyond making your content longer, you can improve overall quality by offering various kinds of content, including:

• Polls.
• Quizzes.
• Infographics.
• Surveys.
• Assessments.
• Videos.

These interactive elements help keep people on your page longer, which also plays a role in your ranking, and keep things interesting for your content team, too.

Craft a Plan for Link Building Efforts

When solid content is the backbone of your strategy, link building becomes a bit easier.
Great content will typically earn more links on its own, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get the momentum going yourself.
Remember, you need high-quality links from a variety of domains.
You also want links to deeper pages on your site – not just your homepage.
You’ll also want to aim for links that contain your brand or company name, as well as links that contain your target keywords.
With this in mind, you first need to look at the type of links your competition has, and make sure you get those links and more if you want to have a shot at competing against them in the search engines.
Then, you want to make sure you have the content that those websites would be interested in linking to it. Make people care enough about the content to link to it when you’re creating it by focusing on the hook during the creation process.
Then, create a spreadsheet to track your link building progress.

Optimize Headlines to Improve Click-Through Rate

Your headline is what gives people the first impression of your content, and as such, plays a major role in whether people will click.
Spending time creating a compelling headline is crucial to getting engagement with your content.
Using a tool like CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer can help. The free tool will grade your headline based on factors such as the number of words it has, the type of words it uses, and the type of headline it is. It gives you advice about how to improve it, such as adding or deleting words.

Encourage Engagement

Including a call to action that asks your readers to comment and interact on your posts can help improve your rankings.
Google’s Gary Illyes has mentioned that fostering community can help boost your rankings because it shows that people aren’t just reading your content, but they’ve taken it further to interact it.
It keeps people on your website longer, which is a signal that your content is what people are looking for.
Beyond that call to action, take the time to ask open-ended questions, or give people the chance to ask you questions to start the conversation.

Conclusion

Schedule regular reviews of your SEO strategy. It’ll help you keep things fresh, stay ahead of any algorithm updates (and help you prepare for any that may be coming), and steer you toward consistent growth.

Reference:https://www.searchenginejournal.com/evaluate-improve-seo-strategy/267145/