However, traffic ultimately amounts to nothing if you don’t call website visitors to a desired action on your site.

One way of getting the most out of your website traffic for your online business is by converting them into leads.

This way, you can still connect with them even after they leave your site, if not turn them into clients!

In this post, I will discuss with you the top 10 ways to effectively generate leads from your site.

1. Create a ‘subscribe to my list’ page on your website

Email marketing remains one of the best ways to generate large numbers of leads and turn them into paying customers of your product or service.

The personal nature of email and the fact that it goes straight to the inbox of subscribers with their permission make email an attractive choice to grow your business.

But before you can get there, you must build a landing page where you can funnel all visitors to sign up to your email list.

The page should not only have a lead capture form where people will enter their name and email address. It must also have information highlighting the benefits to signing up to your list.

Creating one should be a breeze if you have access to a landing page builder. Most of these tools have templates with high-converting web design that you can use and edit to create a personalized one on your website.

2. Develop a content marketing strategy

The key to successful lead generation from your website is by driving more traffic to it.

Acquiring leads for your business is a numbers game – the more people that visit your site, the more prospects you can gather.

Therefore, you need to roll out a content marketing plan that will reach hundreds and thousands of website visitors.

What’s important in content marketing is identifying a clear buyer persona of your brand.

By developing the ideal person who will visit your site, you can then create content that resonates with his or her wants and needs.

3. Add pop-up forms to your best performing pages

Over time, with help from the content marketing strategy you developed, your site would have increased traffic.

Now, this is where a pop-up form comes in handy.

You can make them on your blog posts in eye-catching ways. As a result, you can hike up your email sign-ups even more!

If you’re using an email software, most of them offer this feature that you can show on certain pages of your site, if not site-wide.

Now, it’s one thing to set up the forms. It’s another to pick your spots where you must set up these forms.

To maximize the performance of your forms, make sure to head on to Google Analytics and check the pages generating the most traffic.

Now that you have a list, embed the form on these pages so you can squeeze out more leads from your website with the least effort!

4. Diversify your opt-in forms

Opt-in forms come in different shapes and sizes. So, placing just one form on a page probably won’t be enough to generate prospects for your business.

It’s best practice to include a variety of opt-in forms in a page to make sure that visitors don’t miss them.

Below are the different forms available for you to use:

• Lightbox – Appears on the screen front and center
• Welcome mat – Similar to lightbox but covers the entire screen so visitors don’t miss it
• Slide-in – Glides up the screen on the side
• Floating bar – Shows on top or bottom of the page in the shape of a small, thin bar
• Sidebar – Positions itself on the sidebar section of your blog posts alongside your other widgets to not disrupt visitor’s experience
• Inline – Appears within the content so readers of your page can spot them

Use a combination of the forms in a page to help you generate more leads from them.

At the same time, you don’t want to use all types in your page and spoil the user experience. You need to find the balance that works for you and your visitors.

5. Control how you want to show your forms

By default, the forms appear on your screen immediately after the website loads.

And since there’s no established relationship between you and visitors, they will most likely leave your site once they’re bombarded with your forms.

Therefore, you want your forms to appear once your visitors get settled in your website.

For example, make the lightbox appear after users scroll past half of the page.

The fact that visitors are scrolling your page means that they are engaged with your content. Now, once the lightbox appears, there’s a good chance that visitors will submit their email address to your list.

But, arguably the best way to generate more leads from your forms is by using exit intent.

For example, if a visitor tries to leave your page, the pop-up form appears just before they close this window or open a new one.

This is a great way to get their attention with a mind-blowing offer to keep them on your website.

6. Use content upgrades to incentivize your opt-in forms

Most forms simply state that they’ll share update and exclusive news to subscribers.

That’s not an appealing proposition for visitors because it doesn’t offer an immediate benefit to people. This results to a low conversion rate of the forms.

Hence, you need to offer something of value to people that will encourage them to sign up to your email list.

One of the best incentives you can use to encourage sign-ups to your email list are content upgrades. Upon joining your list, new subscribers will receive the content upgrade as a way of thanking people for signing up.

There are many forms of content upgrades that you can use to entice visitors to join your list:

• cheatsheets
• resources list
• audio-recording
• whitepaper
• templates
• ebooks.

The key to using content upgrades is providing a solution to their problems.

For example, with the checklist, it can be a checklist of on-page SEO factors for a website that’s about SEO. This can be a great way to generate more leads from your site.

7. Split-test your forms

Don’t settle with just one version of the form on your website.

Through A/B testing, you can create different versions of the same form and test them at the same time.

What it does is display the variations at random intervals. Over time, you can see which versions landed the most subscribers.

From here, you can create another version of the winning form to further test and maximize your conversion rates.

When putting these variables to the test, be sure to test them one at the time. This way, you can isolate the factors and see how each of them affect the overall performance of the form.

8. Feature testimonials

Even if you have a good content upgrade, don’t expect all of your visitors to become your subscribers.

Aside from providing people with value, you also need to earn their trust.

The easiest way to do that is by using testimonials from customers or influencers.

Include them in the form or landing page where you’re gathering their contact information.

It would be great if you could get glowing recommendations from people whom your audience respects.

Because if the people they trust trust you, then they’ll also pay you the same respect by becoming your subscribers!

9. Use a live chat widget

Moving away from opt-in forms, you can also use live chat to generate more leads to your website.

This widget is normally found at the bottom right of the screen. If visitors click on it, it opens a dialog box that helps people with their questions and concerns.

The advantage of live chat is people can reach out to you and expect a reply in minutes, if not earlier.

There are tools you can use to help you set up a live chat widget on your site. Most of them work the same way – it’s just a matter of choosing one that you’re comfortable using.

10. Use call tracking

Some people prefer reaching out to you via phone, which is why call tracking as a lead generation tactic exists.

Using a call tracking software, you can create a toll-free phone number to feature on your website.

When people use the phone number to call you, the software tracks the calls and breaks them down into metrics – think Google Analytics, but for phone calls.

Aside from singling out calls that come from your website, call tracking gives you a better understanding on how callers interact with your support.

This way, you can improve your interaction with callers and close them into becoming prospects of your business, if not clients.

Conclusion

Building an email list of leads for your business can be a long and draining process. But if you want to expedite the process, then make sure you following the quick wins above.

The idea behind the aforementioned tips is to leverage your existing website traffic and convert them into prospects.

So, if your online business is attracting tons of traffic, then expect to acquire tons of name, email, and phone number information as well!

The post 10 Quick Wins to Get More Leads From Your Website appeared first on David Carralon.

As part of this task, you are set with the task of designing a global SEO strategy set for success.

Some of the questions you may ask yourself at this point are:

• How do I promote my website internationally
• What is International targetting?
• How do I apply my SEO strategy to multiple countries?

It would be bad advice to lay out here a kind of template for strategy definition since every business is different, and the right strategy will be based on the precise characteristics, requirements, and capabilities of the company.  

The right strategy will also depend on 

• the business’s ability to be agile (or accommodating to reqs)
• available resources
• business ambition
• Overall budget for the project
• Dependencies and stakeholders
• Technical infrastructure (feasibility/flexibility)
• and multiple other factors and requirements, both technical and operational.

The above factors will be critical to help you formulate the right type of international SEO strategy.

Oftentimes, such strategy may be far from being the one you would ideally have. You have to fit in with the constraints of the environment you work in. Things like company business goals, resources and existing technology may determine how ambitious you can get. 

Nevertheless, it is certainly possible to give a framework of fundamental areas that should not be missed or left out of consideration when designing an SEO strategy for multi-language or multiregional expansion. 

Let us examine some of these areas that will play a critical role to the success of your international SEO strategy.

Table of Contents

Global Strategic Business Plan

What does the business truly want to achieve? 

How fast do they want to do it

…and how ambitious they really are? 

Your international SEO efforts should begin with a clear assessment of your business goals for expansion. Your primary goal here is to evaluate your organization’s plans, project ambition, and existing resources. 

Based on your assessment, identify your strengths, weaknesses, and find areas where your opportunities are most substantial then direct your attention and resources in that direction.

Assess how your online business model works and define your online goals.  How do you deliver services/products to your clients, and what do you want to achieve with global SEO? Do you have the capacity to deliver the same goods/services globally?  What are your current business constraints, and how do you plan to deal with them?  

Keep in mind that it is how you lay your global strategic business plan that will guide your international SEO strategy. It will serve as a roadmap going forward. Assess the skills and competencies of your staff members to establish what they can and cannot do.

Offer training if need be to make sure that everyone is on the same page before you move into the next step that involves market research. Trying to understand the implications of going international with your SEO right from the beginning may save you a lot of time and resources in the long run. 

2.   The Research Phase

Once you have defined your global strategic business plan, the next thing you need to do is conduct thorough market research to establish the magnitude of the task ahead of you.

In this step, you are expected to conduct international keyword research, competitor research, and establish a clear approach to how you will handle language and cultural differences in different regions.

International Keyword Research

It is paramount to get your keyword research right while performing multilingual SEO. Aiming for the wrong keywords could easily affect your rankings, visibility, and authority hence derailing your effort. This is where linguistic understanding and prowess becomes crucial.

Keep in mind that effective keyword research isn’t just about translating your English keywords into other languages. The most important thing to remember here is that localisation is critical. Find a way of reflecting and understanding how native people perform their web searches and the exact terms they use.

The same thing applies even in markets that speak the same language.  For instance, while British consumers may search for the phrase “football boots,” an American looking for the same product may search for “soccer cleats.” Therefore, you need to do everything possible to ensure that your target keywords reflect the local market.  

To accomplish this, find native speakers for each market you are targeting to guide you. Apart from understanding the local language, native speakers will also appreciate the regional nuances of that particular language and the local consumer behaviour that may help you accomplish your goals.

Do not be tempted to just translate your keywords!

Competitor Research

The primary purpose of competitor research is to know who you are fighting against in the new digital market that you are targeting. Competition research helps you to gauge your potential competitor’s performance when it comes to paid advertising, SEO, and content marketing.

Take time to know your competitors well and what makes them stand out. Consider this as a way of benchmarking to spot opportunities.

What are their main sources of traffic? Which keywords are providing them with the bulk of their traffic? What edge do you have over them?  Can you offer some products/services that they don’t?  

You should also take time to analyze their backlinks and websites for strengths and weaknesses.  Gather as much information about your competitors as possible because you will need it to outrank them.  Analyse their overall online strategy to unearth the approaches they are following to obtain successful ranking in your target country. 

While doing your competitor research, don’t focus only on Google. Try to find out the most popular search engine in the country you are targeting and focus on that search engine. For instance, Baidu has a 75% market share in China, while Yandex commands a significant market share in Russia.

3. Language Considerations

You need to understand the nuances of your target audience to succeed.  You must strive to understand the countries they are from and the languages they speak.

A detailed market and keyword research is essential to identify the unique vocabulary that users from a specific location use while searching for products/services online. 

Learning the vocabulary of your target audience will help you speak to them in a way they expect to be spoken to. 

For instance, targetting the entire region of LATAM with Castilian Spanish (from Spain) may not be effective as you initially thought. You should consider that people in Mexico, Argentina, or Chile speak Spanish with quite distinct vocabulary depending on the niche market.

For a sizable international project, you must resist the temptation of generically targeting languages. Whereas for a humble startup project with an initial incursion into targeting non-English speakers, language targeting vs country language may suffice. It all depends on the complexity of the product, amongst other things!

For certain projects involving diverse demographics as the target audience, in-depth research is needed in order to ascertain if a single language to target a specific country is enough.

As an example, simply targeting Belgium with a site done in French does not reflect the multilanguage reality of the country as they . For example, the main foreign languages spoken in France are English, German, Italian, and Portuguese.

To complicate things each of those three official languages boasts several dialects being ‘Flemish’ a popular Dutch one and ‘Walloon’ a French main.

Furthermore, a piece of market research for Belgium wouldn’t be complete without addressing the English speaking segment of the population which is a 38%

Every nation will always have its own unique language/vocabulary considerations and variations to be aware of. There will always be variations to the language structure as well as a few words to consider.

Strive to understand how your target audience in a particular country read and digest content in their language. Keep in mind that if the language that you are serving to a target user isn’t truly talking to them, then you lose their trust and potential conversion opportunities.

4. Cultural Considerations

There are also lots of search implications usually driven by a culture which might affect the balance of search intent of people across different countries. For instance, seasonality plays a critical role in user behaviour, especially when thinking about holiday months and the overall buying behaviour over the year.

A summer promotion for Australia may not apply to the United States who will be experiencing winter. There are lots of other cultural complexities that you need to take into consideration given the different languages spoken across the globe.

For example if your company decides to target France and the UK with a single product format, eg: men’s grooming, it will be essential to take time and try to establish the number of people in those countries from a variety of cultural backgrounds and ethnicities in order to guide your strategy.

Always remember the fact that an individual’s physical location may not reflect their culture and identity. Therefore, blanket regional targeting may not yield desirable results.

5. Assess existing International Traffic and sales

Before you dive deep into implementing your SEO strategy, you need to establish your current visibility in the country that you are targeting.  This will guide your next steps.

If you don’t have any current visitors from that particular country, then it means that your highest priority should be conducting brand awareness. Focus on creating top of the funnel content that will educate your target audience about your products /services.

On the other hand, if you have been receiving a significant number of visitors from the country, then it means you may be looking at people waiting to be converted. In such a case, your focus should be getting your site live, encouraging conversions, and focusing on other bottom-funnel actions.

Each one of these situations presents its own unique set of opportunities and challenges that you will have to deal with. However, beginning the journey with a crystal clear understanding of what is expected of you will set your business up for long-term success.

6.   Domain and URL Geo-targeting 

There are different URL structures that you can employ to target specific countries with your site. You can use country code top-level domain (ccTLD), a subdirectory, subdomain, or a generic top-level domain (gTLD) with language parameters. Each URL structure has its own pros and cons.

