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7 TIPS FOR OPTIMISING CONTENT FOR VOICE SEARCH

By the end of 2019, the US alone will have more than 67 million voice assisted devices in use. And of the 2 trillion global Google searches performed each year, half of those are expected to come from voice search by 2020.

Voice search is changing the very way that online content is created and managed. Traditional content creation methods are unable to cater for this huge shift toward voice assistant devices. Which may prove challenging for many digital marketers and content creators.

To help you stay ahead of the game, we have pulled together a list of our top tips for optimising your content for voice search. So if you’re ready, let’s get started.

1 – Up Your Question Quota

The majority of searches performed online are question phrases… people just love to ask Google for an answer. But there is a difference between the way that people ask questions via a text search and a voice search.

Whenever a user performs a typed search, it’s typically a compact, shorthand version of how they would vocally present the phrase.

As an example:

Typed: Red velvet recipe

Voice: How do I make a red velvet cake?

To improve your chances of making it in the voice searches, you need to ask more questions with a natural structure and tone.

The perfect place to use full question phrases is in your headers. You can then use the header body to answer the question. Try to weave in semantically related questions where possible. And always aim to ask and answer those most important questions as naturally as possible.

2 – Avoid Fluff and Filler

As people type less and talk more, avoiding fluff and filler has never been as important as it is today. The intention of voice searches is to deliver accurate and easily digestible results.

Try to keep your verbiage as clear and succinct as possible. Avoid complex phrases and difficult to understand words. And get straight to the point.

While listening to lengthy audio output is much easier than reading large blocks of text, we live in a world where people demand instant gratification.

Make your message as clear as possible from the get-go and try to include a summary at the beginning. This helps both reader and search engine understand what to expect from the content.

3 – Get Conversational

The search engines are always going to favour good content above all else. So creating this as you always do is important. However, what will change is the way that you write.

As voice devices read your content aloud to the user, natural language is going to start to dominate. Look at the way you normally write and compare this with how you would have a conversation with someone.

You will probably notice stark differences between the two. And typically, typed text is much more formal and less natural sounding to the ear than spoken text.

Don’t be afraid to interject linguistics, speech disfluencies and filled pauses into your content. As voice assistants evolve to become more human sounding, these all help add to a more natural experience.

Colloquialisms are good. But remember that they tend to be regional and not everyone is going to understand their meaning. Think of the bigger picture but add as much character as you can.

4 – Put Yourself in the Searchers Shoes

We all know the importance of keywords. And while they are slowly starting to take second place to context, they are always going to play a vital role in SEO.

There are literally thousands of tools out there to help you discover the best keywords to use. But how do you find natural sounding question phrases instead?

The first thing that you can do is think about how you would ask a question out loud. Then head on over to Google and perform a search for the exact wording via the voice search function.

Scroll on down to the bottom of the page to wear the ‘people also search for’ section is. This will throw up a lot of related question phrases you can use along with your primary search phrase (PSP).

While SEO tools are useful. Sometimes the most powerful tool we have is our own thought process. Use this as the foundation for discovering more semantically related phrases.

5 – Optimise Old Content

If you are thinking about getting ready for voice search, optimising your current content is much easier than creating brand new content. It also gives you a better understanding of what you need to do when new content is needed.

Now, while it would be easy to focus all of your energy on optimising for voice search… it’s important to remember that other avenues are always going to be used too.

Just as some people have decided to hang onto home phones, cable TV and CD players, desktop searches won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. So you need to find a balance between traditional SEO and voice focused SEO.

In all honesty, they are two of the same things. The only difference is the way that your content is delivered and the way that you need to construct it. As an example, instead of foregoing keywords completely, use conjunctions and articles to create natural sounding phrases.

Voice search SEO is still pretty new. So many of the techniques and strategies you will need to use are still being worked out.

6 – Build on Mobile Search

Mobile search changed the way that SEO and content was implemented. A brand-new set of search queries, such as ‘near me’ entered the world of search terms.

As mobile devices use GPS and Wi-Fi signals to determine a user’s location, optimising for geographic keywords and Google my business became vital.

And here’s the thing:

Voice search and mobile search are much closer together than voice search and desktop search. But why?

More often than not, people use voice search when it is not possible to use text search. And these searches are performed on mobile phones and voice assistant devices.

So understanding how to optimise your website and content for mobile search can go a long way with helping your voice search efforts.

7 – Get Structured

You’ve probably seen content featured at the top of traditional searches. These might be a bullet point lists, ingredients or event dates, etc.  

But what are they? 

These are known as rich snippets. And the only way you can ever be featured for them is to use structured markup. 

Structured markup let’s the search engines better understand the context of your content. You provide all of the information needed and Google does the rest.

And there are literally thousands of different types of structured markup out there. A great example of how structured markup help is with video content.

Google is smart. But it’s not quite ready to be able to watch videos and determine what they are about. And this is where structured markup comes into play.

You basically tell Google (and the other search engines) what the video content is about. It then takes this information and is able to display the video in the search results to the right people.

Check out schema.org to find the perfect structured markup for voice search. These already exist and let the search engines know that your content is voice search friendly.

Final Thoughts on Voice Search Optimisation

When it comes to winning online, being ready to make changes as soon as possible goes a long way with helping.

You might think that voice search is not important for your business. But regardless of your industry or niche, it will be.

As more and more people move away from traditional text and screen searches, the search engines are going to be looking for content that translates well into spoken words.

If 1 trillion voice searches are performed each year and you are not voice search ready, your online business is missing out on a huge number of potential opportunities.

Head on over to our blog today for much more on the rise of voice search, actionable SEO tips and tricks, and a dedicated archive to everything digital marketing.

Article first published here: 7 TIPS FOR OPTIMISING CONTENT FOR VOICE SEARCH

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3 Awesome Messaging Apps for Businesses to Try in 2019

Over the past few years, instant messaging apps have become the de facto medium for businesses. From internal team communication to easier contact options for consumers, I.M apps can help increase productivity and sales.

Many of the apps featured in this review guide offer a multi-faceted approach to communication. Combining instant messaging with video calls, screen sharing, voice messaging, real-time calls, private chat rooms and much more, it’s easy to see why they are such a popular choice.

To help you understand which of the business messaging apps is your best choice, we will take a closer look at the features each one offers along with how much it costs.

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  Why Use I.M over Email and Call?

Email serves a purpose. But when it comes to instantaneous, real-time communication it just doesn’t cut it. From slow delivery to being marked as spam… it’s pretty much the dinosaur of communication today.

Calls are also a method of communication that’s rapidly falling out of favour. When you can say what you need to in one or two sentences without spending hours on the phone, productivity increases. 

Here’s a quick summary of why instant messaging is superior to calls and emails:

  Instant delivery and notifications

Brief sentences instead of essays

Opt-in and opt-out discussions

Easy to navigate ongoing conversations

Call, text, video and image based communication

Ability to create group forums and chat rooms

Direct notifications or send to all

Easy to install on mobile devices

creates a more friendly and personal experience

See when a user is replying in real time

  When it comes to instant messaging apps for customers to contact you, you can increase sales and communication by forgoing phone calls and emails. Messenger contact is free to use for the customer and makes it easier for  phone-shy people to reach out to you.

And in a world where fast communication is vital to beat out the competition, instant messenger apps for businesses are invaluable. Say goodbye to excessively long emails and say hello to lightning-fast communication come day or night.

Naver Line

Monthly Cost: Free

Official Downloads: 1 Billion +

Best for: Customer and Team Communication

Why? Hugely popular in Asia and the USA. A great choice for a completely free communication platform that deserves a try.

Launched in 2011, Line Messenger is a subsidiary of Naver Corporation. By 2015, Line had more than 600 million registered users. Today, more than 187 million users login each month.

Available on Android devices, iOS and as a standalone desktop app, it offers everything that a business needs to communicate for absolutely no cost. 

Users can reach each other by username, phone number or QRcode and the ability to create unlimited private forums and chat rooms makes it easy to separate teams and customers.

Key Features of Line App:

    Unlimited private chat rooms and messaging windows

Add up to 100 users into a single group messaging forum

Free VoIP calls and Video Calls

Option to make paid calls to landline numbers

User-to-user instant messages

Send voice, image and video files

Secure, encrypted messaging

Google Chrome extension available

Timeline features

Millions of stickers and options to create branded collections

Line Pay – Global credit card payment platform

  Download Line for free from the official Line Corporation website.

Slack

Monthly Cost: Free – $560 AUD per user per year.

Daily Users: 10 million +

Best for: Team level Communication

Why? The best known of all the apps out there. 

    Slack is by far the most used business messaging platform on a global scale and for good reason. With several plans available from free to enterprise grid, there is a solution for all sizes of businesses. The free plan offers all of the features that small to medium sized businesses will need. 10k searchable messages, 2 factor authentication, 1-on-1 video calls, and integration of up to 10 apps.

Standard and Plus packages cost $6.67 and $12.50 per user, per month, which is quite expensive when the free plan plus a few external apps can take care of everything you need. Enterprise Grid pricing is non-disclosed, which is never a great sign. Pricing transparency is vital for businesses. However, costs disclosed by users who have taken on the plan state it ranges between $500 – $580 AUD per user, per year.  

With that said, Slack has cornered the market for communication and sharing and makes organisation so much simpler than email and call.

Key Features of Slack:

    Use @name to directly notify a user of a message

Free VoIP calls from user to user 

Up to 10 thousand searchable messages (free plan)

User-to-user instant messages

Private and public chat rooms

Multiple app integration (unlimited in paid version)

Mobile and desktop versions available

Group calls and screen sharing (paid version)

  Download Slack for free from the official Slack website.

Workplace by Facebook

Monthly Cost: Free – $4.30 AUD per user per month.

Daily Users: 2 million paid + free users unknown

Best for: Company Wide Communication

Why? Reasonably new platform that comes fully-loaded and is super affordable for all.

    Much like the Social Media giants traditional platform, Workplace by Facebook looks pretty similar. The main difference is that it caters to employees and businesses and makes communication among team members across organisations a breeze. Employees can create profiles, businesses can use it as a central communication hub, and a whole host of messaging and scheduling tools take things to the next level.

With 2 plans available, including standard and premium, its low cost makes it ideal for even the smallest of budgets. If you know how to use standard Facebook, you will have no issues with Workplace by Facebook at all. Private channels make it safe and secure to transmit documents from one user to another, unlimited groups can be created, and task management is improved with app integrations.

Key Features of Workplace by Facebook:

    Multiple Communication avenues

Live streaming of video

Mobile and desktop video and voice calls 

Work Chat & Workplace apps (mobile devices)

Unlimited video, photo and file storage

Unlimited project and team groups

File storage provider integration

Windows Desktop Notifier 

Secure company collaboration 

Pre-built integration directory – Paid plan

Community management admin controls – Paid plan

IT team monitoring tools – Paid plan

APIs for bots & custom integration – Paid plan

Integrations with compliance providers & e-discovery – Paid plan

SSO (single sign-on) – Paid plan

Active Directory support – Paid plan

G Suite, Windows Azure AD, Okta, Integration (plus many more) – Paid plan

1:1 Admin email support – Paid plan

  Join Workplace by Facebook for free on the official website.

Notable Mentions

Naturally, there are literally hundreds of other worthy chat and workplace specific apps out there to choose from. 

  Microsoft teams

Flock

Spideroak semaphore

Twist

Glip by RingCentral

Zoho cliq

WhatsApp messenger

Ryver

  These instant messenger and communication apps are all perfect for business is and range from free to $14 AUD a month per user. Whether you are a large organisation or a small startup business, communication platforms can help boost your output by streamlining workflow and task assignment.

Of course, you don’t only want to focus on the internal side of business. It is important that you provide an instant messaging service for your customers to get in touch with you. While Facebook messenger definitely leads the way with this, don’t overlook the power and performance of Line messenger… especially if you do business across Asia and Oceania.

For more fantastic reviews, tips and tricks and digital marketing strategies, head over to our blog now. We upload fresh content on a daily basis covering a variety of topics including SEO, SEM, web design and much more.

Article first published here: 3 Awesome Messaging Apps for Businesses to Try in 2019

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The History of Google – Then and Now

A giant among giants. In just 25 years, Google has managed to grow from a small company to one of the most valuable multi-billion companies in the world.

Google’s logo and search engine home page are easily recognisable all around the world. Today, Google serves about 4.5 billion users in 160 countries and 123 languages.

But how did it all begin and where is Google headed in the future? Let’s take a look at Google’s history.

Early History

Despite what you may think, Google was not the first web-based search engine to appear on the worldwide web. The first search engine used to search for content on the Internet was Archie. 

Google’s history begins in 1995, which is when Larry Page met Sergey Brin. Page was studying at Stanford and Brin was considering studying there. The two started working on an engine called BackRub in 1996.

Backrub alludes to the way that the engine’s algorithms rank pages. You guessed right, backlinks were extremely important even back then. The technology that they developed was called PageRank; it determined a website’s relevance by checking the number and importance of pages, mainly by checking for other pages that linked back to the original site.

Page and Brin operated out of their dorm rooms. They built a server network using cheap, used computers. Backrub worked on Stanford University’s servers for a bit more than a year, but as the engine grew, Page and Brin had to expand and grow.

Both Page and Brin wanted to license their search engine technology at an early stage of development. After a number of failed negotiations, they decided to keep Google and seek more finance.

On September 15th, 1997, Google.com was registered. The term Google is a play on words of ‘googol’, a mathematical term which is used to describe the number 1 followed by 100 zeros ( 1 googol = 1.0 × 10100) . 

