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Tips for Local SEO during Holidays

Holiday is the time to relax and get together with the family and friends. And many people plan about how to spend their holidays. This change of plan becomes necessary for the businesses but their planning is for the hectic work that they have to do in order to deal with the increase in the number of orders they receive. But the matter of fact is that this hectic season is what they keep planning for throughout the year. The marketing task also becomes crucial in this scenario.Even the businesses working on local levels have to make sure that they get a good number of orders during holidays.

https://youtu.be/QrZBMQd6uiU

In this day and age, SEO has emerged as one of the major marketing necessities for the business. The influence of online and social media has widened in such a way that even local business have to convince users in their communities through online media.This requirement has raised the need to work on local SEO; and Google and other major search engines have been pretty helpful in this regard.

Of course you are going to have to work on your local SEO to make it properly aligned with the holiday marketing requirements. In this article, we are going to discuss how you can perform local SEO for your business during holidays.

Updated NAP information

While it is a no-brainer that every local business has to have accurate NAPs (names, address and phone numbers), many of the business do not pay attention to this important aspect. If you do not have updated information on any of the online directories, you are at the risk of missing leads. Important platforms where you need to have updated NAPs include Google My Business, all important social media platforms, Moz Local, and business directories that you are using.

Optimized on-page content

In order to bring holiday related traffic to your website, you have to make sure that you have optimized on-page content for holiday-related keywords. Well, you do not need to do it blindly. First have to look for the content on your site that people would want to consume during holidays. Then you can optimize it for the holiday-related keywords.

While there may be some keywords for which your site has been performing well in the past, you still have to make sure that you are using the keywords that bring your website the traffic. Remember, there is nothing ever-green in the modern day SEO.

Stand out from the crowd

People pay attention to the service or business that is different from the others. But being different is not everything you need to be concerned about. When you are working on increasing the holiday sales, you have to make sure that your website is easy to use.

It is the truth that solid and optimized content is essential to bring traffic to your site; but if there are problems with the usability of site, users will not like to stay on your site for much longer. The main issues with the site usually include pages cluttered with flash material, ads, problems with the JavaScript, and blocks of text. These problematic pages can lead to higher bounce rates. So, when you are working on optimizing your site, you have to make sure that you are preventing or getting rid of all of the issues which can turn your customers away from your web pages.

The local factor

When you are promoting your local business through your website, the website needs to target your local audience. This is the most important point of your local SEO.It starts with the local keywords. For instance, the keywords you are targeting must focus on bringing your site in front of the people who are looking for the type of services you are offering in the area you are doing business in.

And it is not all about the keywords. You will need to develop the content to convince your local audience. Remember, there is a difference between local and international SEO. you need to understand this difference fully.

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Tool That Helps ImprovingImage SEO

It is a human nature that we get a change in our emotions or perspectives when we see images. According to a research, visual content has a better recall value when we compare it with the text.

It means that people are more likely to consume the content that has images. They are more likely to buy from an online store that shows high quality images of the products on the product pages.

While we all make tremendous amount of effort in optimizing the text content to make it more appealing for the users and search engines, it is quite unfortunate that many of us literally ignore the value the images. One thing worth mentioning here that there is no denying of the value of text based content. High quality and properly optimized text content is still the king. But when we talk about the quality content, value of properly optimized and high quality images also needs to be discussed by default.

Images are important for SEO

We all know about the image search part of the Google. But you may have noticed that Google has started showing images in the regular web search results. This shows how important the images have become. It is, therefore, an ultimate requirement to up the game of image SEO.

One of the tools that you can use to improve image SEO is the ImageKit.io. This tool basically helps in improving the image SEO by automatically applying the best optimization techniques.

Image optimization for SEO with the help of ImageKit.io

When we talk about image SEO, we usually consider the factors such as alt text, titles, captions, and file names. These are still the important elements of image SEO. But are these the only elements to talk about?

The crawlers are becoming more intelligent and they are gaining the understanding of visual information.

In this scenario, ImageKit.io is capable of doing a number of things for the better optimization of your images for image SEO.

The first thing that you are going to get with this tool is that it can automatically use correct image formats. Every image format has its strengths and pitfalls. If you want to use photographs in the content, you can use JPG images. On the other hand, PNG format is ideal for the logos. Interchanging these two will make the image placement quite pathetic.ImageKit.io is capable of using the right format in right portion of the content.

