The 5 SEO Analytics That Your Business Needs To Be Tracking
SEO analytics tracking is crucial for analyzing your website’s overall success.
Creating and implementing an SEO strategy requires data & performance analysis & the simplest way to do it is by leveraging tools like Google Analytics.
Google Analytics offers tons of information on website performance. And by evaluating this, you’ll always be clear on the direction of your SEO campaign or if you need to modify your strategy.
It’s one thing collecting data, but understanding how to leverage it to make business decisions is where you get the most value.
In this article, we’re going to breakdown analytics & SEO tracking & the 5 metrics your business needs to be monitoring.
1. Organic Search Traffic- SEO Analytics
The main performance indicators of any SEO campaign is an increase in organic traffic & the easiest way to track it is by using Google Analytics.
To check organic search traffic reports, you can check “Channels” underneath “Acquisition” in the Google Analytics page to view all total sessions against other channels. You can also change the time-period to see how organic search results have performed compared to past weeks or months.
2. Conversions (Leads or Sales)
You’re driving sufficient organic traffic to your website, what next?
You need to check if that traffic is converting or not. Measure what percentage of the overall organic search visitors take action and turn into a lead or a customer. To measure this, set Conversion Goals in Google Analytics. Once you do, you can track how the call-to-actions are performing.
Furthermore, if you have got a multi-step checkout process, you can view your Goal Flow reports to check how far your organic search visitors go in the process.
Conversion rates can be affected by various factors. Some factors revolve around the intention and awareness of the user. If your traffic is coming from early research keywords, they might not convert immediately. However, this does not mean that it is not working. Try to understand how organic search works in combination with other traffic channels to boost the conversion rate.
Start with exploring the “Multi-Channel Funnels”, “Assisted Conversion” and “Model Comparison Tool” to know how you can use the organic traffic to increase conversions that usually show up as coming from other channels.
3. Page Load Time
Here’s a fact– user experience plays a crucial role in your website’s ability to rank higher and convert your visitors into leads. And one of the factors impacting user experience is page load time. Even a delay of 100 milliseconds can cause conversion rates to drop by 7%.
So when you optimize your website, you must check how the changes have affected your website’s page load time.
Luckily, you can easily monitor your website’s load time using Google Pagespeed Insights. However, boosting page load time might need some technical support. So you can consider hiring an SEO agency in Sydney.
If you want to speed up your website by yourself, here are a few tips to help you:
- Minify JavaScript, CSS, and HTML files.
- Reduce redirects.
- Remove render-blocking JavaScript.
- Improve server response time.
- Use a content distribution network.
- Optimize images.
- Enable compression for JavaScript, CSS, and HTML files.
4. Bounce Rate
Simply put, bounce rate is the measure of the percentage of sessions in which a user loads the page but exits immediately without taking any action.
You can calculate it by dividing the total number of non-interactive sessions by the total number of sessions.
As search engines like Google prioritize satisfying the user-intent, bounce rates show if the website is relevant to the user search query or not. And that makes the bounce rate an important KPI.
Therefore, if a website has a high bounce rate, Google might think that it isn’t satisfying the user intent, and hence it shouldn’t be ranking high.
Now to rank higher in the SERP, you should consider regularly checking the bounce rate of each page of your website and optimize the pages accordingly. Here are a few ways to decrease the bounce rate of your website:
- Improve your content’s readability.
- Avoid pop-ups.
- Add compelling call-to-action.
- Improve your brand storytelling.
- Keep updating your blog with fresh content.
- Target keywords with high-value traffic.
- Attract the right visitors.
- Write attractive meta descriptions for search users.
- Create multiple landing pages for high-volume keywords.
- Speed up your page load time.
- Make your website mobile-friendly.
Need help with this? Hire an SEO Agency to help!
5. Time on Page From Organic Traffic
Last but not the least, time on page from organic traffic is another important factor that you should consider. The easiest method to track time on page is by checking “Average Time on Page” and “Average Session Duration” reports on the Google Analytics page. You can check the total organic traffic for all pages or check for individual pages.
Usually, the more time a user spends on a webpage, the better it will be for the SEO of that page. But there are exceptions. For example, the contact form page should be easy and quick to fill in by the user. If the user is spending a lot of time on that page then you might need to optimize the form or shorten it.
Every page on your website serves a different purpose, therefore, you should identify and optimize the pages with problems.