The options are: 

• cctlds : local country domains. For example: yourgreatsite.jp for Singapore
• TLD (top level domain) subdirectories to target regions, languages or both! For example:
• yourgreatsite.com/jp  or yourgreatsite.com/ja
• TLD (top level domain) Subdomains. For example: jp.yourgreatsite.com
• URL parameters. For example: yourgreatsite.com/pagetop1240?country=japan 

Every model is endorsed by Google except the last one (url parameters). Very rarely an SEO professional recommends that one these days. 

We will not look at domain geo-targetting here in detail, but it is certainly one of the aspects of International SEO that you don’t want to get wrong. It is also one of the most complex as it involves UX, technical input, marketing, content, development. For very large companies an exercise like this can get very very political. 

As an SEO your role will be to do as much research as you can inside and outside the boundaries of the company’s online presence before you put forward a compelling domain geo-targeting plan, ideally clearly flagging advantages and disadvantages for every option.  

Additional geo-targeting methods

You can use different geo-targeting methods to strengthen your content’s local signals seen by search engines. There are several ways to geo-target your sites and pages apart from just the domain name itself. Some of them are not even mentioned by Google because we all know they are used in determining your content’s suitability for a specific region. The most popular ones include:

• Geo-location assignment in Google Search Console:  Access your GSC dashboard and click on “legacy tools and reports.” You should see the international targeting option that takes you to the language and country targeting page. From here, you can set the specific country that you are targeting.

The bad news is that Google has announced that the legacy tools in Search Console will be going away before the end of the year. It is unclear if there will be a replacement for International Targeting in the Search Console. 

Bing Webmaster tools also let you define your region preferences. You can do this on a domain, subdomain, subdirectory, or even page level. However, you should only set your region preferences if the search engine is having problems trying to rank the right page for the right audience.

• Use of Hreflang tag: The Hreflang HTML attribute, also known to as rel= “alternate” hreflang= “x” is used to tell Google which language is being used on a specific page of your site so that it can serve the page to web users searching in that language. This tag is extremely helpful when you have created content that is specific to a local audience.

• Local hosting: Having the regional version of the website hosted in the territory the website targets can help enhance the geo-targeting signals. It is not the end of the world if this cannot be done as it is not always possible to source local hosting for every version of the website, especially in enterprise environments. But if you can, it helps a bit, not just for SEO but for things like page speed. 

If local web hosting is however not possible, then using a CDN with a hub in the target country or near will also help you deliver a better user experience for your users as your website will download faster. 

• Link building : This method can be as effective as no other… if you launch a product in a foreign market, and it fails to get traction in those markets then link building is the solution. Once local mentions of the brand start pouring in, in the form of links, your localised content will start to get visibility. 

Whether you need this or not as soon as you move into a region is dependent on factors such as market saturation, competition, and the uniqueness of the product itself. 

• Content localisation: this section deserves a heading in its own right as it’s far too important, see keep reading onto section number 6.
• Local currency: Adapting to local market and mention the local currency when it applies
• Payment methods: Display the local payment methods.
• Address: Display each local office address on the website footer. 

If possible, the overall design and experience of your site should also be developed to address the specific behaviour of your target audience better. 

Things that you should not do

Some webmasters attempt to improve geo-targeting by redirecting users based on IP address. This is bad advice and can cause your website to underperform. 

Auto-redirecting is annoying, confusing, and can even cause visitors to never find certain content.

Luckily Google has added information about this (finally!) on their guidelines: 

Do not use IP analysis to adapt your content. IP location analysis is difficult and generally not reliable. Furthermore, Google may not be able to crawl variations of your site properly. Most, but not all, Google crawls originate from the US, and we do not attempt to vary the location to detect site variations. Use one of the explicit methods shown here (hreflang, alternate URLs, and explicit links).

Google Support – Managing multi-regional and multilingual sites

If you want to let visitors know about the existence of an alternative, more suited version of a webpage, use a banner at the top or bottom of the page or a javascript-enable message informing the visitors of alternative language options. You can also add links to different localised versions of the content at the bottom of your page.

Avoid using cloaking, which refers to serving different versions of the same content to search engines and users. Some International SEO experts are tempted into cloaking as a solution to auto-redirection, but since we have said auto-redirecting users is a bad idea, cloaking only makes things worse.

7.   Translation and Localisation go hand in hand

Going international means that you will have to produce the same content in one or several other languages. Unfortunately, it can be challenging to translate a page into a local language accurately.

Translating your content into different languages is a challenge you have to deal with. How do you verify and check a translation to make sure that it’s going to be spot ? You need to make sure the translated content is useful to build trust with your target audience. Consider creating a team of native speakers to help you with the translation. 

It also means, especially for large corporations, that some content in a given language may be shared across several regions, often lacking the resources to localize it. For example content in English from the US or from the UK may be reused by their operations in Singapore, Australia, or Southafrica. 

In those scenarios SEO can suffer a lot as some regions stronger in displaying some signals will cannibalize other weaker ones. So it is important to try and localize the content in every way possible.

Note: Avoiding use of JavaScript to render translations. Though if it has to be done that way then it has to be done properly using Server side rendering of the translated content, and if possible using a pre-rendering engine. 

Don’t be tempted to put your site’s content into Google Translate and then proceed to post the translated text on your international site.

The results will not be good for your visitors who understand the language better and can cause a major blow to your multilingual SEO efforts.The truth is that most translation tools are inaccurate and confusing.

Furthermore, you are looking for something much more than just translation. You want to add elements of localization to your translated content to serve your target audience properly.

It is advised to always go beyond translating: 

• Consider working with a local professional translator who is a master of words and understands your target region’s local culture and language nuances.  
• Have your local staff read the translated content and adapt it, if needed, taking into account local language nuances. 
• Have the copy check by one additional third party to ensure it is spot on and aligned with the nuances of the local language.

For example, English copy quoting ‘beautiful city’ may be translated to Spanish as ‘esta linda ciudad’ by a translator from Colombia. Problem here is that ‘linda ciudad o ‘ciudad linda’ does not quite sound like Spanish from Spain. It should rather be: ‘bonita ciudad’ for example. It is paramount to properly localize translated content. 

• Localization of URLs, navigation, content, meta descriptions, title, headings

Lastly, having your international keyword research done professionally can help you avoid many issues in future and even lose money.

8. Technical considerations for International SEO

Technical infrastructure such as existing legacy CMS, dbases, APIs and over-engineered systems can play a big role for International SEO, to the point of constraining ambition plans.

They can also be an advantage at all times. It’s something to study carefully and bring into your plan early in the planning phase.

Content Delivery Networks

One of the thorniest aspects of global SEO is that of CDNs and load balancers. If they are public-facing and accessible that can be a problem as they can be crawled even if you have requested the bots not to. Somehow they will be found, so a plan is needed.

Duplicate content caused by technology

If there are duplicate versions of your site, be ready to deal with some cannibalization issues. Google bots are quite good about such issues. It is more about visibility.

So, make sure you verify every public-facing IP. Don’t rely on Google to try and do it for you. Make sure that you’re giving them the right thing; it’s just simple.

Server configuration or location

Working on multiple sites targeting different countries and/or different search engines is indeed a challenge so, finding ways to stay on top of it without taking too much of your time is key.

Targetting China effectively, for example, requires mirroring your website to be hosted in China, IF you truly want to stand a chance against competition and outrank them.

Another that stands a challenge is the whole paradigm about replicating code across different servers. There are various ways of doing it more or less effectively depending on resources. A slight mistake on this front can be catastrophic. 

Rolling out code across servers

Pages with a lot of JavaScript and CSS usually take time to download, parse, execute on. When you’re on mobile devices, like much of your international audience, things might be worse. Creating AMPs can help you solve the issue, but you must find a way of making them stay on the page. Think of incentives that can work to your advantage.

Encoding

This is something that you won’t have to worry if you are just dealing with English copy. But the moment you get into the multilingual context and especially if the website picks up data from a database and encodes it in order to return accurate results on the listing page, you are starting to deal with URL encoding issues.

What is URL encoding?
URL encoding stands for encoding certain characters in a URL by replacing them with one or more character triplets that consist of the percent character “%” followed by two hexadecimal digits. The two hexadecimal digits of the triplet(s) represent the numeric value of the replaced character.

The term URL encoding is a bit inexact because the encoding procedure is not limited to URLs (Uniform Resource Locators), but can also be applied to any other URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers) such as URNs (Uniform Resource Names). Therefore, the term percent-encoding should be preferred.

There will be implementation flaws and/or oversights and if these are not caught up on time, you will soon end up with two versions per url. Sometime the encoding flaw happens on the actual url and other times in the rel canonical.

Use this tool to perform some tests and learn how the encoding/decoding process takes place

Eg: a url containing the French region: Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes would be written :

www.mytravelsite.com/regions/auvergne–rhone-alpes special characters stripped out

www.mytravelsite.com/regions/auvergne-rhône-alpes special characters left in

www.mytravelsite.com/regions/auvergne-rh%C3%B4ne-alpes special characters left in but url is encoded

Some other special characters like the “ç” is encoded in UTF-8 as two bytes C3 (hex) and A7 (hex), which are then written as the three characters “%c3” and “%a7” respectively.) making URI long (up to 9 ASCII characters for a single Unicode character).

Modern browsers however display the decoded form, and many protocols can send UTF-8 without the %HH escaping.

As an International SEO Consultant or Director of SEO inhouse, it is often up to you keep tabs on the different aspects of a websites, to ensure you can report things very quickly if your monitoring systems alert you or a fault, deficiency or issue

Make sure you verify everything in Google Search Console and communication promptly any issues you may identify. Being able to catch these things off before they cause you any real problems across the entire network, is essential to bullet-proofing your SEO.

9.  Integration

In this step, you will be expected to come up with your standard operating procedures (SOPs) for SEO integration in all of your other functional units: UX, content, product, technical development… 

You can think of this as the best practices that you need to share around with all the teams for implementation success of International SEO.

UX teams, and in particular information architects will welcome keyword research data that you may have, especially if it shows large demand for some products or services offered by the company that may have been missed through traditional UX processes such as card sorting, content inventory or user’s workgroups… 

Similarly SEO best practice guidelines for technical development can be key in rolling out Multilanguage and multiregional SEO effectively. Things like avoiding auto-redirecting visitors and/or search engines based on their browser setting or IP addresses is something better brought up before it gets implemented. 

Furthermore things like setting defining structure and multi-layer possibilities for XML sitemaps, exclusions on robots configuration, meta descriptions, and compliant use of javascript can help you avoid giant problems globally once it gets approved and goes through to the production stage. .

When it comes to Product, it is also sensible to take part in the discussion around planning product development and when the right time pops up, bring up ideas, or proposals to implement things in a way to deliver better results globally, eg: appropriate schema markup. 

Things like using a  dedicated URL for each localised content variant.

10.   Build the Case for International SEO

Once you have a blueprint of what you want to achieve with your international SEO efforts, it is essential to define how you will be managing your global SEO strategy.  Think ahead and don’t try to limit yourself to a particular strategy. It is paramount to describe clearly the benefits for the business in the long term.

Feel free to try different things to determine what is working and what isn’t working. Document every step you take and the outcome so that you have a strong foundation to make sound decisions in the future.

Executing an your plan successfully is all about building a case for your SEO strategy. With buy in and approval from top management; resources, team support and SEO integration will follow. 

Although it will still take some effort to ensure your Global SEO strategy is actually executed. Things slip often in large companies, so you may end up delving into having to use up your corporate  SEO skills. The good news is that once you get approval, chasing up parties to respect, follow and implement the plan makes it easier.

11.   Plan the Global SEO Training Plan

International SEO is a complex set of methodologies, processes and techniques, and so, you need to find a way of ensuring that your team is competent enough. This is where training comes in. 

Before you go further into implementing your strategies, get some training for your global team in how to respect different cultures and customs.

Some of the training areas you will need to think of for your team are: 

• culture training
• conducting international keyword research
• content optimization
• Outsourcing content
• Performing outreach

12. Find Champions and allies that will Support SEO

To succeed with this type of SEO, you will need to talk to the right people who have the keys to the international version of your company website and can readily authorize your changes to the site. 

You will need their support and trust moving forward to build the case for SEO internally. This is where you need to put your communication skills to use. Make sure you are sending the right message across the organization, and everybody understands what you are trying to do.

In doing so, you will ensure that your appeal for resources is backed up by voice of the community (internally).

You will sure encounter challenges in your quest to scale to international markets, but finding a way of bringing the people who matter onboard will help you make that road easier to navigate.

13. Benchmark and Monitor Success for International SEO

In simple terms, benchmarking can be defined as a standard by which something is measured. Benchmarking in international SEO is a critical aspect of the process.

Keep in mind that your global SEO effort does not begin and end with the creation of the country subfolder for each key market.

Always strive to keep everything in check even if your site has already attained the top position in the SERPs for most geographic locations. 

Benchmark your performance over a three to six month, or six to twelve period to gain valuable before-and-after perspective and insights.

Advice: do not over complicate it by building the ultimate dashboard that aims to track EVERYTHING

Gather your benchmark metrics, key performance indicators, and data points that you will use to evaluate your overall performance. These can be very different from project to project but broadly they can include:

• percentage of traffic from organic search per country
• average page load speed by regions, by content types…
• business leads generated per region
• time spent on the page, bounce rate, click-through rate,
• No. of backlinks acquired by region
• overall business performance by region upon implementation

14. Execution

This is perhaps the hardest part of the plan: finding a way to execute and track your to-do list effectively.

As a team leader, you need to find a way of integrating your SEO plans into existing processes, communicating the strategy, deliverables, and how-tos to the whole team and making sure the overall strategy fits well into existing project management efforts and methodology.

It is assumed that you have full management buy-in for your plan, costs approved and resources allocated. If this is at all unclear in anyway, then you are risking that the plan may end up bein unsuccessful. It’s very very important that you address this matter in its entirety early in the process.

If the current project management methodology within the organization is Agile, so your SEO plan will be. SEO integrates and thrives into the Agile methodology.