Funding

It wasn’t long before Google was noticed by investors. After a quick demo of the search engine at work in August 1997, Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim was so impressed that he wrote the pair a check for $100,000. 

The problem was that the two founders couldn’t cash in as Google Inc. did not yet exist as a legal entity. They incorporated on September 4th, 1998 and they eventually raised $900,000 more. Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos was one of Google’s angel investors.

Google’s first office was opened in Menlo Park, California. It was attached to the garage of a friend who sublet the place to the new corporation. It was about that time that Google hired its first employee, Craig Silverstein. He stayed with the company for more than ten years.

At the time of launch, Google.com answered about 10,000 queries every day. Google now processes more than 63,000 search queries every second, which translates to about 5.6 billion searches per day.

An Old Rival

Long before Google, Facebook, and YouTube, Yahoo was the undisputed king of the internet. Yahoo reigned supreme for more than a decade, but was sold for a mere $5 billion in 2016. 

Yahoo’s history is interesting on its own, but as you may have already guessed, Google’s rise to prominence had everything to do with Yahoo’s downfall. Yahoo had a chance to acquire Google in 1998 for just $1 million. They turned down the offer. In 2002, Yahoo’s CEO Terry Semel offered Google $3 million for the company. It was Page and Brin’s time to Turn Yahoo down, reportedly holding out for 5$ billion.

Yahoo’s platform was successful at the time. Its directories were designed to answer questions and view emails. They rejected Google’s PageRank algorithm because they didn’t think it would benefit their platform in any way. 

In the following years, Yahoo missed several more opportunities to acquire small companies that would go on to completely change the way we think of the internet today. Some notable examples include Facebook, YouTube, and eBay.

Constant Growth

Google was no ordinary search engine. The company’s willingness to innovate and keep moving forward were key factors to its success. Adwords (since renamed to Ads), Google’s own pay-per-click advertising platform has been the biggest contributor to their success.

Improvements, such as the doodle series, multi-language support and the Google toolbar also played an important role in the search engine’s success.

 In 2001, Google acquired Deja.com, an archive of 500 million discussions dating all the way back to 1995. In the same year, Google launched Google images and released their first annual ‘Google Zeitgeist’, a way to see what other people all over the world are searching for.

Google Adsense, which allowed businesses to connect with advertisers from all over the world, was announced in 2003. Google was growing at an incredible rate, and in 2004, moving to their new office at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, known as the ‘Googleplex. 

Google launched Gmail in 2004. What was then an invite-only service now serves more than 425 million users. Google finally entered the stock market, offering the public class A shares at $85 each.

New Heights

2005 was another great year for Google. Google Maps was born and Google set its eyes on the mobile market. Google Earth launched in the summer of 2005.

Google Analytics changed the way businesses track and measure their marketing impact. Even today, it’s one of the most useful free marketing tools available on the market.

2006 was the year that Google bought YouTube for a whopping $1.65 billion. Today, YouTube is estimated to be worth around 75$ billion dollars. Google and ‘googling’ were added to the Oxford English dictionary in 2006. 

Street View debuted in 2007 and is now available in more than 50 countries. Android made its first appearance in 2007 and was released officially on September 23, 2008.

In 2008, Google Chrome was introduced to the world. It quickly established itself as one of the fastest and most secure browsers in the market. It’s currently the most used web browser, with a market share of 64%.

Google+ launched in 2011 and Chromecast in 2013. Google’s smart home speakers powered by Google assistant launched in 2016.  

Logo

Google’s logo has changed quite a bit over the past 20+ years. The original logo was designed by Brin himself using GIMP. The logo used between 1999 and 2013 was designed by Ruth Kadar. A new, revised logo was unveiled in September 2015. 

The logo is regularly modified in the form of doodles. Doodles come in all forms and shapes, celebrating all kinds of different events and anniversaries.

Goooooooooogle’s Big Numbers

63,000 searchers per second, 3.8 million searches per minute, 228 million searches per hour, 5.6 billion searches per day. Wow!

Google Search was responsible for 63.1% of queries in October 2018.

Google Search’s desktop market share is 90.22% (95.2% on mobile).

15% of all searches on Google are unique. 

Google owns more than 200 companies.

Google earned $39.1 billion in revenue for Q4 of 2018.

90% of all internet users see Google Display ads.

Gmail has 1.5 billion active users in 2019. Its market share is 27%.

  And there’s no sign of Google slowing down anytime soon. Unless the world turns upside down, Google will continue to dominate the search and video market for a long time to come. 

Learn more about Google and digital marketing by visiting our blog today!

Article first published here: The History of Google – Then and Now

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The Ultimate Exit Survey Guide

Some users will convert. Some will sign up for your newsletter. But what if people don’t really do what you want them to do? How can you tell if too many visitors are leaving your website and what can you do about it?We do everything we can to make sure users make it to our website. Once users do make it to our website, we do everything we can to make sure they stay there.

An exit survey can help you learn more about the state of your website. Here’s everything you need to know.

What Is an Exit Survey?

Exit surveys are shown to visitors just as they’re about to leave your website. Exit surveys often come in the form of a pop up that appears if a visitor moves their cursor away towards the browser toolbar. Other mouse movements can be set to trigger the survey.

Now, why would you want to annoy visitors with a pop up survey when they are about to leave? Most people will ignore the survey anyway. That’s one way to look at it.

Think about it this way. If visitors are leaving sooner than you’d want them to, then chances are they won’t be returning anytime soon. It makes sense to try and learn more about their experiences on the website, even if sudden pop ups may come off as spammy. 

It may be the case that only a small percentage of the users who leave your website actually complete the survey. However, even such small numbers can tell a lot about the state of your website.

Any kind of feedback that you can get is good feedback. You’d be surprised at the actual number of people who complete exit surveys.

What Are the Pros and Cons of Exit Surveys?

Exit surveys may not sound too exciting, but they can help you discover problems with usability, layout, value proposition, content, and the list goes on. Here’s why you might want to consider adding an exit survey to your website:

  Surprisingly, exit surveys have high response rates and they often outperform other kinds of website surveys. Maybe people are eager to express their discontent. Maybe they just like filling out surveys.

People who fill out exit surveys provide you with the most valuable insights. Of course, you want to take into account the opinion of happy or converting customers too, but it’s often hard to improve when all the feedback that you get is positive. Finding out what doesn’t work that well will help research and reduce bounce and exit rates.

Lower bounce rates translate into higher conversion rates. Knowledge is power. If you know that people think your product is overpriced, then adjusting the price tags or adding more value to your product will most likely increase conversions in the near future.

  Be that as it may, exit surveys are not always reliable, especially if samples are small. We’ve mentioned the good so it’s only fair that we tell you about the bad as well:

  Exit surveys are intrusive. There’s no other way to put this. A large pop up never makes for a good user experience. 

This is not a problem, if the user would just leave and never come back. But exit surveys can be triggered accidentally if users hover over specific elements during their stay on your website. Showing an intrusive exit survey to a user who’s just browsing is more than just awkward. 

Results can be biased. Some visitors may see exit surveys as an opportunity to express their frustration. In this case, you might receive conflicting feedback from confused and agitated users, which may make it difficult to come to sensible conclusions.

  Types of Exit Surveys

Exit surveys come in many shapes and forms. Depending on when users decide to exit your website, different surveys can provide you with valuable insight. Here are the most popular types of exit surveys:

Shopping cart abandonment surveys

Did you know that 70% of users abandon their online shopping carts before making a purchase? Now, that’s a shocking number. An exit survey can offer marketers a quick glimpse behind the scenes. Why are users not completing orders? What is it that stops them from buying?

Of course, this can be anything from an unexpected increase in price, lack of interest, lack of trust, to exhaustion at the face of extremely long forms that ask for way too much information. 

To create an abandonment survey, all you have to do is focus on those users who added a product to their cart and then decided to leave. Here are some sample questions that you could include in your survey:

    Why did you decide to quit shopping? A generic question that can work surprisingly well.

Having trouble completing your order? This one’s a bit trickier. It implies that the user wants to complete the order but something’s holding them back. 

Do you have any questions before completing your order? Similarly to the previous question, it’s implied that the user wants to complete the order. These last two questions are great for helping troubled customers convert, but don’t do much in the way of obtaining information from users that just don’t feel like buying anything anymore. 

    This is exactly why being able to track the time that a user has spent on your website is extremely important. Someone who has had something on their cart for a long time, may actually have trouble completing the order. They decide to leave the website in frustration. Questions two and three can solve the problem and help them convert.

A user who just added a product on their cart and decided to leave after a few seconds, may have a completely different reason for wanting to go. A more general question (such as number one above) may give you a better idea of the reason behind their decision.

Pricing abandonment surveys

Users often make it to the landing page of a product or service but leave when they click through to the plan/pricing page. Obviously, pricing alone can determine whether someone will convert or not, but that’s not always the case.

Of course, when you’re setting up a pricing abandonment survey, you know that a lot of people are going to specifically complain about the product’s price. However, you may discover that pricing alone doesn’t answer many questions that visitors may have about your product. 

You may find that users do not clearly understand how your pricing plans work. Here are some sample questions that you could include in your pricing abandonment survey:

    Is our pricing clear to you? A crucial question, especially if you have several products or service plans on offer. 

  Compared to similar solutions, do you think our prices are lower, higher, or about the same? You may already know how your prices compare to those of your competitors’, but knowing what customers think is probably more important.

  How much would you be willing to pay for our product/service? They say that the customer is always right. If the majority of people leaving your pricing page say they would feel more comfortable with a small drop in price, then it may be wise to take their suggestion into consideration.

  Goal completion surveys

Goal completion surveys are more generic exit surveys that can pop up in places where other more specific surveys wouldn’t make too much sense. 

Goal completion surveys simply ask visitors if they managed to complete their goal during their visit, whatever that goal may have been. It may be that they found some useful information on your blog; maybe they learned more about your products or services.

Goal completion surveys are more than just about numbers. If customers are able to achieve their goals, then user satisfaction is high; a sign that you’re offering a great user experience. Such general information may not seem very useful but says a lot about the overall state of your website. It doesn’t really matter what their goal is today. Satisfied users are more likely to convert in the future.

  Simple goal completion questions that you can include in your survey include:

    Did you complete the goal of your visit?

From a scale of 1 to 5, how difficult was it to complete your goal?

Would you visit our website again in the future?

How likely are you to recommend our website to a friend?

  Landing page bounce research

People leaving right after making to your landing page is never a good sign. Instead of panicking and trying to guess why people are not taking the actions you want them to take (e.g. sign up to your newsletter, download your new ebook, visit your products page), you can just ask them.

More than any other page on your website, your landing page is designed to hook users with actionable content and great value propositions. If people are leaving without going anywhere else, then chances are you’re either not being as clear as you should, or you’re bombarding users with too much information.

In this case, an exit survey won’t be able to solve all your problems. It can, however, help you uncover the root cause of the problem. Here is what you can ask:

    What should we do to improve your experience on our website?

What more would you like to see on this page?

What prevented you from signing up?

    Exit surveys as a lead generation tool

One of the more effective uses of exit surveys comes in the form of special and limited offers. Just as the user is about to leave, you provide them with a personalised offer that they won’t be able to ignore: a discount, a free consultation, a free guide etc.

You can set up lead generation exit surveys on promotional or specific product pages. Think about it. Just by setting up a convincing exit survey you’re generating leads out of thin air. 

You can use the information you’ve obtained from other exit surveys to position your offers and propositions accordingly—discounts work great if customers believe that your product or service is a bit too expensive for them. 

Make sure you that you don’t ask for too much and that your offer has value. Remember that you’re targeting users who almost clicked away. A name and email for a 20% discount on a mid-range product is a good example of an exit lead generation offer done right. 

Response Rates

How you design your exit surveys, where you place them, and what you ask will affect your response rates. These can vary greatly, but successful exit surveys enjoy response rates of up to 70%. 

The type of survey clearly affects those numbers as well. When users are engaged, surveys have higher response rates (as is often the case with cart abandonment surveys, for example). 

When users are less engaged and not considering taking a specific action (e.g. they’re just browsing your blog), response rates remain low (as is the case with goal completion surveys).

This is all fine and dandy, but what can you do to increase your response rate? If you’re going to take the time to create multiple exit surveys, then you’ll want to make sure that people respond to them as much as possible. 

Using the best practices you can achieve high response rates and collect a large amount of data, even if traffic to your website is low to moderate.

Creating the Best Surveys Possible

Keep it nice and short

Don’t forget that exit surveys are pop ups. No one will engage with a 500-word, essay-long exit survey. Ideally, it should consist of just one question. If you really have more to say, then create more space and spread things out. 

Multiple choice or scale questions work the best. Text-input surveys can work too, but users are less likely to answer those. Still, written feedback is extremely valuable so what you can do is add an extra comment box at the end of the survey—give users the choice to express their concerns in more detail.

Don’t forget to follow up with an appropriate ‘thank you’ message. If you’re asking more than one question, make sure users know about it. They’re much more likely to make it to the end of the survey if they know there’s only one—or two—more questions coming up.

Make it visible

You don’t need to be subtle with your exit surveys—think of them as your last resort. It’s your last chance to capture the user’s attention and prompt them to take action. 

The form should appear in the middle of the screen and should be clearly visible and easy to follow. Unmissable is the word: make use of an overlay, go with a large design, and don’t be afraid of bright colours.

Test

Make sure that your surveys run well on all screens and devices. This is not always easy as buttons and fields may be too small and hard to interact with on mobile phones (especially if you’ve designed your website with desktop users in mind).