If your visitors are leaving your website immediately, audit your website and see if you’re providing your visitors with the solutions they are looking for through your content. To make your visitors stay on your website, add more relevant content, links, videos, etc.
6. *BONUS* Branded vs Non-Branded Keyword Traffic
If you’re running an online business, this metric is crucial for you to track. Branded keywords refer to queries that include your brand or product/service name, as well as related terms. For instance, Samsung phone, Samsung smartphone, or Samsung Galaxy Note are all branded keywords for Samsung.
Now keywords that are not related to a brand particularly are called non-branded keywords. If your content is ranking well, it means that you’re ranking well for both kinds of keywords.
It can be a strenuous task to track branded as well as non-branded keywords for organic search using Google Analytics as the tool doesn’t provide much data about organic keywords. If you look at the keywords report in Google Analytics, you’ll see that most of the clicks fall under one category, identified as “(not provided)”. It means all those clicks from organic search are encrypted to protect the users’ privacy.
To check the branded and non-branded keywords using Google Search Console, go to the “Performance” page and then click on “Queries” to check all the keyword queries that generated impressions and clicks for your website.
To Conclude
Now whether you’re just starting your business or have been running it for quite some time, tracking the right SEO metrics is essential. These were the 5 major SEO analytics that you should measure to track your online growth. Without these metrics, you won’t be able to understand if your SEO strategy is on the right track or not for SEO Analytics.
Focus on the right SEO metrics and dedicate the rest of your time to improving your website content. And if you think that you can’t do it yourself, you may hire SEO services in Sydney to get the work done by experts. We are a full-fledged SEO and Facebook Ads Agency in Sydney that can help to improve your SEO strategy and rank higher on the search engine results page.
7 Smart Tips related to SEO for small businesses | Do’s and Dont’s of SEO
In the good old days, websites used to be more like repositories for keywords than the online face of businesses. Well, today, the scenario is not quite the same. SEO has evolved over time. You can no longer trick the system by stuffing content with keywords and expect a great result. The keyword-focused approach has changed to a more engagement centric approach.
With the dawn of the new decade, the role of digital marketing has superseded any other medium of communication and presentation. To rank your content, it needs to be shareable, accessible & likeable on every platform.
In this article, we’ll walk you through 7 practical online marketing tips to run SEO for small businesses seamlessly.
The DO’s of SEO for small businesses
1- Good User Experience
SEO + UX = Guaranteed Success
A good digital marketing strategy emphasizes creating a great ‘user experience’ that adds value to your customers, readers, and target audience.
Search engines collect data and employ advanced data mining operations to monitor user behaviour. With the help of that data, they tweak the algorithm to provide more of what the user wants and less of what they don’t. That simply means websites that successfully understand the user’s needs are automatically ranked high by Google.
What does this mean for you?
You need to understand what your audience is looking for and provide it to them in the most presentable and convenient form.
It merely means using the right combination of generic + specific keywords, Header (H1, H2) tags, and easy site navigation. You also need to include the searcher’s intent, improve site speed, optimize a mobile-friendly website experience, and remove any clutter from your website or content.
For example, Novo Banking uses ‘banking’ as the primary keyword, which is further combined with other supporting keywords to add value to the customer reading it. Anyone using this keyword with ‘small business’ or ‘freelance’ or ‘small business solutions’ would be able to find the site. With a clear message above the fold, it’s easy for the readers to understand how they help and who they help.
Similarly, if you notice Swiped’s mobile version, you can see that they cater to ‘copywriting‘ and ‘marketing‘ as their primary keywords. You can easily browse through their topics, blogs, ideas, and much more at the click of a button.
Smart and straightforward designs go a long way in establishing a quick recall value with the audience and also makes Google and other search engines love your website.
2- Focus on Local Search
If you thought SEO for small businesses is for small corner shops or ‘retail stores’ only, you couldn’t be more mistaken! Today, the digital marketing world is constantly changing and evolving at a rapid pace. Hence, it makes more sense to cater to your local audience than concentrate on a global level only.
Local search encompasses search terms that scream local intent, such as –
- Salons near me
- Doctors near me
- Digital marketing agency in Sydney
- Lawyers in Bondi
Your SEO for small businesses strategy has to focus on increasing your presence in your local area to get more hits on your link, more inquiries, more walk-ins, and a more comprehensive digital footprint locally. All your content, on-page optimizations, and link building with local intent in mind will help you gain more traction amongst your target audience.
