Author: Elena Zelencova

Most customers have some knowledge of SEO, but they don’t know how to fully take advantage of its potential. During your SEO sales presentations, you should teach your clients about the best ways to use SEO.

This is part of your client management.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a field that has many subfields. The challenge with justifying SEO strategy comes from explaining all the different ways to improve SEO in a way that clients will understand.

Your customers will have a better understanding of SEO when you tell them about its importance in modern digital marketing strategies without getting too technical. 

Here are some actionable tips that you can use to justify your SEO strategy.

Share a Brief History of SEO With Them

Seasoned online marketers know the value of SEO because they have witnessed its growth firsthand. The new algorithm updates make sense to these kinds of people, and they recognize the value of some SEO strategies over others. Understanding the why and the how of SEO can be more challenging for someone without this background knowledge.

Let Them Know That SEO is About Humans, Not Robots

It’s understandable if a newcomer to SEO is put off by discussions of “search bots” and “algorithms,” and they may even wonder why such things are prioritized over marketing to actual humans.

However, SEO is designed with people in mind.

To compete in a world where Google uses bots and algorithms to help people find the content most relevant to them, we need to focus on creating unique and engaging content that addresses the specific needs of humans. 

Inform your client that one of the benefits of implementing SEO strategies is improving the customer experience. 

Give Some Easy-To-Understand Examples of SEO Techniques

As a seasoned online marketer, you may know the meaning of metadata, semantic search, keywords, on-page and off-page ranking factors, search engine algorithms, and link profiles. However, all these sound like gibberish to a newbie. Avoid bombarding your client with jargon. Instead, focus on the basics such as the examples shown below: 

“Google values inbound links because they show that other sites find the content you provide useful.”

“To understand what your website is all about, Google looks at the content actual words on the web page and also considers information that can’t be seen by users.” 

“Keywords are the words or phrases that people enter into search engines like Google to find specific information.” 

Focus on breaking complex concepts into simple ones that anyone can understand. As your clients’ knowledge of SEO grows, it will be easier for you to explain more advanced ideas to them. 

Show Them Why SEO is Necessary for Their Business 

When trying to justify an SEO strategy to new clients, keep these three things in mind: 

• Describe SEO in a language that they are used to.
• Show them that SEO is still relevant.
• Explain SEO’s value in the simplest way possible.

When you’re meeting a new client for the first time, use the fact that they’re interested in SEO as a springboard into a deeper discussion about how to prove the value of SEO.

Clients who are slow to adopt SEO and who don’t realize that “online is the new offline” are missing out. Today, you can find almost any business on the web, and most people are used to buying things and doing other things entirely online. 

The benefits of search engine optimization are debatable. Customers should prioritize SEO because almost everyone uses the internet to learn more about a topic. Most visitors will find your site through an organic search, so your Google page rank is crucial to your online presence. You might look up Italian restaurants in your area on Google Maps, peruse their menus, and read customer reviews online before deciding where to eat 

Things to Note While Justifying SEO Strategy

Assess SEO Knowledge

While the majority of customers have some understanding of SEO, they are often less conversant with other terms used in the industry. Try to gauge their SEO level as soon as possible so that you can help them close any gaps in their understanding.

To gauge your clients’ knowledge of SEO, always maintain eye contact with them during conversations.

Through this, you will know if you need to explain some of the technical terms or if you can offer a simple definition and move on.

Help Your Clients Understand SEO

While you do your best to teach your clients during your in-person meetings, you should also focus on providing blogs on your site that cover various facets of search engine optimization as additional resources for those who want to dig deeper into a specific topic.

The idea is that they will return to your site for updated SEO information over time, which is a fantastic way to keep reusing your content. 

You can also help your clients know more about SEO by explaining the following points to them:

• Most of the people that visit a website did so because they found it through an organic search.
• SEO optimization increases consumer confidence in your products and services.
• SEO makes it easier for customers to choose your business by putting it in places where potential customers spend time.

Clarify Goals

To ensure that an SEO report corresponds with monthly deliverables, ensure you clarify the goals and the workflow. These are the kinds of behind-the-scenes efforts that will win you accolades from your customers.

Share Reports With Your Clients

Clients will learn that a lot more time is required than they initially anticipated during the planning process for improving SEO results. To help them understand this, show them reports that comprise the lists below:

• Emails
• Calls
• Custom KPI reports

Understand and Use a Learning Style That is Suitable for Your Client

There are three primary approaches to learning: verbal, physical, and visual. The use of one or more of these techniques is useful for emphasizing specific points. 

In-person and telephone consultations with some of your clients can prove fruitful. For some customers, a diagram, sketch, or chart is what you need to justify an SEO strategy. They can’t understand the concept unless you physically show them how it works. The most effective method of doing this is by using an analogy or providing a digital illustration.

Wrapping Up

Offering SEO services is not just limited to getting results (although that is important). People are now more comfortable with and adept at using modern technologies than ever before. Hence, it is important to give customers credit for what they know and also educate them about the things that affect SEO “behind the scenes.” 

Customers will be more convinced of the value of SEO after you have helped them understand the concept behind it. SEO professionals can boost their reputations if they can explain and show how valuable they are.

Elena Zelencova

Elena is an SEO and Keyword Research enthusiast, Contributes to the blog section, and manages the chat system at 1stpageKWs. She loves spending her precious time with the family.

1stpagekws.com

Google has become the hub for conducting online searches over the past 25 years. Dictionaries describe the act of “googling” as conducting an online search using any means at one’s disposal 

Although competitors like AksJeeves and AltaVista are long dead, the combined user bases of existing alternatives like DuckDuckGo and Bing can’t come close to challenging Google’s dominance. Nevertheless, there are some issues associated with switching to a single provider for all of our web search needs.

Google also has a commanding presence in the browser market (Chrome accounts for nearly two-thirds of all browsers) and in online advertising (Google Ads had about 29% of all digital ad spending in 2021). Competition and antitrust regulators all over the world are interested in this combination of browsers, search, and advertising. 

However,

Does Google deliver the desired outcomes? Do we find what we’re looking for in the search engine results (which influence the content at our disposal?) 

This issue will be explored in this article. We will consider the different areas where users feel Google is getting worse and see who is right (Google or the users).

Annoyance

The influence Google has is not limited to mere search engine rankings anymore. YouTube, which is owned by Google and has over 2 billion active users every month, is widely regarded as the most popular site for online advertising.

Despite YouTube’s ubiquity in the video-sharing space (as Google is in search), users can choose to bypass advertisements by upgrading to a premium YouTube account. However, very few people pay for the premium service.

Ads

This is a common criticism, and it’s a tough one to refute. If you are one of the many who believe that monetization worsens free services, then you can conclude that Google search has gotten worse as the company has refined and broadened its system for monetizing its search engine results pages (SERPs).

Google made about $104 billion from ads on Search Engine Results Pages and other Google sites in 2020. By 2021, it had surpassed Amazon to become one of the most valuable corporations in the United States.

Ads that make use of its search data and pay-per-click results have always been responsible for powering Google’s financial performance. 

If you’re feeling down about this reality, take heart in the fact that Google search is still free to use and the organic results are still there, regardless of the density of the paid ads. Google’s search engine results page has a lower ad density than many other ad-supported media, and the ads there are easier to ignore or skip than those in print publications, radio, and television.