Structure your deadlines and milestones to adapt to this way of working where maximum impact vs. minimal effort kind of criteria needs to be taken into consideration.  

Even if the overall project management methodology is being managed in a conventional Waterfall fashion, you need to structure your plan for international success to fit in.

In most cases, it will not be SEO that determines how development, marketing, and product work together. Instead, it is the other way round. Therefore, adapting your SEO strategy to the current working environment and methods is critical to long-term success.

Congratulate and share glory upon the whole team whenever success is achieved for any milestone and encourage them when something is not implemented 100% correctly. Basically, execution is largely about good project management, communication, and good team working karma. 

Conclusion

If you have read through this guide up to this point, then you can agree with me that international SEO is much more than just translating copy. It involves understanding different cultures and trying to figure out how to localize your site to appeal before the eyes of your target audience.

When done right, international SEO goes beyond the core SEO metrics we monitor since it can help your brand establish a global brand. Remember the fact that new markets equate to new opportunities, but only the best strategies will prevail.

In my next articles, I will be digging deeper into some of the mentioned items to help you understand the concept of international SEO better. That is it for now, and good luck in your global SEO effort!

If you need help with your Internationalization plans or an SEO Audit , feel free to contact me for a quote.

>> Other Resources

• International Search Summit, the only industry conference focused on International Search
• Aleyda’s International SEO Process and Tools
• A simple Guide to International SEO, by SEO Powersuite
• Google’s Managing Multi-regional and Multi-lingual sites
• SEMrush’s How to develop your International SEO Strategy
• International SEO Best Practices , by Moz

The post International SEO – Your Guide for Success appeared first on David Carralon.

Most of us can agree that 2019 was an incredibly eventful year for SEOs. We all saw a significant number of Google algorithm updates and ongoing keyword ranking fluctuations in different industries as Google continues to “improve overall user experience.”

Without any further ado, let us dive into a quick overview of SEO in 2019 and see what happened from the start of January up to December.

January 2019

Google reveils key information about Unnatural Links and the need for Disavowing

2019 started with a significant statement from Google’s representative, John Mueller, on unnatural links. When asked if there was a difference between a human being adding unnatural links on a site compared to a bot, John made it clear that it was the responsibility of the site owner to ensure their website is clean no matter how content and links are added onto it.

John made it clear that even if someone decides to spam or hack your content, you need to do everything you can to clean up your site and make it look good. Before this update, the stance had always been “you do not need to disavow the bad links you have no control over“.

Only a couple of weeks later, John Mueller gets asked again about disavowing links in a webmaster hangout. He revealed that disavowing bad links may help Google algorithmically trust your links more.

That last statement, together with the previous one in the month of January 2019, basically made it clear to the SEO community that the need for disavows is not over, as Google had made it sound in previous forums. There are still situations where link auditing and disavowing will help :

• avoid algorithmic devaluation if your site is under negative SEO attack
• avoid a manual penalty if the webspam team assesses your site
• strengthening the perceived value of your web content by Google

LinkResearchTools Organizes a links-only Conference in Vienna

The first-ever link-only SEO conference in the world took place in Vienna in January. The conference brought together the best SEO experts from different parts of the world to discuss off-page SEO issues and how to take SEO to a whole new level.

It also served as a networking event that provided attendees with an incredible opportunity of meeting amazing people from all over the world and a chance to make new friends. 

Some of the key topics discussed were quite blackhat, eg: how to build and maintain PBNs, link buying and selling. But there were also quite interesting sessions on SEO competitive analysis, outreach, PR as well as more technical sessions on Google penalties and how to avoid them, Redirected links and REL-Canonical linking.

The conference was an opportunity to sell the fantastic tool for link analysis: Linkresearchtools, however all the proceeds from the LRTcon went to charity. The 2020 edition is scheduled to take place in Vienna next May 28th to May 30th.

February 2019

Google Confirms E-A-T Is an Essential Part of the Ranking Algorithm

 The acronym E-A-T, standing for Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness, became popular in 2018 when Google’s Quality Raters Guidelines (QRG) went public. The 2018 E-A-T algorithm update was released as part of Google’s campaign to battle credibility issues of content.

According to QRG, a website must possess a set of pre-defined qualities to score high when it is evaluated under the E-A-T guidelines.

Basically, E-A-T tells Google whether a page contains valuable and credible information that people are looking for. It helps Google know whether a page can be trusted.

On February 19^th 2019, Google confirmed E-A-T to be an essential part of their ranking algorithms. However, the announcement did not come as a surprise since many SEO professionals already suspected that E-A-T was a critical ranking signal. This is still a debatable topic today that causes signification agitation and disagreements in the industry.

Martin Splittz joins John Mueller on the Google Hangouts

Being a Webmasters Trend Analyst at Google, Martin Splittz brings in a different dimension to Google Webmaster communication channels. 

Whereas in the past Google’s recommendations on javascript frameworks (Angular, React, Vue…) had been vague or insufficient, Martin kicks off a series of youtube channels, where he focuses on popular hot topics such as javascript crawling, rendering, server-side rendering (SSR) and the like.

His angle is JS frameworks for website building do not necessarily have to bad for SEO if implemented correctly. I’m obviously cutting a long story short.

Community members welcomed his arrival on the search engine optimization scene since he brings with him new insights into site crawling, rendering, and indexing.

Take a look at his Javascript SEO series here and here’s one of his videos:

March 2019

Google Rolls Out the March 2019 Core Update

Google rolled out the first major update of 2019 on its algorithms on March 12^th through to March 13^th. 

Google’s Danny Sullivan announced that the update would be referred to as the “March 2019 Core Update” to cut back on confusion.

There was a ton of movement across different sites, categories, and countries. While some people believed that this was an extension of the Medic update that had impacted mostly health/medical niche websites, a significant movement was reported across the board.

In its mission to fight disinformation in the YMYL space, key players in news, e-commerce, games, coupons, and may more niches were hit badly as they reported substantial traffic drops after the update.

One of the verticals especially badly hit was health or medical information websites prominently displaying health-related information going against medical consensus

Here’s the drop experienced by a client in the ‘Peptides’ Ecommerce industry who turned up to me for help around May 2019 to run a website audit:

Google also explained that the March 2019 Core Update wasn’t a full reversal and had nothing to do with the other neural matching updates.

Google Ditches the Rel=Next/Prev Annotation

– March 21, 2019 –

For many years, webmasters had been using the rel=next/prev markup tag to communicate to Google that some web pages were all part of a larger set of pages.

Typically, if you had an article split into several pages, you could use this tag to tell Google that the pages were all part of the same set. The search engine would then combine all signals and content from all pages in the same set.

However, on March 21^st, 2019, Google’s John Mueller confirmed during a Google hangout that the search engine had stopped supporting the annotation completely. It was unclear when Google had stopped supporting the markup, but according to John, it was a “number of years ago.”

This came as a complete shock to the SEO community and anger manifested across many different corners stating the disappointing fact that Google had kept this quiet.

At the same time Google seemed to ignore the fact that astounding amount of resources, time and effort had been going into integrating the rel prev next tag according to google’s guidelines, particularly for those dealing with enterprise SEO.

Google Search Console Starts to Show Google-Selected Canonical URLs

On March 26^th, Google announced that it had added a new feature inside GSC that will allow users to see which URL has been selected as the canonical version for a web page.

To access this new functionality, you need to navigate to the inspection tool and enter your webpage’s URL. This tool was introduced to help webmasters see what Google was actually seeing and stop using guesswork in their work.

Ahrefs Announces Plan for New Search Engine

On March 27th, Ahrefs CEO Dmitry Gerasimenko announced on March 27, 2019 that the company had plans to develop a better search engine that supports content creators and protects user privacy much better.

In his proposal, Mr. Gerasimenko described a more open and free web that rewarded talented content creators with a revenue split. The new search engine will seek to correct some of the common flaws he feels Google has that are bad for publishers and users.

While this sounds like a good idea from a publisher point of view, feedback from the SEO community was far from positive, with many thinking that this was ‘fail’ idea. Let’s wait and see!

April 2019

Google’s indexing bug causes mayhem

Due to some technical upgrades carried out by Google’s engineers, Google started dropping pages out of the index. Something that Googlers thought could get resolved in a few hours, took them over a week to get the bug fixed.

A few months later, in august, Google wrote about it, to explain to the webmaster world what really happened.

Google’s Monopolistic Practices on the spotlight again

For many years, Google has been accused of creating an existential threat to many internet retailers with its firm grip on digital advertising. 

In fact, the company was recently hit with a monopoly abuse charges, and the investigation is still ongoing in the United States. 

Rand Fishkin, founder of SparkToro has been proactive at creating awareness of how much the world of search is unfairly dominated by Google, and things won’t change any time soon.

In an exclusive interview with Webcertain published on April 1st, he reveals how digital marketing is being disrupted by various traffic giants such as Google and what marketers need to do to achieve desirable ROI. You can watch the interview here:

May 2019

Google Makes Improvements to GSC

In May, Google announced the introduction of three new reports to Google Search Console (GSC). They introduced the unparsable structured data report and two enhancement reports to the user interface.

The primary purpose of the unparsable structured data report is to aggregate all parsing issues that usually stopped Google from identifying the feature type. You can use this report to check if Google was unable to parse any of the structured data you tried to add to your website.

The two enhancement reports that were introduced included the logo and sitelinks searchbox enhancements report. Community members had also complained of the missing legacy tools in the new GSC user interface.  Google listened to the complaints and reinstated the legacy tools under the legacy section.

Yoast SEO Becomes the First WordPress Plugin to Provide Defragmented Schema Markup

Experienced webmasters know that proper markup helps search engines see and understand how web pages are related to one another.

Technically, if you have poor markup implemented on your site, you will make it harder for Google to understand your site structure and potentially lose out on relevancy or other factors where semantics play a role.

Fortunately, Yoast SEO can now take care of all that with its defragmented schema markup that is also included in the free version of the plugin. So if you use WordPress, you may want to give this a try. Otherwise you should still do your best in 2020 to have schema structured data well implemented on your sites.

June 2019 

June Core Update

Although Google does not usually provide details about an upcoming update before it is officially announced, Danny Sullivan pre-announced the June Core update on Twitter on June 3^rd. This was the 2nd time that Google pre-announced an algorithm update.

This was five days to the actual rollout date. The June Core Update seemed to target news sites with Google raising the quality bar for news topics.

The search engine seemed to be going after news sites that offer low-quality content for news topics, as well as punishing sites whose medical, health content was going against scientific and traditional consensus, again. Eg: Dr Merkola site plunged

Health, e-commerce, cryptocurrency and news sites were hit, as well as a bunch of different niches in the YMYL space.

Google for Jobs Launched in France

Google for jobs was made available in France for the first time on June 7^th, 2019.  The primary purpose of this service is to aggregate job openings from the leading French job boards and provide a quick summary in one place.

Searching by specific location the key phrase “vacancy” and a specific job type, you are redirected to a results page that provides you with the latest job opportunities.

To make this possible, Google partnered with leading job sites in France, such as HelloWork, Figaro Classifieds, and Pole Emploi.

This was just one more move by Google into monopolizing one additional vertical. Previous ones were: hotels, travel… and new ones will arrive in future years.

The move prompts reaction from British and European job boards who have since formally complained to the European Court and Competition Watchdogs in the UK to investigate Google for unfair exploitation of their search engine and abusing their dominance to favour their own assets in the search results pages.

July 2019

Google Starts to Add Timestamps to YouTube Videos in Search Results

In mid-July, there were several reports that Google was testing YouTube timestamps in SERPs. This means that users could jump to specific sections of the YouTube video that answers their question, hence eliminating the need to watch videos in their entirety.

This change is still being tested in a few countries, and if Google decides to roll out the change globally, video content creators will be required to have timestamps and descriptions on their videos.

August 2019

Google Reveals More Information about Its Core Updates

On August 1st, Google’s Danny Sullivan published a blog post focusing on essential details that webmasters need to know about the search engine’s core updates. In the blog, Google re-emphasized the importance of content and why webmasters must adhere to all guidelines set while creating content to avoid losing their rankings.

There was also a section talking about the quality rater guidelines, E-A-T ranking factors, and how you can recover from a major algorithm update. In this article Google links out to prominent SEOs who actively participate in Twitter conversations, release reports and run tests. This causes some stir as other SEOs see this as a service endorsement.

SparkToro Publishes Research Showing That Less Than Half of Searches Now Result in a Click

Rand Fishkin strikes again with a SparkToro report based on a comprehensive piece of research that was conducted using data collected by Jumpshot to prove the increasing number of searches that don’t result in a click. The study showed how click-through rates have changed over time.

A clear pattern was established; while the organic searches were shrinking, there was an increase in paid CTR. The trend was more predominant on mobile devices, where more than half of all searches take place.

For smart marketers, this research meant that there was a need to start finding ways of getting value from zero-click searches and seek out keywords with a higher CTR potential. There is also a need to get your content optimized on Google’s own properties, such as AMP, YouTube, and Maps.

For those following Google’s monopolistic practices, this shows just one more, with clearer scientific and credible evidence that Google’s competitive behavior is aggressive and unfair, to say the least.

September 2019

Google Introduces Sponsored and UGC Tags as Alternatives to Nofollow

On September 10^th, 2019, Google announced the introduction of two tags to complement or sustitute the “nofollow” attribute. The “sponsored” and “User-Generated Content (UGC)” tags were introduced to improve the performance of the “Nofollow” tag.

With the introduction of the sponsored link attribute, it means that all sponsored /advertising links can be labeled as such, while untrusted or unsure links can still be labeled with the “nofollow” attribute.

The User-Generated Content (UGC) allows webmasters to clarify that they don’t editorially endorse specific hyperlinks on their websites. The UGC tag also enables Google to know that the link is within user-generated content such as a forum post or comment.

September 24th Core Update

Google published a global update to its core algorithm for the third time in 2019 on September 24^th.  This was a global update meaning it affected all niches and search indexes.  And just like the June update, the September 2019 core update was pre-announced on Twitter.