A good idea will be to optimize Google My Business to build your small scale business or even a start-up. It is a misconception that it is only for small brick-and-mortar shops. It’s value to your business is much more than that.
According to Statista, SEO for small businesses has grown by nearly 50% since the pandemic and will continue to grow exponentially. If you read the image, you can see the increased use of terms ‘near me’ and ‘close to me has become more popular for people from across the country. The trend continues to rise globally.
If you want to generate a strong social media presence, don’t ignore your local audience and local exposure. Publishing engaging content that is relative to your city is the perfect online marketing strategy to generate sales and leads from people in your own backyard.
3- Focus on Videos and Visual Content
Experiential learning adds more value to students than words and sentences on a paper. Most of us fall in the category of ‘visual learning enthusiasts’ and prefer to consume visual content rather than actually reading written material.
Incorporating visuals and videos in your content can go a long way in retaining your audience’s attention and grabbing a preferential sweet spot in your consumer’s mind. If you notice below, Venngage distinctly creates a visual board to help you (audience) understand the importance of ‘why visual and video content is significant for large and small businesses alike.
A classic example of optimum video and visual content is the leading food delivery partner and player- Zomato.
- 90% of Zomato traffic comes organically from Google.
- They optimize top keywords to create unique URLs and web pages.
- They put a lot of effort into using real people and real stories coupled with great copywriting to create magic on the internet.
- From newsletters to emails, web content, blogs, and even display adverts on social media, Zomato has captured the local and national market with its strategic SEO campaigns.
If you want to create an impact on your audience’s mind, a small business should incorporate SEO driven visual content as part of the online marketing strategy.
While it sounds easy in the SEO world, there are a few iconic blunders you need to avoid altogether.
Don’ts of SEO for small businesses
4- Stuffing Keywords Into Your Content
For those of you who think you can trick Google (or any other search engine) to rank your content based solely on Keywords, you couldn’t be more wrong! Stuffing keywords in no distinct order that’s readable and user friendly will often lead to your website being penalized by Google.
There was a time when small businesses stuffed keywords in as few as three sentences and made their website rank. But that was nearly a decade ago.
Today, the same strategy can get you blacklisted by search engines and will make you lose out on potential rankings for your website.
A classic example of keyword stuffing looks like this:
Develop a habit of creating content that puts ‘reader’s first and one that matters to your audience. Use your main keywords sparingly, i.e., 2 or 3 times per 500 words. Using specific long-tail keywords will help search engine crawlers identify your content’s worth.
5- Shady Link Building Techniques
We, and so many other websites, couldn’t have said this enough ‘don’t use shady link building techniques’ to try and rank on Google. It will crawl through the website, catch it, and penalize it. With Panda and Penguin always on the lookout, using spammy techniques to gain followers and ‘seem’ relevant to your audience will not work.
Whenever businesses use Black Hat SEO techniques, it often backfires. Submitting to article sites or directories which only deal in volume is a big no-no.
If you get an offer to utilize do-follow services, it is best to stay away. These marketers charge businesses a hefty amount and violate the Google quality guidelines. Having too many “do-follow” links from unrelated websites will harm your website’s ranking.
(Source: Neil Patel)
Save your website from any manual or algorithmic penalty and avoid using shady link building techniques to strengthen your digital marketing strategy.
6- Spun Content/Low-Quality Content
Most small businesses utilize the services of low priced and low-quality writers or SEO agencies who rewrite existing content ‘concept by concept’ and present them as unique. Spinning the same content in different ways will push back all your marketing efforts and deteriorate your brand image.
An example of spun content:
7- Blog Forum Spam
Google has a pretty neat way of finding out spam comments and blog link requests. These do not benefit the readers anyway and will hurt your digital marketing strategy and impact your website’s ranking in the long run.
If you have been part of a community related to your product or service, posting your website link in the comments will not harm your business. However, if you are new and indulge in posting ‘Hi, I am ABC. Have a look at my website XYZ to get more offers.’ It will harm your website’s reputation and your own. If you see this on your website as well, stay away.
Conclusion
Several tried and tested ways to drive an effective SEO for small businesses Strategy exist; however, what works for others may not work for you. Marketing trends change all the time, and it is advisable to start using the SEO techniques mentioned above to help build a scalable small business. The key is to pay attention to the trends in digital marketing and employ qualified and experienced SEO agencies to help you deliver the desired result.