Another thing that ImageKit.io does for you is that it compresses images without affecting the quality of images. This compression gets specifically important when your website is at the risk of slow loading due to any reason. This tool helps in finding that perfect balance between the visual quality and image size.

Another aspect for which ImageKit.io is helpful is that it can help in the correct resizing of images. We now have different types of devices which we use for browsing on the internet. With different screen sizes, it has become important for the website owners to make sure that their websites are adjustable according to all of the screen sizes. And since webpages have the images to show, the images need to be resized in the right way.

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Boosting SEO with Effective Link Building Tactics

Link building remains to be the most important practice to build online traffic to and from your website. But there are many people who claim that link building is nothing more than just a spam practice to give your website a major damage in the long run. But the matter of fact is that the good quality link building is not only there, it is alive and kicking. Without good quality link building, there is no way you can build much needed traffic for your website.

If you are building high quality links, they are going to help your website in gaining authority. On the other hand, bad quality links play a role in the website’s loss of authority. Having that said, there are a few ways you can building links to boost the SEO of your website.

Link reclamation

The easiest and simplest method of building link for any website is link reclamation. The main concept of this tactic is to reclaim a backlink which existed previously but it is broken or removed now. You can get help from the tools like Moz’s Fresh Web Explorer which allows you know about any unlinked mentions of your brand by simply typing in the name of your brand in the search portion of the tool.

Broken link building

Broken link building and link reclamation are essentially the same techniques. However, broken link building extends to other sites as well. You can use a Google Chrome Extension, Broken Link Checker, to discover any broken links on a page.

However, the real research can be conducted with the help of tools such as SEMrush and Ahrefs.

Reverse engineered competitor link building

With the help of SEMrush or Ahrefs, you can download link details of your 3-5 competitors in CSV format of spreadsheet. Then you can filter the spreadsheet and tag by gTLD, industry, DA/PA, geography, referral domains, and other metrics which may be valuable to your campaign.

The basic purpose of this technique is to figure out the process through which your competitors have earned links. By knowing the process, you can do the link building in a better way just to beat the competition.

Guestographics

Guest blogging is a wonderful idea of producing high quality backlinks and building traffic to the website. But the frequent use of this method has made things quite challenging for the SEOs. Instead of finding mediums for the guest posting, another way is to use the current mediums for the posting of infographics. This technique can be referred to as guestographics.

The tools like Buzzsumo and Ahrefs can be used for finding the trending content in the industry. You need to think of the innovative ways to turn content into infographics. Although an extensive research may be required here, the resultant traffic is worth the efforts you make.

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Things You Need To Know About Structured Data

If you are not yet aware of what structured data is, it is actually a code that helps search engines to understand your website’s information which needs to be displayed in search results.Search engines read the code and use this code to display information search results in a richer way.Putting this code in your website is quite an easy step.

An example here is about the website with food recipes. You are going to want searchers to be able to see extended information about your recipes being shown in search results. You can make this happen with the help of structured data. Your recipes will be shown in much richer way.

Remember, structured data is always in the code format. And one thing that you need to keep into consideration here is that the structured data for different types of websites is going to be different. For instance, the structured data used for food recipes is going to be different from the structured data for the website that sells or shows books.

Things that you do with structured data

The main purpose of structured data is that it allows you to talk to search engines. With the help of this data, you can tell search engines about the ingredients in your recipes. You will be able to tell them about the preparation. You will also be able to tell them about the number of calories the dish will contain once it is prepared.And the most important thing here is that you will be able to give all of this information to search engines in a language they understand. This is what the structured data is all about.

Schema.org

Schema.org is basically a project developed by major search engines. This project allows you to find structured data markup which is supported by search engines. In simple words, Schema.org is basically a large collection of codes which you can use to make structured data.

By looking into this project, you can find the markup which is required for your particular page. It helps your develop the snippet which tells about the features of your product specifically.

JSON-LD

JSON-LD is one of the Schema.org markups. It is simply a way to write code.  There are other markups like Microdata and RDFa also available on Schema.org but JSON-LD is the more effective way of writing codes. The reason is that it doesn’t break your site like other markups. Moreover, it is the markup which is preferred by Google.

Importance of structured data

Your website is going to rank well if search engines know what your site is all about. Telling search engines about what your site is all about is one of the major purposes of structured data. With the use of schema.org, you actually talk to Google and other major search engines in the language they understand.