The rollout lasted two days, resulting in massive rank fluctuations. SEO experts believe that the September update mainly targeted YMYL and finance sites. These two categories recorded high volatility compared to sites in other niches.

October 2019

BERT Arrives

The Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) update began rolling out on October 21st for selected English-language queries.

In simple words, this update is designed to help Google better understand the context of words in various search queries. The primary aim of this update is to improve user experience and ensure that the search results remain relevant.

Google open-sourced BERT in November last year, which means that anyone can use the BERT code to train their own language processing systems for question answering or any other task.

Useful reading/listening: Google Bert Update: what it means

“BERT and family improve the state of the art on 11 natural language processing tasks. Even beating human understanding since linguists will argue for hours over the part of speech a single word is.

But what if the focus of a page is very weak? Even humans sometimes will be like “what’s your point?” when we hear something.

And pronouns have been very problematic historically but BERT helps with this quite a bit. Context is improved because of the bi-directional nature of BERT.

“There will still be lots of work for us to do since we need to emphasise importance, utilise clear structures, help to turn unstructured data into semi structured data, utilise cues on content light pages (e.g. image heavy but not text heavy eCommerce pages) using such things as internal linking.” – Dawn Anderson, says

Later in December Google announces that BERT has been rolled out to about 74 languages, BUT only to serve data for feature snippets. It’s worth taking that into account before concluding on whether Google understands non-English languages with the same accuracy as English. I personally think they don’t.

Here’s a tweet from Dawn Anderson on the matter:

New page speed reports integrated in GSC

Speed reports also started rolling out in GSC in October.

November 2019

The November 7^th Update

Webmasters in the United States who run affiliate sites  in health, travel, food, and lifestyle sectors observed massive changes after what is believed to be another Google update rolled out on November 7th.

Between November 7^th and 8^th, webmasters in these industries reported massive changes in their search engine rankings. Multiple food and lifestyle blogs reported a 30%+ drop in their traffic.

Google confirmed via the Twitter account, Google SearchLiasion that it had made several updates to its core search algorithm during this period. However, it refuted claims that the updates were targeting specific niches or industries. 

The tweet further stated that the updates made during this period were only part of changes made regularly to the search algorithm. Some webmasters suspected BERT to be the cause of a massive decline in traffic over this period, but Webmaster Trends Analyst, John Mueller, explained that BERT could not be responsible for such traffic decreases.

He clarified that only a core update could cause such massive changes in rankings. Kevin Indig, former SEO consultant at Searchmetrics and now VP SEO & Content at G2, termed the update as “aggressive” and compared it to the first Penguin update that Google rolled out in 2012.

Webmasters and SEO experts also believe that the November 8 algorithm update focused on discounting value of reciprocal link schemes, link parties, etc and greatly affected Travel and Recipe bloggers.

December 2019

Google Updates Its Search Quality Evaluator‘s guidelines

Google made a few minor changes to its search quality evaluator on Thursday, December 5th, 2019. The minor revisions added to the evaluator emphasized diversity, impartiality, and language referring to users. The guidelines now explain why individuals conduct searches and the specific ways in which they perform them.

Final Thoughts

While Google continues to gain market and increase its revenue, there is no secret that the company is motivated to provide users with the best search results possible. The same thing applies to other search engines making SEO a much more complicated aspect of digital marketing.

With over 400 algorithm tweaks every year, the leading search engines in the world have found a way of keeping SEOs on their toes. I hope that this roundup provides you with a clear vision of what to expect in 2020 to make your sites rank better.

We wish you a Merry Christmas and a fruitful 2020!                

The post 2019 SEO News Roundup appeared first on David Carralon.

As the content marketing landscape increases in competitiveness, the importance of knowing what is great content – and obviously, how to produce it – has significantly risen.

Let’s take a deep look at what it REALLY is, and what you need to know as a marketer when it comes to producing outstanding content.

What is high-quality content

High-quality content is content that gets outstanding results. It achieves goals and marketing objectives and is best assessed by taking a look at its performance.

The clearest way to determine the quality of content

Most people, when trying to determine the quality of a piece of content, use an approach that consists of looking at a list of attributes and characteristics, and checking if the piece has them.

While characteristics have a very important play at how well a piece performs, they are not direct indicators of quality content. A piece can have all of those attributes, yet may not have good results – which is exactly what high quality pieces achieve.

What your measurement of quality should be based on is on data. Results are the best way to determine the level of quality of a piece. They are the only way to objectively measure it.

It doesn’t matter how much time and money you spent on a piece of content, or if it looks very visually appealing. The way to evaluate quality is by the results it gets.

With data and results, I’m mainly talking about things like how well it ranks in the SERPs, it’s daily visitors, it’s conversion rate, it’s click-through rate, etc. I’m going to talk more about which of these points you should look for soon.

What are the characteristics of high-quality content?

We now know that to precisely evaluate quality, we need to use objective data. But what data should we look for?

It’s now time to pin down the characteristics of content that screams quality!

Characteristics of quality content

Meets a goal

You work hard on a piece. You get it published. It looks good, has relevant information and a lot of great images, but doesn’t perform well.

Is it considered quality content?

NO!

You can’t evaluate a basketball player based on its height, speed, and shot accuracy. Those may be signs that correlate with being a good basketball player, but the real performance of the player isn’t revealed until you ask him to play and help to win the match.

If he can help you reach your goal of winning the match, even despite lacking extreme levels of speed and accuracy, he’s a good player. Makes sense?

*That doesn’t mean being fast or having other qualities doesn’t help. The best players are almost always fast. But they are not objective indicators of quality.

It ranks well on Google

Google is constantly working on improving its complex language processing algorithms, like BERT or Rankbrain, that use machine learning to show the best results for each query and the highest quality content.

These algorithms are sometimes evaluated by over 10,000 raters hired by Google. These ‘quality raters’ are given actual searches, and they evaluate the quality of the pages that appear in the top results.

The data generated by the raters is fed to google’s algorithms to improve its accuracy at showing quality content. 

The outcome: an algorithm that is extremely accurate at measuring the quality of websites and their content, and delivers the most relevant results to search engine users.

Clearly, there’s a HUGE focus on quality. If your content is ranked high, Google itself gave you the thumbs up, and you’ve got a marvelous piece.

It drives backlinks and shares naturally

A good indicator of high-quality content is backlinks and shares, especially when they happen naturally. 

Every backlink and share is a point that your player (your content) is scoring. Bad players generally have a bad time scoring. Good ones, the ones that craft the art of producing great content,  score again and again.

It has a high CTR

Is your content good at making people click when they see it?

If you take a look at your best-performing pieces, you’ll notice higher click through rates across the board.

Google rewards this type of content by ranking it higher. And if you’re using paid ads, the price that you have to pay to advertise this type of content is lower. Low CTR, more often than not, means low quality and lacks engagement.

Dwell times are low

Another important factor that Google is suspected to be considering along with CTR is dwell time.

Dwell time is the time a user spends looking at your content after clicking it.  In some cases, your content may have a high CTR, but it can still be considered low quality if its average dwell time is low.

You want to make content that people consume. If they’re clicking and leaving, it’s not high quality, and Google is quick to notice somehow.

Whether directly or indirectly, time spent on content is something that Google is likely using to measure engagement and to score pages.

Subjective characteristics of quality content

These characteristics don’t define quality content because they aren’t hard data, but they are common across quality pieces. Make sure that each piece of content that you make has the following characteristics:

Meets the search intent

Something that’s clear is that good content provides information that is relevant and helpful to the searcher. When a piece of content fails to meet the search intent, it fails to do its purpose and is lost deep in the SERPs.

It’s almost impossible for a piece of content to get excellent results and fail to meet the search intent at the same time.

It provides value

You’re probably very aware of this but I’m including this tip anyways because of its importance. 

Your audience doesn’t want content. They want valuable content. Some businesses forget about this fact. They make it a goal to churn X amount of content every month, but don’t prioritize value.

Content that doesn’t provide value is a waste of time, both for you and your audience. 

Always prioritize value. If that means you can only release half the amount of content, so be it. 

It’s engaging

Nowadays, just being informative is almost never enough. People expect your content to also be interesting or entertaining.

Think about it. The information that you’re displaying is probably already out there. But if you can display it in an engaging way, you can differentiate your content and people will prefer it over other sources of information.

Keep an eye on engagement KPIs such as dwell time, CTR, bounce rate, likes and shares, and pages per session. Make it a priority to consistently create the type of content that your audience finds engaging.

How to create high-quality content

The biggest dilemma today is: How do we go about creating high quality content? What should we aim for to inform, engage, and captivate readers?

Defining what quality content is is extremely useful, but doesn’t necessarily help us at the time of producing it.

That’s why I also brought you some proven, practical tips and examples to help you create the type of content that nails it today:

Engage with visual content

Our brains are wired to quickly analyze and understand visual content. 

In fact, the human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text, and 90 percent of information transmitted to the brain is visual.

No wonder that images and videos are so engaging.

You need to leverage their power as much as possible and fill your content with images and other forms of visual content, such as :

• Infographics
• Animates Gifs
• Cinemagraphs
• Videos
• Animations

Text content can be repurposed into an infographic, giving it a visual touch – and in turn, making it more engaging and shareable.

Infographics, often, get 3x more shares than any other type of content (NNGroup) and with tools like Visme you can easily learn to make a pretty cool one easily.

Back up your claims citing statistical research and mentioning the source

Making a bold statement? Or presenting a new idea to your audience?

Backing up your claims not only helps to convince the reader that what you’re saying is true but also makes you and your brand look more professional.

When you show statistics, mention studies, or link to authority websites, you also provide valuable information that gives additional insight to readers

This is an example of two statements with the same message. The difference is that one is stats-based, and the other isn’t:

“Many visitors will quickly leave your site if it doesn’t load right away”

“53% of visitors leave your site if it doesn’t load in 3 seconds or less” (Google)

Let’s say you were to include the first statement in your content. You could get the same message through by using the second one, but with more credibility and precision.

Readers are also more likely to see the importance in the statement because they can see, numerically, how much loading speed can affect their business.

Display Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. (E-A-T)

In August 2018, a Google algorithm update called “the medic update” drastically changed the factors that Google considered when ranking YMYL (Your money or your life) websites.

Since then, showing Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (known as E-A-T) in your content has become of paramount importance.

High quality content that displays E-A-T signals is loved by Google. I wrote an in-depth article to help you understand how to make this kind of content:

• Recommended reading : Google E-A-T for SEO – breaking the Enigma

Follow Google’s guidelines

In one of Google’s many guidelines, there’s a section called “What counts as a high quality site” that’s worth pure gold.

It contains a list of questions that you should ask yourself to assess the quality of a page or article:

From Google’s Webmaster Central blog:

• “Would you trust the information presented in this article?
• Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?
• Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?
• Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?
• Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?
• Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?
• Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?
• Does this article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic?
• Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?
• Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?”

For the full list of questions, read Google’s advice to Webmasters last August 2019 responding to questions about Core Updates and what they mean.

Use engaging content formats

Video

Videos are engaging and effortless to consume. They are and will never stop being one of the most popular and engaging content formats.

One of the issues with video and one of the reasons why many content creators don’t do them is that they are usually a bit more difficult to create due to the requirement of certain skills like speaking in front of a camera and editing.

But if you can get your hands around doing them, they are proven to win big:

59% of executives say they prefer to watch a video than reading text. (Wordstream)

Cinemagraphs

If video and photographs had a child, that would be the cinemagraph. 

Cinemagraphs are pictures with minor movements that form a short video clip.

Top brands are implementing the cinemagraphs with outstanding results:

Image from Flixel

If you have the resources, it’s time to get on-board. People love the cinemagraph, and they work very well in certain sectors like travel, sports, lifestyle.

Use stats-based content

A really good example of this is the series of informational posts that Rand Fishkin, from Spartoro, regularly publishes in his pursuit to raise awareness of Google’s monopolistic practices.

His articles shine with interesting data sets about search engine market share, SERPs clickthrough and the like.

How to avoid site issues that spoil high-quality content

In recent updates, Google has made it harder and harder for low-quality content to rank well. To filter out this type of content, Google takes a look at a series of factors and signals like grammar mistakes and excessive ads.

You need to do your best to remove these signals from your content. Otherwise, Google will think your content quality is poor.

In particular try to avoid:

Over-monetization: Content with excessive monetization through affiliate links or other means.

Excessive ads: Avoid having too many ads as they worsen user experience.

Keyword stuffing: Loading your content with keywords in an attempt to get better rankings will get you penalized.

Unnatural linking: Never do artificial linking to manipulate rankings. 

Misleading titles or content: Clickbaity titles that trick readers instead of accurately describing content. 

Low E-A-T: Having a low E-A-T score will tank your rankings (especially in the YMYL sector.)

Malicious behavior: Such as viruses, phishing, theft.

For a more extensive list of malpractices, check out this article by Search Facts.

Conclusion

Creating high quality content isn’t easy. It takes trial and error, looking at your results to see what kind of content works, and optimizing your content creation process accordingly.

After reading this article, you might have noticed that some of what you thought was your best content is actually mediocre. What defines quality is not what we thought, and we can only see its real value until we take a look at its results.

It is worth taking into account that success is not solely dependant on producing good content. Having the right systems and resources in place to promote that content is equally important.

…but that’s a different story altogether beyond the scope of this article.

Do you have anything add in terms of what entails ‘great content’?

The post How to produce high quality content appeared first on David Carralon.

I’m mainly referring to the Core updates, highly focused on quality, that have been released since the beginning of 2018 and which have been particularly devastating on the following dates : 

• August 1, 2018
• September 27, 2018
• March 12, 2019
• June 3 2019 – pre-announced by Google

For a full account of all the Google Core Quality Updates, as well as other specific algorithm updates, refer to this summary in Dr. Marie Haynes’s website.

In particular, August 2018, March 2019 and June 2019 seem to have been, in my own experience of taking on clientes affected by those algo updates, the update that have brought in the most damage on rankings for folks in the YMYL (Your money your life) space.