5 POWERFUL SEO TOOLS YOU NEED TO BE USING
Search engine optimization is an ever-evolving process & with every Google update, you have to re-evaluate your SEO strategy to make changes to your website and improve your SEO rankings.
With the right keyword research and tools, you can tap into what your potential customers are looking for and develop content that solves their problems. You can also create content that guides the prospect down the path to a sale or a conversion. SEO-optimized websites load faster, are easy to browse and surf, and can be easily viewed on different screen sizes.
SEO also helps build brand awareness for your business as search engine users are more likely to trust a site on the first page of search engine results pages (SERPs) than other brands. 81% of shoppers research their product online before purchasing. Hence, digital marketers know that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most crucial investments to grow your business online.
After knowing the importance of SEO tools and how it helps your business, comes the next big question:
How to implement it?
You can appoint a reputable SEO agency or digital marketing agency as they already have highly experienced professionals that know how to get results. In case you don’t want to go through that route, you can also learn and implement SEO strategies yourself.
As a website owner, you should know the key SEO tools even if you are outsourcing to contractors or a digital marketing agency. SEO can be more efficient and effective when the right tools are employed, so we’ve put together five of the most powerful SEO tools which can work like magic for your business.
1- Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the most widely used website analytics application. It helps you understand the performance of your website and traffic sources.
Often, we believe that most of our traffic is routing mainly from our Homepage, but in Google Analytics, you can check the URL of the other pages that are getting traffic which helps you make data-driven decisions in your business.
The navigation path followed by visitors on your website may be entirely different from what you had planned. From the Navigation Summary in your Google Analytics dashboard, you can see where they came from and which page they visited next.
If you have a frequently updated blog, it will undoubtedly generate traffic from informational and conversational search queries. Blogs are visited frequently on websites, and once we understand which of our blogs are ranking higher, we can develop more useful content and opt-ins around those blog posts. Companies that blog get 55% more web traffic on average. Another stat says that 57% of businesses have acquired a customer through their company blog.
Firstly, segregate your overall traffic based on the source or medium it is coming from. After filtering the traffic, the first section that appears is the landing pages that led people from Google to your website. As you can see from the screenshot given below, the homepage received only 852 views while the other pages (the top three) received thousands of views.
GA gives you a straight breakdown of the queries that are bringing users to your website and which pages are performing best.
With the help of Google Analytics, you are not shooting in the dark while developing your content. Rather, you know what is already performing and can boost that further to enhance the results.
2- Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free tool built by Google that gives you tons of information needed for an effective SEO strategy. It helps you rectify errors as well as strategize and optimize your search engine rankings. It primarily generates three types of reports: Performance, Coverage, and Enhancement.
Its “Performance” report contains the necessary pieces of information you need to plan an effective SEO campaign. It provides you with the data like what keywords your site ranks for, what position you occupy in those keywords, how often people are clicking your result, and which other sites have linked to your content. It also tells you about crawl errors, manual actions, and whether your site is mobile-friendly or not.
The Coverage report shows insights about your site’s URLs that Google has indexed over the past year and displays all indexed pages in your sitemap.
The data generated through Google Search Console can help your business to discover new opportunities. It helps to boost existing performance and learn how exactly people are coming to your website. It’s a reliable tool for businesses that depend on their website to get leads through organic traffic.
3- Google Keyword Planner
There are many tools to help you find keywords related to your business, but Google Keyword Planner is arguably the most powerful one, and free too. But to use it, you need to have a Google Ads account.
This tool helps you find and create a list of keywords for your upcoming PPC campaign.
It also helps you to identify the list of relevant keywords in your niche which has high search volume. You get two different tools within the Keyword Planner: ‘Discover new keywords’ and ‘Get search volume and forecasts’.
Discover new keywords helps you to find new keywords. Firstly, enter products or services closely related to your business.
Once you’ve entered your information into one or in all three fields, click Get Results and, you will get the Keyword result page.
The Get search volume and forecasts are helpful when you already have a long list of keywords and are interested to check their search volume.
You can easily choose keywords based on three criteria: Search Volume, Commercial Intent, and Organic SEO competition. This tool can be used for blogs, press releases, conference agendas, podcast transcripts, in short for any page that has text.