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Scientific Method to Find True Ranking Factor

As an SEO, you may wonder about many things to be ranking factors. I am talking about potential ranking factors here. But one thing that you are going to have to keep in mind here is that not all factors are ranking factors for all websites. Something that may act like a ranking factor may not do the same for other sites. So, the best answer to this question is “it depends”.

It’s the age of subjective SEO

Technically, it makes sense to get the same result when a change is tested on multiple sites. However, SEO doesn’t follow this formula. Believe it or not, SEO can be more nuanced than what you would think.What makes more sense here is to treat SEO as subjective. It means that different pages require different factors in order to rank for different queries.

Now, it doesn’t really mean that some confirmed ranking signals should not be worked upon. There are several other ranking factors which may be able to help a website or webpage rank. The main purpose of testing these factors is to know the degree at which these factors may be helpful.

Applying scientific methods to your SEO

Google’s main focus is to serve the best answer to the searchers’ queries. The best answer in this regard is the one which is relevant. And when we talk about relevance, it is worth mentioning that it is a subjective quality. It means that if you want to know what can work best for your site, you are going to have to test.

When it comes to testing SEO theories, there is no better option than a scientific method. There are a few steps involved in a scientific method for SEO.Let’s discuss those steps briefly.

Step 1: Make anobservation

It is quite important to write down what happens to your website. For instance, you might see your pages with fewer internal links ranking worse. Moreover, you can also look at the factors which are putting your site on the right course. This observation is specifically important when you are running a bigger website and you cannot test everything on every page.

Step 2: Do your research

After you have made an observation, you will have to search whether there is any information about this observation already available. Information from credible sources will help you do intelligent hypothesis.

Step 3: Form a hypothesis

Forming a hypothesis is basically a process making an educated guess based on your observation.

Step 4: Conduct an experiment

Conducting an experiment is can be a daunting (or fun, depending on how you see it) stuff. The reason it can be daunting is that it can be difficult to get clean results from an experiment. For instance, it might still be difficult for you to tell if the increase or decrease in traffic was due to the test and not due to an algorithm update. Seasonality can also be a factor here. And this change in traffic may also be due to any other change made in your website.

The best way to solve this issue is to apply the change on several similar pages on the site and leaving a group of pages without doing anything. This way, you will not only be able to get more conclusive result but you will also be sure that you are not wasting your time.

Step 5: Data analysis

In order to draw a logical conclusion, you need to analyze the data. You are basically uncovering whether or not your hypothesis was right.

If there are improved metrics on the pages that you have tested as compared to the ones that have not been tested, your hypothesis was right.

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Improving Content Marketing by Using Psychology

When you are marketing something, you are actually trying to ride the emotions of the customers in order to convince them about buying your product. This very process can also be referred to as playing with the psychology.

Although it’s a fact that marketing has been used to its wrong potential by promoting something which has not been quite healthy or helpful for the people, there are many companies who tend to use marketing methods for good intentions. Both of these groups try to manipulate or boost certain parts of the customers’ psychology.

Since we are talking about the good part only, it is quite important for the marketers to spread happiness. As a matter of fact, this should be the primary policy or a mission statement.

In this scenario, it is quite important to follow certain psychological principles within a content marketing campaign.

Social proof

According to a survey, about 8 in 10 Americans say that they consult online ratings and reviews when they decide about buying a specific type of product for the first time.This survey is enough to tell how powerful the social proof is.

Reviews and rating grow in strength on a daily basis. This is the reason that they are becoming quite important in the world of digital marketing.

Generally, the social proof is considered to belong to certain channels that share reviews, ratings, testimonies and shares. However, social proofs can be created in a number of other ways.

For instance, you can influence an expert within your industry. That will help your brand to become popular through recommendations by the people who have a fan base.

Moreover, you can make guest contributions in certain major publications within your industry.

Social media is a great platform where social proofs can be quite effective for your brand. More specifically, you will find social media more effective if you sell clothes or baby products.

Admit Previous Faults

When you admit your faults in the past, people tend to feel empathetic towards you. In case of content marketing, this admitting of faults is referred to as honesty, and it rules. The reason you need to admit your faults in the business is that it lets other people feel that you have got the change you were in the dire need of and that you are not heading in the right direction.