YMYL refers mainly to websites in the categories of personal finance, financial advice, investing, and – on the other side of the spectrum – health information websites. Ecommerce stores are also included.

With this update, Google put a heavy focus on trust signals and devalued websites that were deemed ‘unsafe’ for end-users. Most major cryptocurrency sites in the market took a hit, with CCN.com actually taking the drastic decision to shut down following the update:

Our daily revenue is down by more than 90%

Business owners, eCommerce entrepreneurs, and affiliates in the finance and health sectors have been going around frantic trying to work out the problem of their website rankings dropping and how to deal with the new E-A-T factors. The SEO community has taken various positions on the matter:

• Some have been vocal about the importance of the GQRG (Google Quality Raters Guidelines, latest update: sept 6, 2019) and the relationship with the E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) factors.
• Others have refused to believe that there is anything such as the E-A-T ranking factors. 
• And the rest have done nothing much but observe different opinions from both sides, take notes and absorb information about published case studies and reported news on E-A-T. 

But what’s the truth? Are the E-A-T factors really that important to get your content ranking well? And should you even care about the Google Quality Raters Guidelines?

I’m going to be talking about that really soon, but for now, know that YES – E-A-T does matter for SEO, and your approach has to adapt if you want your website to rank well after the recent Google Core algorithm updates. Especially if your website is in the YMYL category.

Google has confirmed various times, both informally ( via Twitter) and more officially, via recently published papers that they are taking every step possible to fight disinformation across their product line. Today Google actively encourages every webmaster to read the GQRG’s with particular attention to the E-A-T factors mentioned in such document.

Authoritativeness and Trust are signals that many agree, form part of the Core algorithm, as Mary Haynes explains in this Whiteboard Friday video:

What is E-A-T SEO?

Let’s begin with the basics. What’s exactly E-A-T, what does it mean, and how does it relate to SEO?

E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Each one is a factor that the Google algorithm takes into consideration when determining a page’s value and its eligibility to rank.

The term E-A-T became trendy in August 2018, when the google algorithm update called “the medic update” took place.

After the update, many sites in the YMYL sector went through a drop in rankings, and since then, there’s been more awareness of the E-A-T factors due to their importance to rank on Google. Since then, requests for E-A-T-driven site audits or site reviews have exploded.

So, what is Google looking for, and what does each factor mean?

Expertise: Google wants to show content written by people with expertise on the topic. The authors should have professional experience, in-depth knowledge, or qualities that position them as experts.

Authoritativeness: Another important thing that Google takes a look at is at the authoritativeness of the content. When your content is being shared and used by other experts in the field – that shows authority.

Trustworthiness: And last but not least is trustworthiness. This factor refers to how much visitors trust your website and brand.

Google Rankings Dropping Dramatically

If you’re here, there’s a decent chance that you were negatively affected by the so-called “medic update,” or by one of the other core algorithm updates.

These updates were an effort by Google to show the best possible content to its users – and they resulted in hundredths of sites in the finance and health sectors suddenly dropping rankings and traffic, sending webmasters and CEOs to panic.

But why were websites specifically in the health and finance – or YMYL – sectors targeted?

The reason:

Information in the Health, Finance, and Security sectors can greatly impact a person’s life – both positively and negatively. Bad advice can have awful consequences on users.

As a measurement to prevent this, Google rolled out the core updates that we’ve all heard about – meant to value pages that have a high level of Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T)

Is your website in the YMYL sector? Because if it is, understanding the importance of improving your site’s E-A-T may be a crucial element of your success.

Google has to think your pages have a high level of E-A-T to display them to its users. Luckily, there are a lot of things you can do to improve in that regard. We’re going to give you some E-A-T tips to improve your site’s rankings later, but right now we’ll talk about where the term originated from:

The origin of E-A-T: Google Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines

The terms E-A-T and YMYL came from an important document released by Google called the “Google Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines.”

The reason why this document is so valuable, and why we’re talking about it is that the document provides insight into Google’s perspective when evaluating a website’s quality. Understanding the document basically means understanding how Google ranks pages.

The document’s original purpose is for Google’s rating team – which consists of over 10,000 employees worldwide. Raters evaluate Google’s search results by rating the quality of the pages that rank best.

These ratings help Google improve its ranking algorithm’s effectiveness at measuring quality. 

What I want to emphasize, is that the Google Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines teach raters how to evaluate high-quality websites – and one of the main things taught by the document is that pages with a high level of E-A-T are considered to be of a high-quality.

What that means is that Google is doing it’s best to make an algorithm that effectively measures E-A-T. The core updates are steps that google has taken in that direction.

Now that you know precisely why E-A-T matters, how do you improve your website’s E-A-T?

How Can I Improve My Website E-A-T?

It’s finally time to get to the practical side of things. If you’ve found out that you have a problem with low E-A-T, you’re in luck, because I’m about to break the ‘Enigma’ of E-A-T giving you some tips that are worth their weight in gold.

If you’ve considered reading the Google Search Quality Raters Guidelines to improve your E-A-T, well, think again, because it’s a condensed 166-page document. Reading the document may seem like a very straightforward way to improve your website quality, and while that’s true, it’ll take a major effort from your part. 

The great news is that you can get the same insights by understanding what the document entices from a post that summarizes it. (like this one)

Here’s how to improve your website’s E-A-T:

How to improve your website’s Expertise

When we need advice to fix a problem – whether it’s business-related or personal – seeking an expert is usually a good idea.

Experts have a deep level of knowledge in a particular field. And If their knowledge is related to our problem, we can have confidence that the answers and solutions are correct – because they are backed up by education and/or experience.

Clearly, advice from experts is more valuable, and Google will prefer content that showcases expertise.

“How do I do that with my content and website?” You may be asking. Here’s how:

Create great content

“Create great content” may sound like a very general tip – and it is. But it’s a very important one, and I’m placing it at the top of the list for that reason.

Here’s what I mean with “create great content”:

Expertise isn’t just about showing your credentials and experience. Showcasing knowledge is important, but that alone isn’t enough to make you an expert in front of Google and its users.

You also need to effectively communicate this knowledge to people in a targeted way that engages them and in a way that solves their needs.

Quick tips to create great content:

• Master keyword research
• Be original and have a unique approach
• Make actionable content
• Engage readers (create stories and intrigue)
• Solve a need/answer a question
• Create powerful headlines
• Be accurate and professional

I could elaborate more on how to create great content, but that would have to be on another post. If you want to know more about what makes “great content,” here’s a helpful article.

Showcase expertise

Writing with expertise is nice, but it’s even nicer when visitors know it.

There are two types of expertise, according to Google Search Quality Guidelines:

Formal expertise: Expertise acquired through formal education. People with formal expertise usually have accreditations or other means to verify their knowledge. 

Everyday expertise: Acquired through life experience.

In the YMYL sector, showing formal expertise is particularly important. As I said before, misinformation in this sector can potentially harm users, and as a result, google values it more.

That doesn’t mean Everyday expertise isn’t valuable. But particularly in the YMYL sector, it’s best if the author has formal expertise.

Tip: Add bios and descriptions of your site’s writers to every piece of content, promoting their expertise and knowledge. 

“But my site’s content was written by writers with no recognized expertise! Am I doomed!?!?”

Luckily, there’s a workaround to this. Your content doesn’t necessarily have to be written by a formal expert. It’s enough if it’s reviewed and approved by one.

“Phew!” What a relief.

There are many ways to acquire an accredited expert, but one of the easiest ways is to find a freelance editor with the right accreditations.

You can then publish the content under the original author’s name, and add a “Reviewed by..” notation linking to the reviewer somewhere visible on the page.

How to improve your website’s Authoritativeness

The next letter in E-A-T stands for Authoritativeness. Some of the definitions for authoritative are – “Able to be trusted as being accurate or true,” and “Considered to be the best of its kind and unlikely to be improved upon.”

Authoritativeness refers to how well your brand does in comparison to the other options in your niche. In comparison to expertise, authoritativeness is more competitive. Your industry can have a lot of experts, but only the best can be considered an authority.

When is your level of authority considered high?

• When other websites and content creators in your niche are citing your content.
• When people are mentioning your name or brand on topics relevant to your industry across facebook, twitter, or other social media sites.
• When your branded search volume is high. A branded search is any query that contains the name of your brand or company. This indicates authority because people are searching for your brand specifically, and they wouldn’t do that unless there’s a decent level of reputation and authority. (in most cases)
• When your content gets links from high E-A-T websites.

Here are a few tips to help you increase your website’s authority:

• Focus on building backlinks: Backlinks are definitely one of the most important factors when it comes to building authority. Build relationships, ask for links, and remember that backlinks from high authority sites are much more valuable and worth the hard effort. 

• Regularly publish high-quality content: You need an effective content strategy to get backlinks and build authority. Publish content regularly, and make sure it’s always excellent quality-wise.

• Work with high authority writers: There’s a certain level of perceived authoritativeness in both the creator of a piece of content and on the website as a whole. By having high-quality writers publishing content on your website, you improve the overall authority of your website.

• Keep it professional: Being unprofessional in any sort of way will tank down your authoritativeness. Do you think a high-authority brand would misspell its email address, or have an unresponsive website design?

• Stand out from the competition: To be an authority, you must stand out. That’s done by delivering outstanding services, effectively addressing pain points or having a unique approach to design and innovation:
  
  

How to Improve your Website’s Trustworthiness

And lastly, there’s trustworthiness, defined as “the ability to be relied on as  honest or truthful.”

In this regard, your goal is to make users feel confident that they can rely on you and your information.

In the eyes of Google, trustworthiness works a little bit differently than the other two factors. A high level of trustworthiness alone won’t get you on top of the search results. It’s a high level of Expertise and Authoritativeness that will help to boost your rankings. But, if your trustworthiness is low, it will completely obliterate your rankings.

To keep this factor in check, your brand’s reputation is crucial. Keeping it clean across review sites and social media will help a lot to keep your trustworthiness high.

Something else that helps is being transparent and having detailed business and employee information on your website.

Lastly, you must create a safe environment around your services and brand. Have clear policies, and make sure your website domain uses HTTPS.

Some tips to increase your trustworthiness:

• Promote offsite and invest in personal branding: Having a positive reputation is crucial to keep a high-quality score. Ask your existing customers to leave reviews on sites like Google My Business or Yelp, interact with influencers and your audience through social media, work with other trustworthy experts in your niche, and be reliable with your content and services. 

• Avoid misleading content like the plague: Google hates misleading content that deceives users. Some examples of deceptive behaviors and content are:
  • Impersonating other brands or people
  • Stealing personal information such as passwords or credit cards
  • Using inaccurate or incorrect information to manipulate visitors
  • Faking reviews
  • Making false claims for someone’s benefit
  • Deceptive advertising

• Have clear and detailed contact and business information: It’s fishy when a brand is missing an address or contact information. Include as many relevant business details as possible.

• About page: Your about page is an opportunity to build trust. Give visitors information about the owners or leaders, and let them know that your brand is human too.

• Team page: Just like an about page, having a team page ads a layer of trust. If you can add bios of each member that visitors can relate to, that’s even better.

• Technical security: Your database and website have to be secure to protect your customers’ and visitors’ personal data. Use HTTPS and take security measures against hackers and spammers.
  
• Use 3rd party ratings and review sites, to showcase user’s satifaction levels about you, your products or your services. 3rd party product review web services like Trustpilot, BazaarVoice and Power Reviews are currently being used by Google’s algorithms to assess factors like Trust.

A few more E-A-T tips

• Cut or edit low E-A-T content: Low E-A-T content may be getting you a bit of traffic or conversions, but it lowers the overall E-A-T score of your site. Cut as much low E-A-T content as you can, or edit it to improve its E-A-T score.

• Optimize for mobile: If your website isn’t optimized for mobile, Google will instantly consider it to be low quality. Come on! We’re in the mobile-first era! More than 50% of all traffic comes from mobile devices!

• Easy to navigate content and website: A website that’s hard to navigate will turn off users quickly, especially when there are so many alternatives to get the information, products, or services that they need.

• Claim and optimize business listings: Google prefers businesses with high standards and organized listings. If you haven’t yet, claim and optimize your business’ listing across platforms such as Google My Business, Yelp, and Bing. Additionally, this will help potential customers find more information about your business. (phone numbers, addresses, open hours, etc.)

Conclusion

After the updates to Google’s core algorithm and the changes to Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines, it has become increasingly important to manifest expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.

Unlike how it was in the past, there are no shortcuts anymore. You have to grow a real brand and patiently nurture it by putting your users first.

How? By using E-A-T as a framework. Doing so will help you give Google and its users exactly what they’re looking for – high-quality results.

I hope this article helped you improve your website’s E-A-T elements to recover your rankings and improve your SEO. However if you are not sure what caused your ranking drop, make sure you hire a SEO consultant to run an SEO audit of your website.

Or, if you want to add anything that may be useful to other readers, feel free to comment.

The post Google E-A-T for SEO – breaking the Enigma appeared first on David Carralon.

Last year we had sessions of great interest such as those on semantic clusters by Isabelle Guiu, Web and SEO Manager at Cyclable, or by Andrey Lipattesev from Google. On the English-speaking tracks, we had sessions by international marketing experts like Purna Virji from Microsoft and Barry Adams from Polemic Digital.

Programme

The agenda for 2019 is now ready .

The event will host for the first time John Mueller, webmaster trends senior analyst at Google.

Do not miss this opportunity ! You’ll get a sneak preview of upcoming Search trends for the year 2020.

As in all conferences, SMX brings in diversity amongst speakers so all most main channels will be represented:  SEO, PPC, Social. There is always something for everyone there… check out the programme here.

Location

The location is not far from ‘Arc de Triumph’ and ‘les Champs Elysées’

Etoile Saint-Honoré

21-25, rue Balzac,
75008 Paris, France

To get there:

Métro :
Ligne 1, 2, 6 : Charles de Gaulle-Etoile
Ligne 1 : George V
Ligne 2 : Ternes

RER :
Ligne A- Charles de Gaulle-Etoile.