Testing tools, such as BrowserStack can help you get it right. Browserstack can help you check out how your website looks and runs on more than 2,000 devices. Needless to say, optimising for mobile is key, even beyond the scope of exit surveys.

To Survey or Not to Survey

There’s much debate around surveys, but exit surveys always seem to spark debates among marketers—some marketers love them, others hate them.

It’s not a matter of getting the code and implementing it on your website. There are more than a dozen tools that can help you create all kinds of exit surveys. The issue rather lies with the intrusive nature of the survey itself.

A well-placed exit survey can help you gain valuable feedback, which is exactly where things can get out of control. Instead of implementing an exit survey for a specific reason (e.g. a need to understand why users abandon their carts at the last moment), many end up using a combination of different exit surveys for more than just that.

We’ve all been to those websites. Navigating through them feels like walking through a field of landmines. And this is exactly why marketers need to be careful with exit surveys—and any kind of intrusive, in-your-face marketing tactic.

Too many pop ups negatively affect the user experience as they target more and more users. Things can quickly spiral out of control. Leverage exit surveys but make sure you know why and when to use them.

For more digital marketing guides, make sure to check out our blog today!

  Article first published here: The Ultimate Exit Survey Guide

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How to Write the Perfect Blog Post

It goes without saying it that writing a blog post is a time-consuming process. One of the worst things that you can do is pull together a blog post without first putting in the required leg work. You can’t simply pluck a random I hear out of thin air, throw some words onto the screen and expected to perform well.

If you find yourself pushed for time and unable to do your research and writing justice, you would be better off not writing at all. Poorly constructed content is one of the biggest reasons why people bounce. And bounce rate ultimately changes how the search engines rank you on the SERPs.

Today we are going to take a closer look at the nine foundations of a perfect blog post. While SEO is important, we are going to push it aside for today and focus purely on constructing a Blog worthy of your readers time. Once you have a Blog writing template and place, future writing becomes much faster and easier to do.

  https://www.talkagency.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/blogging-101-social-video.mp4

  Honest Headlines

When a reader lands on your blog page, it takes them approximately 8 seconds to decide if they are going to stay or if they are going to leave. And this is where having an honest headline can really help.

As the headline is the first thing that your readers are going to notice, you need to make it as attractive and click worthy as possible. With that said, you should avoid using clickbait headlines. They might get the user to click on the link, but again, you can expect the bounce rate to be pretty high.

The aim of the game is to try to grab their attention while being as honest as possible. Think of it as being a micro sales pitch that lets them know what they can expect to receive from your content. 

  How to

10 of the best

Top tips for

An easy guide to

7 reasons why

Why you need to know about

  These are all great formats for a headline that converts. People appreciate content that delivers value, so if your post isn’t an actionable how to guide or a top 10 reasons why… you shouldn’t use that as your headline.

Subheaders

once you have come up with an amazing header, it is time to start working on your subheaders. These help break up large blocks of text into bite-sized, digestible pieces of information that are a pleasure to read.

Whenever you write content for your blog, you want to have a beginning, a middle and an end. And this is where you use subheaders so that the reader is guided from start to end.

Again, just like with your header, subheaders should be eye-catching and intriguing. They should summarise what the following paragraphs are about and give the reader encouragement to continue.

They also make it easier for the reader to scan through your content and find exactly what section they are looking for. As a bonus, they can help with your search engine rankings as Google actively looks at your subheaders for context.

Body Copy

The body copy is the juiciest part of your content. It offers your readers the most value and makes up the bulk of your blog. whenever you write your body copy, you should avoid using filler text and fluff.

Filler text and fluff serves a purpose every now and then. It can help bulk out than content. However, your readers will quickly lose patience if you don’t get to the point.

The average person is prepared to dedicate up to 7 minutes reading a blog post that interests them. On average, the typical person can read through 2000 words in 7 minutes.

But just how long should your content be? It is no secret that longer content is preferred by Google as it offers the most value to the reader. The search engines also look at the length of a post and determine whether it is long enough to be considered as authority content.

As a bare minimum, you should always aim for at least six hundred. and you should remember that you can have too much of a good thing, so try to keep blog post under 3000 words. Yes, longer content may perform better in the search results, but unless your readers are particularly determined, they are not going to spend hours reading.

Statistics

Whenever you use statistics or data in your blog posts, you should back these up with high authority references. By High authority, we do not mean Wikipedia. 

Yes, wiki can be a great source of information but it is all too easily edited on modified by the public. This can cause you to reference inaccurate or false information.

Wherever possible, try to use .Gov and .edu resources and present a summary of what the findings are. The more accurate your content is, the more likely your readers are to trust you. And this can have a knock-on effect with the search engines who will see you as someone who provides value.

Don’t worry if you don’t use references, statistics and data. Not every blog post calls for it. but try to use it where you can as it really helps improve reader retention. 

Visual Elements

No blog post is complete without a few visuals. Be it an infographic, an image, a video, or even a gif, visuals make your content come to life.

But in today’s world of social media,visual elements can also help your content go viral and drive more traffic to your website. Both videos and infra graphics work amazingly well with this and are considered to be especially share-worthy.

Of course, social media sharing a side everyone knows the old saying of a picture tells a thousand words. So whatever kinds of visual imagery you use, you need to make sure that it is relevant to the context of your content.

As an example, if you are writing a blog post about organic gardening, using a photo of a race car we’ll make no sense whatsoever. Every part of your blog post should connect in one way or another. Images and videos are just another piece of the puzzle to fit in.

Summary

At the end of every blog, you should always include a summary or a final thoughts section. This is where you break down everything that you discussed in the main body of your blog and share your thoughts or opinions.

In fact, it is one of the few places where you should share your thoughts and opinions. You should always try to refrain from doing this in the main body copy as the reader is there for authority value and not random opinions.

Basically, your summary will answered the question your blog is covering. It will then follow along with you wrote what you wrote. And then it should wind down the article so that the reader has a conclusion. The summary is also where you can use your call to action, which we will discuss in the next section.

CTA

A CTA or call to action is an important paragraph located at the end of your blog post. Think of it as being a request for the reader to perform a certain action. As an example, a CTA could include the following:

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Share this post on social media

Check out our latest blog post here

  The great thing about placing a call to action at the end of your blog post is that the reader is much more likely to perform the action after receiving value from your content.

And this section is going to be quite short as that is all there is to it.

Making Meta Descriptions Matter

Meta descriptions are often overlooked by many bloggers and websites. but they can be an invaluable tool for encouraging readers to check out your work.

Every time you perform a Google search, you will see a small snippet of information explaining what the content is about. This is your meta description.

instead of leaving Google to auto-generate a metal description that cuts off halfway through, you should try to create your own. Think of it as a window into your content. A place to pique the reader’s interest and encourage them to click on your blog page link.

A well-written meta description should be targeted toward people and not machines. Google is much smarter than many people give it credit for, and it fully understands the context of your meta description content.

Use it in the same way that you would use Twitter. Create a coherent and grammatically correct sentence that tells the reader what they can expect inside. Simple.

Finding a Featured Image

Featured images work in two different ways. Firstly, they are located at the top of your blog post and give an attractive visual to your contents opening.

Secondly, they can help readers find your content whenever they perform a Google image search. If you use image alt tags to describe the image, whenever someone performs a search using those terms, it will be displayed to them in the Google image search.

Think of your featured image as being the cover of a book. it should entice and intrigue the reader while remaining completely relevant to the content context. Pixabay is a great place to find free images to use. or you could use Canva to create a completely unique and custom featured image for your blog post.

Final Thoughts

Now you have a better understanding of what goes into writing the perfect blog post. The main thing to remember is that even if you don’t use all of the above, everything should connect perfectly.

Whether this is the images that you use, the statistics and data that you quote, or the headlines you create, each should be relevant to the next.

The rest of it is up to you. Get creative and enjoy the process. Once you have completed a few blog posts using a set method, you will find writing blogs to be much easier and enjoyable.

If you want to learn more about how to create awesome blog posts, improve your writing skills and learn more about SEO, check out our blog today. We upload fresh content on a weekly basis so that you can stay up-to-date with all the latest changes.

  Article first published here: How to Write the Perfect Blog Post

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How to Reach Millennials with your Marketing Campaigns

There are few generations as widely discussed as millennials. Baby boomers don’t understand them and gen-X most definitely doesn’t like being confused for them. But here’s the thing… Millennials play a hugely important role when it comes to the future success of brands and businesses.

In the United States alone, millennials make up a quarter of the population and are directly responsible for more than $200 billion yearly consumer spending! Multiply that on a global scale and the power of millennials becomes shockingly clear.

In this post we are going to look at why millennials are so difficult to target, who they actually are, and how you can connect with them. 

Millennials Vs Gen-X Vs Baby Boomers

We’ve all heard of millennials, but do you actually know which generation they fall into? Do you even know which generation you are? Let’s take a quick look at each of the different generations before getting started with millennial 

Baby Boomers. Born between 1946 and 1964, they range from 55 to 73 years old today. This generation were around during the flower power era and enjoyed a huge population boom following the Great Depression and World War II. Baby boomers we’re the ones who fought for protection of the environment and were the first to experience the civil rights 

Generation-X. Born Between 1965 and 1979, they range from 40 to 54 years old today. Also known as generation bust, Gen X were the first generation to experience MTV, the fall of the Berlin wall, Tiananmen Square, and the rise in popularity of 

Xennials. Born between 1980 and 1985, they range from 34 to 39 years old today. Seen as a crossover generation between generation X and millennials, Xennials enjoyed life before home computers, mobile phones, and social media and were also the first generation to use them. They are considered to be more like generation-X than 

Millennials. Born between 1986 and 1994, they range from 25 to 33 years old today. Millennials were born during a time where almost every home had internet, mobile phones, smart TVs and modern technology was the norm. They are often seen as the entitled generation who were raised to think that they are special. Every loser was a winner and they were raised to believe anything was possible. Of course, reality soon hit home 

Generation-Z. Born between 1995 and 2012, they range from 7 to 24 years old today. This generation has access to mobile phones and modern technology from birth. They spend less time socialising and more time online. They are also seen as the most tolerant generation toward different races, sexual orientations and cultures. Gen-Z’rs are also less likely to believe in church and government and are more forward-

Generation-Alpha. Born between 2013 and 2025, they range from 1 day to 6 years old today. This generation is still too young to have developed any clear character traits. 

    Why Millennials are a Marketing Nightmare

Unlike the preceding generations, millennials are much less likely to respond to traditional advertising campaigns. And here is where the problem 

As Millennials start to take the reins of consumer spending, it is becoming harder and harder to understand their spending 

Plenty of research has been conducted trying to understand what it is that gets their attention. And while some patterns have become clear, it’s still not understood why they don’t match the marketing numbers of previous 

With more Millennials spending online than any other generation, marketing campaigns should have some type of influence. We already know that influencer marketing works with this generation, but why are ad campaigns missing the 

    It’s all to do with the lingo you use!

The Solution to Millennial Marketing

We know where Millennials hang out and which platforms work best for reaching them. But unfortunately, most marketers don’t know how to connect with 

If your ad campaigns and marketing efforts don’t resonate with them, they will simply ignore you. So what can you do? The answer is actually much easier than you would 

Forget about spending a small fortune on ad campaigns that keep failing and work on utilising words from the millennial lexicon! Yep. That’s all it takes.

Every generation has its own style of language that the preceding generations struggle to understand. Just as you find millennial lingo confusing and hard to connect with, the same is true in 

The internet makes it so easy to integrate relevant millennial-friendly phrases and words into your campaigns. But to save you the time and effort of trying to find them, we’ve pulled together a list of the biggest and best millennial words for you.

    Millennial Lexicon (with old people translations)

    Final Thoughts

Adapting and modifying the way that you write your marketing campaigns can cost effective and easy once you know how. Of course, the millennial lingo goes far beyond the examples that we have listed in this post. 

Start off slowly by testing the waters with a few additional millennial words sprinkled in here and there before going in full force. This will give you a better idea of which words grab their attention and which don’t.

You also want to make sure that you don’t come across as condescending. It might not be your intention to insult come up but it can happen all too easily. Anagrams such as FOMO, GOAT and SMH not only resonate with this generation, but can save you space and money when creating ad campaigns.

    Combining these words with visual images that resonate with causes and activities such as sustainability, global warming, political events, etc are the perfect way to reach out to and connect with the often confused millennial consumer.

Millennials are not the enemy… they are just harder to understand than all of the other generations. And now that you know what makes them tick, you can start checking all the right boxes to get them on side.

Why not check out our blog today for more awesome marketing and SEO tips, tricks and techniques to boost your reach across the board.

Article first published here: How to Reach Millennials with your Marketing Campaigns

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The Evolutionary History of YouTube 

Next year, the world’s biggest and best-known video site turns 15. From humble beginnings as a place for amateurs to upload videos to a platform that launches global cyber stars, YouTube continues to grow day by day.

Each month, more than 4 billion hours of video content are viewed. And for every minute that passes, users upload 72 hours worth of video content. 

Without it, Gangnam Style would have been confined to the airwaves of South Korea. Rebecca black would never have been so happy about Friday. And a prepubescent Justin Bieber wouldn’t have sung about his baby, baby baby.

Ok. So now that we’ve got the unfortunate side of YouTube out of the way, let’s take a look at the video sharing giant from its early inception to how it went on to dominate the world.

Nip Slips and Tsunami’s

Ideas come to people at the strangest of times, and YouTube was no different. 

