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Strategizing SEO for Software Businesses

If you want to use your software business with the help of the business website, you are going to have to make sure that the website has clear hierarchy and structure. For this purpose, you will have to work on the content first.

While working on the SEO of your website, maintaining website structure gets even more important. The reason is that this website is going to have information such as product details, product features, use cases, and solutions. New releases, tutorials, and knowledgeable articles are also shared through these websites.

In this article, we are going to talk about the strategizing of SEO for your software business website.

The core of your website

The people will come to your website by searching for your brand name or through referral. The first thing they are going to interact with is your home page. Homepage and main navigation are the centerpieces of your website. They tell users about the product you offer, its features and use cases, and other parts of the website that users would want to navigate to.

The navigation of a software business website mainly includes:

  • Products and their features
  • Solutions from the perspectives of need, industry and role
  • Case studies
  • About and Contact pages
  • Resources and tutorials

Creating the navigation that supports your SEO efforts

You can classify customers from the perspectives of their needs and tailor the sales copy of that product to reflect those classifications. In this scenario, you need to create a ‘mega’ menu that will direct different prospects to right sales pages.

In this scenario, the menu created can include different presentations of your product. Those presentations mainly include:

  • By brand name or by features
  • By main purpose or functionality (keywords)
  • By industry
  • By role
  • By task

It is not an obligation to display all of these categories. If it doesn’t make sense for your website, you don’t need to show it. Nevertheless, it is a great framework to classify your users and their needs.

Content creation

While the core of your website is not going to have long form content, you are still going to need it if you want the site to do well in search results.As a matter of fact, it is pretty important to have sufficient content on your website if you want to do effective SEO and content marketing.

The main purpose for which you have created the site is to bring the home page and product pages in front of your users because those are the pages that directly help you in earning revenue. But there is a huge audience that searches for information that is available through topic search. That’s where the website’s blog comes in.

This blog is quite helpful as it allows you to share information about the type of services you offer. You can talk about the technology which is being used in your products. You can share other forms of knowledgeable information.

Other things that you can share include tutorials of your software, resources and whitepaper, and reviews and comparisons.

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Blog Content Optimization for People Who Skim

People skim online content in order to get the point without spending too much of time. A survey suggests that 55% of the online readers read a post for no more than 15 seconds.

While one may think that it’s just a habit of this huge portion of readers to skim the content, the real reason is that the content is not usually up to some good standards. The first thing to ensure in this regard is that the content being developed is digestible. The main objective here is to optimize the blog content for the people who skim while still retaining the readers who like to read full articles.

In this article, we are going to discuss some ways to optimize blog content for people who skim content.

Summary graphics for each header

The main purpose of using H2 and H3 tags is to optimize content for people who skim. The use of these tags structures content quite logically. But you may be wondering because you already do this and still do not get people to read your content.

Well, you don’t need to stop at the use of H2 tags. You can go one step further by using summary graphics. These graphics are visual representations of your content. It is used to summarize the key sections of your article.

Intro paragraphs

Introduction is an important part of the articles. Sadly, most of the people skim that part. The reason is that many writers tend to write lengthy intros for unknown reasons. And the people who skim content jump straight to the H2 section without reading that intro. Keep in mind that article’s intro is one of the most powerful sections of any article. So, instead of wasting time in something which people do not care about, you need to follow a simple strategy such as PAS (Problem, Agitate, and Solution).

Writing intro this way gives readers a quick overview about what the article is all about and what they can expect from the article.

Table of content and scroll to top button

A 5000-word article with no table of content makes reading quite difficult for the readers. The main problem here is the usability. A detailed table of content makes reading experience quite better in this regard. The insertion of table of content is specifically important when you are reading on mobile screen where scrolling might seem endless.

Moreover, people may be searching only for a specific portion of your article. A detailed table of content makes it easier for such readers to directly jump to that part of the article.

In many cases, readers want to jump back to the top of the article. That’s where you can use ‘Jump Back To Top’ button.

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Content Marketing Trends to Look Out For In 2020

Content marketing and SEO are expected to reach new levels in 2020. We are moving to technically amazing content which is capable to align with the habits, preferences and search needs of the users.The reason content is getting better is that the content creators are getting smarter atresearching, strategizing, creating and publishing the content.

Content marketing is not a marketing experiment. It is actually an entire strategy which can be quite beneficial for your brand.

In this article, we are going to discuss some top content marketing trends that we are going to see in 2020.

Convincing visuals in content

Platforms where visual content is shared continue to be trendy and it seems that this popularity will continue to rise in 2020. Examples include Instagram, YouTube, and SnapChat. These are the favorite platforms for teens.

