Four Pillars of SEO | Technical, Content, On-Site, Off-Site

The Four Pillars of an Effective SEO Strategy

SEO can be complicated — in many cases, overcomplicated. How many ranking factors are involved in generating strong organic search results? Ten? Twenty? Thirty? Two hundred?

A quick search for “SEO ranking factors” will give you all of these answers and myriad others. There is a lot of information out there. And the reality is, while there are likely hundreds of variables working together to determine final placement, much of what is suggested is guesswork. And certainly, not all ranking factors are relevant to every business.

Point being, it is easy to get lost down an algorithmic rabbit hole. It’s information overload out there, and you can spend all your time on a research hamster wheel and achieve very little.

In this article, I want to simplify things and outline the four main areas you should be focusing on with your SEO. Really, when it comes down to it, SEO is actually pretty simple at a strategic level.

The four pillars of SEO

The four key areas of SEO that site owners need to consider are:

1. technical SEO: How well your content can be crawled and indexed.
2. content: Having the most relevant and best answers to a prospect’s question.
3. on-site SEO: The optimization of your content and HTML.
4. off-site SEO: Building authority to ensure Google stacks the deck in your favor.

Of course, these four areas have some complexity and overlap, but understanding your strengths and weaknesses in relation to them is key to focusing your efforts.

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SEO - Internet Marketing | Strategy and Tips

The SEO ‘do more with less’ cookbook

“Do more with less.” How often in our careers have we heard that phrase? Ultimately, that statement always means there is a need to reduce budget while still maintaining growth (or, at a minimum, flat year-over-year performance).

The good news is that in SEO, we are the kings and queens of “do more with less.” SEO professionals today are constantly competing against significantly larger teams — unless, of course, you are working at the online gorilla Amazon or in a top affiliate organization.

Over the past 20 years working in SEO, I have worked in pureplay, omnichannel, startups and Fortune 500, and the cookbook for doing more with less contains the same recipe. Sure, the recipe may need to be modified at an ingredient level to increase servings, but the ingredients never change. What you should find in your cookbook for your “more with less” recipe is as follows:

• Pursue position gains for head terms.
• Maximize CTR (click-through rate).
• Expand long-tail keyword inventory.
• Maximize value from existing traffic.
• Amplify external content marketing efforts.
• Align SEO efforts more closely to the campaign calendars.

Myself, I like to add a bit of a kick to my recipe: I step back and think big picture. How can I adjust my ingredient amounts to maximize the effort to include value for all channels?

Demonstrating impact across all channels is critical in obtaining resources to support my objectives today, and it establishes credibility within the organization long-term. The nature of our profession requires that an SEO professional routinely take off their marketing hat and explore user experience, merchandising and broader technology issues. These areas of the business have a direct impact on the performance of all marketing channels as well as direct traffic.

While we are always looking for program improvements, clearly there are times where we must squeeze the most out of the program to achieve the goals assigned to us by the company. I like to use a divide-and-conquer approach to make sure I have dedicated attention to each core growth activity.

In the divide-and-conquer approach, I typically take on the global impact improvements and task my other team members to devise a strategy to tackle the SEO-specific activities. Depending on your team size, you may have to do all the activities, or you may be able to spread them out evenly across the team. Regardless of team size, every growth opportunity area must be worked. Don’t forget to include your key partners as well when assigning out the activities.

For my part, I am going to specifically look at areas of the website where the data indicates that an improvement in user experience, merchandising and/or performance can drive additional revenue. In this example data set, I pulled landing page data from Google Analytics. This can be entry page data from Omniture or Coremetrics as well. The key area of analysis in this data set is focusing on potential opportunities by evaluating engagement metrics and conversion rate.

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Gary Vaynerchuk - Daily Vee | Zero Percent of Zero is 0

Hyperlocal SEO - The Future of Online Marketing

Why Hyperlocal SEO is the Future of Online Marketing

The Internet and smartphones have transformed the marketing world. Targeting geo-specific groups or individuals is quicker and cheaper than ever before. And now that Google has implemented localized listings, hyperlocal advertising will continue to grow. The following article will explain why.

Hyperlocal is Good for the SERPs

Hyperlocal isn’t a buzzword that will become outdated within a year or two—it’s been around since the dawn of marketing, and it’s going to get even more important in the future. In March, Google implemented a major update known as Fred. One of the primary changes to the algorithm involved boosting websites that were optimized for local audiences. Many global and national companies experienced significant rankings drops for geo-targeted search terms, while many smaller local companies got a rankings boost.

