SEO News

Last week we published the first instalment of our complete guide to Google ranking signals. It featured on-page-factors such as title tags, H1 tags and meta descriptions. This week we continue diving into on-page factors, with the use of keywords in your page content. Keywords In our previous article we mentioned that any keywords you wish to rank for need to be placed in the title tag, with the closer it is to the start the better. Keywords should also appear in the H1 tag and meta description. But where else should you keywords appear, how often and in what form? Page content 1) Make sure your keyword or phrase appears in the first 100 words of your pa…

An SEO audit is standard procedure for any website. In fact, if you are serious about your internet business, you will make sure you do it frequently. Unlike a traditional audit, this one is performed solely for marketing purposes. A properly done SEO audit should give you a better insight into your website, individual pages and overall traffic. It is a great way to improve performance allowing you to rank better in the SERPs. According to gotchseo.com, an audit should be performed: At the beginning of a new project At the beginning of a new quarter But, like most other things, you have to take this with a grain of salt. Yes, an SEO audit helps us dete…

As local marketing becomes more important, it’s time to focus on local search strategy in order to beat your competition. David Whatley, Founder & Managing Director of MiShop.local delivered an interesting presentation at BrightonSEO on the difference between global and local marketing and how a physical presence can help local search. Defining local search Local search is simply when people search for “product” or “service” + “location.” It should include the following elements: Consistent NAP (name, address, phone number) Consistent Categories Rich content (business description, photos, logo, videos, keywords) Customer reviews Links to location…

You watch your competitors, they watch you, so let’s see what they’re looking at. I’m reasonably certain we’ve all had a good look around our competitor’s ecommerce sites and I’m pretty sure they’ve had a good look around ours as well. It’s been industry practice to do ‘competitor shopping’ for decades – but in the digital world where everything is measurable is there anything we can learn from them while they are trying to learn from us? Firstly to be able to achieve the following we will need our competitor’s IP address. This is most likely not the IP address of their web server, but the IP address of their office / home. If your competitor is medium to large i…

Facebook is the biggest social network on Earth, and Facebook advertising has long been known as a great social advertising channel to drive user awareness and engagement. However, in recent years Facebook has made incredible improvements to its advertising service and has become one of the best digital ad channels for conversion-driven campaigns. In many verticals, Facebook even outgrew Google in driving large numbers of leads and orders, such as in fashion, banking, lead-generation, and more. Facebook conversion campaigns have some fundamental differences from Facebook awareness campaigns, in terms of goals, KPIs, ad types, ad messages, and landing page activit…

Welcome to our weekly round-up of all the latest news and research from around the world of search marketing and beyond. This week we have a couple of potential upheavals to Google SERPs and the core algorithm, as well as updates to Knowledge Panel and a warning on spammy widgets. Google experiments with new desktop SERP layout As I reported earlier this week, in among Google’s 1,000s of minor experiments a few users were served with a rather fundamental change: a new desktop SERP layout featuring mobile-style cards. The number of results on the card-based SERP is exactly the same as the ’standard’ layout and the snippet width is significantly longer (roughl…

If you’ve just started your WordPress blog and want everybody to read your content, then you should promote your blog on multiple online platforms. Creating and launching an appealing and informative blog is not enough. For better results, you need to get serious about its promotion. Marketing has always been a great way to drive the targeted audience towards your brand or product. You can convey your organization’s message to a large number of people by making the use of effective marketing techniques. Similarly, a blogger optimizes their posts with the aim to better represent them across various web platforms, where they can generate traffic to the site. Bu…

The numbers for mobile subscribers and mobile web users in China are mind blowing, but when the enormity of the population is taken into account, how does China compare with the US on mobile? In the previous column, we compared how the largest Chinese and US companies – specifically banks, retailers and internet companies – were performing and reporting their mobile performance. The conclusion: US companies – particularly the big US retailers – have a lot to learn from their Chinese contemporaries. In this column we are going to consider if the mobile opportunity in China is larger than in the US. This might help explain why Chinese companies appear to take mobile m…

Keywords are often misunderstood in SEO, so it’s time to debunk the most popular myths around them. Laura Hogan, Head of Search in Ricemedia, focused on keyword myths in her presentation at Brighton SEO last week, and it was a useful reminder on all the misconceptions around keywords in the SEO industry. Popular misconceptions about keywords Myth 1: on-site exact match anchor text no longer works Laura Hogan shared an example on how anchor text can still work, leading to an increased rank, even without link building. In this particular case, there was 24% CTR from the specific anchor text, reminding us that we can still apply anchor text optimisation in our con…

Recent stats suggest that the mobile web has the edge over apps in terms of m-commerce sales, but this doesn’t mean retailers should dismiss apps. Five to ten years ago, after the release of the first iPhone and before the widespread adoption of responsive design, there was a genuine decision to be made between apps and mobile web for retailers. For a time, before Apple’s rivals got their acts together, mobile web essentially meant iPhones. In turn, this meant that having a mobile commerce app was a real alternative to a mobile website, and could deliver a better user experience in many cases. Now things are different, and few would argue that an app should be a…