Consistency in all efforts

If you want to appeal your current and future clients, you need to be consistent in your content marketing efforts. When you are doing content marketing, you need to avoid sporadically posting videos or guest posts. Instead, you need to complete the process in a consistent manner.

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Is It A Bad Idea To Change The URL Structure?

Many people do everything to bring traffic on their website but they fail to get something substantial. One of the questions such people ask is whether it is a good idea to change the URL structure. Well, the answer to this question is “it depends”.

If you are going to make this change in the URL, you need to be very sure about the impact of this change. It means that you need to deliberate the reasons for making this type of change very carefully.

If you are not sure whether the change in URL structure will provide you with the benefit you are looking for, it would be a better idea not to go for this change.

Nevertheless, there are scenarios in which the change becomes crucial. For instance, you will need to change the URL structure when you are rebranding your company.  Site migration, redesign, and launch of some specific products may lead you needing a change in the URL structure.

Now, the major question here is that should you need to change the URL structure. The answer is if there is any price you can pay to avoid this change, you need to pay that price.

Why it is important to maintain the URL structure?

The reasons you need to avoid changing the URL structure are quite obvious and straightforward. For example, a change in the URL structure breaks the bookmarks the users would have stored in their browsers. It means that you will lose direct relationship with your users after changing the URL structure.

Another reason the change in URL structure can be harmful is that the users will not be able to find you after seeing your website’s URL shared on different advertising channels. In this scenario, an easy way is to put 301 redirects. However, complete restructuring of the website might make it quite difficult for you put these redirects.

It would be worth mentioning that the reason you would not want to make such a change may probably be related to SEO in most of the cases. Even if you have a robust SEO strategy in place, Google will take time to rediscover your website.

If you must bring this change in the website’s URL, the first and most important thing you will need to work on is your link profile. The entire link building work tends to be of zero value when you redesign your site. However, you can avoid it by putting the redirects. You need to analyze the link profile fully and apply redirects where needed. This way, people using the old links will be directed to your site with a changed URL. And the major benefit of this approach, apart from the retained viewers, is that Google will not take much time rediscovering your website.

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User Testing and the Benefits It Has To Offer

Having insights about your website is very important. You can get these insights by seeing your clients using your website or products. Looking at the way they navigate, search or click the links on your site can provide you with information which you may not be able to get through data analysis. This way, you will be able to know about the blind spots in your website. An easy way to see what your users do in specific situations or sessions is to do the user testing.

https://youtu.be/6DRQzOSWu-M

If you want to do well in terms of SEO and marketing, you have got to know your audience.

What is user testing?

User testing is a kind of user research in which your users will not only give you answers to the questions you ask but they will actually work for your website or your products. This way, you are better able to know what works well for your website and what doesn’t.

Why and when

It is quite important to get user testing insight next to the data extracted from analytics. Some of the outcomes are easy to understand and you will be able to edit them without any trouble. Other insights are complicated, and they may need to thought about, designed and/or developed.

Adding user testing to the process needs to be done at an early stage. For example, you can create a staging website for testing purpose when you are designing the new website or product. A response form the users will help you make valuable modifications in the development of the main website. If you are launching a product, you can design a prototype. This way, you will be able to know about the shortcomings of your product before even it is launched.

One thing worth mentioning here is that user testing can be performed at all stages of the process. You can do the user testing for a product for which you would have done such testing 2 years back. That will help you to know about the current perception about your website.

Types of user testing

  • First type to talk about is the live user testing with a moderator. This live user test involves a tester testing your website or product and a moderator noticing the process and results. This test usually requires you to gather tester and moderator in a quiet place, like an office. However, it really depends upon the type of product or service being tested.
  • Another type of testing is known as remote user testing with a moderator. In this scenario, the tester will not be at a place where the moderator will be present. However they are connected to each other through a video call. This way is easier because you can find testers from anywhere in the country or even world.
  • The third kind of testing is the remote user testing without a moderator. The tester will receive your instructions and do the testing at the time and place of their choice. The major advantage of this approach is that you can easily make many people testing your website or product.Nevertheless, it will not be quite easy for you to collect the outcomes from all of the testers and compile those results.
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Tips To Avoid SEO Misinformation

There is a lot of information about SEO available on the web. If you want to bring your website on the top on search engine page results, you need to use that information according to your needs. But the bad news is that a huge chunk of that information qualifies as bad information, or misinformation.