Google, unlike these other media, only makes money (or their advertisers are charged) if you click on the paid results (which less than 10% of searchers do, or as few as 2% of all searchers do) rather than scrolling down to the organic results. Every time you skip over one of these annoying ads, you’re turning down a donation to Google’s corporate coffers. 

But Google needs money from ads to stay in business, so this part of search and the SERPs is likely to stay and even grow in the future.

Poor Search Results

This is one of the most baffling criticisms.

This is because SEO experts use Google more often to get the precise results they want than the average searcher.

The countless updates and announcements we bemoan in the SEO and marketing realms are direct reflections of Google’s efforts to improve at promoting relevant, useful content and giving internet users better and more direct answers to what they are searching for.

Most of the other criticisms of Google as a brand, a for-profit company, and the influence it has on society focus on its efforts to enhance relevance and define success around meeting the intent of searchers.

• Google’s anti-competitive or monopoly status is made more complicated by the company’s decision to offer a variety of services like local reviews, maps, and featured news stories. These services put Google in competition with other companies and websites that are trying to meet these different searcher and consumer needs.
• Google is getting better at understanding queries and keywords from both searchers and web content. This makes SEO more competitive and difficult and makes it easier to tell who wins and who loses in the search game. This is possible because Google’s algorithms now include responsive semantic sophistication and natural language processing.
• Google could be accused of favoring an ideological agenda since it spends a lot of time and money finding, flagging, and removing harmful, divisive, or otherwise bad search results.
• By considering the ranking signals rather than just the number of backlinks or keyword density, Google’s algorithm favors big sites with well-known brands, which get mentions, traffic, and links just because they have competitive advantages off the web. This makes it hard for new or smaller sites to compete in the digital market.

To then accuse Google of showing irrelevant or low-quality results is to undermine all of Google’s good intentions while also undermining its reputation.

Google Does Not Favor Smaller Websites

Google has made it more difficult to get visitors through search, which is bad news if your revenue model depends on ads, affiliates, or visibility.

If all of your site’s traffic used to come from people using Google’s search bar and not from direct navigation, social media, referrals, or any other channels, then Google’s newer SERP features like Rich Snippets and Knowledge Panels may have rendered your site obsolete by providing the information and answers users seek without requiring them to leave Google’s results page. 

This effect is also difficult to deny.

Google helps people find content, but it doesn’t always lead people to the websites that host or create that content. A large number of people think this is unfair, and some even think it is outright theft from smaller, local news outlets that produce difficult and expensive content.

This issue has sparked international negotiations, boycotts, threats, and lawsuits. 

Are We Tied To Google?

With Google’s massive market share and pervasive presence in our lives, it can be difficult to imagine life without the search engine. However, Google is not the only search engine on the internet.

There is some success with Microsoft’s Bing search engine in the United States, but the company will have a hard time separating Bing from the Microsoft brand. 

DuckDuckGo (which also claims to be ad-free and protect users’ privacy) is gaining popularity, perhaps because of its ties to the TOR browser project. 

Google may be best known for its search engine, but the company also has a hand in computing devices, AI research and development, autonomous vehicles, healthcare, cloud computing services, and a wide range of home automation gadgets. If we succeed in breaking free of Google’s control over our web searches, we’ll still face a host of new challenges in the future.

Elena Zelencova

Elena is an SEO and Keyword Research enthusiast, Contributes to the blog section, and manages the chat system at 1stpageKWs. She loves spending her precious time with the family.

1stpagekws.com

Creating content that a target audience will find useful has always been important.

However, SEO-focused content has flooded search engine results pages. The Google Helpful Content Update is now complete, and the phrase “people-first content” is everywhere.

If you’re hearing this phrase for the first time, you’re probably wondering why it’s so important and how it will affect your content marketing. Understanding human-first content is critical for making the most of the Helpful Content Update. However, you should be concerned about more than just what this means for search engine algorithms.

Take this as a signal to improve your content strategy by emphasizing originality and usefulness for your readers. By focusing on content in this way, you can find more qualified leads and an audience that is naturally interested in your content.

This article will explore what person-first content is. It will also shed light on why it is important and how you can create it to boost your SEO.

What is Person-First Content?

Person-first content refers to any type of content that focuses on what people care about first and foremost. It: 

• Meets the searcher’s intent
• Is accessible to all readers and consumers
• Is structured, written, and formatted in such a way that consumption appears effortless
• Doesn’t alienate anyone; and

Person-first content will provide visitors with a satisfying experience. The emphasis then shifts to providing value and keeping people coming back to your site because your content answers all of their questions. They don’t need to look any further.

Why Should You Create Person-First Content?

It will demonstrate your knowledge of a subject

You’re probably an expert on the topics your brand covers, so share it. This can be accomplished by writing well-researched and guides on topics that are of interest to your ideal audience. You can quickly gain your audience’s trust by proving that you know what you’re talking about.

Readers will consider you a reliable source

When your audience knows they can rely on you for factual, top-quality, and useful content, they will keep coming back for more. Not only does this increase website traffic, but these people also become loyal readers.

They then share your content with their audience and friends, assisting you in developing a circle of people who are a good fit for your customer base. They know they can rely on you because you offered them value via your content, whether through social media, email, or blogs.

It will set you apart from your competitors

There is a high concentration of businesses online.

The best thing you can do for yourself is to research the gaps in your industry that you can fill. You differentiate yourself from your competitors by creating human-first content that addresses their needs and provides assistance that your competitors cannot or do not provide.

How Can You Create Person-First Content to Boost Your SEO?

The number of blogs that publish new content every day is increasing. Keep in mind that duplicate content, low-quality content, and keyword stuffing will not benefit your target audience. This is not a good SEO content strategy. It will also not improve your organic ranking.

One study says that even if your content is useful, it needs 3 more things to bring in organic traffic:

• It must be optimized for a large number of keywords with high search volume.
• It must generate a sufficient number of credible backlinks, and
• It must be about an evergreen concept or topic.

Here are some elements of person-first content that can help you get the most out of your SEO strategy:

Keyword Research

Keyword research is still important when creating person-first content. The intent is the most important aspect of any keyword used by searchers. Before you can write great content that solves a specific problem, you must first understand what each keyword stands for.

Don’t forget to consider keyword classification. In other words, determine whether or not search users intend to purchase a product.

Google still uses keywords to determine the topic of a web page. Avoid over-optimization at all costs.

When targeting keywords in your content, stick to this three-step strategy:

• Include the primary keyword in the headline. Assuming your keyword is ‘bounce rate,’ your headline could be ‘7 Ways to Reduce Your Website’s Bounce Rate.’
• Use alternative keywords in the introduction, meta description, and title tags.
• Write naturally to please your readers and then include the primary keyword in the conclusion.

Incorporate Storytelling

Since humans enjoy good stories, storytelling can help you stand out as an SEO content writer. You will gain more attention if you can incorporate your brand’s story into your blog post, article, or video.

Brand storytelling is not a new concept. Several brands have used and continue to use it. According to Kristen Matthews, using natural storytelling in your content allows you to have the greatest impact on the reader.

However, your story should not be about you alone. Find a way to make it appealing to your target audience instead.

When you do this, brand storytelling can help boost your organic ranking, traffic, and sales conversions. 

Include Humor

One reason you should write with humor is to keep the reader or audience interested. You can also use humor to help you understand a difficult subject.

SEO content writing is more than just creating useful content that solves a specific problem. Your content must also pique the interest of your readers.

