SEO

Google Ads have a huge potential to help you reach out to users who are searching for products and services that you offer. However, managing paid search marketing can be overwhelming as you have to be creative to stand out from the crowd. Fortune 500 companies and mom-and-pop stores are vying for users’ attention and, thus, it becomes crucial for businesses to have an optimal campaign structure in place. You need to strategise and leverage the targeting tools the ad platform offers you. To help you, here are some tips to create successful Google Ads for local businesses:

Use keyword research tools for ads: Using keywords in your Google ads that relate to your location and what people are looking for locally can help increase traffic to your website. Google Keyword Planner can help you find the most relevant keywords for your business. As per your budget, you can choose the keywords and use them strategically in your ad copy.

Craft an effective ad copy: While your competitors are vying for the same precious space, your ad may end up saying the same thing as others, hurting your the chances of ads getting that click. An effective ad copy is one that doesn’t lose sight of what the customers are looking for. Your ad clearly tells customers the solution that they are looking for.

Use local-friendly ad extensions: Setting up a call extension is also a great way to generate more traffic. With one click, customers can call and inquire about your business. Location extensions help people find your business with address and redirect into Google Maps for easy navigation. If you sell products from more than one location, affiliate location extensions can help people find your other stores.

Have a targeted landing page for the ad: As a majority of users search for local businesses on their smartphones. You will have a huge advantage if your landing page is optimised for mobile phones and easy to navigate. The mobile-friendliness and the overall landing page experience can affect the ad rank.

Refine the targeting: Posting Google ads is not a one time job. To keep them working for your business, you should use the keywords that are performing well. Keep reviewing your ads so that they stay relevant and competitive.

Use Google Tag Manager to track your conversions: Once you have your Google ads up and running, it is important for you to track them. To make data-driven decisions you need to know which ads have performed well, which ads led a customer to take actions like — buy from your website, call your business or download an app. For those with limited web development experience, this could be quite an exhaustive and time-consuming process. By making use Google Tag Manager throughout your website and you can ascertain the return on investment on your advertisement. If visits to businesses’ your physical locations — restaurants, hotels and stores, are crucial, then you can use store visits conversion to track how your Google ads influence store visits.

Need A Google AdWords Agency? As a full-service digital marketing agency, we offer inbound marketing and PPC management services. We will help you create a unique marketing strategy that custom made to suit your business and help you maximise your conversion potential.

From keyword research to understanding your competition, from producing regular ongoing content to boosting link quality, a good SEO strategy has many activities that need to be done in sync with each other. If you are a business owner looking to improve the performance of your website, then you bound to have many questions. To help you, we’ve answered 15 frequently asked questions on SEO: 

1. Why does my business need SEO? Yes, in today’s digital world all businesses that are online need SEO. By investing in SEO, you can increase traffic to your website and moreover, SEO is more cost-effective than paid advertising. If your website ranks organically on search engines, the cost per click would be low.
2. How to find the right keywords for my website? A well-optimised website has all the keywords that its customer base are searching for. There are several tools like Google keyword planner that can help you learn about keywords that are relevant to your business. However, you must remember that keyword research is an on-going and ever-evolving process. Old keyword phrases need to be reviewed and replaced with high volume and competitive keywords. 
3. Why isn’t my website ranking on Google? The reasons behind your website not being ranked on Google could be: you are blocking search engines from indexing and crawling your pages, your website doesn’t have domain authority — relevant keywords and high-quality backlinks — to rank for competitive search queries, you have duplicate content on your website, or you have a Google penalty. 
4. What is the difference between on-page SEO and technical SEO? On-page SEO tells search engines how to match pages to relevant queries. Technical SEO involves the technical aspects of the website that make it easier to crawl and understandable for search engines. 
5. What is on-page and off-page SEO? On-page SEO concerns all the activities that you can do on your website such as site content, title tag and meta tag optimisation, H tag and internal linking. On the other hand, off-page SEO refers to all the activities that do not happen on your website such as link building, content marketing, social media and reviews. 
6. What is page speed and how does it affect my website’s ranking? Page speed is a measurement of how fast your website loads and Google recognises it as a ranking factor. Enabling compression, optimising the code, reducing redirects and improving server response time are some of the ways to improve the page speed.
7. What is link-building? It is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your website — this acts as a vote of confidence or trust from one website to another. Links are one of the top 3 ranking factors of Google.
8. How can I get other sites to link to my website? Infographic, white papers, how-to guides, videos and image galleries can help you earn links from websites that may find the content to be interesting or informative. Broken link building, unlinked brand mentions and digital PR are some of the link-building strategies. 
9. What are the basic components of a good SEO strategy? User-friendly site architecture, relevant keywords, mobile-friendly site, content marketing, and quality backlinks are some of the basic components of a good SEO strategy.
10. Which SEO techniques are popular? Improving user experience across the website, upgrading existing content, finding and fixing keyword cannibalisation issues and using FAQs schema are some of the popular SEO techniques. 
11. What is Google penalty? Google penalises websites that violate its guidelines. There are algorithm penalties and manual penalties. Buying links, excessive reciprocal links, duplicate content, internal 404s, and overusing H1 tags can land a website with Google penalty.
12. How lengthy a page content should be? There is no right answer to this. There are several content analysis tools that can help your website pages stay effective and relevant.
13. How do I create SEO-friendly content? Creating SEO-friendly content requires proper planning and strategy in place rather than just stuffing keywords. Write what your users are looking for, use SEO-friendly URLs, optimise meta descriptions, optimise your content for mobile, update your content regularly and use Schema markup. 
14. Will HTTPS affect SEO? Yes, Google has confirmed HTTPS as a ranking signal. The search engine also indexes HTTPS pages first. HTTPS is essentially a more secure form of HTTP. HTTPS is faster than HTTP which ensure a better user experience. 
15. Why is mobile-first indexing important? The lack of a mobile-friendly user experience can negatively impact your website’s ranking. When determining your website’s ranking, Google prioritises mobile page load speed as a key metric. It means that the mobile version of your website becomes the starting point for what Google includes in its index. The biggest benefit of mobile-first indexing is that you will reach your audience faster.