For instance, John Mueller recently said on twitter that there is no such thing as LSI keywords.

But Google places SEO misinformation on the top of search results

That’s where things get confusing about the Google’s approach. It is easy to for anyone to be misguided.Let’s talk about the LSI keywords. If you type LSI keywords in Google, you will find first result telling about the advantages of these keywords. And the next two search results will suggest LSI keyword generators.

Know the difference between Opinion and Fact-Based Insight

Checking whether the author is referring to the citing reference is quite important. Things like a patent, a Google statement, or a research paper can help you in forming opinions while writing content which is based on fact-based sequels.

Everything else that you write as web content is usually based on opinions or you’re a set of your own opinions. In this scenario, it doesn’t matter much if your content looks reasonable.

In this scenario, it is worth mentioning that the concept about Google putting something above search results is not true.

Statement from Google needs to be taken into consideration

It is a good habit to have diary to write important notes about anything related to your work. If you are doing SEO, you need to get to know about what Google says about SEO. Some people take Google statements and try to relate those statements with their SEO plans.

Now, fear and uncertainty in business are the important elements of any plan. That’s where people working on the plans might find Google putting forward some contradictory statements.

But according to Mueller, it’s the people who get the wrong perception from what Google says. That’s where the misinformation about SEO is formed. Even if you are able to get the right results using your understanding about Google statements, this understanding may not be helpful for the other people.

For instance, if you have seen your website sinking into the bottom of search results, you may assume that you have got a hit from Google’s new algorithmic update. But according to what Google has been doing, the reason you get your website or webpage sinking in the bottom of search results may be due to the fact that Google would have found a better information resource. Ranking of that information resource will automatically cause your website to lose rank. In this scenario, you can tell people that you have got hit from Google’s update. And that’s where you are becoming a source of misinformation.

What needs to be done?

You may ask what needs to be done in this regard. Well, we do not say that you should start reading opinions. But you need to avoid forming your opinions based on the opinions that you read. A simple way is to compare what an article is saying to what Google has said on its official portal.

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Diagnosing Technical SEO Issues

Technical SEO serves as a backbone for the promotion of your website. If you are working on SEO of your website, you may already know what technical SEO is. So let’s keep the introduction short and, instead, talk about the common technical SEO issues which can bring your website down in no time. Diagnosing these issues is very important because this is now you can get your website back on track.

Don’t be panic

Even if your website has dropped to the bottom of the ranks, you need to calm yourself. Some people try to perceive an emergency situation by creating panic for themselves. This approach is a perfect recipe for even bigger failure. When you face any problem and you find out that problem is a bigger one, you need to get up from the chair, have a cup of coffee and go out in the park for a short walk.

Understand the problem

Now after coming back to your seat, you need to open the email with detail about the problem. To understand the problem, you first need to ask yourself some questions.

  • What does the email say?
  • What is the underlying issue and what does email say about that problem?
  • What do I already know about the problem?
  • What are the symptoms surrounding the issue? (it may help in identifying root cause more effectively)
  • Do I really need to get the problem solved ASAP?

Keep in mind what Einstein said: “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”

Make a plan

When you have the data and you know about the problem, you can either start working on solving the issue or you can make a plan.Making a plan and working on it seems a lengthy process through which you might not be able to get the benefits of a quick fix. But the matter of fact is that a quick fix can do more harm than good.

Another major benefit of making a plan is that this process helps you is doing hypothesis – something which is quite essential in knowing about the real consequences of the problem well before the consequences start happening.

Working on the plan (analyzing)

Since technical SEO involves too many things, there might be too many factors contributing in the failure of your website. If you already know about the exact reason for the technical SEO failure and you know that solving the problem is not going to take much time and resources, you are in luck. But the major issue with the troubleshooting of on-page or off-page SEO is that any fix doesn’t make a change in the results on instant basis. You will need to wait for the search engines to do the crawling and give your website a clean chit.

The process of analysis may need you to rely on several tools and metrics. Even if there is a problem with the website structure, you might need to rely entirely on the analytics to know about the problem.

Suggest solution

After you have analyzed things well and got the complete report about the problem, now is the time to work on solution. Based on what you have discovered, you will need to make a strategy to solve the issue. Discuss it with your team and ask about their feedback. Ask for further suggestions. Once you have finalized the solution that you need to work on, you need to work on it.