They should be eager to click your headline, read the introduction, and then scroll down slowly. That is what persuasive writing entails. If you can do that, no matter what you create, people will appreciate it. They will buy whatever you recommend.

Make Use of Case Studies

Case studies are one of the 15 content types that will increase traffic to your website. They can make your content compelling.

According to research at Content Marketing Institute, case studies and research-based content are what B2B buyers like best.

If you keep writing useful, in-depth case studies, the main long-tail keywords that you’re targeting will start to show up in Google’s top 10 for relevant keywords.

Case studies typically explain your company’s products and services. A good case study will demonstrate your experiments, research studies, and interviews, as well as the results.

Wrapping Up

The more time you spend on content marketing and SEO, the more you realize that a cookie-cutter, autopilot approach to content is tedious. You’re thinking ahead when you create person-first content. You know that not everyone wants to read a blog post, so you create a podcast. You create videos because you know a lot of people prefer visual content.

You know there’s a person behind every search query, so you try to figure out what that person requires.

By using the strategies discussed in this article, you are likely to boost your traffic, improve your brand image, and make your audience fall in love with your content.

Do you want experts to help you improve your website’s SEO and boost your ROI? Get in touch with us.

Elena Zelencova

Elena is an SEO and Keyword Research enthusiast, Contributes to the blog section, and manages the chat system at 1stpageKWs. She loves spending her precious time with the family.

1stpagekws.com

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) involves boosting a website’s visibility and ranking on search engine results pages. This is typically accomplished through the use of several strategies and techniques that make a website appear more relevant and authoritative to search engines.

By making a site rank higher in search engines, SEO can help it get more organic traffic. 

SEO is usually a combination of on-page and off-page optimization. On-page optimization focuses on making a website’s content and structure more appealing to search engines. This can include optimizing page titles, descriptions, and content for relevant keywords, as well as improving the overall user experience of the website.

Off-page optimization, on the other hand, refers to activities performed outside of the website that can help it rank higher in search engines. This can be done by getting positive comments and mentions of the site on social media and other online platforms and by building high-quality links from other websites to the site.

Overall, the role of SEO is to help improve a website’s visibility and ranking on search engine results pages, which can lead to more organic, unpaid traffic.

This article will help in figuring out if the value SEO offers lasts forever or temporal.

How SEO Started

Since it is possible to approach organic marketing in various ways, there is some debate about when SEO truly began.

As a result, virtually any effort to improve organic search engine visibility could be classified as “SEO.”

However, the decision to have your website indexed immediately after the creation of search engines could be considered the earliest form of SEO.

Many consider the increased use of online directories in the late 1990s to be the period SEO started.

However, these efforts showcase an approach (that is a little more sophisticated) for boosting online visibility. The term “search engine optimization” is attributed to Bruce Clay, who used it to describe his company’s services in 1997.

How SEO Has Evolved Over the Years 

Keyword stuffing is no longer permitted

In the early days of SEO, webmasters would frequently stuff their website pages with keywords to boost their rankings.

They’d use black-hat keyword stuffing techniques like hiding them within the website’s code or in invisible text.

Google eventually detected these practices and changed its algorithm.

Websites that used these black-hat SEO tactics saw their Google rankings drop as Google’s algorithm changed. Google now values and rewards websites that naturally and properly use keywords in their content.

Quality over quantity in content

There was also a shift in how content was written.

Previously,

SEOs prioritized quantity over quality of content. They would generate a large number of non-essential pages that were frequently poorly written, stuffed with keywords, or contained duplicate content. 

Websites that did this were able to easily rank for various keywords for a long time. Most of the users who discover a site are also Google users, and Google most likely directed them there. Because of this, it is in Google’s best interest to make sure it sends people to websites with high-quality content.

The emphasis has shifted, and Google now prioritizes well-written, informative content.

You now need to focus on crafting top-quality content that incorporates keywords naturally while also informing readers if you want to rank in Google for a keyword.

Mobile prioritization

Over the last decade, the emphasis has shifted from desktop to mobile search traffic.

With more people browsing on their phones than ever before, Google now favors mobile-friendly websites.

In the last few years, more websites have been made mobile-friendly to keep up with how people search.

Google also indexes and ranks your site based on how it looks on a mobile device. This makes it even more important that your site is ready for mobile devices.

Emphasis on Local SEO

Local searches have become more popular and more specific over the last few years, which has been one of the most important changes in SEO.

Local businesses can easily reach their ideal audience by leveraging the focus on local search.

Local businesses can use Google My Business to make a profile that will help them rank in local searches.

As the popularity of local search grows, so do the opportunities to optimize keywords. SEO marketers can now optimize their content to rank for location-specific keywords, allowing them to reach their target market more easily. 

Link schemes are no longer in use

Many people took part in link building schemes in the early days of SEO, giving their websites lots of fake links from various sources to boost rankings. Google caught on to these schemes and now penalizes, bans, or de-lists websites that participate in them. 

Google now favors websites that have gained links organically.

Guest posts and obtaining backlinks from authoritative and relevant directories and sites are common link building strategies.

The Future of SEO

What direction is the SEO game taking? Here are the trends that show where SEO is heading:

No-Click/ Zero-Click Searches

A zero-click search is a search engine results page that answers the query directly at the top of a Google search result.

Zero-click searches are becoming more popular because the searcher does not need to make any additional clicks to complete the search.

After all, the answers are provided directly.

Here are some of the best ways to rank for zero-click searches:

• Satisfy your website’s visitors’ search intent.
• Make use of the “people also asked ” box (target the keywords in this section).
• Create an attention-grabbing meta description.

Valuable and Evergreen Content

To improve your Google rankings, you need to create the content that Google is looking for. These are content that are useful for your website’s visitors.

There is a lot of competition in almost every niche. The only way to set your website apart from the competition is to create excellent content.

The concept of “evergreen” is the best way to create evergreen content. Expertise, authority, and trustworthiness are abbreviated as E.A.T. 

Google uses these 3 factors to determine the amount of trust it should place on a website for it to rank on the first page of search results.

Here are some of the best ways to make your content E-A-T friendly:

• Make yourself the go-to guy in your field.
• Create useful content.
• Pay attention to the searchers’ intent.

Voice Search

Voice search SEO is the practice of optimizing your website to rank higher in voice search results. 

Be prepared for voice search SEO if you want to get long-term traffic from search engines like Google. 

Here are a few best practices for optimizing your website for voice searches:

• Find out what questions your target audience is asking (you can use tools like Answer the Public for this).
• Focus on local search optimization
• Optimize your website for featured snippets

Mobile SEO

Mobile devices account for nearly 60% of all online searches. This number is rapidly increasing. 

So, if you want the best SEO results, you must prepare your website for mobile SEO. Mobile SEO is all about optimizing your website for mobile users (or tablet users).

You must improve your mobile page speeds to improve your website’s mobile SEO.

Here are some of the best practices for optimizing your website’s speed for mobile device users:

• Remove render-blocking resources.
• Enable mobile device caching (install W3 Total Cache or WP Rocket for this purpose).
• Make your website completely responsive (use responsive WordPress themes such as GeneratePress or Astra for this purpose).
• Optimize your images for mobile devices
• Publish mobile-friendly content.

Will SEO Lose Its Value?

SEO professionals and their clients may begin to wonder how much long-term value this investment has as they invest a significant amount of time and energy in keeping up with the best SEO practices. SEO is not only a relatively new marketing discipline, but it is also rapidly evolving.

Will it lose its value? Or will it be replaced by a better alternative?