GPS systems and Google Maps aren’t just for getting around; they can also serve as viable marketing platforms for the mobile generation. If you don’t have a Google My Business page, get one live and optimized before you do anything else. Fill out all of the relevant contact information, ensuring that it’s seamless across the board, matches your website, and has some visually appealing pictures to accompany it.

The World is Mobile

Smartphones are no longer a luxury, but a necessity. For many, they’ve become an essential part of living, particularly among the younger generations. For example, over 77% of all Americans now own a smartphone and 71% sleep with it next to their bed. Additionally, more people are accessing the Internet using them than they are on desktop computers.

For the last few years, search engines have also been awarding higher rankings to websites that are optimized for smartphones. Therefore, if your website isn’t set up to harness the power of mobile technology, you’re selling yourself short. Optimize your website for all viewing platforms. While any website designer worth their salt will already do this, if you haven’t updated your website in a while, it’s best to give it an overhaul.

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SEO | Video Marketing

SEO and Video: How Are They Connected?

You may have heard that search engine optimization (SEO) tactics can benefit your video marketing campaigns. You may have also heard that video can help with your SEO efforts. Both statements are actually true.

SEO and video marketing are inherently connected; focusing on improving one can actually benefit the results of the other when executed correctly.

In this post, we’re going to take a look at how SEO and video marketing relate to each other, and how you can use this connection to benefit your business and get the most out of your marketing campaigns.

How are SEO and Video Marketing Connected?

SEO marketing and video marketing can directly impact each other.

When you use strategic SEO strategies on your video content, you’ll boost the visibility of your video content significantly. You’ll help your video pop up more often in search engines, both on YouTube and in Google. Focusing on keywords will be crucial to getting these benefits.

Video marketing can also improve your SEO results if the video itself is aligned with your overall SEO strategy. Not only will you have more content to help you connect with customers at all stages of the sales funnel, you’ll also be able to get other potential benefits like link building and the ability to stand out in SERPs (especially if you’re using Rich Snippets, which we’ll discuss in a minute). It’s also expected that since customers are increasingly preferring video becoming more important, Google and other search engines will continue to prioritize sites that have video content in the rankings.

If you’re using third party media players like YouTube, you can also post links to your site in the descriptions of the video, creating backlinks and sending traffic to your site.

The Step-by-Step Process to Improve SEO and Video Marketing at the Same Time

It’s clear that SEO and video work well together, like the peanut butter and jelly of the marketing world. There’s a process you should be following, though, to get the full benefits that you should be seeing.

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SEO Trends For 2018 - Link Building, Mobile, Voice Search

7 Top SEO Opportunities For 2018

When it comes to SEO, change is the only constant. No wonder it's tough to stand firm on its ever-changing ground, when the rules and trends are shifting if not at the speed of sound, then at least way faster than you get a chance to adopt them. In the blink of an eye, tactics that were working just fine may not only become obsolete, but even harm you. Meanwhile, some new trends may leave you too far behind to catch up, if you don't foresee it or neglect it for some reason.

Last year, we've discussed the SEO trends for 2017: waving goodbye to keyword density, confident steps into the age of semantic search, and moves towards safer and mobile-friendly web. This year, let's catch up with the shifts in older tendencies, and uncover some new opportunities along the way.

1. Link-building Is Very Much Alive (But Challenging)

A never-ending story - there will always be SEOs that claim link-building dead, and SEOs that desperately brainstorm on new ways to gain links, and turn 'building' into 'earning'. You'd better be on the second team, as there's also a never-ending flow of studies and surveys, proving backlinks to invariably remain one of the major rankings factors, and uncovering the direct correlation of sites' rankings with their backlink profiles.

Google isn't getting less strict about unnatural backlink profiles and manipulative link-building methods, so stick a fork in it. While the low-quality and spammy links are more likely to just get discounted and devalued by Google, there's still a chance of getting a manual penalty if you go for illegitimate methods.

The Opportunity

To be on a safe side with Penguin (which is real-time since 2016), make the regular backlink profile cleanup a part of your routine. 'Could it get more boring?' - you may wonder, but that's not much of a burden, while a good chance to be one step ahead by not being one step behind (as those who don't bother).