4- AnswerThePublic:
There are 3 billion Google searches every day, and 20% of those have never been seen before. Every month around more than 20,000 companies do wonderful things with AnswerThePublic, and over 200,000 people from all over the world use it every month for content ideas, ongoing search monitoring, keyword research, and much more.
It is a keyword tool that visualizes search questions and suggests autocomplete searches. The categories consist of the 5 Ws (What, When, Where, Who, and Why) plus how, can, are, which, and will.
You can use 3 free searches every day, which means around 21 searches a week. You can pick the data or visualization view based on your needs. Hide the suggestions that aren’t useful to you, so you don’t have to waste time on them.
It represents the data in nice visuals and allows you to get to know your audience better. AnswerThePublic analyzes the questions that users are asking. This insight is valuable for your SEO strategy as it helps to target keyword research and helps you answer questions that can get you into Google’s featured snippets. With these valuable insights, you can create content that enjoys optimized ranking on SERPs. This type of content attracts more audiences and plays a crucial role in generating more organic traffic.
5- Woorank
Woorank is an SEO tool and website analysis tool that enables you to create detailed reviews that are easy to understand and assist in finding the best steps to optimize your websites. It is user-friendly and offers free and paid options to keep track of your website’s performance.
When you log into Woorank, you can easily create a review by entering the URL. There are two options available Advanced and Standard Review, and both these options provide you with a sufficient amount of data.
You can do an unlimited amount of standard reviews while the number of advanced reviews is limited. It can track down website rankings and see how well they are performing. It presents you with a detailed SEO audit for all the essential ranking factors like secure and accessible websites, mobile-friendliness, page speed, technical SEO, and much more. With Woorank, you can have these details in a few seconds, whereas retrieving this kind of information manually can take hours.
The SEO audit is a report of your website’s health. You can use this information to fix any bugs or mistakes that may harm your rankings. Woorank has properties like website reviews, keyword tools, site crawl analysis, marketing checklist, and competitive analysis.
Hence, it is the ideal tool that allows you to analyze your website, whether you’re an SEO agency, digital marketing agency, or website owner.
Conclusion
In a year alone, Google makes upwards of 3,200 updates to its search engine algorithms. The SEO strategies that worked for one company won’t work automatically for the others. Whether you are looking for an SEO company in Sydney or New York remember that no business and their needs are exactly the same. So, choose the best SEO company with full-scope SEO services to achieve your desired results.
Even though SEO campaigns may not necessarily drive results overnight, by sticking with the best SEO strategies and using the right tools, you can build an impressive online presence. The right SEO tool will help improve your rankings, and once you are in the top spots, you’ll continue to generate profit with lesser time, effort, and expenses.
DIGITAL MARKETING & SEO ULTIMATE GUIDE 2021
How will SEO change in 2021? Well, it’s no secret that Google loves updating their SEO algorithm. And only the companies that can adapt to the changes in the search engine landscape will be the ones who thrive in digital marketing.
SEO is the process of improving your site to increase its visibility for relevant searches. When you optimize your content the right way, you’ll see your content ranking on Google and every other search engine.
Whether you are looking to boost your website traffic, start online digital marketing, build a presence online, or start a digital marketing and SEO agency, this guide will help you get started on the right foot. This article contains the best SEO practices for 2021, so you can improve your site’s performance in the search results, get more traffic, leads, and sales.
Let’s have a look at all of them one by one.
Rank for Featured Snippets for digital marketing
According to SEMrush, 6.83% of all search results have a featured snippet. These are the results that show up on the top of search engine results pages, typically after the ads but before the ranked results. There are different types of featured snippets including paragraph, numbers, bulleted list, table, YouTube videos.
Here is how a Numbered Featured Snippet looks:
How do these snippets help SEO rankings?
These snippets make content consumption faster as well as easier for users and keep traffic on Google’s search result page. Therefore, Google promotes such content and awards it by keeping them at the top of search results with high visibility. It is nevertheless beneficial for websites to implement it because you have a chance to be featured, which would eventually drive tons of traffic to your website.
According to the data from Ahrefs, featured snippets, on average, get around 8.6% CTR while the top organic result gets 19.6% of the traffic. This is extremely impressive and shows the power of a featured snippet in getting search traffic on your website.
Now, let’s learn how to get your snippet featured on the Google search result page.