Bookings

Current rates for standard entry are lower this year at 750 € + VAT or for 2 days, or €450 for a single day.

If you want a discount you may use my discount code to get 15% discount

Get a 15% discount using this code: DC19

The post SMX Paris 2019 appeared first on David Carralon.

Most professionals SEO Audits cover a multiple number of critical checkpoints that range from accessibility and indexation essentials onto penalty audits and even SERPs or competitor analysis, depending on scope and budget.

In this article I aim to highlight specific areas that, in my opinion, should get a little more attention.

These areas or checkpoint can be a less common yet essential, to avoid SEO disasters, particularly for websites targetting International markets:

1. 1. Inconsistent url casing
   2. Inconsistent encoding on url formations
   3. Incorrectly formatted robots.txt files
   4. Assessing TTFB (Time to First Byte)
   5. CDN optimisation
   6. Chain redirects or Redirect Loops
   7. Multi XML sitemaps
   8. Semantic mark-up

While some technical SEO audits I’ve been able to see and review were pretty decent and well researched, some others, despite them being expensive and carried out by large known SEO agencies, lacked in depth or focus.

This happens as frequently SEO audits are carried out based on the same usual checklist template, rather than being tailored to the needs of the client.

The list below is an attempt at identifying uncommon points covered on templated SEO audits, yet essential to complex large websites:

1. Inconsistent url casing

How often do you hear the term ‘canonicalisation’. It’s a common term used by SEOs in SEO and can be applied to many different contexts, most of them revolving around the idea of ‘duplicate content and how to avoid it’.

This is where establishing a strategy to define urls is key, and in particular, deciding on the casing is very important. In doing so, you will avoid having to patch things up with rel canonicals, 301 redirects and other hacks in future.

Let’s take a look at these two scenarios for urls:

1. /this-type-of-url

and

2. /this-Type-Of-Url

Both are valid and both do exist. Although force lowercase is becoming more ‘standard’ these days, there are still plenty of websites boasting both capital and lowercase letters on urls, especially .net-powered websites. This is fine. So long as the rules for the url formations are established from the beginning, eg: only nouns would have first letter capitalised, etc… a set of rules that would define how it will be done.

The problem, starts to get out of hand when:

-Inbound links start pouring with the wrong syntax on urls, eg: capital letters everywhere instead of just first letter

-internal linking pointing, due to some flaw, to the url with incorrect syntax

This then starts becoming duplicate content realm.

All this can be avoided by strictly defining how the system should deal with incorrect url formations.

For example, a typical url syntax plan can be:

1. all urls in lowercase
2. no trailing forward slashes allowed (this is just my preference as I think it looks nicer, but your choice)
3. dash ( – ) symbol will replace white space in between words

From those 3 rules you could create, what I have always called:  the golden rule of 3 for urls. 

But that’s not enough. If we want to avoid deviations from the above rules, we should specify stability-driven code rules :

• Lowercase urls as a must
• Programmatically, the platform reverses any instance of capital url onto lowercase.

Eg url: /rainy-days-are-over   if you try typing it as : /rainy-days-are-Over

the system will automatically revert onto:  /rainy-days-are-over   via 301 redirect

This unique feature works as a shield against duplicate content, as it minimises the chances that someone may link to use with the wrong syntax. So this means if someone links to the site with a capital letter, by mistake, the system automatically reverts onto lowercase.

See where I’m going? unless these prevention systems are put into place to help minimise potential misuses of the urls, their integrity will always be on the line. I rarely see advice like this on seo audit reports, in the form of actionable recommendations.

2. Inconsistent Encoding on url formations

When the website deals with non-Latin characters or special characters, it is important to decide on the right strategy for url encoding. Is the whole product name going to be encoded, even spaces? or will space be replaced by dash as an exception, or by an underscore like Wikipedia does? Does the rel canonical url need encoding too? is there inconsistencies in the way encoding has been performed?

This is quite a technical topic that’s often a must to review as part of an audit exercise on multilingual websites displaying names with accentuations, non-latin characters (eg: Cyrillic) or special characters.

This is a matter that understandably requires thought, consultation, and patience to get right, so I can see why it is often just superficially mention throughout audits, but it does deserve due consideration and assessment. The decision should be documented and if possible included in a more overarching strategy document such as the ‘URL strategy’, or ‘URL Policy’ document, or ‘SEO Strategy’ for the matter.

The right questions to ask, in the framework of an audit, are:

• What parts of a url are we going to encode (full url or just the dbase-powered part of it)?
• Is there also transliteration to do?
• what encoding system are we going to use?

For example:

• the ampersand character (“&”) should be encoded as “&” as it’s a special character. The same should go for the rel canonical url, it should appear encoded.
• the accented “é” in some European languages like Spanish or French should be encoded as “%C3%A9”. Eg: “développement” in French

This kind of encoding is critical for websites that display database-powered products or services. For example, E-commerce websites dealing with listing categories that display products in different languages. Or Job board websites boasting jobs containing technical names with special characters. For example C# developer on Indeed. They have had to encode the symbol that accompanies the letter ‘C’, otherwise, the results would be displaying just job offers for Developers in C programming language, as opposed to C sharp (#) .

https://www.indeed.fr/emplois?q=Developpeur+C%23

It is important to decide on the best encoding for the purpose of the website.

Unicode or UTF-8 encodings are safe choices since you can use a single encoding to handle pretty much any character you are likely to encounter.  This greatly simplifies things. Deciding on a system for url encoding can help avoid a whole host of issues in the future.

Read more about url encoding here:

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/06/all-about-unicode-utf8-character-sets/

http://www.unicode.org/standard/standard.html

http://www.utf-8.com/

3. Incorrectly formatted Robots.txt files

The robots.txt file is a text file intended for search engine bots or any type of bots visiting the site. In principle, bots start exploring websites by looking for the robots.txt file at the root of the site.

By looking at the directives in the robots.txt file, search engine robots can specify which pages or content paths can or cannot be indexed. Bots do not always obey those directives but there is still value in defining the structure of a robots file.

For an SEO consultant who’s performing a technical audit, the task of auditing and assessing whether a robots.txt file contains the right directives is not easy. It should be carefully carried out allowing sufficient time to consider every aspect of the site architecture.

The way I usually advise on the set up and configuration of the robots file is by

1. making small annotations of the different website paths throughout the audit.
2. noting down parameters, filters, and fractions that should definitely not be crawled
3. should have added enough intel to be able to give advice as to the most suitable config for the robots.txt file.

One needs to have first-hand experience of the website structure and its features such as faceted navigation, pagination, etc before they can advise on a suitable configuration for the robots.txt file.

Technical seo audits are often delivered without much input on the robots.txt file other than general syntax corrections.  grab image too

While it is good correcting the syntax and ensuring that UTF-8 is use, advising on the right configuration for the robots file is key to help maximise crawlability on the site in question. Don’t let robots crawl more than they should.

I have seen audits where great advice is given as to the need to deindex content deemed as duplicated or thin (eg: e-commerce urls boasting appended parameters), but then no advice is given to help declutter the robots file or even set it up properly with an eye on the taxonomy of the website.

3. Assessing TTFB (Time to First Byte)

Google recommends a Server response time under 200 milliseconds. People want fast websites and they get frustrated when they have to wait till the page is downloaded. Therefore TTFB should be a must to cover in technical seo audits?

I’m not intending to cover in full the whole subject of Website speed touching all server/client side factors. But I feel that TTFB has a lot of weight in the overall paradigm of Website speed.

The question would be: how long does the browser wait before receiving its first byte of data from the server? That critical ‘wait’ state should ideally be optimised down to below 200 ms. Not that I’m proud of that score of 662.4 on my own website.

So, where is the bottleneck in there?

Let’s summarise how TTFB takes place in three easy steps:

A. Request to server processing: on every website visit, the client(browser) has to make a request to the server. This request can be fast or slow based on several factors. One of them is the speed of the DNS lookup. Are you using the DNS service provided by your domain name, or a premium one? this can make a big difference to delivering a faster request to the server.

You can dramatically improve DNS lookups and load time by moving as many resources as possible to the CDN provider. Yet this is rarely mentioned/covered on technical SEO audits, despite seeing large counts of resources, eg: multimedia content often hosted by the website server itself.

B. Server processing: This is the part where the server has to deal with things like database calls, caching, parsing of 3rd party scripts, quality of code. Server resources really play a role here: server processing power, memory, ability to perform compression (eg: gzip).

This is where having a good solid host can really make a difference. Some hosts claim to have very fast servers, but they don’t. At some point, moving one of my affiliate sites from WPEngine onto Kinsta saw a speed increase of over 125%.

If your site is running wordpress there are plenty of good options today. Even if you are on a budget you should be able to find good wordpress hosts.

I see websites backed up by solid well-established businesses running even with VC help, but being hosted in unresponsive or less than ideal hosting solutions.

C. Server response to client: again in here having a good host counts too as the network used by the server to send the response has to be fast. This is not to mix with the client’s internet connexion, wifi issues, etc, that would also affect the TTFB, but it’s out of scope here.

In short, assessing how robust the server is, the CDN set up and the effectiveness of the DNS lookup are key things that can dramatically affect overall website speed. These areas should genuinely be included in a technical SEO audit.

4. CDN optimisation

Content delivery networks have a lot to do with the site’s overall performance in search, especially if we are looking at a website that has international reach. Yet, CDN auditing is rarely covered in SEO audits.

CDNs (Content delivery networks) boast the ability to improve SEO in many ways:

• Accelerating page webpage load time across the globe. Webpage Loading time is an important criterion for SEO. CDNs decrease webpage’s response time and therefore improve their loading speed
• Decrease image size sent to the user whenever needed depending on the device.
• Keep stability at the times of heavy traffic to the website
• help reduce the number of server calls

In short, CDNs can be highly beneficial to websites with high levels of traffic or sites with geographically dispersed traffic.

However, there are risks associated with CDNs too.

• 1. Misconfigurations of CDN But be careful when installing your CDN: do it cautiously or seek the help of a professional. If you do not install it correctly, it will damage your SEO and your user experience.
• 2. The CDN provider may not have servers in some of the locations your company operates. Your customers will then experience Latency and longer downtime and user experience will be affected.

CDN set up and configuration, as well as possible interference with other aspects of the web architecture should be audited in the same way as other elements.

5. Chain redirects or redirect loops

This often is often more visible in SEO audits, it’s kind of a must, but I have still seen audits that did not address properly the different types of chain redirects, or perhaps chain redirects were acknowledged but redirect loops were left aside. They are two different things and both contribute largely to wasting crawl time on site.

Chain redirects can be caused by development changes made to the internal link structure, or by renaming urls or perhaps by platform migrations. It is worth assessing properly how serious the matter of chain redirect is throughout the technical SEO audit and advise on prioritisation accordingly in the list of recommendations via an audit report.

6. XML Multi-sitemaps

What can be better than a sitemap that acknowledges the taxonomy of the website?  A cluster of xml sitemaps comprised of identifiable child sitemaps that represent each of the key categories or sections of a large website is like a treasure map to indexation success.

XML multi-sitemaps act as a roadmap for diagnosing indexation issues, bloated sections or even bloating in the index itself. Using xml sitemaps and matching them against content already in the index presents a phenomenal tool to help troubleshoot or optimize crawlability and indexation.

Let me clarify: I do agree that sitemaps will not give you an SEO boost, but they will help you get indexation visibility across the horizon in order to improve your technical SEO strategies. These xml files in combination with crawling data and log file data can massively inform your SEO to help you establish the next big move.

XML sitemaps get a lot of criticism, often unfairly called ‘useless’, yet they are an extremely useful SEO tool, in my opinion. I have used them to good effect in my career as an SEO and today I still use them to diagnose, test and improve technical SEO.

More often than not, if the website being audited is over 5K-6K urls, in my opinion, there is already enough justification to recommend splitting the xml sitemaps logically into sensible topics, sections or categories.  But instead audits usually just kind of recommend to have an xml sitemap, or if one is present, this is ticked as if nothing else is to be done.

6. Semantic mark-up

Despite industry available advice to prioritise structured mark up and search engines like Google encouraging webmasters to embrace it, there is still little adoption of structured data today, especially by big brands.

The main goal for structured data is to declare specific elements in the websites’ HTML to help the search engines better understand what the content is about: video, images, ratings, events information, recipes, organization information, job offers.

Read Google’s guidelines for use of Schema structured data  and 3rd party resources like Moz’s series on structure data for seo to start getting acquainted with it.

There are three different types of search structured data as part of the Schema.org protocol :

•  JSon-LD
• Microdata
• RDFa

However other types of structured mark up exist such as the DublinCore initiative, Facebook Opengraph and Twitter cards.

In some verticals, this is huge, to the point that unless you implement structured data effectively, you will lose out big in the race to be visible. For example, in order to rank on the ‘Google for Jobs’ boxes, every individual job posting needs to followed strict Schema parameters either with Json-ld or microdata.

Here’s an example:

Pop over to Merkle to get your schema code automatically generated.

The benefits of implementing marketing up at scale on large website networks are clear. However, this is still today something not fully embraced by large organisation, either due to lack of internal knowledge, resources, clumsy old CMS or other corporate SEO impediments.

Here are some tools that you can use to help validate your mark up data:

1. Google’s Structured Data Testing tool : https://search.google.com/structured-data/ testing-tool/u/0/

2. Rich result test (Google): https://search.google.com/test/rich-results

3. Validation tool  for Bing: https://www.bing.com/toolbox/markup-validator

Researching structure markup feasibility and making recommendations for its implementation if scope exists, should be included on technical SEO audits.

Conclusions

Sometimes though, key insights on an audit report can be missed as the auditor hasn’t really spent enough time understanding how the business works and how the website delivers against the business objectives. Internal knowledge about the company can really help formulate better recommendations upon the technical SEO audit exercise.