If Janet Jackson hadn’t ‘accidentally on purpose’ displayed her breast to the world at the 2004 Super Bowl and the Indian Ocean tsunami didn’t devastate Southeast Asia, YouTube might not even exist today.

It was these key events that spawned the idea of an online video sharing platform according to Jawed Karim, one of YouTube’s 3 founding partners.

While at a dinner party with Steve Chen and Chad Hurley who had worked with Karim at PayPal, the concept of an online place for amateurs to upload their own video content was born.

On February 14th, 2005, a year after they came up with the idea, Chad Hurley register the domain, logo and trademark for YouTube setting it on it’s path to world domination.

YouTube Goes Live

3 months after YouTube was registered and trademarked, it’s very first home page went live when the beta version. One month later on April 23rd, the very first video was uploaded onto the platform.

Titled “me at the zoo”, the 19 seconds long clip was uploaded by co-founder Jawed Karim. Filmed in front of the elephant enclosure at the San Diego Zoo, a baby-faced Karim spends 19 seconds talking about elephant trunks.

Just five months later in September, Nike went on to become the first video to achieve 1 million views with their iconic Ronaldinho ad. This served to cement YouTube’s potential as a promotional platform for brands and businesses on a global scale.

YouTube Goes Public

In mid December 2005, Sequoia Capital invested 3.5 million dollars into YouTube. This allowed YouTube to finally improve-it servers and increase its bandwidth so that it could launch itself as a public video sharing platform.

But it’s conceptual idea of being an amateur video sharing site changed come February 2006. It was this month that NBC ask YouTube to upload a clip from SNL titled Lazy Sunday.

This gave rise to YouTube content verification program, which was created to help content owners remove infringing video content uploaded by others. Ongoing promotions for NBC made Google stand up and pay attention to the potential of YouTube.

In Comes the Giant

October 2006 what was the month that Google purchased YouTube for a whopping $1.6 billion. The world’s largest search engine took YouTube and turned it into the world’s largest video sharing site.

When Google acquired YouTube, there were just 65 employees working for the video-site… fewer people than what work in a single department today.

Google had already conquered the online revenue earning potential of AdSense, now it was time to let people monetise their video content.

Average Joe’s Making Moolah

May 2007 saw the introduction of the YouTube partner program. This was a key turning point in taking YouTube from a standard video sharing platform to one that would grow to be the world’s biggest.

It suddenly became possible for the everyday person to take their hobbies and turn them into an online business. Just 12 months later, the most popular users on the platform were already earning incomes consisting of six figures!

In fact, it wasn’t just hobbies and businesses making money. Who can forget baby Charlie biting his brother’s finger and giving an evil grin to the camera! This funny family moment caught on camera has earned the parents behind the video more than $175,000!

From cats and fails to makeup tutorials and cookery shows, YouTube became firmly established as a viable alternative to TV.

Greedy Old Google

August 2007 was the month that Google decided to start placing ads on videos to generate revenue. 

Covering approximately 20% of the video screen, semi-transparent banners started to make an appearance. Of course, Google is a business and was looking for ways to monetise the website and ads seemed the natural way to go.

Giving rise to one of the biggest annoyances that viewers faced when watching content, it didn’t take long for adblock plus to make an appearance. 

Going Mainstream and Vevo

January 2009 saw the launch of official congressional channels on YouTube. In February, even the Vatican got in on the action and launched its very own channel.

Then comes April 2009… the year that the world’s ears were forever tortured with the high pitched vocals of Justin Bieber.

But going mainstream also caused a lot of tension within the music industry. Record labels started to complain about copyright infringement, licensing terms and piracy… and thus, Vevo was brought on board.

A joint agreement between Vevo and YouTube allowed the video sharing platform to continue streaming mainstream music so long as the video content is uploaded and monetized by Vevo.

Going Live & Democracy

2011 saw some pretty big advancements that would shape at YouTube into what it is today. 

In April, YouTube launched YouTube live, making it possible for video content to be live streamed on the platform. 

It also started to invest heavily in original content, carving out it’s very own Netflix Style programming and creating an online place for watching series and original movies.

Along with Twitter and Facebook, YouTube also played a pivotal role in the early stages of the Arab Spring. 

Helping spread important messages covering everything from political commentary to protests and activist planning, it made it possible to empower freedom of speech and democracy.

Banging Out a Billion

At the end of December, 2012 KPOP superstar PSY became a global sensation and went on to become YouTube’s most viewed video. Gangnam Style rapidly racked up over 1 billion views in 2012 and moved the goalposts for viewing goals.

By now, people were enjoying over 4 billion hours of viewed video content each month and uploading 72 hours worth of content every minute!

Dislikes Making a Mark

YouTube has been releasing a rewind video for the past few years. YouTube rewind looks back at the biggest and most iconic moments on the platform over the past year.

But the 2018 video released by YouTube went on to become the platform’s most disliked video ever. Within a week of being uploaded and released, it attracted almost 10.3  million dislikes, surpassing the then most disliked video, Justin Bieber’s “Baby” (which had 9.9 million dislikes.)

This was one of the first times that audiences, creators and YouTubers clashed with the views of YouTube as a corporate giant. Many claimed that YouTube overlooked the efforts put in by content creators and instead focused on creating an ad and celebrating already known celebs such as Will Smith. 

Viewers and creators wanted to know where Logan Paul and pewdiepie were. A few controverses seemed to break their relationship with YouTube. Which, in turn,broke the audience’s relationship with YouTube.

Making Millionaires

For quite a few years now, YouTube has been turning average people into millionaires. In 2018, the highest paid YouTubers were raking in double digit millions.

  PewDiePie – 15.5 million

Jacksepticeye -16 million

VanossGaming – 17 million

Markiplier – 17.5 million

Jeffree Star – 18 million

Ryan toysreview – 22 million

  The biggest earner of 2018 hadn’t even reached his first decade of life before earning his family a multimillion-dollar income.

Business Sense

With social media and video content leading the way in an ever connected online world, businesses realised the potential that online video offers their marketing strategies.

Other platforms such as Facebook and Instagram have managed to forge their own paths in online video sharing. Gone are the days off sharing a video from YouTube to Facebook. They now make it possible for businesses to upload directly. 

For now, YouTube doesn’t look set to hand over it video content crown anytime soon. But, as is true with everything online, things can change almost overnight.

That’s about it for today’s post. Why not head over to our blog and check out more of our social media posts.

Article first published here: The Evolutionary History of YouTube 

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HOW TO GET MORE SOCIAL MEDIA FOLLOWERS

Social media plays a huge role in today’s world of online marketing and brand identity. But what if your social media follower count is almost non-existent?

What can you do to supercharge your followers and fan base… especially when you don’t have time to create new content on a regular basis?

Today we are going to look at how to get more social media followers without creating brand new content. These tips and tricks will see your social media followers increase with little effort on your part.

Is Social Media Follow Count Important?

One of the most common questions people have about social media is whether the follow count is actually important?

As an online brand or business, people will check your follower count before deciding if they are going to follow you or not.

When you want to partner with a social media influencer, they will take a look at the numbers to decide if you are a good partnership opportunity.

Having a low follow count doesn’t mean that your content or brand is not up to standard. But it can impact how seriously people take you.

When you look online for tips on how to increase your social media follower count, almost every marketer says you need to create more content.

But is this actually the case?

Not always! In fact, sometimes the best way to build your social media fan base is by taking a completely different approach.

So let’s take a look at what you can do to get your follow counter ticking upwards.

Promoting Vs Informing

When it comes to social media, you have two options available to you. You can focus on selling your products or services… or you can focus on providing trustworthy and useful information.

At the end of the day, content is content and what people expect from it is the same. Be it on your website, your blog or your social media accounts, people appreciate value.

One of the biggest mistakes that people make on social media is to use it as an online sales pitch platform.

But here’s the thing about this method:

When people are looking at purchasing one of your products or services, your sales pitch is not going to have much of an impact on their decision.

They will tend to seek out reviews from prior customers, check out YouTube for opinions and thoughts on your product, and make comparisons to check out if it is worth it.

People prefer to make an informed choice when it comes to spending their hard-earned money… and you can use this to your advantage.

Forget about uploading glossy photos and sales banners that focus solely on selling and instead aim to offer real value.

By this, we mean highlighting how your product or service can benefit them, making use of customer testimonials, and explaining how it works.

Ideally, you want to answer any questions that they may have so that they are armed with all of the info that they need to make a purchase… and all without coming across as a sales pitch.

The majority of people don’t care if your item has 15% off or if your item is selling out fast. This isn’t going to attract followers. 

Informing and educating helps build brand authority and trust. Which, in turn, makes you much more follow-worthy in the fickle world of social media.

Target a Younger Audience

When it comes to social media, there is no denying that millennials lead the way. And millennials typically tend to follow brands and businesses that have a certain degree of social impact.

But what do we mean by social impact?

Basically, social impact is when a brand or identity advocates a worthy cause. Be it environmental or political, they expect so much more than just another online business.

A recent study showed what millennials really care about… and it most definitely is not flashy ads and sales pitches.

83% believe that businesses should have an involvement in societal issues.

82% believe that businesses can have an impact on addressing societal issues.

79% want to know which companies are doing good.

69% want businesses to make it easier for them to involve themselves in societal issues.

Improving your brand identity to reflect social issues, such as sustainability, environmental care, equality, fair trading, etc. will bode much better with the younger generation.

And overlooking the younger generation is one of the biggest mistakes that you can make. Not only are they much more likely to follow brands and businesses on social media. But they are also the future success of your company.

They may not be your target audience today. But getting them on side means that they are much more likely to be your customer base a few years down the line.

Start Following More Brands and Users

As with most things in life, we receive what we give. And one of the best ways to start encouraging more people to follow your social media accounts is for you to do the same.

This doesn’t mean that you need to follow absolutely every social media account that you come across. But you should try to spend a little time understanding which brands your audience follow.

Once you have a good idea of where your audience focuses their attention, it’s time to get interactive. Don’t just follow that brand or influencer. Leave them comments and get involved in the conversation.

By doing this, people are much more likely to check out your profile and follow you. And while we are on the subject of interaction, don’t be afraid to repost another brands tweet or image.

Of course, you need to make it clear that you are retweeting or sharing so people don’t think it’s your content. 

But why would you share your competitors social media content? Isn’t that counterproductive? 

In a nutshell, no! By sharing your competitors content, you are building relationships not only with other businesses but with their audience too.

This makes attracting followers easier… and all without needing to create content. Pretty much a win-win for everyone.

Build Your Following Away from Social Media Platforms

If you have a website that receives plenty of traffic every month, you have the perfect opportunity to boost your follower count away from social media.

This is something that many websites overlook. Which means they are missing out on plenty of new social media follower opportunities

But how do you get more social media followers from your website or blog? The answer is so simple, CTA.

A call to action can get people subscribing to your social media accounts without needing to leave your website. Making use of social media widgets and pop-ups on your website to pages can see your follow count skyrocket.

If you are using a CMS platform such as WordPress for your website, there are plenty of plugins that allow users to follow your social media on site.

Pop up screens are also a great way to get people following. The awesome thing about using your website to get new followers is that you know they are already interested in your products, services or brand.

After all, they are already on your website, so you know that the interest is there. 

Use a simple call to action, such as:

“Follow us on social media for much more.”

You might just be surprised at how effective this is for boosting your follow count with uses prepared to interact with your brand.

Final Thoughts

There is no denying that getting high quality followers on social media can be tricky. But once you shift focus from selling to informing and educating, things can pick up speed pretty quickly.

Of course, sooner or later you are going to need to create some kickass content to upload. But there is nothing wrong with first building connections before jumping in with regular content uploads.

For more about social media, including the best times to follow and the best types of content to use, why not check out our blog today. We have plenty of actionable content ready and waiting for you.

And while you are here, why not follow us on social media.

Article first published here: HOW TO GET MORE SOCIAL MEDIA FOLLOWERS

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SEO in 2020 – Getting Ready for Google’s Changes

Anyone who deals with SEO knows that changes can come in quick and heavy. Just as you finally nail your SEO techniques, Google goes and switches things up throwing you back to the start. 

But Google is not doing this to annoy you. Just as eBay favors the buyer over the seller, Google cares very little about your SEO pains and is much more focused on the user. 

So as you have now come to expect, you need to be one step ahead of the game to succeed. And this means switching your focus toward the search engines motives instead of your own.

And the only way that you can do this is to be armed and fully prepared to go to battle with your competitors by using newer techniques.

Today we are going to look at the future of SEO and what is expected to change in 2020.

Out With Keywords – In With Phrases

This is something that horrifies many SEO marketers. But it is something that is happening… and at a pretty quick pace.

Smartphones and Amazon Alexa are changing the very ways that search engines discover and present content. It is estimated that by 2020, approximately 50% of all internet searches will be performed on voice-activated devices.

This means that you are going to have to incorporate completely new strategies into your content creation with voice search SEO. While those ever faithful 1 to 5 word keywords will still play a role, the future is all about natural language.

As screen searches start to give way to voice searches, text links and unnatural sounding language will fall to the wayside. Trying to stuff in unnatural sounding keywords just isn’t going to cut the mustard in 2020.

As an example, voice search will favour:

“Ten of the best hotels to stay at in Sydney” over “10 best hotels Sydney”

But why? It’s all about the user experience. Voice search intends to deliver the most natural-sounding speech possible. This means that phrases that are missing conjunctions, articles and correct structure will most likely be skipped.

Using links to provide further information by directing the user to another page is also going to fall out of favour. Voice assistants cannot read beyond the link. So you are going to have to answer the questions in detail on one page.