Adults are more attracted towards YouTube. And it is an intelligent guess that visual content is going to be more interesting in 2020.

Video content and visual storytelling

While talking about the importance of video content, let’s have a look at some stats. The popularity of YouTube, digital imagery and AR has given boost to video content and visual storytelling.

  • In 2018, about 85% of internet users in US watched video content in monthly basis using different devices.
  • About 56% of the people aging between 25 and 34 years and 54% of the people aging between 35 to 44 years actually want to see more video content from the brands they like to hear from.

Moreover, 62% of internet users say that they consume video content more thoroughly as compared to the text content. It means they are better able to pay attention to the video content.

E-A-T

Google published a blog on Webmaster Central in August 2019 reminding about the core updates. It also told about the ways to handle those updates.

Among other suggestions, Google pointed at the importance of paying attention to E-A-T which stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

Now, you may wonder what’s so special about it since there is a majority of people already working on it. The fact that Google pointed out specifically at this factor emphasizes the importance of it. And it also means that Google is going to pay even more attention to this factor.

So, what is E-A-T all about?

  • It starts with earning links or brand mentions from high authority resources.
  • Then you need to provide E-A-T information on your site. For instance, you can include bio and other credentials on your about page.
  • Then you need to link out to authoritative sources.
  • Lastly, you are going to have to update your site and content on a regular basis. Make sure that the content you are placing is relevant and accurate.

Customer first content

In 2018-2019, we saw that the content that targeted customers rather than insisting on sales was more successful. This is actually the trust-building strategy that worked. The only way you can confirm sales from the customers now is that you have trust from those customers. And good thing is that Google’s systems are updated enough to support this type of marketing. So, it is all becoming more natural as your content can rank only if it is capable of convincing your target audience.

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Content Trends to Focus In 2020

Right since the inception of the concept of SEO, a major emphasis has been put on the value of content. The content kept getting better with the passage of time. It is mainly due to the expectations the people have with the content. With people getting more familiar with the consumption of content to get information they want, it has become quite necessary for the content creators to develop high quality content. And another reason for content getting better with time is that the content creators continue getting better with the process of strategizing, researching, creating and publishing the content.

This entire situation makes it necessary for the content creators to focus on current and upcoming trends to stay ahead in the competition. Thus, it would be worth talking about the top content trends which need to be focused in 2020.

Visuals in the content

Right according to expectations, visual content has been quite trendy until now. And this trend is going to rise even more in 2020. The evidence is the fact that content creators are using expressive imagery for elaboration of their content; and people like it.

In this scenario, it is worth mentioning that content creators are moving beyond the use of still images. GIFs and video embeds are getting more popular because such visuals tend to explain what the text is talking about.

Video content

In 2019, videos continue to grow in popularity. Looking at the current trends of popularity of YouTube, dynamic imagery and AR, we can expect that video content will rise further in 2020.

  • Stats suggest that 85% of the internet users in US watched video content on monthly basis in 2018.
  • About 56% of people aging from 25 to 34 and 54% of people aging from 35 to 44 want to see video content from the brands they like.

These stats mean a lot for the marketers. Marketers can have an analytical look at habits and preferences of the audience.

In this scenario, it is worth mentioning that it’s the good quality of content that makes a video different from the one that fails to get user attention. And this quality is basically concerned with the storytelling capability of the video.

E-A-T

E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It is the factor which the Google pointed at in a blog published at Webmaster Central in August 2019. And what’s more interesting here is the fact that many of the people are already working on it.

However, the act of Google specifically singling out E-A-T can be seen as a huge hint. It means that Google is going to pay special attention to expertise, authority, and trust in the content published in the websites and blogs.

Better and purposeful content

2019 saw the rise of stellar and purposeful content; and this trend seems to continue going in upward direction in 2020 as well. This is the reason that content creators and marketers pay attention to the high quality content.

  • Survey suggests that successful content creators give priority to the information needs of their customers over their promotional needs.
  • The content marketing area which took a huge part of the spending by companies in 2018-2019 was content creation.

This is due to the fact that content creators have started understanding the fact that the only way you can win good ranking in SERPs is the insertion of high quality content in the website.

Consumer-first content

As mentioned above, content creators have been paying attention to the needs of their customers over their promotional requirements in 2018-2019. This is what successful content creators have been doing. Successful content creators understand that the key to a permanently better rank in Google SERPs is to work on the high quality content which is helpful in building trust with the audience.

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Using Right Directories to Build Links

If you remember the old days, you would also remember the use of phone books. At that time, a phone book was the only information resource from where any local business in the area could be contacted with. Well, those phone books are obsolete now after online directories took over their role. That’s one of the countless major benefits internet has provided.