While these concerns are understandable, there is little chance that SEO will disappear anytime soon—or at all. This is because it relies on tried-and-true marketing best practices at its core, such as reputation management and brand building.

It is critical not to underestimate SEO’s versatility as a marketing tool. In many ways, the marketing opportunities it provides are only limited by the marketer’s imagination. As a result, SEO will be relevant for a long time not only due to its continued value in online spaces but also because it is a flexible marketing strategy. 

Elena Zelencova

Elena is an SEO and Keyword Research enthusiast, Contributes to the blog section, and manages the chat system at 1stpageKWs. She loves spending her precious time with the family.

1stpagekws.com

Do you want to create an effective link building strategy that appeals to your link building audience? You’re in the right place.

As a website owner, you understand the value of search engine optimization (SEO) in driving traffic to your website. Building high-quality links from other websites to yours is an important aspect of SEO. This process, known as link building, can help improve the visibility and credibility of your website in the eyes of search engines.

However,

Link building can be a tedious task, particularly if you don’t know where to begin. In this article, we’ll go over how to develop a successful link building strategy, including how to identify your ideal link building audience, identify target websites, and execute your link building efforts.

This article will provide useful insights and actionable tips for enhancing your link-building efforts and boosting your website’s search engine rankings, whether you’re a beginner or an experienced SEO professional.

What is a Link Building Strategy and Why is it Important?

Marketers and SEO professionals use link building strategies to get other websites to link to their websites.

Link building is essential for SEO.

This is one of the primary factors used by search engines to determine ranking, i.e., appearing on the first page of search results. 

Pages that rank first in Google search results have 4 times the number of backlinks as pages that rank second through tenth. Google and other search engines consider how many links point to your website when determining how to rank it (and the quality of those links). 

The more reliable, quality, and authoritative websites that link to your site, the higher your sales pages and blog posts will rank in search results.

Furthermore,

Links to your site assist users in finding it and can increase traffic and trust.

How to Identify Your Target Audience for Link Building

Your link building audience differs from your site’s target audience. Your link audience isn’t looking for your products or services.

Target sites,

Where you intend to build links, will typically have a larger or smaller audience than your business audience.

For instance, if your target audience is IT professionals, you could look at a broader audience of STEM students and create outreach blogs about education.

To find audiences effectively, you should first identify relevant niches for your business and then search for them online using advanced search operators or other site-finding techniques. You might be surprised at how many sites you never thought of reaching out to can be topically related to your content.

Domain and content relevance are both important, and striking a balance will result in a more diverse link portfolio and a higher success rate.

Steps for Creating a Successful Link Building Strategy

Examine Your Target Audience

A large part of successful link building is finding backlinks in places that are relevant to your website’s niche. This necessitates intimate knowledge of your target audience. You can’t encourage them to click on links they’re likely to see unless you know what they care about and where they hang out. 

If you haven’t already, now is a great time to create a target audience profile.

That’s a detailed description of the type of visitors you want to bring to your website. You should thoroughly research them and gather information on their demographics, behaviors, interests, and needs, among other things.

When it comes to link building, you should focus on where your target audience spends their time online. What websites do they frequent, and which social media platforms do they favor? These are the locations where your link building strategy will be most beneficial. 

Examine Your Existing Content

It is time to start thinking like a content marketer.

You can’t get people to link to your site unless you know what you want them to link to. In general, you should focus more on content on specific pages, instead of your homepage.

As a result, now is an excellent time to conduct a thorough audit of your site’s existing content. So, you can:

• Look for high-quality pages and posts (or even product pages) that you believe other sites would like to link to.
• Find content that has the potential to be great but needs to be improved.
• Identify “gaps” that you can fill with new content.

After auditing your content, the natural next step is to begin improving and expanding it. Having a large amount of high-quality content makes link building much easier. 

Consider the Link Building You Can Do on Your Own

As stated earlier, most link building entails convincing others to link to your site. However, you can do some link building on your own without getting spammy.

Internal linking is the first and most important part of this step. You must ensure that all of your online presence is linked. This means that you should link your social media accounts to your website (and your website should also point to your social media accounts).

If you have multiple websites, they link to one another.

You should also include links to your content on other people’s websites, especially in forums and comment sections. But take care not to create too many of these links, and make sure they’re always highly relevant. 

Begin Your Outreach Efforts

Apart from doing some link building on your own and improving your website’s content marketing efforts, you also need to get links.

However, the best way to obtain links is to request them. You can contact a website and simply request that they link to your content. This is a common practice that, when approached carefully, can be very successful. It may even aid in the establishment of mutually beneficial relationships between you and other relevant sites. 

Here are some pointers for successful outreach:

• Get in touch with highly relevant websites.
• Provide specific content to which they can link.
• Distribute genuinely useful content.

•       Suggest specific locations where your links could be included.

Focus on Guest Blogging

Guest blogging can be a very effective tool in your link-building strategy.

It is also known as “guest posting” because it entails creating a new post specifically to be featured on another website. This post can then include one or more backlinks to your site and content.

Guest blogging can often get you further than simple link requests. After all, you’ll be providing free content to another website. In exchange, they will link back to your site. This is an especially appealing proposition for blogs, which are constantly in need of new content. 

These tips will assist you in developing a successful guest blogging strategy:

• Avoid sites that ask for payment to publish your guest post.
• Look over the blog to see if there are any guidelines for guest bloggers.
• Conduct research to learn about the blog’s style and the types of topics it covers.
• Send out a proposal first.
• Produce high-quality, one-of-a-kind content.

Wrapping Up

A successful link-building strategy will always aim to bring a new, targeted audience to your website.

However, developing and implementing a link building strategy takes time and effort; there is no quick fix for generating high-quality, organic inbound links that boost your page rank. 

Fortunately, there is a wealth of information and tools on the subject. You will be on your way to enjoying SEO success if you craft solid, valuable content for your audience and use Google-friendly link building strategies.

Elena Zelencova

Elena is an SEO and Keyword Research enthusiast, Contributes to the blog section, and manages the chat system at 1stpageKWs. She loves spending her precious time with the family.

1stpagekws.com

It is getting harder to rank high on search engine results pages due to Google’s ever-evolving ranking algorithm. However, influencer marketing may be the key to finally reaching the top.

Influencer marketing and SEO work hand-in-hand. The value of global influencer marketing in 2021 was $13.8 billion. This shows that the power of influencer marketing has increased by more than 100% in recent years.

Also, in today’s social media-driven world, it’s more important than ever to get high-quality visitors to your website.

According to BrightEdge, organic searches in many sectors generate more than half of all website visits. According to the same study, more than 40% of revenue is attributed to organic traffic.

That’s why forward-thinking companies are forming strategic alliances with influential people to spark and participate in important conversations, so they can expand their brand’s visibility and reach. Including influencer marketing in your digital marketing strategy is a tried-and-true approach to improving your SEO.

So, how can you boost your SEO and company’s growth through influencer marketing? Read on to find out.

What is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing is a form of social media advertising that involves using influential people to spread the word about your brand.

Social media influencers are those who have a sizable online following. They can influence their followers to make certain decisions, such as buying a product or hiring a particular service provider. 

Influencer marketing improves your social proof.

What if credible influencers in your niche talked about your brand or endorsed your products? Your brand would gain exposure, credibility, and trustworthiness. Followers trust the authority figures they follow. That’s why this strategy is effective in boosting SEO and increasing sales. 