Writing for machines is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. Adopting a conversational tone that is friendly and informative will far outweigh the benefits of using unnatural sounding keywords.

Local SEO will Continue to Grow

Currently, local searches make up 46% of all searches. And the focus on local SEO is set to grow. 

Much of this ties in with the growth of voice search. This is because voice shirt tends to be a much more specific and focused on the local area.

So what do you need to focus on to improve your local SEO? The following are things that you don’t want to overlook.

Non-traditional Keyword Queries

Non-traditional keyword queries cover the card like results displayed by Google. Of course, there are many other search engines out there but Google dominates and it makes sense to focus your efforts toward the giant.

Along with your Google My Business listing, non-traditional keywords include the most important information, such as:

Hotel near me

Crowne Plaza

What time is check in open?

What time is check out?

Crowne Plaza phone number

Distance to Crowne Plaza

Room rate today

Focus on Geographic Keywords

Crowne Plaza have hotels located around the world. So for local SEO you need to include geographic targeted keywords. Let’s say that we are focusing on Crowne Plaza Melbourne. What types of geographic (service in location) keywords could we use?

Crowne Plaza in Melbourne

Hotel rooms in Melbourne

Meeting rooms for hire in Melbourne

Hotels for couples in Melbourne

Accommodation In Melbourne

Suites in Melbourne

Google Autocomplete

What better way to get keyword recommendations then from the giant itself. Whenever you perform a search on Google, it provides you with the autocomplete function.

And this autocomplete function goes much further than just finishing your search term. It provides LSI keywords (latent semantic indexing) that help provide context to your content.

Along with that, it will give you some awesome suggestions that you may not have thought about. You can also scroll down to the bottom of the SERPs for the “people also search for” section for more inspiration.

As an example, when you type in Crowne Plaza Melbourne you will get the following suggestions.

Crowne Plaza Melbourne restaurants

Crowne Plaza Melbourne address

Crowne Plaza Melbourne casino

Crowne Plaza Melbourne gym

This gives you some pretty useful keywords to weave into your content. Of course, you need to remember to make them sound as natural as possible. So use them as sentences that ask or answer questions in a friendly and personable tone.

Revving Up for Reviews

Everything from your business service to engagement and popularity are taken into account. And this is set to continue well into next year.

It’s reported that Google is working on a system that is favoured toward highly rated and ranked businesses. This means that quality customer reviews about your products, services or brands are now more important than ever before.

Audience engagement is also taking a leading role with the way that businesses communicate with their customers. Providing content of value that answers the question can go a long way with helping.

Whenever your business is searched for directly or reviews are left, Google is taking note. The more engagement your business has, the more popularity it can achieve.

And popularity is another thing that the search engines look out for. This means that you need to focus on creating a solid reputation on social media. Getting people talking by generating a buzz around your brand, products or services may actually have an impact on your search engine ranking success.

SEP (Service, Engagement, Popularity) is definitely something you want to try to achieve whenever possible. Don’t just start the conversation, aim to become a part of it to generate a stellar online business reputation.

Final Thought

We can only go on current trends and historical changes to guess what will happen with SEO in 2020. But looking at the way things have been heading over the past 12 months, voice search is almost a dead cert.

The rise of mobile devices and voice-activated assistants are changing the very landscape of SEO. Ensuring that your websites are responsive and focus on providing the best user experience possible are also driving forces behind the upcoming changes.

If you only start focusing on one thing today, we recommend natural language and a conversational tone. If voice search continues to grow at its current rate, screen search could be almost obsolete within the next 5 years.

It’s all about finding that perfect balance between what currently works and what looks set to lead the way. Why not check out our blog for more today.

Article first published here: SEO in 2020 – Getting Ready for Google’s Changes

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The Dos and Don’ts of Content Marketing

For the beginner, content marketing might seem like something that is easy enough to do. But just like with everything else in life, there are things to do and things to avoid.

The very face of content has changed over the last decade, meaning content is no longer just about written words. Everything from audio and visual content to video content and text is now commonplace. And each of these can be divided into hundreds of subcategories.

Regardless of the types of content that you use on your website, the rules are pretty much the same. And having a solid content marketing strategy in place will go a long way with helping you reach your goals.

In today’s post we are going to take a closer look at some of the biggest mistakes businesses make with content marketing. We will also have a look at the methods and techniques that not only work, but can see your content marketing strategy skyrocket.

The Don’ts of Content Marketing

And the following section, we will focus on the don’ts of content marketing. You will notice that there are more dense than dos on this list. This is because don’ts have a negative impact on your strategy. And once you know what to avoid, your chances of success improve dramatically.

Keyword Stuffing

This is something that dates back to the earlier years of SEO. And unfortunately, it is something that some businesses still do… to the detriment of their online success.

In the past, this black hat SEO techniques used to work wonders. However, today it not only detracts from the overall user experience, but is also frowned upon by the search engines.

Let’s say that your primary keyword is “automatic robot lawn mower.” Stuffing this in 20 times throughout a 500-word blog post or article is going to put your reader off right away… and Google is going to pass on by.

In today’s world, there is no place for low quality content and black hat SEO tactics. You need to be able to create content that delivers value and focus on people, not machines.

The search engines, specifically Google, look much deeper than just your primary keywords. Stuffing your articles like a Christmas Day Turkey is something best left back in the early 2000’s. It’s all about context and not keyword count.

Forgetting the Search Engines

Your content marketing strategy should have a dedicated focus on the search engines. As we mentioned above, you don’t write for machines, you write for people. But that’s not to say that you don’t need to optimise your content for the search engines.

Instead of focusing on one or two primary keywords, try to throw some semantically related keywords into the mix. Google is not just looking for keywords whenever it scans your content. It is looking for LSI keywords so that it can be sure your content is what you say it is.

But optimising for the search engines goes much deeper than the different types of keywords. You should also focus on your meta descriptions, image alt tags, robot tags, and structured markups.

Each of these works in a different way to let the search engines understand what your content is all about. The more information you give, the more likely you are to rank. But as we mentioned earlier, you should never place the search engines over your audience.

Not Listening to your Audience

Here’s the thing about the internet; if people don’t like your content, product or service they are going to make this known.

As a business, you have a good idea about the direction that you want to head in. But your customers are the ones that keep you afloat.

Any content marketing strategy worth its salt takes customer and consumer opinions into account. What exactly is it that they want to know more about? How can you improve their overall experience?

Nobody likes to see negative reviews or opinions. But the idea here is to take them as constructive criticism. Don’t see them as weaknesses. See them as strengths. Once you know what it is needs to be fixed, you can deliver exactly what your audience wants.

And if you don’t deliver… they are going to head right on over to your competitors instead.

Focusing on Sales Instead of Value

One of the biggest mistakes that content marketers make is to focus all of their content on sales. People don’t need a sales pitch to make their mind up. In fact, it could have the complete opposite effect.

Whether it is an image, a video or a full-blown article, it needs to provide the user with value. You might think that the best way to sell your products or services is to dedicate blog post after blog post about why they need it. 

But here’s the thing: the majority of people tend to trust honest customer reviews over a company sales pitch.

Instead of pitching to people, aim to answer their questions. How can your product or service make their life easier? What is the history behind it? What research or data does it have to back it up? 

Your content should create a story that leaves the reader satisfied. If it creates more questions than answers or leaves little to be desired, it’s not going to have quite the impact you expect.

A great product or service will always sell itself. And great content that focuses on more than just sales can boost it.

Ignoring your Website Content

Social media is awesome. As a business in 2019, if you’re not on social media, you are missing out on huge potential.

However, it is all too easy to focus all of your efforts on social media instead of your website. Big mistake. 

See, there is only so much you can do with social media before you need more flexibility. And this is where your website comes into play. Your website is home to your business or brand, and should always be your main focus.

If anything, social media should be used for generating traffic for your website and building your brand identity. But all of that juicy content, the content that converts, should be reserved for your website only.

If you put everything on social media, people have got no need to visit your website. Therefore, you should look at repurposing your website content for social media. Give a sneak peek. Pique their interest. Then send them on over to your website for more.

The Dos of Content Marketing

There are plenty of things you can do to improve the outcome of your content marketing strategy. The following advice can be beneficial with helping you work out a plan of action that works.

Having an Open Mind

As an online business, it is all too easy to get stuck in your ways. As people’s behaviours and the internet evolve, so should your content marketing strategy.

A great example of this is the very content that you produce. For now, you will get away with focusing on screen searches and typed searches. But by this time next year, more than 50% of all searches are expected to be voice searches.

This means that you are probably going to have to step outside of your comfort zone. SEO strategies that worked before are rapidly becoming redundant. We’ve already made this clear with keyword stuffing. But actual keywords themselves are playing less and less of a role.

Natural language and fluid paragraphs are expected to supersede standard keywords. Video content is better received than text based content. And content that provides value outweighs content that doesn’t.

A successful content marketing strategy always works best when you have an open mind. Don’t be afraid to try new techniques and embrace any changes as soon as possible.

Include a Summary

Both users and search engines love a summary. But why? The answer is surprisingly simple.

One may be a machine while the other is human, but both want to understand the context of your content from the get-go.

For humans, we don’t want to waste time reading through a huge article if it isn’t going to answer our questions. And for search engines, delivering content of value to the user is the priority.

Typically, a summary is the first paragraph of your content. It will briefly touch upon what the topic is about and what the user can expect to learn. You can throw in a “spoiler alert” to encourage the user to read on.

But why would someone carry on reading if they’ve already been given an answer? It’s all to do with the desire to learn and understand more.

And the more that people learn about your products or services, the more likely they are to convert later on in the funnel. And this leads us nicely on to the next section.

Educate don’t Dictate

Nobody likes a dictator. You might have thoughts about how people should perceive your brand, product or service… but telling them how to do so is not going to go down well.

Everyone loves to learn something. And if you do it the right way, this can have huge benefits on your content marketing strategy.

The aim of the game is to always try to educate. Let the reader know how your product or service can improve their life? Cover its back story. Find a fresh and unique angle. And most importantly, make it interesting.

As an example, let’s say that you sell organic honey online. You could focus solely on the honey. Or you could dig deeper into how it’s made, the history of honey, information about the different types of honey bees, etc.

The reader most already knows that they want to buy some honey. But what is it about your honey that makes it the perfect choice for them? 

Everyone loves a story and everyone loves to learn. 

Final Thought

Content marketing is a fickle business. What works today might not necessarily work tomorrow. Bought with an open mind, a little bit of research and an understanding of your audience, you can’t go too far wrong.

SEO is always going to play an important part in your content marketing strategy. But it shouldn’t detract from delivering valuable content that keeps the user satisfied.

After all, what is the point in ranking on the first page of Google if people don’t enjoy the content you publish? It’s all about balance. And with content marketing, that balance definitely falls in favour of the user.

Why not check out our beginner’s guide to content marketing today for step-by-step, actionable instructions. 

Article first published here: The Dos and Don’ts of Content Marketing

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IS IT BETTER TO REMOVE OR UPDATE THIN CONTENT?

Thin content is one of those things that nobody wants, but nearly everybody has on their website.

Whether it’s on a products or services page, a short blog post, or your about us page, thin is definitely not in!

So what exactly can you do with thin content on your website?

You have three choices available to you.

You can no index, redirect or update.

Today, we are going to look at each of the three ways to deal with thin content so you can stay away from that delete button.

What is Thin Content?

Whenever you create content for your website, it should be juicy and loaded with keywords, LSI keywords, links, and all those other useful SEO techniques. (But not filler content)

Thin content is the opposite of this! Typically, thin content is any of the below.

Articles or posts containing less than 600 words.

Outdated content or material.

Not SEO optimized.

Contains a keyword ratio of more than 2.5%

Has links to spammy sites

Offers no real value to the reader

Contains duplicate content

But is thin content always bad news for your website? Well… not always.

Sometimes thin content that has been up for many years can be a great source of backlinks. 

And if it’s featured on the first page of Google, it can be a real source of traffic.

But… as with everything in the modern era of the internet, your content is going to need to be regularly updated.

So let’s take a look at when and when not to update or modify thin content that is performing well.

To Edit or to Leave it?

This one can be a bit tricky to work out. But once you know what you are looking for, you know what to touch and what to leave alone.

The first thing you want to look at is how long ago you wrote an uploaded the content to your website.

See, depending on the topic, what was relevant it then maybe completely obsolete now.

For example, let’s say that you wrote a blogpost about SEO techniques back in 2010. Chances are that all of the techniques you wrote about are long gone and buried in the ever-evolving SEO graveyard.

Sure, the content might be driving traffic to your website. But it’s what that traffic does once it opens to page that really counts.

If people open the page only to leave just as fast, that sends Google poor user signals.

And over time, these can relegate your website to those hardly ever visited search engine pages… 2,3 & 4.

So what should you do about content like this?

Should you update it or just remove it?

Before making any rash decisions, first ask yourself the following questions:

Does the web page have a high bounce rate?

Is the content still relevant to the topic?

Does it play a role in the buyer’s journey?

Not all content needs to be updated. For example, if you have a gardening website covering plants characteristics and scientific names, these are pretty much set in stone. There may be one or two new species or cross breeds that you can add into the mix. Otherwise, it is best left alone.

However, if you write about digital marketing. Chances are that you are going to need to update your content on an almost monthly basis.

Remove or Redirect Content

Choosing whether to remove or redirect content can be a tricky decision.

Sometimes, the best thing you can do is to completely remove thin content from your website. 

Be it user-generated content or duplicated content, if it’s got to go, it’s got to go. 

Here are a few situations that removal of content is preferable to redirection:

Content is no longer current or is outdated.