The recent link-building survey conducted by SEO PowerSuite shows that most of SEOs are now struggling the same way with the lack of opportunities, ideas or experience, but there are still some old and new tactics worth trying, with an emphasis on common sense. The advice for 2018 would be like:

• Not wasting time for grey-hat and spammy tactics,
• Growing your link profile at a natural pace,
• Creating useful and cornerstone content worth linking to,
• Establishing relationships within the niche instead of just rushing to get as many links as hands can hold,
• Turning to legitimate paid methods, but reasonably.

2. All-things-Mobile

Nowadays, mobile search has become ever more integral to people's lives, and Google is known for its aspiration to be reflective of users' needs. In the end of 2016, the so-called Mobilegeddon (expanding the use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal) was followed by the announcement that Google starts testing the mobile-first indexing. While 2017 has been a year full of controversy around the topic and delay notes from Google, 2018 seems to be the year when it may finally take effect, and the rankings may be determined based on the mobile version of a site.

Load time remains the factor that drastically affects user experience, and has at least some effect on the performance of a page in the SERPs and further interactions and conversions. To prevent a huge shift from mobile browsing towards apps, Google has introduced Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), which may load 4x faster than the regular pages and improve the user experience with little hints (like displaying ads in a mobile-friendly way). Case studies show that AMP implementation improves user-behavior factors like CTR and bounce rates as well. So, AMP is not a ranking factor now, but it well may become one.

The Opportunity

With mobile-first indexing, Google incessantly calls not to panic. However, in case your site is not fully responsive, and 

primary content and markup vary across mobile and desktop, it's high time to consider some changes, and make sure your mobile pages are not clumsy, void or less informative in comparison to desktop ones.

If you haven't considered implementing AMP yet, it's also a great time to get on board. According to Google, more than 900,000 domains have adopted the AMP framework by now, but that's a really small fraction of the 1.2 billion websites on the internet. So that's a one more benefit you can get with basically no risk, while your competitors may regret missing out on it one year from now.

3. Voice Search Is On The Rise

The number of tools based on voice recognition continues to grow - we have Siri and Cortana to give us a hint on 'where to go for best pizza near me' and to tell us a joke, Google Home and Amazon Echo to let us shop almost hands free.

The accuracy of the voice recognition continues to improve as well - Microsoft reported reaching a 5.1% word error rate, Apple SVP Phil Schiller in his interview with John Gruber made a joke that he's not afraid of saying 'Hey Siri' on stage anymore.

As it becomes more convenient and less frustrating, we observe the amount of voice searches growing real fast. Over 70 percent of respondents to recent HigherVisibility survey admitted using voice search at least once per month, and nearly half is using it weekly or daily. According to Google, 20% of mobile queries are made via voice now, and ComScore even predicts that it will make up 50 percent of all searches by 2020.

The Opportunity

Unlike text-based queries, the voice search queries tend to be longer and more specific in intent, and the searchers await clear immediate solutions. To adapt to the shift and optimize for voice search, there are several changes you may consider applying to your content:

• Incorporate long-tail keywords to address the more precise queries
• Use more natural language and conversational tone, answer the What, Where, When and How questions,
• Add a FAQ page, phrase the questions the way real people would ask them, and provide comprehensive clear answers,
• The four most common intents behind the voice searches are 'I want to know', 'to go', 'to do' and 'to buy'. Understand (research) your users' needs and offer solutions,
• Take good care of your local SEO, as most voice searches are local in intent.

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Social Media - Content Marketing in 2018

4 Trends for Social Media Content Marketing in 2018

Social media content marketing is continually evolving, and businesses around the world need to make sure their marketing campaigns are keeping up.

As a quick reminder for all beginner marketers out there, good content is good content, no matter what kind of platform you implement. Our main goal should always be to create appealing, resonating content with our targeted audience, otherwise, we’ve failed.

Setting that aside, we also have to acknowledge that even great content needs to be delivered the right way. Choosing this can be a big headache for most companies. Just as conventional publishing evolved decades ago, the digital marketing world is following the same path. However, there are two main differences: the rate of this change and the fact that most digital businesses are forgetting to be human.

There is no denying that creating and delivering compelling content on social media platforms is crucial for most branding endeavors. The trick to grasp modern social media marketing relies upon using a more humane approach.

Here are four trends for social media content marketing that are expected to make a big impact on 2018:

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