Whatever use you make of the report and the recommendations, it is advised to find an SEO that can work with your technical teams to implement the recommendations in a way that’s efficient and always looking at the 20/80 rule: trying to achieve 80% of the results investing 20% of time & resource.

The post Common gaps in technical SEO audits appeared first on David Carralon.

In a panic about link building techniques and methods? Not sure what’s changed and how to get started? are you afraid your site will get penalized if you end up in the wrong hands?

Misconceptions have always surrounded search rankings. And search engine algorithms change all the time, so it’s no wonder people feel like they can’t keep up. Yet plenty of techniques for building links are as relevant as they’ve ever been.

Search engine algorithms are smarter than ever. If you want your links to elevate your site, they need to be quality links. You can expect links from spammy sites to have a zero or negative impact on your site’s rankings. Irrelevant links outside your niche will also be useless to you. You also need to make sure your anchor text is or at least looks natural.

Read on as I take a look at some link building techniques that can still be used in 2018, without necessarily having to go large investing in resource-intensive initiatives like ‘Content Marketing’.

1. Building ‘linkbait’ Quality Content

I don’t mean to suck beginning with the usual ‘Content is King’ drag, but nothing will save your link building campaign from weak content. Every link building expert knows that relevant, quality, audience-led content both generates links on its own and strengthens an existing link building initiative.

People want to link to sites that offer real value. They’ll share such content with their online social circle. And blogs will want to use and cite such content for their own articles too.

This type of quality content has to be or high quality and relevant to your niche, as well as fresh and useful to your readers. This mean you need to get to know your audience. Consider taking reader feedback first to inform the direction of your content strategy. That way, you’ll ensure you’re creating content that people want to consume.

The key is in finding the influencers for your target audience and find a way to showcase your content to them without pushing or projecting the idea of linking to you. If your content is good they will likely link to it.

Make it shareable too

Along with having real value, your content should be shareable and invite people to want to share it with their connections.

Sites might think twice about linking to a mountain of technical jargon. Rework your content so it’s accessible and easy to scan. This means other sites are more likely to link your content without risk of distracting from their own.

Keeping your content digestible also means it’s more likely to find readers in the first place. Attention spans are in short supply online, so your content is more likely to attract links if others have read and understood it.

2. Build User Resources

This one is closely tied to quality content, but it’s, in my opinion, one of the best long-term strategies for acquiring quality backlinks

If you can provide content that other sites in your niche will find useful, then you have an inbuilt tool to generate links. This could mean providing statistics, or how-to guides, checklists, or perhaps it means creating an index of useful information for your audience. Or, if budget permits, consider providing tools unique to your industry that aren’t widely available.

Aggregator sites that allow users to compare prices are a great example of this strategy. Commercial sites that offer highly detailed online user guides and videos on how to use their products creatively is another example. To get a better idea I’d like to cite the fantastic Techsmith Camtasia video editing product and their information user training guides and videos. This is not the first time I link to them.

Before you jump into creating resources for your niche, make sure you run adequate keyword research in order set you in the right direction with content creation.

3. Build authority through publicity and public presence

Authors continue to do book tours in the modern day because they still work.

Old-school publicity like interviews makes your brand more visible. You can act as an ambassador for your content by appearing in YouTube videos, on podcasts, industry events, or on the radio. Creating a personality for your brand makes it memorable. It’s also a great way to build credibility.

When you aim to build this Publicity in a broader perspective, you get not just the linking signals you were looking for but also the very thing that those signals are trying to measure, namely Authority. Remember, the link is a signal that Google interprets to understand something deeper.

There are many personalities in the Search Marketing industry who do this very effectively: sharing knowledge as speakers, writing in-depth blog posts, participation in expert panel discussions or moderating events sessions or small groups.Anders Hjorth from Innovell does this very effectively. When he is not speaking, he is moderating on SMX in London or SMX Paris or joining the judge’s panel for key events like European Search Awards.

In return, he gets his brand exposed to highly targeted audiences who may at some point contact him for client work. It’s the power of authority-building.

4. Digital PR

You could take your brand authority-building efforts further by doing this in the framework of a coordinated Digital PR campaign. I see a lot of success with brands or agencies using data-driven content to seed out stories to the top-tier press.

If you think you are able to bring an element of public value or interest to your ideas and campaigns. For example: your brand may be offering value to emerging start-ups in the digital space, promote multiculturalism and/or multilingualism through your company culture, brand new innovative solutions to global issues, or even at a local level there is value in Digital PR, eg: you could be organising local and social events in your community, contributing to green initiatives…

Think about those targeted online publications in your niche that outstand and reach out to the journalists that lead the news in your favourite columns with a highly personalized message to tell them about what you do. Or better still, offer the journalist a free lunch to hear your story. You may not succeed in this first attempt but you will have begun connecting and establishing relations.

5. Chase up your Brand Mentions

A link building expert understands that effective marketing is about making sure no one forgets who you are, and to make yourself heard.

Good and whitehat link building is also about keeping a lookout for people talking or mentioning your brand. Has a site mentioned your content in a positive light but forgotten to link to your site? That could be an opportunity for a link. Reach out to then with a gratitude and kindly ask if they could also link to your site. If they’re talking favorably about you, they should be happy to oblige.

Your content could also appear on social media without attribution. When this happens, nudge users to check out the source and ask for the original poster to mention you. You may need to push to get credit, but you’ll thank yourself when it helps to build your links.

This link building technique works better when the brand is kind of already established for at least a year or two. If you are new in your space there may not be many instances of your brand being mentioned, so you first need to make sure you get some publicity.

6. Guest Blogging

Guest posting gives you a platform much like traditional publicity. You can prove your credibility and wow new audiences with your content. The best results you will get off guest blogging will come when you forget about the link and really focus on targetting influential bloggers with audiences relevant to yours or your client’s site.

As part of a guest post, typically you’ll be able to get a link back to your site. But you can also include content that you can back up with data from your site, too. This increases the link building potential of your guest post.

Once you’ve made a guest post, staying active in the comments can build your visibility and the authority of your brand. It also shows the host site that you aren’t in it just for the links.

To make this strategy truly successful you should mainly approach websites or blogs that truly appeal to your desired audience.

There is plenty of information out there on guest blogging etiquette, conducting effective outreach and the like, so I won’t be covering that, but if you don’t know how to get started with prospecting tools like Buzzstream Discovery, Pitchbox or NinjaOutreach are a good start.

7. Industry Directories

Certain directories remain relevant depending on your niche, despite what you hear about directories being dead. Directory submissions as a form of link building was spam and it is dead indeed. However, being present at key industry directories can be beneficial both for your local SEO efforts and your link building.

The key is to ensure your site is included in relevant directories only. Doing otherwise can negatively impact your search rankings or take you nowhere other than wasting a lot of time. Try and look for niche directories related to your keywords that may have been overlooked by competitors. Try to think of all the permutations in your niche that could have a directory.

Directories can be not just a free source of backlinks but also help you discover potential prospects for collaboration within your niche.

8. Competition-analysis link building

The point with this link building technique is not to copy what the competition is doing, but try to establish the level-playing field in SEO for your brand. You want to be able to have at least the same links you competitors have plus unique ones impossible for them to emulate. So chasing the links they have is always a good start.

The process is usually to analyze two or more of your competitors to find common sources of links on their backlink profiles. Consider approaching these sources to see if they’ll do the same for you.

Are you doing enough in your SEO to attract the sites who are linking your competition? Take a look at the content being linked to on your competitors’ websites. If you can provide the same information in a better format, you’re more likely to attract these links in the future.

9. Leveraging Social Media

Social media is still an amazing tool for a link building expert.

Users of social media have grown more used to seeing advertising. But native advertising and astroturfing techniques can get through to even the most jaded users.

Even if you don’t have a dedicated social media marketing plan or strategy, you should try to be active on social media to promote your brand. This allows you to engage actively with potential readers, who are likely to share and promote your content. These shares can form links themselves, or they help bring your content to new audiences.

Taking part in social media also brings credibility to your brand. It shows you’re an active presence in your niche, not just a faceless blog. That boosts the likelihood that others will share your content or link to you.

10. Broken Link Building

You can build links using the shifting nature of the internet. It is one of the oldest forms of link building and it does still work pretty well.

For instance, you can use specialized SEO tools to help you find broken links on other sites. If these links were pointing to other sites in your niche that are no longer there, it’s an opportunity for you to plug the gap.

The way to go is to approach the webmaster and offer to help fix these links. You can then use your own content as a suitable alternative. If you’re already a resource site like we mentioned earlier in point two, then this becomes even easier.

Webmasters you help out like this are likely to remember you when it comes to linking new content. By helping fix their broken links, you’ve improved the SEO of their site. You can establish relationships this way that can help with future, mutually-beneficial collaboration.

11. Host and Sponsor Events

It may sound bizarre, but link building doesn’t have to happen online. This a great way to bring sites in your niche together. It’s even better for businesses with a local focus.

Let’s take a look at these two options separately.

Hosting

Hosting an event puts you at the center of link building. A link building expert will host events to increase their brand awareness and gain coverage for their content.

You’ll want to promote an event you’re hosting, so your site will appear on all advertising. If your event gains traction, then other sites will start to report on it, giving you even more links. Social media will bolster your link building even more.

Any businesses involved in the event will also be promoting you by default. By acting as the host, you’re putting your site at the head of the pack in your niche.

Sponsorship

Event hosting can be costly and could even backfire if it goes wrong. If you don’t want to commit to an event, you could try offering sponsorship.

Sponsorship has a similar effect on the visibility of your brand. And like event hosting, coverage of your sponsored party will also link back to you. If you’re a site with a local focus, this gives you a positive image along with plenty of organic coverage.

Conclusion

In the context of SEO, it is important to acknowledge that not all links are equal. There are many different ways that a link builder can leverage in order to build/gain links for clients, whether it is through working with the client to build amazing content, through Digital PR or through creative community initiatives such competitions, or through a combination of them.

Whatever it is the link building technique is used, it is key to cultivate strong, quality links within the same industry, or with logical ties to it. These will give your site greater authority and credibility. It is equally important to demand transparency onto whatever the process or method for link building may be.

If you’re trying to build effective links, then following the above ideas like a checklist can help keep you on course. Building links will become easier over time as you gain more exposure and create relationships with other sites.

Another point to take into account is that link building can only get better as you go through and start improving your overall SEO. Only by ranking high enough, you will find yourself garnering links naturally. In other words, by bringing up other aspects of your SEO strategy, you can improve the chance of links coming to you.

And if you’re stuck, you can get in touch for link building consultation!

The post Link Building Techniques That Haven’t Gone Away appeared first on David Carralon.

Bing might be suggesting that link building is on its way out, but Google still regards links as one of the top three ranking factors for search.

Links are search-engine gold but link building is not for sissies. It takes time, knowledge and experience to get it right. Many businesses choose an outside agency to do the hard work for them.

Read on to find out if you should choose the option to outsource link building for your company’s online presence.

The Process of Link Building

Link building refers to the practice of getting other sites (preferably authoritative ones) to link back to your site as a source of information.

It is possible to offer money to people in exchange for backlinks but reputable operators will not indulge in this kind of practices. There are other, direct and indirect ways to earn links.

Firstly, your content needs to be good enough. Secondly, they may return the favor if you link, mention them or comment on their blogs first. Establishing a relationship with influencers, bloggers, and other highly-regarded sources are key to link building. This is a time consuming and long-term process.

Significant interactions with other web entities can work wonders for your SEO and is an important part of your overall strategy.

If you have no idea where to start or lack the time and resources to engage in this lengthy process, it is a good idea to outsource link building to someone who does.

Strategy and Link Building

We’ve all heard SEO terms such as the careful use of anchor text, content, links and keywords to drive organic search queries to your site.

Are you familiar enough with the latest marketing trends and search engine algorithms to figure out how these all fit together to work for you? Reading a few articles on the topics won’t cut it.

Unless you forget the concept of link building and follow the route of content marketing, which is not always within your reach, you are bound to have to take into account the following types of anchors:

• Page Post Title: page title anchor text refers to the meta title of the page and occurs more typically in blog posts
• Keywords: it contains the precise key phrase you want to rank for. Ideally, no more than 1 or 2 are needed.
• Keyword plus or Conversational keyphrases: it contains a key phrase you want to rank for with other words that make the anchor look natural.
• Partial Keyword: anchor text that contains part of a key phrase that you are targeting.
• Home URL or Website name: https://www.heresmysite.com OR heresmysite.com OR www.heresmysite.com
• Full URL: The Full URL refers to the full deep url, perhaps more suitable for links coming from forums
• URL with www’s: Some website owners simply leave off the “http:// or replace it with www. It’s quite common
• Brand: A link with an anchor using your brand name, eg: HeresMysite
• Brand Plus Keyword: Brand plus keyword you are trying to rank for in the anchor text.
• No Text: no anchor text at all. Typically from images that link to a site but without title or alt tag
• Natural: no reference to any key phrase whatsoever. Examples: “here”, “website”, “this site explains”, “find more here”.

The above applies to every single page or url that you wish to rank as part of your website and assumes that you have done your keyword research. Yes, it’s hard work to keep up with this such system. You need specialised tools that help you stay organized and methodic.

It also takes time and know-how to stay on top of all rapidly-changing developments in link building and search engine algorithms that consider backlinks to rank web pages. It takes years of experience to interpret all of this correctly.

What About Paid Search to Get Results?

Paid search is just that – paying search engines to push your website to the top of search results. The amount varies according to the competition for these keywords.

Organic results do not cost you anything unless you consider the amount of time and money you have invested in getting them to the top of the pile.

While paid search is a legitimate way to get clicks, it only lasts as long as your budget does. Diligent SEO marketing may take time but it also has longer lasting effects.

After you have reached a certain level you may be able to continue on your own thanks to the benefits of natural links i.e. sites that link to you because they think your content is worthy of it.

Effective link building goes a long way towards achieving this status.

Many companies make use of both tactics to cover all their bases, as it is very costly to utilize paid search for all your keywords.

Does it pay to outsource link building though?