While you are busy with the day-to-day concerns of running your business, SEO often gets ignored. As a full-service digital marketing agency, we can help you to exploit the best tools, resources and strategies to keep up with an ever-evolving landscape of SEO.

SEO has over recent years has become a significant revenue channel. The right applications of SEO techniques can help make progress with your marketing goals. SEO methods are constantly evolving due to search engines’ developments and consumer behaviour changes. However, when SEO techniques are implemented incorrectly it take some time to recover.

To make sure that you don’t make these mistakes, we share 8 common SEO mistakes

1. Ignoring HTTP status and server Issues: HTTP status codes are crucial to determine how your website is accessed by visitors and spiders. If there are technical issues with your website related to HTTP status, it is best to get them fixed at the earliest. Due to this problem, you may not only lose out on traffic but also damage your rankings on Google.

2. Not creating right title tags & meta descriptions: Title tags and meta descriptions tell search engines and users what your site is about. Therefore, it is important that you create the right title tags and meta descriptions using the relevant keywords. Optimised title tags and meta descriptions give your website the chance to maximise its impact in the SERPs by encourage users to click on the website. Ensure that you don’t create too many pages with same titles and descriptions — it will make it difficult for search engines to properly determine relevance and, thus, it will affect the rankings.

3. Not addressing crawling issues: If a website has crawling issues, some of the pages on the website might not be as accessible to Google. Crawlability is the foundation of your technical SEO strategy and thus you must get crawling issues resolved.

4. Indexability: Good indexability is crucial for SEO. if a page is not indexed, it won’t be seen by a search engine and, therefore, it won’t be seen by users. Duplicate meta data and content are some of the factors that can make it difficult for search engines to identify which pages to rank for certain similar search terms. Low word count, too short or too long title tags, and hreflang links are some of the factors that can affect the indexability of your site.

5. Ignoring internal and external link optimisation: Internal links direct the reader to a page within the website, whereas an external link directs the reader to a page on a different website. While internal links keep the users engaged on your website for longer, external links are seen as a vote of confidence by others. When other websites provide external links to your website or content you have posted, it boosts your site’s ranking.

6. Pages are not mobile friendly: Mobile-friendliness has become ranking criteria for both mobile and desktop for Google last year. To enhance your search performance make sure that your website complies with Google’s AMP guidelines.

7. Not evaluating site performance: Knowing how your website is performing helps you identify areas of improvement. There are many tools like Google Analytics that helps you with things like traffic, demographics and how much time the users spend on your website. Make use of these tools to continue to improve the web experience for your users.

8. Not updating your website: SEO is an evolving field and you must keep yourself abreast with all the latest happenings. Google keeps bringing out new updates and if you miss out on a major one, then your website rankings may suffer and you may lose out on valuable traffic.

Committing any of these SEO mistakes can hold your website back. As a full-service digital marketing agency, we can help you ensure that your website follows the best SEO practices.

Gone are the days when keyword stuffing would get you results. The SEO scene has changed today. To help your business do a better job at reaching out to the target audience, it is important that your SEO content focuses on overall user experience. Working on E-A-T score as a ranking factor helps in improving your chances of ranking well in the search results.