And the good thing is that the users can use search engines to find contact information from the directories. It means that if you are running a business and you want it found online, you certainly need to use online directories. And another major benefit of using these directories is that you get your business site’s URL listed in these directories; and that brings a link building advantage for you.

Benefits of using online directories

Those link building opportunities are quite rare that allow you to build high quality links through an easy process are very rare. One of such ways is to use online directories which are also known as business directories or business listings. A few benefits of using these directories are as under.

  • Online directories make it easy for you to put your business in the right category. It means that users will be able to find your business when they will search for the business that offers the type of service you are offering. These online directories also allow customers to leave reviews about the business.It means that if your business has done well to serve the customers, you will get a genuine reputation for that with the help of those directories.
  • When you get your website listed in an online directory, it tends to get its SEO improved as a byproduct. High-ranking online directories are trustable sources of information for a wide domain of internet users.Since your website link is going to be added in the site, it will complement your link building efforts.
  • A majority of online directories allow free submission of your business listing. Those online directories also include top websites such as Bing Places, Yelp and Foursqaure. Some online directories charge a listing fee. Even if you have to pay for a listing, it’s a worth making investment because you will get a high quality link back to your site.

Ways to find right directory for your business

It is worth mentioning here that there are different types of online directories out there. For instance, there are general directories, business listings, local listings and niche directories. In this scenario, choosing the right directory is not a process of submitting your business listing in every type and see what happens. You will need to strategize your efforts to find the best directory for your business.You can strategize your efforts through the ways mentioned below.

  • If you want to reach the right audience, you are going to have to make sure that you are submitting your link to the relevant directory. Type of directory does matter in this regard. if you are a local travel business, you would not want your business listed in the directory that contains lists of international businesses. Doing so can surely hurt your SEO efforts.
  • After confirming that you have a list of relevant directories, now you need to pick the sites with high domain authority. It is worth mentioning here that domain authority is not the most important ranking factor but it is also the truth that link building in the websites with higher domain authority can bring your site into the SERPs sooner. There are several online tools that you can use to check domain authority of any site.
  • It is up to you to decide whether you want to go for a simple NAP+W listing or a listing that offers additional features such as photos, reviews and ratings. If you want your audience to learn more about your business, it is worth going for the extra features.
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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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How Can SEO Be Used To Work Smarter With Larger Brands

Working with the bigger brands requires a different approach because if you are doing your work like people do in all other companies, you are essentially limiting the chances of your success.

The above statement becomes even truer if you are working in a digital marketing agency and you are given a chance to work with a larger brand.

Bigger brands have their own set of unique challenges. But the potential is huge.

In this scenario, it would be worth mentioning the ways you can work on SEO to work smarter with the larger brands.

Reason you need to focus primarily on SEO

Through SEO, you can do the accountability of an entire website because the whole website needs to work well if it has to do well in SEO. The areas at which a website needs to be perfect mainly include:

  • Technical performance
  • Website health and maintenance
  • Content
  • Marketing integration
  • Total site performance
  • Data
  • Coverage

Now, we are going to discuss the ways SEO can help you work smartly with the larger brands.

  1. Setting a solid foundation

While a website foundation is the most overlooked part, it is the most important part from where the website can grow to reach the new levels of success. And the good thing is that SEO can be quite helpful in this process.

The discussion about foundation mainly includes site health, functionality, andtechnical performance. These are the aspects which need to be checked and maintained on a monthly basis or whatever the requirement is. While working with the larger brands, there is no room for any error in the base or foundation of the site. Therefore, if you are working with a bigger brand, you have to make sure that you are focusing on this aspect before anything else.

  1. Creating a comprehensive data ecosystem

Your site’s better performance mainly depends upon the working of its entire data ecosystem. In this scenario, you have to work on the data-driven approach of SEO because it is the way you can manage and improve the data ecosystem in an effective manner.

The main responsibilities in this scenario mainly include:

  • Connection, integrity and tracking of data
  • Visualization and reporting of data
  • Automation of data-led insights
  • Dealing with the tactical change from data
  • Expansion of data points
  1. Leveraging the power of brand

This step mainly involves practical brand storytelling, sharing of expertise, ensuring audience awareness, and community contribution.

Inclusion of SEO in the marketing of website can help the marketers to ensure systematic reinforcement of the local focus leveraging which usually go unused. Location optimization for retail brands is the typical example to mention in this regard.

  1. Keeping an eye on the little things

People working in the larger organizations usually start ignoring to pay attention to the smaller things while they are focusing on the bigger goals. The job of people working on SEO is to make sure that those small things are not ignored. For instance, if there is broken content on any page of the site of a larger brand, it is something which might go ignored in many cases. SEOs have to make sure that this factor is not ignored.

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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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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.