There are many parts to influencer marketing.

These can be anything from mentioning a specific brand or product to providing an affiliate link or endorsing a certain brand. Your site’s SEO will greatly benefit from addressing all of these issues.

How Can Influencer Marketing Boost SEO?

It builds inbound links

Influencer marketing impacts your SEO by helping you build inbound links.

However, one drawback to relying on influencers for inbound links is that many of them will reveal their sponsorship status. Developing influencer campaigns centered around original content is one strategy for getting around this problem.

Advertisers have long relied on social media “influencers” to create their commercials.

Their primary motivation is making a sale, and they place a premium on making direct brand or product recommendations.

To get the most out of your influencer marketing efforts, why not focus on solving actual problems within your industry? Instead of treating them as a separate sales force, encourage them to share their opinions on a given topic in the form of video or written content, referencing your website as a source. 

How quickly you can start getting inbound links from micro-influencers (influencers with smaller but more engaged audiences) will depend on how much money you have.

It boosts engagement and brand visibility

The major challenge of many companies is getting their message to their target audience.

The digital marketing space of today is competitive. According to Moz, engagement and traffic are the fifth most important factor in SEO rankings. 

The easier you make it for your intended audience to find you online and interact with your content, the more people will visit your site and buy your products and services. Because of this, influencer marketing is something that can be used in any sector. 

In a survey, Nielsen found that word-of-mouth is more credible than brand advertising. Since people know influencers, the influencers have a significant impact on their followers’ decisions. According to research conducted by Annalect and Twitter, followers trust influencers just as much as they do their friends.

It builds original content

People don’t tend to hold brands in the same high regard that they do individuals. Although it takes time to earn someone’s trust, doing so can pay off in the form of a loyal customer or supporter of your brand.

But what does this have to do with influencer marketing SEO? 

Authentic content has been shown to boost the freshness and quality of content. It also improves the authority, expertise, and trust signals that are important to search engine optimization. The more people who talk about the site and link to it, the more visitors it will get.

Most influencers, according to a survey by TapInfluence, collaborate with brands because they are a good fit for the influencer’s brand rather than because of financial incentives. Because of this, the best way to get your product in front of an influencer’s followers is to use their established reputation and authoritative voice.

It offers long-tail search benefits

About 70% of all search engine queries emanate from long-tail keywords. This makes long-tail keywords an essential part of any influencer marketing SEO.

Using influencers to promote your brand is just one form of influencer marketing. In addition, you can use influencers who are highly relevant to the long-tail keywords you’re trying to rank for. 

One can expect that any popular person would be linked to a particular group of long-tail terms. These keywords may have a high volume of traffic but little competition. Think about niches like hair tutorials, interviews, makeup lessons, fitness, and more. Creating content on these topics will help you build authority.

It builds specific brand keywords

In-depth keyword research can inform marketing teams of the most productive keywords and phrases to use and optimize throughout the website. But a more effective strategy is to tell influencers to use the same keywords in their blog or social media posts.

As a result of the repeated use of brand-specific keywords by respected opinion leaders, you will increase your chance of ranking for these brand keywords brands and will also see an increase in website traffic.

It increases PR and social links

You can quickly and easily spread your message to a large and interested audience when an influencer promotes your brand’s products or services through social media. 

It helps you get your social signals and links heard above the competition. Social signals do not have a huge effect on SEO rankings, but Google says they are still considered.

Social signals are the results of people talking about your website or content on social media. For example, someone may tweet a link to your product, and their followers may retweet it. 

Though this does not directly lead to more backlinks being created like it would if someone else posted a link to your site on their own, it does show Google that your content is relevant and interesting.

Wrapping Up

This guide has shown the different ways through which influencer marketing can boost your SEO. The right use of influencer marketing will make your brand to be recognized by new audiences. 

However, it is essential to remember that the best results are achieved gradually and through mutually beneficial relationships. The most effective way to get the best SEO results from influencer marketing involves building respectful, cooperative relationships.

To learn more about how to improve your SEO from your marketing efforts, contact us today to schedule a free strategy session. In this call, our experts will discuss your specific needs and provide you with free strategies that you can use to boost your sales and revenue.

Elena Zelencova

Elena is an SEO and Keyword Research enthusiast, Contributes to the blog section, and manages the chat system at 1stpageKWs. She loves spending her precious time with the family.

1stpagekws.com

The main goal of anyone that works online is to ensure that their websites are not only accessible but also usable for everyone.

Website accessibility is usually considered the responsibility of developers and designers.

However,

There are lots of overlaps with the SEO strategies deployed to enhance website accessibility and also make it easy for search engines to understand.

Unfortunately, this is not often discussed in SEO. 

This article will explore what website accessibility is and the role it plays in SEO. It will also shed light on the tips that can be used to improve website accessibility.

 What is Website Accessibility?

The goal of website accessibility is to make your content easy to use for all users, no matter what their needs are.

This is similar to how the goal of search engine optimization is to help potential customers find you when they search the internet.

Website accessibility makes your website usable by everyone, including those with sensory, mobility, or cognitive impairments. The end goal is to create an experience that is as enjoyable for people with disabilities as it is for people without disabilities.

Importance of Website Accessibility

It creates a connection between SEO and accessibility

The release of Google’s Core Web Vitals algorithm further emphasizes the company’s long-standing stance that website accessibility and usability go hand in hand.

Some on-page SEO features that are considered website accessibility features include sitemaps and/or breadcrumb links, image alt texts, navigation tabs and menus, anchor texts, and header tags.

It improves user experience

If you work to make your site accessible to as many people as possible, you’ll also be improving its usability and, in turn, its overall quality.

This will boost your customers’ satisfaction.

If your website is easy to use, fast, and accessible, your audience will also get the impression that you care about them and want to give them the best possible experience with your brand.

It widens your reach

According to WHO (World Health Organization), 15% of the global population is disabled.

Taking into account the ephemeral population of people who experience temporary impairments significantly boosts the population of people who require web accessibility. 

What this means is that website accessibility can help you reach a highly valuable market segment that you might have overlooked. Everyone can benefit from a website that is easy to use, and if you make your website accessible, your business will attract more people and get more leads. 

Legal impact

Some countries have legal mandates requiring websites to be accessible to people with disabilities.

The Americans Disabilities Act, the UK Equality Act, and the European Accessibility Act are just a few examples of such legislation. 

These laws require websites (and other digital products and services) to:

• Work with assistive technologies
• Provide content in a format that is accessible to all users
• Prevent discrimination against disabled people

SEO Tips to Enhance Website Accessibility

Improve Page Titles

The titles of web pages are crucial in letting visitors know what the pages are about.

If you’ve opened lots of tabs on your device, the titles can tell you what each tab stands for without actually opening them all. 

Also,

Screen readers use page titles to give users more information about the web page they are navigating.

Use Headings

Heading tags are a crucial part of search engine optimization. When it comes to heading tags, the <H1> tag can only be used once and must have the focus keyword for it to be a good SEO strategy. 

The secondary and tertiary keywords can be used in the <H2> through <H6> heading tags to define the page’s structure even more. 

To improve website accessibility, there should only be one <H1> tag with the main keyword, and the other heading tags should only be used if necessary.

Use ALT Text

An ALT text is useful when an image fails to load. In this case, an alt text is displayed rather than a blank white space. 

As a result, the alt text must be accurate and relevant to the image rather than simply containing a slew of keywords stuffed to help the bots. The ALT text is also a popular intersection with SEO and website accessibility that the screen readers read aloud.