Welcome to our weekly round-up of all the latest news and research from the worlds of search, search marketing, and beyond. In this week’s round-up, we have two big changes for mobile on Google, plus some more insight into a change that Google made to its AdSense policy recently. And if you’ve ever thought about switching off from technology altogether, it turns out you’re not alone: more than 30% of internet users have taken a ‘digital detox’ in the past year. Google to penalize annoying mobile interstitials Al Roberts reported for Search Engine Watch this week on how Google is taking aim at sites with annoying mobile interstitials (an item which displays befor…

Persistence is the quality that often gets attributed to any type of success in marketing and sales. Most professionals will tell you that you have to repeat the same message over and over again until you get satisfactory results. But is this really true? What if your message is wrong? This is where corporate storytelling comes into play. Stories have existed since the dawn of time and were used to entertain and educate. They are one of the strongest driving forces in the universe being able to start revolutions, unite people and bring joy. Good stories persist throughout the ages. When it comes to corporate storytelling, the principles are the same as with tr…

Is your social media marketing campaign a little lackluster? Are you getting results, but not nearly to the scale you would prefer? Many marketers face this problem, especially given the constantly evolving nature of social media. What makes social platforms so unique is that they are impacted almost entirely not by the features they provide, but how people use them. Twitter was developed to be a micro blogging platform, but users constantly find ways around the character restriction. Facebook was meant for only communicating with people the user knows in real life, but the average user now has dozens of people they have never met on their feed. Since soci…

If you want your m-commerce project to deliver the results you’re expecting, context should be front and centre of your design. Across all industries, mobile traffic is eating into PC web traffic in a big way, even in economies which have a large installed base of consumer PCs. But ecommerce sites aren’t seeing mobile web visitors, particularly those who use smartphones, converting to mobile shoppers with the same success as PC shoppers. As Andy Favell writes in ClickZ Intelligence’s new report, ‘The DNA of a Great M-Commerce Site Part 2: The 12 Pillars of Mobile Design’: “It is fair to conclude that conversions would be higher if the m-commerce experience on …

Before you dive into keyword research for your site, you should know about these common mistakes that many businesses and SEO firms make. Avoiding these mistakes can save you time, help you re-think your marketing strategy, and drive the right customers to your site. 1) Picking keywords that are irrelevant to your customers People often pick keywords with high search volumes in their field, but don’t pay enough attention to the relevancy of these keywords to their target customers. You need to choose keywords that match your customer’s concerns. For example, if you’re targeting affluent families who are searching for good schools for their kids, you shouldn’t pi…

Speed can make more of a difference to the success of your online business than anything else, yet very few people talk about it. If you can increase the speed of your site, traffic can increase and conversion can double. Here I won’t just be talking about your website speed, but the overall “speed experience” of your online business. A 2015 Microsoft study that surveyed 2,000 people and monitored brain activity of 112 additional people with EEGs, revealed that the average human attention span has reduced to eight seconds, from 12 seconds in the year 2000. Interestingly, declining attention spans is affecting online transactions as well. Here are some interes…

Emojis have taken over a significant part of online communication, with people using them in order to express a feeling, a taste or an interest without using a long written description. The term ’emoji’ has become so popular that it was named by Oxford Dictionaries as Word of the Year for 2015, which means that we were not surprised when we noticed an increase of branded messages including emojis. It’s common for brands to attempt to be part of a trend, and some of them excel in it, but there’s always the risk of trying too hard and in no relevant context. The rise of emojis in branded messages According to Socialbakers and its analysis of the top 500 brands, 59…

How are you recruiting new employees? Are you using job recruiters? If so, you know their finder fees are ridiculously high. Typically it will cost you 20% of your new employee’s first year salary. Isn’t there a cheaper route? Why can’t we just find employees through social media? When you think recruiting and social media, most people think of LinkedIn. Many companies believe this myth that you have to do all your recruiting on LinkedIn. Honestly, LinkedIn is a site most people use only when they’re out of work and searching for a new job. So your search for employees on LinkedIn will actually end up excluding people who aren’t actively job-hunting. Often …

Video content has skyrocketed over the past few years, and therefore it’s time to examine how adding SEO to your videos can impact rankings. Video is everywhere and this is both a blessing and a curse, especially if you’re trying to stand out from the rest of the crowd at the top of search engine results pages. So consider the following video SEO tips to help put you ahead of the competition… 1) Add value As common as it may sound, your content should be relevant to your audience, adding value that will convince the users to dedicate the right time to watch your video. The more quality videos, the bigger the chances to serve as an authority, build a trusting relat…

Last year, Google unleashed Mobilegeddon on the world in an effort to make the web more accessible by favoring mobile-friendly sites in the mobile SERPs. Now, Google is upping the ante by taking aim at sites that use intrusive interstitials. Starting January 10, 2017, Google will update its algorithm so that sites “where content is not easily accessible to a user on the transition from the mobile search results may not rank as highly.” In a post on the Official Google Webmaster Central blog, Google Product Manager Doantam Phan provided examples of techniques that Google isn’t a fan of: Showing a popup that covers the main content, either immediately after …