As great content remains the core of successful SEO marketing, we share with you some useful tips:

• Write content that users are looking for: User experience is Google’s ultimate priority. It is, therefore, important for you to align your content with the search intent. This means the content must answer the searcher’s queries. To get this part right, there are several question discovery tools that will help you understand what kind of questions people are asking in regards to the products or services that you are marketing.
• Meta matters: Google crawls web pages from top to bottom. It is, therefore, important that the title tag includes the primary keyword. The title tag, description, and slugs decide the ranking of your page. Avoid creating duplicate title tags and write unique meta descriptions for each page.
• Improve your readability: While it is good to focus on keywords, meta tags and image alt tags, it is equally important to pay attention to the readability factor. Though content readability isn’t accounted for in Google’s search ranking algorithm, it can significantly impact your site’s SEO levels. Using short sentences, bullet points, user-friendly fonts, and infographics can make your content easily skimmable. There are several online tools that can help you check the readability of your work.
• Target multiple keywords: Rather than focusing on only one keyword, target multiple keyword phrases. This will make your content relevant to a wide variety of sources. It is good to focus on the primary keyword but as a content marketer, you can maximise the reach of your content by targeting secondary keywords. When you type your keyword into Google, you will see The “People also ask” section and find additional semantic keywords that are relevant to your topic. Incorporating semantic keywords will increase the likelihood that your site will be shown in the SERPs for the main keyword.
• Make your website mobile-friendly: Google switched to a mobile-first indexing strategy and this makes it important for you to ensure that your website is mobile-friendly. Ensure that all pages on your website are optimised for mobile browsers. This means the text is easily readable, links and navigation are easily clickable.
• Content distribution the right way: Writing effective SEO contents can only be beneficial when they are sufficiently promoted by distributing across the right channels. Some strategies for distributing your content can include:
  i. Creating small bits of content and using ‘modules’ to lead your audience through the purchase process.
  ii. Customising your content to segment your audience and achieve maximum traction.
  iii. Building relationships with influencers can lead to social sharing of your content and thereby result in quality inbound links.

There was a time when if you consistently produced SEO-focussed content, you had a good chance of ranking on search engine results pages (SERP). However, the same cannot be said for 2020. The SEO landscape has changed. Search engines like Google are constantly updating their algorithm to improve user experience and penalize websites that are trying to manipulate the system.

Experts at our web development and SEO company have rounded up some the SEO best practices that will help your business leverage the power of digital marketing:

● Create SEO-friendly title tags, meta description and header tags: Title tags meta descriptions and header tags demonstrate to searchers what they are looking for. It is, therefore, important that you use them in a way that improves the chances of your ranking. While it is important to create catchy headlines, it is equally important to create title tags with keywords so that it is aligned with the search intent. Meta descriptions are the snippet that shows up in the search results with the title tags and, therefore, it is important that content is enticing and uses the right keywords. Use a heading (H1 tag) to highlight the most important information on your page. Do not use too many H1 tags on one page. It is best to keep the header short and make sure it has the keyword.

● Improve your E-A-T: Ensuring that your content meets Google’s E-A-T guidelines can be beneficial. E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. This is important for sites that run news and gives advice on health, finance and law. By following E-A-T guidelines, you can make sure that the content that your audience is looking for is accurate and backed by reliable sources that the users can trust.

Here’re Google’s suggestions for High E-A-T pages –

● High E-A-T medical advice should be written or produced by people or organizations with appropriate medical expertise or accreditation. High E-A-T medical advice or information should be written or produced in a professional style and should be edited, reviewed, and updated on a regular basis.
● High E-A-T news articles should be produced with journalistic professionalism—they should contain factually accurate content presented in a way that helps users achieve a better understanding of events.
● High E-A-T news sources typically have published established editorial policies and robust review processes.
● High E-A-T information pages on scientific topics should be produced by people or organizations with appropriate scientific expertise and represent well-established scientific consensus on issues where such consensus exists.
● High E-A-T financial advice, legal advice, tax advice, etc., should come from trustworthy sources and be maintained and updated regularly.
● High E-A-T advice pages on topics such as home remodeling (which can cost thousands of dollars and impact your living situation) or advice on parenting issues (which can impact the future happiness of a family) should also come from “expert” or experienced sources that users can trust.
● High E-A-T pages on hobbies, such as photography or learning to play a guitar, also require expertise.

● Secure your site: By migrating from Http to Https, your business can boost its credibility factor. Since 2014, Google announced that it would be showing a preference for Https sites in search results. Https provides your users with a safe and secure browsing experience and is a lightweight Google ranking factor., you are likely to retain them. To know whether your website is secure or not, look at the URL, if there is a lock sign, then you are good to go. You can get an insight into your website speed by using Google’s Pagespeed Insights tool .

● Speed up your website: If your website is taking time to load, then you are losing visitors even before they see your services and products. This can adversely affect your potential conversions. From the site’s code and server load to image size, there can be a host of factors that could be affecting your website load speed. Some of the issues can be fixed easily while others may need extra technical support. Page speed is a ranking factor for desktop since 2010, and for mobile since 2018.

For your digital success, it is important that your website is SEO-optimised. As a web development and SEO company, we can help you create websites that can help you meet your digital goals. From the development of your website to managing your marketing activities, we are a one-stop-shop for all your digital marketing needs.