ALT text is useful because it can help you gain exposure and clicks from image searches.

Use a Descriptive Anchor Text

Let’s consider the two hyperlinked descriptions below:

• For more information, click here. 
• For more details, check our detailed guide on How to Boost Your SEO Efforts with Website Accessibility.

Which of these two options sounds better?

The second option sounds better. This is partly because it contains more descriptive words. Anchor text serves more purposes than simply linking to another page within your site (or an external site). 

An anchor text must be used correctly for SEO and for users to be able to find links. If you want to, you can add relevant keywords and a summary of what the linked page is about. 

Create Sitemaps

The pages and files in a website are cataloged in a sitemap.

This is an important feature for a website that has multiple pages that aren’t linked to each other. 

Even though sitemaps help crawlers, their primary purpose is to aid site visitors in finding specific information. 

When designing a website, it is important to keep accessibility in mind. Sitemaps help with that by providing an organized overview of the site and straightforward access to its various sections.

Include Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs provide an alternate way for users to return to previous steps in their journey to the current page. It serves two purposes:

• It allows users to return to the previous page.
• It directs them to the main content.

Breadcrumbs are somewhat similar to a sitemap. They make the structure of a website clearer to search engine spiders and screen reader software.

Have Well-Defined Website Navigation

Having good website navigation won’t matter much if your website only has one page. However, it makes sense to have clear navigation if you have hundreds of pages on your website. 

Your website’s navigation should aid not only your users in finding what they’re looking for but also search engines and people using screen readers.

Focus on Improving Readability

To succeed as an online content creator, you must give your readers something of tremendous value. When you share good content, it attracts shares and comments, which is great because it means more people will visit your site.

The correct title, the keywords in your H1 tag, the ALT text, the internal and external links, the keyword density, and lots more must all be in place for on-page SEO to be successful.

It’s important to keep your content simple because it makes it easier to read for both users and search engines. 

There should also be easy-to-read URLs. Long URLs that are jam-packed with keywords and special characters are not only difficult for humans to read, but they also pose problems for search engine spiders and people who use screen readers. 

Wrapping Up

If your intended audience can’t find or access your brand’s web content, it won’t do any good. To reach more people and increase your ranks in organic search results, you need to prioritize both website accessibility and SEO. This is what will make your company’s online content stand out from the competition.

Here at 1stpageKWs, we plan and tailor every facet of your website to your specific business. Our service will improve your search engine optimization, website design, and marketing strategy. 

Elena Zelencova

Elena is an SEO and Keyword Research enthusiast, Contributes to the blog section, and manages the chat system at 1stpageKWs. She loves spending her precious time with the family.

1stpagekws.com

A well-written review comes in handy when shopping online. In most cases, a product review makes or breaks a consumer’s buying decision.

Most consumers are wary of trying new products, especially when there are alternatives with reviews that provide all the information, they need to make an informed decision.

This is why many people who shop online rely on customer reviews before making a purchase.

Hence,

In April 2021, Google made a change to its review system. This new system gives more priority to reviews that include a lot of information and analysis to help customers make smart buying decisions.

Although Google claims that the product reviews update is minor, you still need to ensure that you meet the new requirements. 

Read on to discover how you can optimize your product reviews to improve your SEO strategy. 

How Do Product Reviews Boost SEO?

Review submissions from returning customers are an excellent source of fresh, original content that will increase your site’s visibility in search engine results. The following statistics from Search Engine Watch should convince you to add product reviews to your online store:

• 72% of consumers will only take the required action after reading a positive review.
• 90% of consumers read customer reviews before they visit a business.
• 31% of your customers tend to spend 31% more on your business if it has great reviews.

Also, 10% of the priority given to a website’s ranking in search results is determined by user feedback in the form of online reviews. Therefore, we must take them seriously.

Here are the different ways through which reviews boost SEO: 

Reviews generate traffic from long-tail keywords

Since long-tail keywords are a string of three or four keyword phrases that are specific to the products or services you offer, you can leverage the power of user reviews without adding your keywords. 

These kinds of niche queries are often buried in comments left by actual customers.

If a potential client searches using terms related to yours, they will likely come across your website.

Reviews boost social sharing

The power of word-of-mouth can be greatly amplified through the use of social media. Nielsen found that recommendations from friends and family were trusted more than any other form of advertising. 

For this reason,

It should come as no surprise that this is also the one most likely to boost revenue for your firm.

With Google’s ability to detect social shares, it’s crucial to integrate reviews into your social strategy.

Reviews increase a site’s organic search results on Google

Since positive reviews can increase your social standing and credibility, paying close attention to them and looking for ways to enhance them can have a significant impact on your search engine optimization.

As you might expect,

Google does take into account your site’s ranking and gives preference to those with higher ratings.

Reviews help you generate more traffic

As consumers look for feedback online, they may form opinions about your brand and its products long before they ever visit your site.

More people will see your content at the most crucial stage of the buying process if you take advantage of reviews.

Steps for Optimizing Product Reviews for SEO

Put your primary keyword in the title

Before you begin writing your review, you should come up with a catchy title.

This is because the title is what the reader will remember most about your post.

Include the name of the product being reviewed in the title and meta description to boost the search engine rankings of the review. By doing so, we help search engine spiders in their indexing efforts.

The click-through rate (CTR) of your links will increase if you choose titles that are interesting and informative.

Google and other search engines use several SEO factors, such as the number of clicks on a page, to decide where it should rank.

Write an attention-grabbing headline

Headlines should be succinct and convey essential information. They need to be written in a way that compels people to continue reading the product review.

Google also places a high value on a catchy headline, so it’s not just for the benefit of the reader.

Consider the reader who is turned off by it and quickly clicks away from your review. If Google sees this, it will lower the importance of your review in search results. 

Write an engaging introduction

Your product review introduction is typically the first paragraph of your blog post.

You should put your most compelling arguments in this paragraph, as it will serve as the backbone of your entire post.

 Ensure your content is unique

To get the most out of your product review’s SEO efforts, you should avoid copying and pasting content from other sites. Search engines like Google can easily detect duplicate content.

Google’s AI is constantly improving, and at this point, it would only approve a piece of content if it was written uniquely.

Instead of just trying to sell the reader on the deal, your review needs to help them.

Optimize the body of the review

The essence of your review should be located in the body.

In this section, you should give the reader all the information they need to fully understand the rest of the content. 

Your review’s main body should contain relevant keywords. If you do this, you’ll have a better chance of being found in Google’s search results for those terms.

You can improve your review’s SEO by optimizing the headings. This is one of the cornerstones of product review optimization.

Add relevant product images

Relevant images of your product are also important for SEO. Using an image that gives the impression that the product is better than it is is an example of a useful image. It increases the likelihood that the reader will follow the link and make a purchase. 

Include a compelling conclusion

In the final paragraph, summarize the key points of your review and explain how the review will help prospective customers. If your review is too long, readers will lose interest and leave without reading the conclusion.

A compelling call-to-action after your review is essential to get good SEO results from your review.

The call-to-action should be clear, short, and convincing enough to get your readers to act. 

Track traffic with Google Analytics

To maximize your earnings, track how many people read your review and how many of them immediately click on the product’s link. In other words, you can see how your product review is performing in comparison to other similar reviews on the web.

It’s also a good idea to monitor shares and clicks from social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to get a sense of how much interest there is in your content and how it’s being shared.