Some of the key ways to optimize featured snippets are:
- Organize your content in a structured way.
- Opt for eye-catching pictures.
- Create answers to frequently asked questions.
- Write dedicated headings to answer featured snippets
For in-depth learning on optimizing content for Featured Snippets, read this article by Optin Monster.
Mobile Continues to Gain Importance
Google gives preference to the sites that are fully responsive and adapt to different screen sizes for a better online experience.
Most developers and webmasters are building their sites on desktop, but around 73% of internet users are accessing those sites through their mobile devices.
The trend towards mobile-friendly and responsive sites will continue to gain further traction in 2021. If not done already, you should take some immediate measures to make your website responsive and easier for users to browse on smaller screens as well.
To check whether your website is mobile-friendly or not, visit this Mobile-friendly test by Google.
Alternatively, you can also run a mobile-friendly analysis of your website at Rank watch.
Master Search Intent
Understanding the user’s intent when they type a keyword in the search engine is important for webmasters, as it helps them to rank their website higher in the search results.
User’s intent and behavior are changing all the time and so is the algorithm behind the search engine.
Therefore, creating content that’s a 1:1 search intent match is going to be a must in 2021.
You can follow the steps below to match your content with the user’s intent:
- Figure out your Target Keyword’s Search Intent.
Sometimes the user’s intent is clear, like when they type in the keyword ‘compare’ or ‘buy’.
But usually, it’s not always the case. You’ll have to look more deeply at the keyword search intent from the search results.
For example, take a keyword like, Avocado Oil.
Someone searching for that term could want to buy oil, or maybe they want to learn more about Avocado Oil and its benefits.
Well, according to Google’s first page for that keyword, most people searching for Avocado Oil are looking for information, not to purchase an Avocado.
- Now, after you have identified search intent, create content that matches the search intent.
The length of your content is also very important because content with more than 2000 words leads to higher ranks in SERPs. A well-researched and detailed piece of content also demonstrates authority on the topic and helps you in getting high authority backlinks.
- Re-optimize old content for search intent.
If you identify that your old article is not getting much traffic or not ranking on the first top 5 pages of SERPS, then think about re-optimizing it. Keep the user’s search intent in mind and include content that is more useful for readers.
Rise of Video Content
Video has been steadily gaining importance in the past few years, and it is now one of the most easily consumable forms of media on the internet. In fact, according to Cisco, 82% of internet traffic will be online videos by 2022. So, it becomes imperative to develop and optimize your video content as an integral part of your digital marketing strategy.
Videos can be uploaded to Youtube as standalone content or can be embedded in your website too.
As mentioned above, the video featured snippets are really prominent on search queries beginning with How-to tutorials, DIY videos and other forms of educational content. These are the three most important things to keep in mind to get your video content in featured snippets.
- Clearly mark sections in your video. It helps Google to use different clips from your video in a snippet.
- Optimize your video for SEO with title, description, and tags to clarify what your video is all about.
- Include titles in your video to help Google understand the content better.
Domain Authority
Domain Authority used to be a metric to predict ranking based on the number of backlinks. But now, Google has confirmed that it also evaluates the site on EAT Principle. EAT stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
In other terms EAT is Domain Authority 2.0. A Domain Authority score ranges from 1 to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a higher ability to rank.
- Google mentions that content written by people who are experts on a particular topic will be more valuable than the content written by random freelancers.
- Google also concentrates on off-site signals to figure out your site’s- EAT. This means having a clear About Page, Contact Page, references and external links to sources, privacy policy and terms of service, and author bylines on every article will help, in your Domain Authority score.
- To increase the authority of your site, try and get cited on lots of other trusted websites and get other people to mention you and your site as a valuable
To check your domain authority score, visit the MozBar website, or you can also download the MozBar Chrome Extension tool.
Getting Ahead With Right Keywords
Keywords are the linchpins between what people are searching for and what content you are providing. You may have heard that keyword-targeting is dead. But, in reality, keywords will always remain an integral part of the SEO strategy. You want to be sure that the keywords you are targeting are the right ones and satisfies the intent of the user.
There are four ways to categorize search intent, and you want to optimize your content for all types of searches.
