Leverage local SEO and influencers to boost your business's position in SERPs
If you’re a small business looking to get noticed on the organic search landscape with a limited budget, you’ll need to pick your battles wisely and arm yourself with a realistic and informed approach. Here are some useful things for small businesses and entrepreneurs to consider:
1. If you are a local business, focus your organic search efforts there first.
Traffic from local visitors is intentful and often more likely to convert – so it should not be overlooked. Also, the good news is that you’ll often find it much easier to dominate the organic SERPs for local search queries than you will do for broad, non-geotargeted queries. Google estimates that over 20% of all search has a local intent, so it’s worth pouncing on the opportunity.
2. From an SEO perspective, many claim that 2016 is the ‘year of the influencer’.
Influencer partnerships…
Find out why email should be a big focus for you post-Brexit and get some tips on campaigns to implement
I was in the South of France when the referendum result happened. The enormity of it hit me quite hard while surrounded by such kind and engaging people, all trying to be sympathetic about the decision. Since that day, focus (at least in business terms) has turned to the impact it will have on companies. As an organisation that works with both Global and UK based companies, we have seen many different reactions to the vote, but the overriding emotion seems to be caution. Some companies are already in recession planning mode (just in case), others are holding off on non-essential projects and most are not comfortable making any big and expensive decisions right now.
One thing we are seeing and hearing consistently is…
Just what is structured data? And how will it help your business appear more creative and memorable in search results?
Rich snippets have been around for some time now, as has Google’s knowledge graph, which was added to search engine result pages (SERPs) in 2012. Over the last year, we’ve also now started to see structured data, which is used to implement these different displays of information, become an even greater influence on SERPs, especially Google’s.
On May 17th 2016, Google rolled out a number of changes to how their search engine handles structured data, with the most important changes being the introduction of rich cards. These are a complete restructure of Google’s documentation about structured data, alongside a new report function in Google Search Console for data relating to rich cards.
Before we delve into the technical stuff,…
Creating great assests should be the cornerstone of your SEO strategy. Here's how to make them without going mad.
Is it getting difficult to come up with a new topics for your blog posts? Do you struggle to write even 500 words a day? Or maybe writing too much has taken a toll on you.
Yet you carry on, trudging through word after word because you want backlinks, to get backlinks, you need content.
What if I told you that it’s possible to create outstanding content without any writing?
As I’ll show you below, there are tons of linkable assets you can create without ever stringing together more than a paragraph.
What are Linkable Assets?
First, let’s answer a simple question: what exactly are “linkable assets”?
Linkable assets are essentially high quality content pieces you can use in your outreach to get links, or to attract links naturally.
Think of them as parts of your website that…
When writing content for your website, blog, or newsletter, should you aim for brevity or go in-depth?
I’d dump Q and maybe J.
Because if attention spans continue shrinking, we’ll need to cut down the alphabet to make words shorter (shrtr).
Given the online ADD epidemic, it surely makes sense to go short if you’re producing articles for a newsletter, blog or website?
Not necessarily.
If short was always the way, this blog would be dead. We just assume people won’t read long articles. The ADD problem has been hammered home so often that we hardly pause to think anymore.
But it’s not that simple.
Like everything online, the “ideal” content length depends on context: the ideal length is the one that says everything you need to say to get the right response.
Not short. Not long. But what suits your needs and the audience you’re targeting.
The…
SEO 101 states; the more* links pointing to your page, the better. But just how long does it take to influence the SERPs?
*by more, I mean more quality links and not spammy links obtained by blackhat techniques.
Kristina Kledzik, recently published an article on Moz about her findings after experimenting with some of her old posts.
She started by using some of her less-popular posts on Distilled (where she works) and set about picking out 76 links pointing to pages which are all similar to each other in content, and they didn't change that content (significantly) for 6 months. She focused on rankings for target keywords with a 25–35% Keyword Difficulty Rating (A Moz metric if you're interested) and she looked at two versions of their target keywords, so she could have a bit more data.
…
How to get your mobile strategy back on track
Next-generation mobile strategies depend on having a solid data strategy. Consumers have little tolerance for generic content that doesn’t speak directly to their interests, so most Fortune 500 companies have shifted toward customized experiences. Good user experiences revolve around effective personalization, and you need high-quality customer intelligence in order to provide that.
Data allows you to better understand your customers, and smart data builds trust. Traditional tools such as geofencing and wireless access points, among other technologies, create a picture of people’s behaviors so you can sell to them according to their circumstances. Modern marketing strategies are adaptive, shifting as they gather more details about audiences.
The way you market to someone browsing your app at home is different from how you’d approach them in your physical store. You might entice…
How to make sure Google knows about your content
Even if you’re arachnophobic, there’s one kind of spider you want on your website. Search bots. These ‘spiders’ crawl through your pages looking for what to show search engine users and save a cached image of what they find. When someone enters a search query, results are pulled from content the bot has cached. Without search spiders, your site is invisible to Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines.
Wrap your head around this: Google has more than 39 billion webpages cached. That number took a sharp dip starting in early June, 2016 (down from a peak of nearly 52 billion indexed pages in May, 2015), but it’s still huge. That’s one of the reasons Google doesn’t cache EVERYTHING. Another is quality – the search engine policies what it shows. Link farms, spam, and black hat SEO often land sites on blacklists.…
There is a link but not in the way some marketers like to think.
One question that refuses to go away in search marketing is how social signals impact organic ranking. Google tells us there’s not much going on here but a large section of marketers seem to think otherwise. And, let’s face it, this wouldn’t be the first time Google has held back from giving us marketers the whole picture.
So what’s the real deal with social signals and search marketing? Well, there is a genuine link between the two – but not in the way some marketers like to think.
What does Google say about social signals?
Not a great deal. It’s one of those topics the search giant likes to keep close to its chest. That said, the few comments we have had from Google say social signals are not a direct ranking factor.
In 2014, before Matt Cutts disappeared, he shed…
Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages are set to appear in all mobile SERPs, rather than just the news carousel.
Google's AMPs are designed to make mobile browsing a more frictionless experience. Rather than taking sites designed for desktop and making them responsive to mobile, AMPs are mobile first and only. It will mean clean, non-cluttered pages which will load far faster on mobile devices than your average responsive site.
Earlier this year we reported that Google has started rolling out Accelerated mobile pages to certain mobile search results- specifically results in the news carousel that appears at the top of certain SERPs with the distinctive lightning bolt.
The big news from Google is that AMPs are now to be rolled out to all mobile SERPs. In a blog post on August 2nd, the company announced an early preview of the new…