All of this data can be monitored with Google Analytics. It’s a free, straightforward tool that gives you everything you need to improve the performance of your affiliate blog posts.

Optimize your review for social media platforms

Including an opt-in form on your affiliate site or blog is a great way to boost the visibility of your social media posts.

Place this form in a visible location on your website or blog, like a sidebar, so that visitors can fill it out whenever they like. 

Add a link to this page in the review’s footer and on any other pages that you think would be useful to readers.

The next step is to start getting traffic from social media by sharing links on platforms like Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Wrapping Up

Having great product reviews online is a potent SEO strategy.

The challenge comes in mastering the best method for applying them.

As an online vendor, you should focus on using reviews as means of boosting your SEO, getting more traffic, and increasing your conversion rates. Hopefully, this guide has shown you what to do.

Elena Zelencova

Elena is an SEO and Keyword Research enthusiast, Contributes to the blog section, and manages the chat system at 1stpageKWs. She loves spending her precious time with the family.

1stpagekws.com

Internal links are hyperlinks that redirect to pages on the same website.

These links help in passing PageRank (or SEO value) and context via anchor text and surrounding content.

Why are Internal Links Crucial for SEO?

Internal links play a key role in helping Google find, index, and understand all your website pages.

If you use internal links strategically, they can send your website’s page authority (or PageRank) to important pages.

In a nutshell, internal linking is important for any website that wants to rank high in Google.

Best Internal Linking Practices

Now that we’ve taken a brief look at why internal links are important to SEO,

let’s proceed to the best internal linking strategies that you can implement for your website:

Include SEO into your content marketing strategy

When you consider SEO while developing your content strategy, you will be able to create content that is appropriate for internal linking. Think about the personas of your audience, their challenges, and the route they take to be converted to customers.

What is the view of your customers about their challenges and what are the possible solutions?

Which terms do they use to search for information on Google?

What is the intent behind the keywords, and in what format should you present your content?

Create content that meets the immediate needs of your audience and anticipate their questions as they move through the funnel. Then add internal links at strategic places in the content to capture their interest and answer the questions in their mind as they go through the content.

Make use of topic clusters and pillar pages

Topic clusters refer to related buckets of content that cover broad concepts. Each group of content has one pillar page as well as many supporting cluster pages.

Topic clusters are effective in internal linking strategy because they create hubs of relevant content.

Each pillar page creates an overview of a high-level topic and also introduces different subtopics.

Then,

Pillar pages redirect to more detailed blog posts about the subtopics using appropriate sub-headings. These blog posts are referred to as cluster pages. The cluster pages link back to the main pillar page.

Cluster pages also link to other cluster pages where appropriate, and also link to other pillar pages.

Topic clusters play a key role in demonstrating expertise and depth of topic coverage to Google. They also organize the content into subtopics which is what Google is interested in.

According to an announcement made by Google, they made a breakthrough in ranking that allows them to have a better understanding of the relevance of each passage from your web pages, and even index the passages separately.

Link out from authoritative web pages

Instead of making this process more difficult than it needs to be, you can easily assess the authority of your web pages through the strength of their backlink profile by using tools like Ahrefs or Moz.

You don’t need to use algorithms or sculpt PageRank. Just ensure that you add internal links to relevant pages that have lots of great backlinks. The higher the number of backlinks you have, the more links you will be able to add without affecting their value.

Include keywords in the anchor text

Some SEO experts advise that you are mindful of the way you use the exact match anchor text to avoid being penalized by Google.

I don’t agree with this recommendation.

There is nothing wrong with linking to your content from your domain using relevant, keyword-rich anchor text.

It is your website,

So you are free to do what you want. Just don’t stuff the anchor text with keywords unnaturally. Also, don’t overuse the keyword-rich anchor texts if you are building backlinks from other sites.

You have nothing to worry about provided your internal links and anchor text are intended to offer value to your users and are meaningful contextually.

The fact that Google says “Avoid using excessively keyword-filled or lengthy anchor text just for search engines” does not mean you shouldn’t use exact match keywords. It means you can use anchor texts like the ones below:

• • SEO strategy
  • How to build an SEO strategy
  • Create an SEO strategy that works
  • Develop an effective SEO strategy
  • 14pt;”>Search engine optimization

The statement also means you should anchor texts that look like this: “search engine optimization SEO strategy tactics.”

I believe you notice the difference. You cannot follow Google’s recommendations and use short anchor text without incorporating exact match keywords. If you include SEO strategy in the anchor text, and you have a web page with content about it, link to the page.

Mix up the anchor text

Anchor text is very important. Google uses anchor text to understand what you have on the other side of a link. It influences your ranking on Google search results, so you need to use it in a way that benefits you.

I believe that when you publish content,

You wants it to rank for other terms apart from the head term. You want the page to rank for tons of long-tail keywords that drive massive targeted traffic.

An effective strategy that you can use to influence your rankings for the search terms with lower volume is to include them in your internal links.

If a web page has lots of internal links with exact match anchor text, mix the anchor text up. Try and use broad match variations, especially if the variations portray the search intent of your main keyword.

Place more priority on relevance than location

Statements like “internal links above the fold or within the first paragraph are more valuable” are controversial because they go against Google’s opinion on relevance and user experience. Packing links unnaturally into your content as high as possible can harm usability and also affect trust.

This shows that Google cannot implement a ranking signal that is not user-friendly.

When placing links, think about who your users are. Add links to areas that are relevant and useful on your page.

You are free to pack your subheadings with relevant context about topics that relate to the links in your content.

Don’t forget that context is king. If there is a section on your page that talks about the role of backlinks, that is the most appropriate place to link to a blog post about backlinks.

But if you don’t have a page about that topic, you can still introduce something into the content as long as it is relevant to the link.

Include links from old content

Everyone talks about this but only a few implement it. The truth is the more content you create, the longer it will take you to go back and include internal links.

When you start to build a topic cluster, you may not have many opportunities to add internal links. But when you start creating massive long-form content, you need to add links from every related blog post on your website.

In a nutshell, when you focus on creating long-form content, you need to spend some hours per week to add relevant and useful internal links.

Fix broken internal links

14pt;”>Broken links are common in SEO. The number of broken links on your site is proportional to the size of your website.

It is important to fix broken links because they affect PageRank, disrupt the user experience, and harm the crawl budget.

You also need to fix redirects. If you redirect web pages to a new URL but the original anchor text is not updated, the links may end up sending different signals to Google about what the new page is about.

This may be scary if you have tons of pages on your website.

However,

You have nothing to worry about. You are most likely to have just a few dozen custom-built internal links that point to those pages from your blog posts. Other links are likely to be navigational links so you have no business with them.

Dofollow links

If you have been in the business of content creation and content marketing for a while, then you must be familiar with PageRank sculpting. Back in those days, webmasters would nofollow internal links to stop PageRank from going to unwanted URLs.

This would direct the flow of links to important pages while also allowing links to be useful to users.

This is no longer the case.

Now, PageRank goes away through nofollow links. It does not go to the destination page, neither does it get distributed to the other links on the page. It simply ‘evaporates.’

In a nutshell,

You should dofollow internal links. An exception to this strategy is if you have millions of pages with low-value which you don’t want to be discovered by Google.

