5 sources and a process to help identify a penalty which reduces yours organic search traffic
Given the importance of organic search to many businesses, keeping on top of the latest ranking factors for SEO and, in particular, the changes to Google's ranking algorithms and webspam penalties, is a major concern for most businesses and a full-time job for many today.
If it's not your full-time job, discovering about a penalty will be a nasty shock and the names of the different webspam penalties can be confusing. To help keep marketers up-to-date with the changes that matter, we regularly update our 7 Steps guides summarising the latest changes and in this post we recommend 5 sources and a process shown in an infographic.
[si_guide_block id="5750" title="Download Expert Member resource – 7 Steps to Successful SEO" description="Our comprehensive SEO Bible aimed at explaining the main ranking factors and penalties to marketers so they can improve…
Explaining how you can use a range of SEO tactics to get your site ranking highly
When most people think about SEO (if they think about it at all), they think of a very specific kind of optimization: the kind that involves putting keywords on pages. And while that's an important part of SEO, there's a lot more to it, as well. In fact, that's just one part of a single type of SEO.
And if you want to get as much traffic to your site as you can, you're going to need more than just one kind of optimization.
Here are six SEO tactics that can help your site rank for the keywords you're targeting. You probably won't use all of them, but having a better understanding of how to improve your rank is always a good thing.
1. On-page SEO
This is the…
Chart of the Day: B2B marketers place SEO Rankings and Traffic Generation above Leads or Sales
SEO is one of the most important channels in any B2B marketing strategy but is often overlooked. Despite its track record in virtually every industry, B2B marketers can feel overwhelmed with the amount of work that goes into ranking your business in the results pages of Google (and Bing etc). When you first starting out with your SEO strategy you need to research keywords, identify your target keywords, write the content, generate links and even after all that you still may not appear in the SERPs due to Google's reluctance to tell anyone how it actually works. Which is why SEO remains a unique challenge for B2B marketers.
But if you get it right you may find that Traffic Generation is less of an issue and you need to focus on turning that traffic into leads…
Chart of the Day: Facebook's revenue per user increase 10 fold in 5 years
Facebook's drive to monetize itself has seen the social media titan raise its revenue per user from $2 to $19 in just 5 years.
In this time Facebook has released many different advertising options for marketers to spend their budgets with. In the early days, we were using the advanced for the time demographic and 'likes' targeting options to serve ads via the news feed & the right-hand side area. But with the introduction more advertising features as well as adding Instagram to the mix, I can only see the gap between TV and Facebook becoming smaller and smaller.
Now there are a wide range of ad options for Facebook. Which are:
Retargeting - art of advertising to people who have visited your website before
Messages - Contacting your audience with short messages on…
How to select the right data management platform and audience profiling tools for your business
A Data Management Platform (DMP) is a place to store, sort and act upon multiple sources of online and offline data including search, social, display media, Email, CRM, Transactions (e.g. Point-of-sale). This includes first party data which the marketer collects on their site or through other customer interactions and on third party data pre-integrated into the platform, or data purchased from branded providers or lists. They also look to integrate desktop and mobile usage to provide a ‘single view of the prospect and customer’. As such they are also now commonly called Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) and Identity Management Platforms (IDMP). Users of a DMP can import known (i.e. an email address) or unknown (e.g. a cookie) data and use this to define audiences or segments. The DMP will then find new customers (i.e. similar audiences)…
Chart of the Day: B2B buyers are 26% more likely to use Twitter
Social Media can have a strong impact on B2B Buyers, as they are influenced by information they find on your business. It is important to understand which social networks these customers are using to view your content, but how you are integrating your social media strategy into your wider marketing plans? Research by Global web index found that 26% of B2B buyers are more likely to use Twitter and 28% will follow a business on social media.
Businesses who take note of this behaviour will be able to capitalise on the influence of social media and start to see a significant impact on growth and sales.
Explore how your business can make the most of Social Media with our range of guides, and templates.
Source: Global Web Index
Sample: Global Web index…
Chart of the day: Digital Ad Spend grows at fastest rate in 9 years
Recommended link: Latest UK online advertising spend research - IAB
In April each year the IAB and PwC publish their regular survey giving full-year figures for online advertising in the previous year.
We recommend using this annual research on online advertising to benchmark your investment in online media with other organisations in the UK at a top level.
The main headline from this years analysis which should prompt review of which channels are being used to engage audiences is about mobile.
Driven by advertisers’ need to tap into people’s rising use of mobile to watch content, digital advertising grew at its fastest rate for nine years – by 17.3% to £10.3 billion in 2016 – according to the Internet Advertising Bureau UK / PwC Digital Adspend report. The last time annual growth was higher…
Follow these SEO trends for better rankings in 2017
SEO is a very volatile industry because of the many changes that take place in the Google algorithm within a period. The algorithm set in place this month may not be the same the next. It is an always evolving algorithm that encourages SEO specialists to stay on their toes and keep abreast with updates.
Now we are well into 2017, it has become more important for specialists to look out for trends that can affect search rankings for their keywords this year.
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Optimize for Rich Answers
Although aiming…
Debunking the biggest SEO myths so you don't fall foul of them
Poor SEO, so misunderstood! These days there are so many misconceptions about SEO that it is becoming ridiculous. It is now time to shed some light on the biggest myths of SEO. Unfortunately, anyone can write anything on the internet. This is how some of the biggest myths are born. Others myths seem to be embedded in people’s heads because they haven’t done their research.
It is common to see many businesses fall for at least some of these myths. This is quite disturbing because believing in some of these myths can cause detrimental effects to your SEO campaign (or even mean businesses do not use SEO altogether).
Some of these myths are simply bad SEO practices while others are outdated due to the ever evolving nature of SEO. Most businesses don’t even know they are following these myths that could…
Our round-up of this year's best seaside SEO conference
My trip to BrightonSEO this year was my first (and long overdue) time attending the conference and I can say with 100% confidence that it was worth the time and expense. Not only was there an awful lot of great lessons and insight from the conference but I was lucky enough to be in Brighton during the warmest weekend of the year so far!
One of the main motivations for attending BrightonSEO was my determination to stay up to date with the latest trends and developments. Although I am no longer primarily responsible for SEO in my current role at PepsiCo, being aware of how search is evolving and where it’s likely to go is still an important consideration, as I believe it will be for all types of business and brands in the coming years as I’ll highlight in the sections that…