Benefits of outsourcing Link Building

Many businesses that outsource link building enjoy fantastic results over time. The benefits go far beyond the fact that it works though. These are some of them:

Not having to worry about this dull and tedious part of SEO

Link building is tiring, ongoing and can be tricky if you don’t know what you are doing. If you delegate it to one of your employees you are taking them away from what they were originally hired for.

Hiring someone new to engage in link building is expensive and you have no guarantee of their skills when you get them on board.

Leaving it to a professional saves you time and stress.

It’s Not Your Problem

If anything goes wrong with your link building strategy or causes you to earn penalties from Google, you can take it up with your service provider. While they often cannot guarantee results due to the ever-changing nature of search engine algorithms, it is kind of their responsibility to fix it.

If you were you doing link building yourself, you may not know where you went wrong or how to fix it.

Save Money Down the Line

I agree that link building services are expensive. How do the costs compare to the amount of time you would spend doing it yourself, though?

Professionals will be able to accomplish a lot more a lot faster due to their knowledge, experience, and networks. When you outsource link building it frees you up to focus on what you are really good at.

The Downside of Outsourcing Link Building

However, there are a few aspects of outsourcing your link building that may not sit well with you due to the associated risks:

Losing Control

Giving up some of the input you have in marketing your business online may seem like relinquishing control. If you do not have the ‘know-how’ to do it yourself, you may not see this as a bad thing.

You should always have the final say even though you are not involved in the daily grind. Direction and goals are still your domain.

Even if you outsource link building you may still want to audit the work that’s to be done: the anchor text, the target urls, the types of websites being approached.

The Fine Print

Avoid being bound by a lengthy and expensive contract. If you are unhappy with the services provided you may be stuck paying out large amounts of money for poor results.

When you outsource link building, make sure you have the option to cancel or make use of a trial period to see if you are happy with the service.

Keep in mind that you cannot expect instant results from link-building and should give it time to work before canceling your contract.

Shady Operators

Just as in any industry, there are unscrupulous operators out there who will take your money and run or who simply don’t have the ‘know-how’ to help you with effective link building. The damage they can cause on your site’s ability to rank may be bigger than not doing link building at all and not ranking right high.

So how do you Choose the right agency or professional?

Be wary of link building services that promise a first place ranking right away. This is simply not possible.

A good provider will work with you towards achieving specific goals in realistic time frames. Check online reviews to see what their other customers have to say and how they respond to any complaints.

Find out about Black Hat SEO tactics and steer clear of anyone associated with them. Search engines will likely catch up with you and it may take a lot longer to lift a penalty (even in Penguin 4’s era) than it does to build up your site with tried and tested tactics, even in Penguin.

Conclusion

While the initial cost of link building is high, the cost of your contract should taper off over time as the number of effort decreases.

Look for analytics and facts. The best link building companies will be able to show you the logic behind their processes and provide you with figures relating to your site regularly

It is your job to provide the best products and services in your niche, leave link building an expert 3rd party.

If however, you are up for the challenge, want to learn and understand more the ins and outs of link building, and keep your campaign and brand fully under control in-house, then pull up your sleeves and start reading, learning and testing. Pick up a small project and build a strategic plan around it and carefully start executing. It’s the best way to learn.

The post The Pros and Cons of Outsourcing Link Building appeared first on David Carralon.

Keyword research is the foundation of search engine optimization (SEO). Keyword rankings, as a means of tracking SEO progress is still big.

A few years ago, following a Google decision to ban use of the Adwords API to some big SEO tools software brands, there was a slight attempt of deviation keyword monitoring for SEO purposes. Google decided that some SEO tool companies were overusing or abusing their Google API to power their tools.

It was the time when the concept of Inbound Marketing was born. Many SEO celebrities began advocating for a non-keywords SEO world or for alternatives to measure SEO. This fad didn’t last long as most SEOs thought that, without keywords, it was much harder monitoring the fluctuations of rankings and organic traffic. Of course!

Keywords and keyphrases provide a compass that alerts you to your progress. They point you in the right direction, toward the fears and desires of your potential customers. Without carefully selecting your top keywords, your SEO becomes wobbly. Do not listen to advice saying keywords do not matter.

Keyword Research methodologies

I will make the assumption that that you have already done market research and know what your niche is. If you work in-house as part of a team you do of course already what products or services you should promote.

It’s important however to learn the keyword research process properly. These days, the best methodology is often referred by many experts as ‘topics research’, ‘topics targetting’ and ‘topics optimization’. This trend and new way to look at the semantics of keywords began with the arrival of the ‘Google Hummingbird‘ algorithm.

Keyword categories

Keywords can fall under one of the following categories:

• relevance
• specificity
• popularity
• competitiveness

On top, keywords can often be researched better when interlaced with adverbs, prepositions or adjectives. These being properties for the noun to be researched. For example: colour, type, model, location, time, audience age, origin… each of those when combined with a product, service or noun can unveil a whole pool of keyphrases, all of which should be taken into account when conducting keyword research, and depending on the business objectives, decide the degree of priority in the selection process.

There are three ways of conducting keyword research:

1. the traditional way, which what I’m going to cover on this post.,
2. the agile way, competitor analysis, kind of keyword-stealing way.
3. or both

Tip: Option 2 is handy for ‘on-the-fly’ keyword research if you just need to know what specific terms a competitors’.

high-ranking landing page targets. That tactic alone can take you straight to some good outcomes for your SEO

The Head, Body, and Tail

So, how do you analyze keyword phrases and how do you know it is the right keyword? As I mentioned earlier, since Hummingbird you do not need to worry much about targetting single keywords. Go and grab those that kind of belong to the same bucket (category).

The next thing to take into account is the number of words in the phrase. The more words there are, the better chance you have of ranking for that term. Four-word phrases are easier to rank for and bring you higher conversion rates than a single head or terms keyword.

Head keywords

There is a term for the single-word top keywords: the head. They are also often referred to as vanity keywords. These terms will return results from a multitude of industries, and they can be great for brand building if you manage to rank high for them.They are extremely competitive though.

This searcher that uses ‘Head’ terms is just starting their research into a topic. They haven’t yet found the information they need to make a final decision. This is often why they their conversion rates are not great.

Head      –       Body       –       Tail

Body keywords

One step narrower than the head terms are body keywords, often comprised of two terms, though they can be three words, and are still very high volume. Many people search using two terms. However, unless you are a well-known established business, you shouldn’t target these words exclusively. You need to find top keywords that entail are lower competition.

Longtail keywords

Your salvation lies in long tail keywords, especially if your site is new – those that contain four words or more. These keywords will help you connect with your target audiences pretty well.

In many ways these keyword pool is the one that feeds search engine algorithms like Rankbrain or AI technology like voice search recognition, which aim, among other things to efficiently match human intent.

When you add all longtail keywords in your niche together, these long phrases make up the majority of search terms. The only flaw with long tail keywords is that they may get only 100-1000 searches a month, often less. So the key is to properly research the questions asked by your target audience when doing the keyword research.

By finding out about these questions you can write targeted content that provides useful customer’s answer. This can really give you the edge over your competition if you bring it into your overall content strategy efforts as a coordinated plan to generate new leads.

I recommend you watch this WebCertainTV interview to Bill Hunt where Gemma asks key keyword research questions in the context of content marketing:

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zx4k0XCdiPs [/embedyt]
 

Get started

So how do you get started? go to your preferred tool for keyword research, eg: Google Keyword planner

1. If you already have an Adwords account, head for Google Keyword Planner in the first place. It is fundamental to tap into this in-depth buyer analysis.
2. Start with a few head terms
3. add variations
4. add additional related keywords
5. add questions about the head keyword
6. add other informational phrases
7. click on the keyword ideas to find more top keywords

Why do you need to add so many keyword ideas?

The Google keyword planner tool can come up with more and better keyword and keyphrase ideas. The planner will only spit out variations of your original entry though. So, you will need to brainstorm quite thoroughly to come up with a variety of related terms your customers might be searching for. If you struggle with going beyond just a small group of keywords it may be because you don’t have a paying account with Adwords, so Google is then less likely to let you have keyword information for free.

Luckily, there are alternatives to Google Keyword Planner? The best for me, these days, is KW Finder, followed by Ahrefs. Both tools are premium though. KW Finder is a beginner-friendly tool that boasts a beautiful and easy-to-use interface. It’s probably the most user-friendly keyword research tool on the market these days. You can get a free account and start running queries in no time.

What shall I do with all the results?

I recommend that you systematically export all your targeted keyword results to excel. There you can better manage the different groups. If your niche is small you may be ok with just putting all your keywords onto a tab, create a table and then filter them by topics and add one extra column for the topic name. Add colours to make it easier to scan through them.

Make sure you have a process to eliminate the duplicates. As you go through the research and selection process, whether you just use one or several tools, you will like be exporting groups of keywords that contain keywords already used in other groups. Make sure you use the ‘remove duplicates’ function in excel, to end up with a unique list of keywords without duplicates.

If you have a complex and rather large topic you will want to add each unique topic entity onto a tab and then add groups on each tab to cater for the different subtopics, segments, locations, etc.

And lastly, if your remit if huge and happen to be running international keyword research for a large company with a multi-product bouquet in their portfolio, you may consider to use one sheet file for each country or location and then within it use the tabs, filters and colour grouping system to organize your keywords.

What is the end goal for each keyword finding?

The goal is to get to find out the real user intent for the keyword or keyphrase in question. If you manage to craft that and then build a content plan around that, you will multiply your chances for success with every topic pursued.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPw0Jr7zBgU[/embedyt]

The most profitable keywords you will find are those that are very close to, but not exactly matching, what you sell. There will be many businesses clamoring for the top keywords. So, by choosing adjacent ones, you reduce your competition. Google Kw Planner will often help you find the topics you need to develop content around.

Keep digging into the process

 Think about:

• the uses of your product
• Ask yourself how they might impact the life of the person doing the searching.
• the actual intent behind the search query (keyword)
• the level of competition for the keywords you decide to target

Often you will come up with an ambiguous topic list for the same niche, but which could potentially target three different niche markets. This is where you need to be careful and engage the product owner into the process. For example take these there keywords:

• nutrition for toddlers
• feeding your infant
• and food for children

All three are about the same thing but it’s three very different queries with different user intents. Feeding your infant is much more generic than ‘nutrition for toddlers’ which is specific to toddlers. If you get this wrong and begin targetting something that’s just similar but not to do with your product, you will lose a lot of time and money.

Consider using personas

If you have trouble while you are brainstorming, there are some strategies that can be used to help. One is creating a buyer persona. This persona will include pertinent information about your customers. Think about things such as their average age, gender, and income. You should also add the hobbies, interests, and goals of your target market. Some industries have multiple buyer personas that you will need to focus on separately.

This kind of specialization is what will capture an audience for your sales pitch. You must become in touch with your base. Learn all about their needs to maximize your profits.

Seek for Commercial Intent

When you are looking for top keywords, you will want to make sure that they have commercial intent. Getting a high volume of traffic to your website is nice. However, that doesn’t ensure those impressions will become conversions. Use the search phrases that people who are ready to buy are using.

If you want to be sure you have picked a good word, look at the Adwords Suggested Bid. This will give you real-world data on the commercial intent of web surfers.  When you find the top business keywords coupled with informational keywords in your niche are, you will have mastered a very lucrative art form.

Tip: do not fall in the trap of thinking that every single keyword you target should deliver commercial ROI. Some of them could be driving in interest, backlinks and valuable traffic that may need special nurturing via an email list or a different lead-to-customer tactic.

Use non-mainstream keyword research tools

One of the best tips for coming up with long tail keywords is looking at the “searches related to…” section. This is typically located at the bottom of a basic search results page (SERP). This can be a goldmine of long tail keywords, and a free way to run keyword research for informational and questions queries to help you rank in ‘position 0’ type of results.

Or if you prefer something with a user interface, UberSuggest is another useful tool for coming up with top keywords, and it’s free. It takes your search term and adds every letter in the alphabet after it to give you many more results. This is a great way to really branch out in the diversity of your search terms. I often find that with the long tail terms and questions suggested by KW Finder it is more than enough to inform my strategy.

Answer The Public can also be a helpful keyword tool. You can enter broad search terms. Then, it will generate common questions that are searched related to that topic.

If you are truly stumped, head over to a forum website like Reddit. You will be able to find tons of honest and accurate opinions of any keyword you type in. This can help you realize where you are in the marketplace.

Keyword Competition

One of the last parts of the selection process is examining if the competition is already using that keyword. You want to see if it is likely that you will be able to get on the first page of search results. Pages that have more authority, generated by time and size of the site, will rank higher on search result pages. Google is simply tallying the votes for what its searchers are looking for.

This is where tools like Kw Finder really give you the edge to competitor analysis as you are able to see in real-time the level of domain authority needed to rank for specific terms or phrases, based on the domain that ranks N. 1 for each term.

Conclusion

Keyword research should be an essential component of your overall market research.

After learning about the keyword generation process, you should now have a list of lucrative top keywords. Now, use those terms in your website copy to bring searchers to your page. There are extensive guidelines to writing the perfect blog post and squeezing more out of your headlines.

The criteria to properly select and target your top keywords should include search volume, commercial intent, and organic SEO competition.

Keyword research, selection and targetting is still today a pivotal part of an SEO strategy and, in many ways, the bread and butter of SEO. Once you master keyword planning and targetting process, and build a content strategy around them, no doubt you’ll see an incredible jump in search engine traffic. You will also come to know your customers in a way your competition just can’t keep up with.

Take some time to read multiple perspectives so you can benefit from everyone’s experience. SEO is as much of a talent as a tool. And it’s a tool that you should now be ready to use.

I have mentioned several different keyword research tools in this article. There are many more out there. Using one of these options will help you set you ahead of your competition. It will also help you to get that coveted first-page spot. Please note that, based on your business and industry different keyword planners will work better for you. Do some research and go with the ones that you feel comfortable with.

The post A Step-by-Step Guide to effective keyword research appeared first on David Carralon.