Don’t use automation

Tools that automate internal linking are not good for the following reasons:

• Internal links generator tools add links without having an in-depth understanding of the pages that need the best links or the pages on your site that are most appropriate to link from.
• Depending on how big your site is, plugins can easily create 1,000 exact match anchor text links within a short period; thereby leading to anchor text spam.
• Internal links are not only meant for SEO but to also help users find relevant content on your website. Plugins or bots ignore this need.

Wrapping Up

Internal links are useful for SEO.

SEO goes beyond just optimizing title tags, including keywords, and building links. It entails giving your users the best experience, being found throughout their journey through the funnel, and ensuring Google and other search engines see the value you offer as much as your users do.

incorporating a strategic approach to internal linking that will help you achieve these goals and also increase efficiencies to yield the best results.

Elena Zelencova

Elena is an SEO and Keyword Research enthusiast, Contributes to the blog section, and manages the chat system at 1stpageKWs. She loves spending her precious time with the family.

1stpagekws.com

Ranking for competitive keywords and optimizing your web pages for conversions is the best way to increase your website traffic and boost sales.

However,

There’s another thing that your website should be optimized for; something that many marketers ignore.

One of the most effective ways to have a high-converting sales funnel is to optimize your landing pages for branded searches. In this article, I will show you what branded search is, why it is important, and how you can optimize for branded searches to boost your rankings and revenue.

What is Branded Search?

Branded search is a form of query whereby someone types a search term containing the name of your brand or product.

In most situations,

Branded searches are used by people that are already familiar with your product. You have a high chance of converting people searching your product name into customers (unlike those that randomly stumbled on your brand).

Hence,

Branded search is an important component of a sales funnel. About half of people often type ‘branded name reviews’ in Google before making a purchase.

Why Should You Run a Branded Search Campaign for Your Business?

Now that you know what branded search is;

Here are some of the reasons why you need to run branded search campaign:

It brings better traffic

The traffic that branded search gives to your website is usually more qualified than what other keywords give. In a nutshell,

Branded traffic goes further in the sales funnel and usually moves close to taking action.

It boosts conversions

People hardly convert the first time they land on a website.

The first time a visitor landed on your website may be via paid traffic and then returned to your website to find more information. The second visit is usually from users that are searching for your product and found your website organically.

It builds awareness

Branded search campaigns are useful for increasing brand awareness.

Whenever your brand ranks at the top of search results, your name will be seen by new audiences.

Ensure you manage the content that the search engines show because it is the first thing those searching for your brand will see.

It boosts brand reputation

You can use branded search campaigns to manage the content that search engines show in search results.

If you have a bad review that comes up first when users search for your company name, you can control the content in the search results by optimizing your website for branded search terms. This will reduce the effect of the negative review on your site and brand.

Unlike paid campaigns, branded search campaigns take time before producing results.

However,

You can enjoy the benefits discussed above if you have a solid strategy and you are consistent. If you’re interested in boosting your site’s SEO, you can consider a branded search campaign.

Tips for Optimizing Your Landing Page for Branded Search

Optimizing for branded searches may appear to be a daunting task.

Fortunately,

Businesses that use branded searches have control over these queries.

As a result, there are steps that you need to take to get more traffic from branded searches. These steps are important elements of your search strategy.

Here are the steps you can take to optimize your website or landing page for branded searches:

Dominate results obtained from direct searches

One important thing that you must always know when you want to optimize for branded search is this: In most cases, branded search is driven by Research Online Purchase / Buy Offline or Online (ROPO / ROBO) behavior.

This means that the searchers already know your brand and they are ready to buy your product.

They are also ready to learn more about you online.

This should motivate you to pay attention to direct search results and the first impression they make when searchers look at them for the first time.

The first impression in this case matters a lot.

Thus, you need to carry out these exercises regularly:

Perform the direct search

The direct search may include your full business name, your business name and your name/ owner’s name, your business name and your business address, and lots more.

Go through the reviews and ratings

These are the rich snippets that searchers see immediately.

By evaluating these reviews, you will know if you should channel more effort towards a specific platform to improve your rating on the platform.

You will also know if you should push any of your listings (with better reputation) higher in search results.

More so,

You will know if you should verify your presence on new local platforms (especially platforms that rank for your competitor’s name).

You can get better rich snippets that are easier to control on smaller local directories like BizJournals, Business.com, and Dir Journal amongst others.

Check third-party assets

Third-party assets include your interviews, articles about you, standalone reviews, and lots more.

Checking these assets will help you know if you need to create more assets. If you need to create more third-party assets, you will also discover if you should publicize them.

Check visual search results (i.e. images and videos)

By evaluating your visual search results, you will be able to know if they are hurting your first impression and if you need to publicize more images.

Due to the ever-evolving nature of search results, you need to carry out the tasks above regularly. You also need to create and implement a new plan at least once a year.

Gather and organize your branded search terms

Many businesses, even big brands, usually miss this step.

Don’t forget that your most important branded search is not limited to your business name. There are lots of ways through which potential customers search for your brand online.

Here are some of the most important ways that you need to pay attention to:

• ROPO searches (Your brand name + reviews)
• High-intent searches (Your brand name + your product or feature)
• Navigational searches (Your brand name + contact) or login
• Competitive research (Your brand name vs. your competitor’s name)

Your target should be to rank as the first search result for all the search types above.

This will ensure that you don’t end up losing a customer to a competitor that is advising against your brand or suggesting a better alternative.

Also,

You need to think about the ‘blended’ search results that can distract users from your brand. These include:

• Videos
• Local pack
• People Also Ask
• Product results
• Images
• And lots more

Whenever these come up for your branded search, you need to include a different strategy to conquer them. For instance, ‘brand name vs. your competitor’s name’ needs an image.

Optimize for local three-pack

Local-three pack has altered the way local search optimization is done. It is confusing lots of local businesses and marketers because they don’t see much obvious logic behind it.

Businesses don’t see any official recommendations that can help them understand what can get them into the local three-pack.

Here are some things that you need to know about optimizing for local three-pack rankings:

• Complete and verify your local listing (including newer sections such as Google Local Posts).
• Work on your Google reviews. According to Bright Local, businesses that appear in the Google Local three-pack have about 47 reviews.
• Ensure you mention the branded search queries on your landing page. This improves on-page SEO.
• Keywords are also important here. Include keywords in your business description on Google local, business reviews, and on your page amongst others.
• Use seasonal fluctuations to your advantage.

Wrapping Up

Branding is a powerful tool since it can help your website to gain engagement that will give you the results you need to boost conversions.

Branded search research is a valuable source of data online.

Unfortunately,

it is neglected by many businesses. It can help you know more about your niche, your competition, the product you sell, and problems with your website (and how you can fix them).

In a nutshell, here’s a summary of the actions that you need to take to optimize for branded searches:

• Include your brand name in meta titles.
• Identify the branded keywords consumers use to find your products or services.
• Answer questions that your consumers ask.
• Optimize your business to rank at the top of local map packs.
• Create useful tools that are unique to your brand. These tools can help you generate leads and boost traffic.
• Publish content on websites with high traffic, and
• Promote your brand offline.

Apart from generating more traffic to your landing page, optimizing for branded search will also increase the trust customers have in your brand; thereby improving brand loyalty.

This comes with many benefits such as increased brand reputation and better conversions.

To optimize for branded searches and improve your search results, you need to constantly monitor and optimize your brand strategy.

Elena Zelencova

Elena is an SEO and Keyword Research enthusiast, Contributes to the blog section, and manages the chat system at 1stpageKWs. She loves spending her precious time with the family.

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