Evergreen content that no longer reflects industry trends.

Incorrect location pages or outdated business address information.

Content that no longer matches your current niche.

Content created using black hat SEO techniques.

If removing content from your website it’s something you are not prepared to do, you can look at redirecting.

For any web page that ranks well in the search engines for any given keyword, use a 301 redirect to a similar page or similar content. This helps your website retain it’s value.

For a web page like this, avoid using a 404 gateway.

If you’re pages content is outdated or contains duplicate content, you can use a ‘noindex’ tag. This prevents the search engine crawlers from indexing your page and removing it from the search results without interfering with your sites internal navigation.

Ultimately, inserting a 301 redirect taking the user to a relevant page can add value to the user journey.

Updating Thin Content

Updating thin content is definitely preferable to deleting it. If your page content still adds value to your website, it makes complete sense to update it to reflect more modern and up-to-date info.

Typically, updating thin content involves focusing on improving its SEO.

But why should you update content instead of producing brand new content instead?

Here’s Why:

Requires less time to optimise compared to writing fresh content.

Increases your indexation rate by maintaining website size.

SEO can increase keyword ranking possibilities.

Content most likely already has backlinks that you don’t want to lose.

So what should you do to update outdated thin content? There are a few main things to fix first.

Update all of your meta descriptions

Add appropriate structured markups

Use LSI keywords in your content

Update your headlines and H2 Headers.

Use fresh images with optimised alt text.

A great to turn old content into new content is to create a social video from it. 

Pull some of the text and add it to a video editing tool, such as Lumen5. 

You could also create an infographic on Canva to encourage interaction with your content.

The main thing is to ensure that everything on your page is completely up to date and relevant. 

Ultimately, it makes savvy business sense to update content you already have than have to delete it and have to rewrite it again.

Take a look at your site analytics, run through user interaction, and if it is harming your website… don’t be afraid to pull it down.

Site Audits are Important

Site audits and UX audits are things that many people would rather not do.

However, if you want to identify thin content that is damaging your website’s authority or ruining the user experience, it needs to be done.

One of the best tools to use for performing a site audit is Screaming Frog.

It analyses every page on your website and shows you where under-performing and thin content exist.

This makes it much easier to tackle problematic web pages before they start to create problems.

You should also aim to perform a Content Gap analysis at least once every 6 months.

SEMrush is an amazing way to discover content you can target that your competitors have overlooked.

You can also perform a keyword Gap analysis to find out which keywords your competitors are ranking for with similar content.

Sprinkling these keywords in any content that you update can give you a real boost in the SERPs.

Final Thoughts on Thin Content

sometimes, you just have to rip the bandage off and delete any content that has a negative impact on your website.

Once you have performed a site audit, bring any posts with less than 600 words up to around 800 words as a minimum.

any content that can’t be updated should use the ‘noindex’ tag or a 301 redirect.

And if you feel it needs to be deleted, all is not lost.

You can take that deleted content and re-purpose it as an infographic or social video to go onto social media to generate leads.

Unfortunately, the internet is not a catwalk… and thin is definitely not in!

Head on over to the blog for more useful content posts.

Article first published here: IS IT BETTER TO REMOVE OR UPDATE THIN CONTENT?

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10 COMMON SEO MYTHS DEBUNKED 2019

SEO is like having a child. It constantly needs attention, rarely does what you expect, and it’s pretty much a full-time job!

Huge algorithm shifts and years of outdated information and mistruths has made it a minefield. You think you’re moving in the right direction… then BOOM! 

With so much misinformation and so-called “facts” waiting for you at every turn, it’s hard to know what’s effective and what is defective.

Most information is wildly outdated. What worked 5 years ago could be as useless as a waterproof tea bag today.

Google is much smarter than people give it credit for. Huge advances with AI and deep machine learning lets it understand much more than it ever has before.

So, let’s get started. How many of these common SEO myths are you going to be guilty of in 2019?

1 – Using Exact Match Keywords in Content

This might have been true up to a few years ago. But with Google’s evolution, exact match keywords in your content no longer need to be quite as exact.

Technological advancements, such as LSI keywords (latent semantic indexing) help search engines like Google gain a deeper understanding of your content context.

As voice search is set to account for more than 50% of all searches by 2020, natural sounding speech is not only recommended, but encouraged. It’s time to optimise content for voice based searches.

This means that using stop words in your keywords and utilising semantically related phrases can both work to help your SEO efforts.

You can write for the search engines using unnatural sounding keywords. And sure, you might get the rankings that you want. But when the user faces unnatural sounding content, you can bet your bottom dollar that they are going to bounce like a rubber ball!

Just to show you that stop words and word order don’t interfere with primary keyword search volumes and top three placement, here are a few screenshots of variants of one keyword:

See, the keyword may not be an exact match, but its intent remains the same… and Google knows this.

And the first page ranking for the top 3 websites using each variation?

    Top 3 sites are identical across the board. And every single site on the first page remains on the first page. Clever old Google!

If you can weave an exact match into the title or headings, awesome. But the main thing to remember here is that  Google focuses on user intent… and has done for several years now.

Forcing unnatural keywords into your text creates poorly constructed content. And that can cause more damage than good to your rankings.

Focus on checking how each variation weighs up and check the metrics, then use a mix of them if you can. Stop words (articles, conjunctions, etc.) are rapidly rising in search volume, so ignoring them is not really best practice.

Even Yoast, an avid campaigner for avoiding stop-words has backtracked on its previous stance.

Remember: poor user experience = high bounce rate. High = bounce rate is a signal your content isn’t delivering.

2 – SEO is About Ranking Number One on Google

Taking that top spot on the first page of Google is what everyone aims to achieve, and that is a good target to have.

But here’s the thing:

Whether you rank number one, number five or number 10 on the first page of the SERPs, your organic site  traffic is going to explode.

When people perform a search, they rarely only ever visit one page. When it comes to gathering information, several sources are usually required.

So while you definitely want to have your keywords rank on the first page of the SERPs, hitting number one is no more advantageous than hitting number five.

And even if you do hit that top spot on Google, rich snippets, PPC ads, Google’s answer box, maps and more are still likely to be above you.

For ranking success, it’s all about being on page one, not being number one. So focus on a broad range of keywords instead of trying to push just one or two into the top spot.

3 – Google Penalises Duplicate Site Content

This is a big one that circulates worldwide. You’ll see it left, right and centre… and it’s really not what some people make it out to be.

In fact, Google have confirmed on more than one occasion that duplicate content does not result in site penalties.

So what is actually going on here?

Let’s say that you’re a new website and you have simply copied and pasted content from another site onto your own…

Google doesn’t look at it and say “this is duplicate content, let’s give them a penalty.” It just ignores the content completely!

And this is where this myth arose from.

People were snatching content and using it on their own sites… and not ranking for it. Even though the site they took it from was on the first page!

The search engines know that duplicate content happens on a website for several reasons. So no, you are not going to be penalised for it.

However, now that you know Google simply ignores duplicate content, any duplicate content you have should be optimised so that it can rank in the SERPs.

4 – One Tool can Fix it All

You’ll see tools everywhere on the internet claiming that they have an all-in-one solution for fixing your SEO.

In a perfect world, this would be true. But this world is far from perfect… 

That is not to say that there are not some truly useful SEO tools out there. But none of them are a magic solution to instantly fix all of your SEO problems on your behalf.

One of the best SEO tools that anyone can use for their website is SEMrush. Automated report detailing exactly what needs to be changed or fixed go a long way with pointing you in the right direction.

Of course, unless you are a site developer with a detailed knowledge of how to execute everything in the report, you’re going to find it tough.

Luckily, the internet is filled with useful ‘how-to’ guides and forums where you can find all of the guidance and information you need to crack on with it.

If you don’t perform a regular site audits, you won’t know what needs to be fixed. And any software that says it can fix everything for you automatically, well… we have a magical unicorn for sale for just $100,000.

5 – Header Tags are Irrelevant

Nope. Header tags are not and have never been irrelevant. 

Now, we are not saying that they are a major ranking factor. Nor are they the be-all and end-all of your pages syntax.

But they definitely go a long way with helping Google and the other search engines understand your website’s content.

Using your primary keywords and semantically related keywords in your title, H1 and H2 headers, along with in your content can have a positive effect on your SEO efforts.

6 – No Sitemap Equals No Ranking

Here’s another common myth that circulates the internet like a fly around your head in summer.

Now, we are not denying that having a sitemap is useful. After all, it helps the search engines get a deeper understanding of your site structure.

However… not having a sitemap does not have an impact on where your site will rank in the SERPs.

This is especially true for small sites that have properly structured site navigation. 

Of course, the larger your website is, the more a sitemap will help the search engines understand what they are looking at. And then crawl an index it much faster.

But the main point to take home from this is that having a sitemap will not boost your rankings… just help the search engines crawl and index with ease. 

Not a bad thing to have really. But not the end of the world if you don’t.

7 – Avoid Outbound Links

You’ve probably heard this one before, but it goes a little something like this…

having too many outbound links on your website will pause your PageRank to drop.

First things first: PageRank is long gone for SEO average Joe’s. 

Anyone who uses PageRank as a reason not to use outbound links needs to build a time machine and head back to 2013… you know, when the Google toolbar got rid of it.

The only ones who measure PageRank are Google… and as is becoming more and more common with the search engine giant, what happens in Google stays in Google.

Secondly: Google does not penalise people for using outbound links. In fact, it looks like the complete opposite. Websites linking to authoritative and useful resources are actually rewarded.

Yes, it’s true that the website you linked to receives a little bit of your domain authority. But you know what? That’s the whole point of outbound links.

You are voting for the site that you link too by telling Google “hey, I vouch for this site.” 

Of course, you need to make sure that any site or content that you linked to is related to your page content or niche. 

Want to save some of your link juice? Throw in a ‘nofollow’ tag. 

At the end of the day, if there were no outbound links used on the internet, there would be no inbound links (backlinks).

Just make sure that what you linked to makes total sense to the search engines when it looks at both website’s content.

8 – Blackhat SEO Doesn’t Work

This is something that we’re not too happy to admit to… but blackhat SEO absolutely can work when done right. Especially when performed by someone who knows what they are doing.

But just because something works doesn’t make it right. And black hat SEO is seriously risky business for your website.

Just like the black market, black hat SEO usage loopholes, underhanded tactics, and often goes against the rules set by the search engines.

Sure, you could pay someone to cheat your way to the top. But when Google finds out, and Google always finds out, your business will be banned (de-indexed) from the search engines.

This is why, although dodgy tactics can work, it’s always better to play by the rules and develop your SEO strategies over time. 

Building your rankings and developing your website is a marathon, not a sprint. Be the tortoise, not the hare… and reap the rewards for decades to come.

9. Meta Descriptions are a Ranking Factor

A few years back, meta descriptions were taking into account as part of the ranking decision.  2009 saw this all change.

Now, while meta descriptions are no longer a ranking factor, that’s not to say that they are not important. They are!

We like to keep bouncing back to user experience (UX), and a meta description can really help.

Google might not care about it anymore, but people do. It gives them an insight into what the content is about and if it’s what they are looking for.

Plugins, such as Yoast can help you create a personalised meta description. This prevents any text from being cut off in the SERPs. Thus giving the user a complete picture of what lies ahead.

A keyword here or there won’t hurt. After all, the meta description is read by the search engines for further content context.

But the main thing to remember is to always write for people and not the search engines.

10. Link building is More Important than Content

This one is probably one of the most ridiculous one on this list. link building is more important than content! 

See, if you dedicate all of your time to link building, you have no time for creating content.

And here is where the problem lies.

Without quality content, people have nothing to link back to!

Of course, link building is hugely important when it comes to SEO. And having several high-quality links pointing to your site can help the search engines decide when to show you over the competition.

But to be able to attract these highly sought-after links, you first need to focus on providing high-quality content.

In fact, high quality content can generate organic links that you don’t have to work on to get.

When it comes to SEO, content is king and backlinks are brilliant. But your main focus should be content that offers value and generates natural links before moving on to link building strategies.

Final Thoughts

If you really want to know which SEO methods work, ignore what the ‘so-called’ experts are saying and look at what they are doing.

If they tell you that meta descriptions should be less than 140 characters, but they use 160, they aren’t practicing what they preach.

If they say that you’re header body copy should be less than 300 words and then go on to use 600, again, they go against what they say.

Site speed not important? Yet their site loads almost instantly… you can guarantee they spend time and money making sure it is as fast as possible.

Basically, what we are saying is that while the internet is filled with useful SEO advice, take what you read with a pinch of salt.

Many people don’t mean to add fuel to the fire by spouting out more and more myths and outdated information. But this is where a little bit of research truly comes into play.

Focus on what works… but don’t be afraid to try new methods.

For more guides about SEO, SEM, PPC, digital marketing and useful tools and software, check out our blog today.

Article first published here: 10 COMMON SEO MYTHS DEBUNKED 2019

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7 COMMON WORDPRESS MISTAKES TO AVOID IN 2019

It will come as no surprise that WordPress powers 33.6% of all websites around the world!

Chances are, that you too are using WordPress to manage your website. As one of the world’s most dominant CMS platforms, WordPress makes building a website easy.

Of course, regardless of how experienced you are, mistakes are going to be made. However, many WordPress mistakes are avoidable when you know what to look out for.

This list of common WordPress mistakes to avoid will help you identify potential mistakes. It will also guide you through the best fixes if you encounter them.

As the old adage goes… “prevention is better than cure” and this is definitely true when it comes to your WordPress website.