- Navigational: when trying to find a particular site
- Informational: when searching for the answer to a question
- Investigational: pre-purchase searches
- Transactional: when users actually want to buy
Apart from search intent keywords, there are three other types of keywords, and amongst them, Long Tail keywords are the ones that are easier to rank. Below is the brief description of the 3 types of keywords
- Short keywords: Are no more than 1 or 2 words, with a high search volume. (Ex: WordPress Themes)
- Medium keywords: Are 2 to 3-word phrases with a medium search volume. (Ex: WordPress Themes for Blogs)
Long Tail keywords: Are phrases of 4 or more words with a low search volume. Most web traffic comes from long-tail keywords. (Ex: Free Responsive WordPress Themes for Blog)
Google features such as Google Autocomplete, People Also Ask, or Related Searches can be a great source to explore long-tail keyword ideas.
For more free Keyword tools, visit the blog by Ahrefs.
Visual Search is a Game-Changer
Visual search is changing the search marketing landscape, as improved visual search functionality is being built into platforms such as Pinterest, Bing, and Google.
According to a report by Google, Google Lens has already been used 1 billion times. Pinterest gets 600 million visual searches per month. People are increasingly conducting more visual searches than ever before.
Today, Google Lens can identify 1 billion objects. And that number is growing every day. Visual search is super helpful for shopping, directions, identifying landmarks, translation, recipes, and much more. Visual search is poised to take off in 2021.
For more information on Visual Search as a game-changer in SEO, read this blog by W3 Lab.
Conclusion
As the human attention span is declining, SEO in 2021 will be more focussed on visual content with visual search on the rise. Each year, Google introduces more than 3000 small changes to their algorithms, and each year, trends emerge in this volatile sector that nobody has been able to predict.
Stay on top of algorithms but, don’t dwell on them as important as they are; the fundamentals have never changed. The right SEO tools can help you get the information you need to guide a smart SEO strategy. The most important point on SEO strategy will always be to develop insightful and useful content for your audience.
SEO for beginners | 7 SEO TACTICS YOU NEED TO KNOW
3.2 million blog posts are published every day, that means that roughly 34 articles are read every second!
If you’re a business owner with an active website, you don’t need the above stats to understand that your content is forever competing with millions of other websites trying to rank specific keywords on Google…
Nor do you need us to tell you that SEO has 20x more traffic opportunities than any PPC ads.
As a savvy entrepreneur, you already know the importance of SEO and the results it can bring, and the reasons you’re here is to learn the ropes of SEO and exponentially increase your website traffic.
Every digital marketing expert, SEO agency, and the social agency has loads of information to share but here’s something that no one is telling you…
The search engine’s job is to help users find the most relevant piece of information assisting with one’s query. Therefore, if your site is optimized for humans, it is optimized for the search engine also.
In this article, we bring you the top 7 SEO tactics which are crucial for every beginner.
Top 7 tactics for SEO beginners
1- Website Speed
How many times have you waited for more than a few seconds for a site to load? Can’t remember? Me too. It’s because we have a small attention span of eight seconds.
Even a delay of one second can affect your conversion rate by 7%.
Now that you know that a slow speed spoils the overall user experience, let’s look at it from an SEO angle.
A site with a longer load time will have a higher bounce rate, sending a negative signal to the Google algorithm.
Feel free to use this Google tool to find the speed of your website for desktop and mobile.
Once you know your page load time, here’s what you can do to improve it:
- Deactivate and delete the plugins that no longer serve any purpose. You can find all plugins in your WordPress dashboard area.
- Use the Smush plugin to bulk-compress the size of your images
- Download a website cache plugin
Here’s a detailed and practical guide on how to increase your page load speed.
2- Secure Website
Just search anything on the internet and you’ll notice that all the page 1 results are HTTPS sites.
HTTPS gained importance for the first time when Google announced it as a ranking factor in 2014. Today, having an HTTPS site is almost essential. Visitors to an HTTP site are shown frequent “not secure” warnings. If you’re still running an insecure website, you may have noticed high bounce rates.
Here’s a detailed guide on how to install HTTPS on your site.
3- Keyword Research
Word on the street is that keyword targeting is dead. The reality is that keywords aren’t only just required for SEO alone. They reveal a lot about your audience and what they are searching for.
What doesn’t work nowadays is targeting an individual keyword or targeting a single page for a single keyword. On the other hand long-tail keywords and queries do work.
Here are some free tools to find what your ideal customers are searching for:
a- Answer the public
Answer the public is a keyword tool that visualizes search questions and suggested autocomplete searches in an image called a search cloud.
If you’re writing on the topic- content marketing, then running a simple query will give you popular questions asked around content marketing in a visual format.
Here’s how this clever software looks.
b- Buzzsumo
Another great tool is Buzzsumo.
Buzzsumo allows you to run a search audit and find popular content ideas trending on different social media platforms.
For example, if you’re writing on the topic- ‘content marketing’, then a simple query will give you top trending topics around those keywords
3- Quora/ Reddit
Another way to write SEO-optimized content is by using a question-answer tool or platforms like Quora and Reddit. These platforms are the real gold mine of your audience’s queries.
4- User Intent
Marketing today is customer-centric. Understanding user intent is imperative to creating content that your audience actually wants to read.
Coschedule skyrocketed their traffic by 594% by aligning their SEO content strategy with user intent.
Here’s how it works-
Say, you’re looking for a quick recipe for a sandwich and the top-ranking video/ blog shows a watch time of 20 minutes. If you are looking for a video with the intent to prep a sandwich ‘quickly’ (based on your intent of getting something in your mouth fast) that 20min piece of content is probably missing the mark. Based on your intent you’ll be more likely to click on a 3/4-minute quick guide. Each and every click the link gets will help the content automatically crawl its way up the rankings harnessing the power of user intent content.
Once you know what your customers want to hear from you, you must then understand the underlying reason beneath it.
There are three major forms of user intent-
Informational: When people search for a piece of information to learn something
Transactional: When people look for a product or service with the intent to buy.
Navigational: When people look for a particular website or redirection link.
So, what is the best way to discover User Intent?
- Have a topic of focus around what you want to write; then take a look at the SERP result to find what type of content is ranking in the first place. Chances are, these are the content pieces that have triggered the user intent well and answered their queries to their satisfaction.
- Another smart way to find user intent is your Google Analytics. Navigate to Google Analytics> All Traffic> Channels and now click on the organic search. Here you’ll find the keywords that people are searching for. If you see your company name in organic searches, these are navigational search terms. Similarly, you can also find informational search terms like ‘hire a blogger’. That means people are looking for information on how to hire a blogger, maybe its pros and cons and average salary, etc.
5- Quality Content
Do NOT create content to rank high. Create content to help your audience find the answer to their questions and help them make the right decisions. A good SEO agency will always prompt you to avoid getting into low-value tactics like creating multiple geo-pages of the same product and having thin content on all.
Provide valuable information on your site.
Creating pages with no real value can come back to haunt you, thanks to Google’s Panda and Fred algorithm updates.
Finally, review and update content on your site regularly.
6- On-Page SEO
A law firm witnessed a 62 percent increase in organic traffic by merely updating H1 tags. Another company increased its organic traffic by 48 percent by cleaning up metadata and internal linking structure.
So what are the key on-page SEO areas of focus?
Use keywords
- at the beginning of the Title Tag
- in the URL string
- in the Title description/ metadata
- Keyword in the Heading and body text
Have proper headings in your article: H1, H2…
Big chunks of dense text are scary.
Having headings makes your content easier to scan with the intent to act as a breather. As a result of that, the readability score of your content goes up.
Internal link building is also crucial for on-page SEO and your overall digital marketing. You must add a relevant article to your blog posts to always keep your readers engaged. Not only will this help the users problem-solve, but it will also increase the time spent on your blog. Consequently, this will send another positive signal to Google.
7- Earn high-quality links
Inbound links will remain the lifeblood of search engine ranking and online marketing, no matter what. Links from high authority sites to your site send positive signals to Google – and always WILL!
So how do you encourage good sites to link back to you? Here are a few ways:
A- Create high-quality content
B- write expert roundups and submit requests to high-authority sites to share them with their audience
C- Focus on the clients’ success stories. They may like to share it on their sites
D- Publish surveys and real data studies
Conclusion
Every year we have major ranking shifts and new factors that go to impact Google indexing.
In 2015 it was mobile usability. In 2016, the focus shifted to content development. HTTPS websites regained importance in 2017 after a major drop-off in 2014. The following year, the focus changed to mobile speed.
In short, ranking factors will keep on changing. But here is one thing that never will –
Google will forever keep rolling out new updates (roughly every few months) so it is your job to keep well informed and stay ahead of the game.