1- Failing to backup your WordPress site

There is nothing more heartbreaking than waking up to find that all of your vital data is damaged or gone missing.

Servers crash and sites get hacked… and yours is not immune!

If this happens to you and you haven’t backed up your WordPress data, your only option is to start from the very beginning again.

This is where WordPress automated backups come into play with our first WordPress mistakes tip.

One of the best plug-ins to use for backing up your WordPress website is Duplicator. 

Duplicator will back up all of your website information into a zip file. This makes downloading and uploading your entire site a cinch.

When it comes to storing your backed up data, cloud storage is the way forward. Keeping an offline copy helps protect your website against server compromisation and any server crashes.

2- Using the wrong theme

Website design is not easy for beginners. Therefore, it makes total sense to want to use a theme.

However, theme templates are not always your best friend. 

Yes, they may eliminate much of the design elements. 

But certain themes can make your site difficult to navigate and incredibly slow.

One thing that is extremely important is to choose a theme that is mobile-friendly. Websites that are not adaptable to mobiles are penalised by Google.

You also need to ensure that any theme you choose is compatible with the plugins that you need.

Don’t simply pick the first theme you like the look of and hope for the best. Spend some time comparing different themes, checking compatibility, and previewing its features.

Another thing to note is that the simpler a theme is, the faster it will tend to be.

3- Not using SEO

We have said it before, and we will say it again… a website without SEO is a website without potential.

You can create a website with all the bells and whistles. It can be visually stunning and loaded with useful content. But without SEO, it is invisible.

SEO drives traffic to your website and helps you rank higher in the search engines. This is why you need to know the latest SEO techniques.

And luckily for you, we have plenty of useful SEO guide on our blog.

It is all too easy to think that SEO is just about keywords… it’s not.

In fact, keywords don’t even make it into the top five most important SEO techniques to use. 

And with voice search beginning to dominate the way that people perform searches online, using question phrases and a conversational tone has never been more important!

That’s not to say that key words aren’t important. They absolutely are! But what is more important are question phrases, backlinks, detailed answers, internal links, content with value and visuals.

A plug-in such as yoast SEO can help you work on your SEO techniques while you work on publishing your content.

4- Publishing posts in place of pages

Many beginners on WordPress don’t know the difference between posts and pages. Using the correct type for the correct content is important.

But here’s the thing:

When it comes to your website architecture, pages and posts behave differently. And pages definitely have a leading edge for important content.

So how do you know what needs to be a page of what needs to be a post?

The easiest way is to look at the type of information you will be creating.

If the information doesn’t need to be updated or changed often, then you definitely want to publish it as a page and not a post.

Think along the lines of:

About us

Contact

Pricing

Privacy policy

Services

Terms and conditions

However, whenever you need to post time-based content to your site, you should always use the post format.

Posts are perfect for how to guides, articles, news updates, general updates and blog posts. 

5- Ignoring site speed

How fast your website loads determines how high you can rank in the search results.

In the past, slow loading websites could easily take the top spot on page one of Google. Today, you can find yourself being penalised if your website is too slow.

But what exactly makes a website slow?

Those ever useful WordPress plugins can seriously reduce your site’s performance!

As does having too many videos, images and audio files.

Basically, the faster your website loads, the more likely people are to stick around.

Avoid installing hundreds of WordPress plugins and stick with just the basics.

If you are using shared hosting, this can also result in a slow loading website.

Focus on optimising and reducing your image files with a plug-in such as ShortPixel. Pagespeed ninja can also make speeding up your WordPress website quick and easy.

To check your WordPress sites loading speed, head to Pingdom and pagespeed insights to see what you need to fix.

6- No or Low Security

Every day, over 90,000 websites are hacked. Of these 90,000 websites, 83% use WordPress as their CMS.

Therefore, security is of vital importance. Protecting yourself from malware, brute force attacks and hackers leaves your site vulnerable.

Luckily, there are many WordPress plugins that provide optimal security for your website. Wordfence is the best of the best and offers up impressive security features for free.

You should also be aware that updating your theme and plugins is just as important. Hackers can find their way into your website through out-of-date plugins and themes.

You should also avoid publicly displaying your email address anywhere on your website. Instead, use contact forms that act as a middleman between you and your customer.

7- Remove Theme Stock

Whenever you download a WordPress theme to use for your website, it will store templates, photos, videos, plug-ins, etc.

Run through your media section on your WordPress dashboard and delete any files that you don’t need.

Then run through your plugins to remove any that you don’t need for your website.

Finally, delete any pages that are of no use. It is best to create a page from scratch rather than use a template.

As we mentioned earlier, any images that you upload should be optimised and reduced in size.

You should also try to serve any visuals on your website as WEBP files instead of JPG or PNG. These files are not only smaller, but our next generation and designed to load faster.

Basically, what we are saying is strip your theme down to its bare bones and build from the ground up.

And as a final note, avoid publishing your website until it is ready to go live. A partially completed website is of no use to anyone.

Final Thought

If you are a WordPress beginner and WordPress isn’t doing it for you, take a look at our best CMS options for 2019.

Ultimately, WordPress is filled with many pitfalls and potential mistakes for those not familiar with the platform.

However, these seven mistakes to avoid can help you on your way to mastering your website building skills.

Article first published here: 7 COMMON WORDPRESS MISTAKES TO AVOID IN 2019

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BASIC SEO TIPS FOR BEGINNERS

So you are just setting out with SEO and are not quite sure where you should start. Fear not! We’re here to get you on the right path to SEO success.

Once you have mastered these basic SEO tips, you can expect your ranking in the search engines to improve significantly.

We’ve got you covered with our top 10 beginners tips for basic SEO. So, if you’re ready to begin, let’s get started!

What Exactly is SEO & is it Important?

Before we get started with our top basic SEO tips, let’s first take a look at what SEO is. Search engine optimization helps you rank your website and content in the SERPs.

In its simplest form, it provides search engines such as Google and Bing with context about what your site and content offers.

In turn, this helps the search engines understand when and where to present your content when a user is searching for it.

Every single website that shows on the first page of Google has perfected their SEO techniques. They have mastered keywords, content and backlink gathering.

Ultimately, the higher your website ranks in the search engine results page, the more site visitors you can expect. And the more site visitors you have, the more likely you are to make sales and conversions.

Sounds awesome, right?!

Tip 1 – Keyword Research

This is the most important SEO step to take… aside from creating kick ass content! It is also the one that step that most beginners get confused with.

Keyword research lets you find high volume keywords to write into your content. The more keywords you use, the more likely you are to rank.

To begin with, you first need to find your seed keywords. These will be used in your title, URL, image alt, for around about 2% of your content text.

Once you have your seed keywords, also known as primary keywords, you then need to find semantically related keywords.

These are the keywords related to your content that users will most likely be searching for. (LSI Keywords)

As an example, if your seed keyword is flowers. Semantically related keywords would be how to grow, how to care for, what are the best types of, gardening tips, etc.

If you use WordPress, Yoast SEO will give you insights about how many keywords to use, etc. 

Tip 2 – Internal Links

internal links are extremely useful for improving your websites CTR (click through rate).

They work by linking up to relevant pages and blog posts throughout your website. Much like a spider web, each link from one page to another helps build connections for search engines and your readers.

Think of them as being the perfect on page promotion tool that diverts readers to more content they will likely be interested in.

Of course, you want to make sure that your internal links are relevant to what your content is about. 

As an example, if you have a beekeeping website, you could use internal links to any beekeeping products or services that you sell. Both are relevant to each other, thus more likely to encourage user click through.

And the longer a visitor spends on your website, the more likely it is to rank higher. The search engines noticed that your visitors weren’t bouncing, showing them that they are getting value out of your content.

Tip 3 – External Links

External links, also known as outbound links, are links on your content that point to an external website.

By linking to external websites, you help the search engines better understand what your content is about.

In fact, the more high-quality, related outbound links you have on your website, the more likely you are to increase your ranking.

This is because the search engines recognise your site as being high quality and trustworthy.

However, you can’t just go linking up to any old site. There is definitely something you want to be aware of.

Only ever link to blogs that are relevant to your website or content.

Limit your outbound links to a maximum of four per page.

Before linking, check the websites domain authority. Anything less than 50 is not worth linking to.

Never use a link farm.

Never buy links… these can literally kill that your website in a matter of weeks!

Message the website owner after you have created a link to let them know. If they ask you to remove it, you should.

Tip 4 – XML Sitemaps

XML sitemaps make everything easier for the search engines to crawl and index your content when you publish it.

A sitemap is basically a list of URLs that you currently have on your website. This let’s search engines such as Google know when they have missed a page or when changes have been made.

A sitemap is one of the basic SEO fundamentals that every website should have. By having one, you can ensure that your content is indexed and displayed in the search engine results page much faster than without one.

Talking about indexing. If you haven’t yet signed up with Google search console, you absolutely should. This free tool not only shows you analytics cover in your website. It also lets you submit URL to be indexed rather than waiting for crawling.

Tip 5 – Format Syntax

You might not know it, but using correct syntax is everything. Syntax is how you format and style your content. And it is an important part of SEO.

Not only does it make your content look more visually attractive. It also makes it easier for the search providers to understand your content.

But what exactly equates to good syntax?

Always use an H1 header

Use at least for H2 headers

Paragraphs should never exceed 90 words

Sentences should never exceed 20 words

Aim to use a maximum of three sentences per paragraph

Each subsection should be no more than 300 words

Use sentence case for titles and headings

Bold important text

And that’s pretty much it when it comes to syntax!

SEO Tip 6 – Optimise Images

You should always use images on all of your content. Images make content visually attractive and improve readability for the reader.

However, images can drastically slow down your website. And a slow website is often penalized by Google.

When possible, you should serve your images as a next-gen image using WEBP. If you use WordPress as your CMS (content management system) you can use the ShortPixel plugin to do this.

Avoid using PNG files as these are much larger than JPEG files. And JPG files are much larger than WEBP files.

Talking about images, you should also make sure that every image on your website has an image alt tag. This helps search engines understand what the image is about and shows it to those using  image search.

Tip 7 – Use Robot.txt files

Robot.txt files, also known as robot tags the search engines which pages on your website their crawlers should index, and which they shouldn’t.

For example, if you have a page or blog post that you don’t want the search engines to index, you could use the ‘noindex’ tag.

Likewise, if you are linking to a website that you are not sure about, you can use the ‘nofollow’ tag. Perhaps it has a low domain authority or could be potentially spammy; whatever the reason, no follow prevents external sites from affecting your SEO efforts.

If you are using WordPress to build your website and publish content, you can use the plugin Meta Tag Manager to quickly and easily add and remove robot tags to your content.

Tip 8 – Optimise Your Meta Description

These little snippets of information are shown in the search engine results page. You will see them every time you do a Google search.

They provide both readers and search engine context to what the content is about. 

Your meta description should be perfectly optimised to the correct character limit. This is currently averaging at around 140 characters. Anything over this will be cut off.

Try to use your main keywords in your meta description and answer the question instead of asking people to click to read more.

By answering the question in the meta description, you are already providing real value to the reader. In turn, they are much more likely to click through to your website.

Tip 9 – Write for Backlinks

If you seriously want to rank higher in the search results pages, you are going to need to get those all-important backlinks!

But unfortunately, finding backlinks is almost as hard as catching unicorns! 

However, there are some easier ways to get backlinks that don’t involve black hat SEO techniques. 

The best way is to produce content that provides real value! This means providing detailed and in-depth content with lots of data, statistics and shareable content.

You can also send out a message seeking guest writers to feature on your website. This method works really well as your guest writers are much more likely to link back to your website to show off their work to their followers.

Double bubble! You score that elusive backlink along with getting extra traffic.

Ultimately, if you want to get backlinks, you have to create content that people use to reference in their own content. Become an authority and watch as your DA starts to climb.

Tip 10 – Write Longer Content

When you take a look at the websites that perform best in the search engine results page, a common theme is clear. 

Longer, more detailed content is a clear winner. That’s not to say that you need to start writing 5,000 word blog posts to rank, but every now and then, go longer than you normally would.

The average website on page 1 of Google has approximately 1,200 to 1,600 words. Why does longer content work better?

The answer is pretty simple.

The more words you use in your content, the easier it is to make use of more keywords. It is also much easier to write these naturally. The worst thing you can do is stuff short content with keywords. This can relegate you to the lost pages of Google… which you really want to avoid.

So when should you create blog posts over 1,600 words? If you are covering a particularly interesting topic that people are going to learn from, this is the time!

And one thing to remember when creating large posts is that you should aim to make them timeless. This is what is known as evergreen content and can drive traffic to your website over extended periods of time.

At the very least, you should be creating content of a minimum of 800 words. Anything less than this and you are going to find it difficult to get your content to rank.

Final Word

That’s about it for this beginners guide to basic SEO tips. Try to implement as many of these 10 tips as you can into your everyday content production.

The more you use them, the more familiar you will become with them. And once you have them mastered, you can move on to more advanced SEO tips for improved rankings.

If you are interested in learning more about website design, web development, SEO tips, PPC, and the different types of Google software, check out our blog.

We have an extensive archive filled with useful and up-to-date information covering everything a digital marketer and beginner web designer could need.

Article first published here: BASIC SEO TIPS FOR BEGINNERS

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How to Create a Landing Page That Converts

When building a website, getting your landing page right should be your number one priority. Think of it as the facade or shop window of your business.

You need to create something that will lure visitors in. Something that will have an impact. A good landing page will generate more leads, increase sales and put you on the path to success. 

But how is it done? While it’s true that no two landing pages are the same, we can identify certain elements that characterise successful landing pages. 

    Why Do I Need a Good Landing Page?

Landing pages are extremely important to any marketing campaign. They usually come with big CTA buttons that direct customers to take action, and this is what sets them apart from any other ordinary web page.

They can be a great way to promote a new product or inform audiences about upcoming sales and offers. They might even exist just as a means of driving customers deeper into the sales funnel.

Landing pages are always precise and focused. You might notice that they usually contain less information than the average web page, but that single piece of information echoes throughout. 

Because they’re so specific, they usually target certain keywords better than regular pages. A good landing page will often help with SEO and boost your overall ranking in Google. 

But before you begin creating your landing page, take a step back and think about your goals. Are you creating a lead capture landing page or are you promoting a new product or service? 

Remain focused. When you focus on a single goal, it’s easier to come up with an effective and resonating message. Don’t suffocate your audience with useless information and try to be as precise as possible.

Nail the Headline

Headlines should captivate and compel visitors to stay on your website and learn more about your offer. Your headline should:

Be nice and short. Your headline will set the mood for what’s to follow. You may be tempted to include more information to keep audiences hooked, but keep in mind that long headlines may scare visitors away.

Grab the reader’s attention immediately. Don’t expect that users will make it to the main body of your copy.

  Be informative. Needless to say, the headline should be all about the product or service that’s on offer. 

    Use images and effective visuals to complement your message. The more you can say with fewer words, the better. 

A good headline is almost always followed by a great subheader. Subheaders offer more information by going a bit more in-depth. 

Make sure you’re not repeating yourself. The subheader should include new information that’s likely to persuade visitors to take action. For example, instead of further describing the product, you could try to focus on one of its strong selling points: what makes it different, how customers will benefit etc.

Incorporate Eye-catching Visuals

Did you know that we process visual information 60,000 times faster than text? You may have come up with the most compelling copy the marketing world has ever seen, but if it’s placed off-centre on a black background, chances are it won’t help with conversions. 

Visuals can and do make a difference. A graphic designer can create something that users will remember. When picking images to go along with your landing page copy, make sure that they are:

  Large and properly optimised. High-quality photos combined with a properly coloured background can trigger emotional responses that may work in your favour.

Relevant and on-point. You may want to include some text in your images, as long as it’s relevant and doesn’t take away from the overall feel and message.

Depicting the product. In the case of physical products, make sure you showcase the product itself.

  You never get a second chance to make a good first impression. The image on your landing page is probably the first thing that visitors will see once they’re on your website. 

That one image can make it or break it. Avoid using stock photos if possible and don’t be afraid to try out new things to stand out from the competition. 

Pain and Pleasure

In Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of personality, the pleasure principle is defined as the driving force behind all human action. That is to say, we do things to gratify our primitive needs, wants and urges. We do things because they make us feel good or because we believe they will make us feel good. 

We also avoid doing things that will cause us pain. Here is how you can use this information to create a landing page that converts:

Establish an emotional connection with your reader by identifying a potential need of theirs. 

Instead of offering the solution right away, identify a ‘pain’ point. What are your readers missing out on? How is their need left unsatisfied?

Offer relief to their pain in the form of a new product or service. 

Mention how others have suffered from the same pain, only to have their problems solved by your amazing product. 

Call to Action

So your readers are hooked and are ready to take the next step. A good call to action button is the final and most important step to increasing conversions. 

Use big buttons and contrasting colour to make sure viewers won’t miss them. Create CTAs that users won’t be able to ignore by offering something valuable. 

Your call to action copy is the most important copy on your website. Depending on the type of landing page that you’ve created, certain buttons will convert better than others. Some examples include:

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More Tips

Use a landing page builder or a landing page creator. Preloaded templates can make your life so much easier!

Offer something valuable that users won’t be able to ignore. Create a sense of urgency to capitalise on the fear of missing out.

Keep everything nice and simple. Remember, your landing page is just your shop’s window, not the whole shop itself.

Make use of testimonials. Can you somehow prove that your product or service is worth your customer’s money? 

Test and monitor your landing page. If something’s not working out as planned, go back to the drawing board and try out something new. Use a tool like Google Analytics to track the performance of your landing page.

A good landing page is the backbone of any successful online marketing campaign. It can drastically boost conversion rates and make lead generation so much easier. Head over to our blog for more digital marketing tips that will take your online business to the next level!

Article first published here: How to Create a Landing Page That Converts

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RICH SNIPPETS FOR BEGINNERS 2019

What Are Google Rich Snippets?

You may have noticed when you check out the Google search results that some snippets come with additional data.

Certain type of website content is much more likely to be shown as a rich snippet instead of a standard snippet. This includes content such as events, recipes, reviews and step-by-step guides.

Typically, Google pulls this additional information from the web pages HTML in the form of structured data.

When you compare standard snippets with rich snippets, rich snippets are definitely much more eye-catching and likely to have a higher CTR.

Are Google Rich Snippets Important?

From an SEO point of view, absolutely! Look at it this way, a standard Google snippet typically only chose three different pieces of information.

These include the URL, a Meta description and the title tag.

But rich snippets work a little bit differently. Instead of a generic display, they stand out from the crowd with a slightly different design. But how exactly does Google determine what information should be a rich snippet?

Whenever a user performs a search, Google scans through the pages HTML. It checks to see if it contains a schema or a similar structured markup.

But that’s not to say just because you use structured markups your content will be featured as a rich snippet in the Google SERPs!

However, there are a few things you can do to improve your chances of reaching your rich snippet dream.

How to Get Rich Snippets

The first thing that you will want to do is understand the type of Rich snippet that you are aiming for.

By doing this, you can implement a Schema mark-up created to achieve rich snippets status in the search engine results page.

In total, there are eight different common types of rich snippets used on Google. Depending on your content and business type, you will need to use a certain type for success.

Events – includes information covering location, times, dates and more.

Video – as Google can’t yet understand the content of a video, video markup makes it easier for them to understand.

News Stories – if your website is Google News approved come out you can use this to appear in the top stories section.

Organisation – includes contact information, business address, logo and relevant information.

Product Markup – provides Google with info covering product images and prices for specific products.

Music – provides information about music such as artist info, album release date, etc.

Recipes – recipes use a particular style of structured data that includes information such as recipe images, reviews, ingredients and preparation times.

Reviews – displays user generated reviews using a 5-star rating system.

How to Create Structured Data?

The most popular way to create and implement a structured data is to use schema.org.

All of the major search engine providers support schema.org and its ease-of-use makes it a common number one choice.

But how easy can it actually be?

Unbelievably easy! Simply select the type of markup that you need… then add in all of the required data that it asked for on the screen.

Once you have completed everything, it is time to implement it on your website.

Now, this can be pretty tricky if you aren’t a web developer. However, if you use a CMS platform, such as WordPress, there are a whole host of useful plugins that automate the process. (all-in one schema rich snippets is the most popular plugin).

Testing Your Structured Markup Works

Okay, so you have got your structured markup created and implemented on your website. The last thing you are going to want to do is check that it actually works.

It’s not as easy as simply heading to the search engines and checking. Google isn’t that easy.

But once again, Google also comes to the rescue with it’s amazing structured data testing tool.

You have two options to test your structured data. The first is to enter the website URL that contains your markup. The second is to simply copy and paste the HTML file into the code snippet section.

Click on ‘run test’ and let the tool do it’s magic.

If everything has been done correctly, Google should display any structured data found on your webpage. And if there are any problems, these will be highlighted in the result.

Final Word on Structured Markups

When you use structured data, you make it easier for your content to be understood by the search engines.

Without it, it will struggle to find the most important information to display as a rich snippet.

So basically, what you are doing is giving Google and the other search engine providers everything they need to create a rich snippet.

As an example, let’s say that your business is hosting an event.

Structured data tells the search engines:

  What time the event starts at.

What date the event is on.

What the event is about.

Where the event is located.

  By offering up this information, you are able to dramatically improve your chances of Google displaying it as a rich snippet.

Of course, not every website is going to benefit from this. Structured data for rich snippets only covers a select number of niches and topics.

If your website falls outside of these categories, you should instead focus your efforts on creating an amazing meta description and using LSI keywords.

Both of these are also great for higher rankings in the search engines and improving you’re organic CTR.

Learn More Today

If you are new to the world of digital marketing, you will find our blog to be super useful for your learning. We regularly post articles and blogs covering everything from search engine optimization to PPC and SEM.

We know that most people searching for information are novices. So the majority of our content is created to be easy to understand and actionable.

Check out our blog today for the latest and freshest tips, tricks and strategies to master the tricky world of everything internet.

Article first published here: RICH SNIPPETS FOR BEGINNERS 2019

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LSI KEYWORDS EASY GUIDE 2019

All You Need to Know About LSI Keywords

LSI keywords (Latent Semantic Indexing) are used by search engines such as Google to better understand what your web page content is about.

They are conceptually related. And with the search engines getting smarter by the day, they can help your content rank… even when your primary keyword hasn’t been used.

What Makes LSI Keywords Important?

In the past, the search engines relied completely on the keywords used in content to understand what the topic was about.

That used to make ranking content much easier. All you needed to do was repeat your primary keywords again and again.

The search engines saw the repeated keywords and came to the conclusion that the content must be based on them.

As an example, if you repeatedly used the keyword ‘organic gardening’ in your content, Google would look at it and decide that the content is about organic gardening… obviously!

This is where content keyword density was born. In order for Google to understand your page content, your primary keyword needed to be used as a certain percentage of your word count.

Jump forward in time to today, and Google works to understand the overall topic of your page. Yep! Google is getting smarter… much to the annoyance of old-school marketers.

But how do LSI keywords help Google dig deeper to understand your content?

Here’s an example:

Imagine you publish an article ‘growing organic vegetables.’

The first thing that Google does is check your image alt text, subheaders, content and your title tag.

Then it moves on to scanning your page content for latent semantic indexing keywords.

For ‘growing organic vegetables’, it will be searching for related keywords such as ‘chemical-free’ ‘green’ ‘clean’ ‘non-GMO’ and ‘organically grown.’

Once Google has finished its scan and has found LSI keywords, it is able to ascertain that the topic is indeed about ‘growing organic vegetables’

While they look like synonyms of common words, LSI keywords are actually terms and phrases closely related to your primary keyword.

But how exactly do you find the best LSI keywords for free?

How to Find LSI Keywords

Google Autocomplete

Google might love making a marketer’s life a misery by constantly changing algorithms. However, it does come with its own set of benefits too.

The quickest and easiest way to find LSI keywords is to use Google autocomplete.

You will notice that every time you perform a Google search, it throws up recommended Search terms.

As an example, when you type in ‘growing organic’ Google autocomplete comes up with growing organic vegetables, growing organic tomatoes, growing organic strawberries, growing organic apples and growing organic corn.

When looking at Google autocomplete, the words that are bold are the LSI keywords. So, you know that you can add these into your content to help Google join the dots.

While there are many other LSI keyword tools available on the internet. Google serves up the most popular and relevant LSI keywords from the get-go.

Google Related Search

The second way to find LSI keywords and terms can also be found on the search results page of Google.

This differs slightly to Google autocomplete as instead of instantly giving you suggestions while you perform a search, it instead chose you related terms.

To find the ‘searches related to’ section on the Google search page, simply scroll down to the bottom. Again, if you want to look for the terms that are in bold.

You should also make sure that the bold LSI keywords are relevant to your content. If they are, then find a way to weave them into your content.

Google Meta Descriptions

The final way that you can use Google to find LSI keywords is to look at the snippets shown for each page ranking in the search engines

Whenever you perform a Google search, these snippets will contain words in bold that are related to the main keyword you search for.

However, it goes a little bit further than this and also bodes any related terms or phrases.

You can take it as read that these are LSI keywords you can use throughout your content to improve your ranking.

Keywords Everywhere

Keywords everywhere is a handy Google Chrome add-on that throws up a whole wealth of keywords related information for free!

Not only does it give you the search volume, CPC, keyword difficulty, etc. whenever you perform a search, you can also use it for on page analysis.

Simply install the Google Chrome add-on, head to your competitors page and analyse their content.

If your content is covering a similar topic, this not only helps you find LSI keywords but also helps you discover other rank-able keywords you may have not thought about.

Where to Use LSI Keywords?

Unlike standard keywords, there are no hard-and-fast rules about where you should place your LSI keywords.

Of course, it is seen as good practice to always include a keyword in your title tag, as part of your H2 sub-header, and in the content itself.

So it makes complete sense to use your LSI keywords in these too. Why? Because these are the things that Google first looks at before moving on to your content.

The sooner you can help Google join the dots, the more likely it is to understand your content and show it to the right people.

And ultimately, that is what you want. If the wrong people are showing your content, you can pretty much guarantee they are going to hit that back button at lightning speed!

And that tells Google that your content didn’t satisfy their needs.

In turn, this can drastically reduce your chances of getting on the first page of Google.

Final Word on LSI Keywords

If you are serious about your SEO techniques, then you should be using LSI keywords in everything that you produce.

While it might take a little more time to include your LSI keywords. In the long-term, it will save you time as you don’t have to re-optimise  your content for better ranking keywords.

Whether it’s a person or AI, being able to understand something equates to a greater chance of success. So optimising your content to help both readers and search engines gain a deeper understanding of your content context can provide you with truly amazing search engine rewards.

If you want to know more about SEO techniques, check out our blog today. We publish regular SEO, web design, digital marketing and SEM content that is fresh and up-to-date.

Article first published here: LSI KEYWORDS EASY GUIDE 2019