The following post Google’s 3 Pack Changing To 2 And What You Can Do is republished from Ken Mandich's MDIMS Blog Looks like Google is changing things up once again. Imagine our surprise at that! Google is always mixing things up, sometimes for the better, and other times for the worse. This time Google is changing the local 3 pack to a 2 pack with a twist. It hasn't been that long since Google changed from the 7 pack to what is now the 3 pack. If you don't know what we are talking about, it's when you search for a business service and something like this pops up in the search: That was a search for Marietta plumber and what was returned. Now Google is going to change this to a 2 pack, with a really big twist. It will still be a 3 pack, although now the top spot will be an ad! So in the example above, the listing of Roto-Rooter would be an ad. How much will it cost? Well that remains to be seen. We can bet that it will cost a pretty penny since the snack pack generates so many leads. How will this impact Google and the user performing the search? Well obviously it will be great for Google as they will make more money from local businesses trying to bring in more customers. For the user on the other hand, probably not so good. There is a good chance that a business that isn't that reputable could potentially end up in the 3 pack. Can you blame Google? After all, they are a business and make a lot of money from ads. We would have preferred to see them leave the pack at 7, then take one away for ads, but we don't have any control over what they do. How Do You Get Into Google's Snack Pack?So how can you combat this? If you still want to be in the 3 pack, one of the best ways to get there and stay there is by getting a lot of citations with the correct name, address and phone number of your business listed everywhere. These citations are places like YellowPages.com, Kudzu, Manta and Yelp to name a few. The more of these citations you have, the better your chances of being listed in the 3 pack. However, it is extremely important to make sure that your business information is listed EXACTLY the same way across all platforms. For instance, if your address is 1234 Main Street, and that was how you listed it in Google, you would want to make sure that you listed your address that same way across all platforms and not abbreviate Street for St. There is some debate, as usual, if getting more good reviews will help get you into the 3 pack. We tend to lean towards no on that, since you can do a search for a business service and businesses with less reviews than others will rank higher in the pack. Try Google's Featured SnippetsThere is another way to get top listings however. And this is something that has been around for a very short time and SEO's debate whether or not it is beneficial to creating leads or not. It's Google's Featured Snippets. Here is what Google has to say about this feature:
Here is an example when we searched how to unclog a drain: Notice that it comes before any of the listings? Pretty cool. Take notice also that there is a link in the snippet to the website where the information was taken from. Will you be able to rank a featured snippet for something like "Atlanta Plumber" or "Roswell Electrician"? Probably not. However, if you can do some serious keyword research you can increase your chances for these snippets popping up in different places. Ryan Clutter wrote an article in Search Engine Journal that explains the best ways to increase your chances of getting featured in these snippets:
Ryan makes a lot of great suggestions in the article. One suggestion that he makes that we really like later in the article is making your long tail keyword search query (what your intended audience is searching for) your H2 tag. That's super slick! If you are performing your own SEO, you need to read the entire article so you can be equipped better for featured snippets. In Conclusion So if you are bent on staying in the 3 pack, more citations to keep you there. We would highly suggest that you also take into consideration on making posts on your site that can possibly get you into the featured snippets. After all, it can help increase the chances of driving more traffic to your site, which is what we are after anyhow. Be sure and contact us if you are in need of an online marketing company to help handle all of your SEO needs :) via Blogger Google’s 3 Pack Changing To 2 And What You Can Do
Why Your SEO Campaigns Should Revolve Around Quality was Long gone are the days of the "wild west" on the internet. In the old days you use to be able to just throw up any old piece of content that was keyword stuffed and didn't have good or relevant information for the person performing the search. As the search engines become smarter and actually learn, your website, or whatever property you are trying to rank in the searches, must be all about quality. Your site must provide good quality and informative information for the person performing the search as well as fresh information for the search engines. When it comes to quality, there are two things that you must always pay attention to for your site. You need to have quality content on your site and quality backlinks pointing to your site. Backlinks AND content in the form of regular posts are a key factor in search engine rankings. Quality ContentFirst, lets look at quality content. When it comes to posts that you write they need to be informative as well as trying to stay on topic as much as possible. To find good quality content for your site you can post what's new in your industry. You can also post about new things inside your own company. In some industries it may be hard to come up with new content to publish frequently enough, which brings us to "content curation", or basically copying and pasting part of another blog's material in your post. It's okay to go ahead and copy a part or small section of someone else's content and add it to your post as long as it makes sense and adds value to your content. We will go more in depth on content curation in a later post, as this topic deserves a post all on it's own. However, one thing that you must do when copying someone else's content, and is very important, is to make sure that you give a link back to the original source as not to receive cease and desist letters from angry publishers. It's only fair to give someone credit for their material. You can learn more if you research the Digital Millennial Copyright Act. A few good questions that you can ask yourself about the content you are thinking of publishing are found in a post by Search Engine Land:
There are a lot of good points in this article. We also agree with a point that is made later in the article about content freshness, which we touched upon earlier about making posts with recent industry news. There is also more in the post that is good information about how Google is now providing what is know as "direct answers" and how people feel differently on whether or not it is beneficial for their websites. Quality BacklinksOkay, so now you have a good idea about creating good quality content for your Website SEO campaign. Now on to Backlinks. Back in the "wild west" days of the internet, the quality of your backlinks didn't matter so much, or really at all. The more backlinks that you had, coming from any source was.... good. The links could come from sites that were total spam or link farms. The sites didn't even have to be relevant to your site or the link didn't even have to be in a post or page that was relevant to your site. Not so much the case anymore. Now days the general rule with links is quality over quantity is far better. Just a hand full of backlinks from highly relevant and trusted websites is better than a bunch of backlinks from sites that have nothing to do with your niche. For example a link coming from a contractors site to a dental site. The definition of a quality backlink from Webopedia is basically just that:
Because these quality backlinks are harder to get is one reason that the cost of SEO campaigns continues to rise. And to be clear, we don't care what anyone says about backlinks. Backlinks continue to drive the web, and without them your site will not rank. Google is working on other methods into their algorithms to help the search engine giant decipher who's website should get top rankings, but is probably still years off. So how do you get these quality backlinks? We found an article that has some great tips for someone that is trying to do SEO on their own. The article was written by Bamidele Onibalusi on the blog ShoutMeLoud.com
That's a good article on places to get some quality backlinks. We agree with all of his methods EXCEPT link exchanges. Link exchanges can be very risky, which is one reason he may suggest that you put the other person's link on another website. This can help you from getting penalized by Google on your site, but at the same time make upset the person your are exchanging links with. In ConclusionSo there you have it. As the search engines become smarter, quality must be a key part of you SEO campaigns. The search engines are understanding your content and when it sucks, they just won't rank it. After all, it is Google's aim to return the best possible information for a person performing a search for a keyword or keyword phrase as to keep users using their engine over their competition. via Blogger Why Your SEO Campaigns Should Revolve Around Quality Tips For Making Company Videos Emotionally Engaging Read more on: MD Internet Marketing Solutions SEO Service Almost everyone knows that emotionally charged marketing videos have a far greater impact on viewers than boring videos with someone just standing there talking. An emotionally charged video can mean the difference between the viewer taking action, i.e. calling for your services or filling their online shopping cart, or just clicking the back button to go to someone else's site or video. In this short article we will cover 2 very simple things that you can do to help make your company marketing videos more engaging. Make Use Of B Roll FootageThe first thing that you can do in creating more emotion is by using what's called in the business as "B-Roll". What is B roll? The real short answer is additional footage inserted as a cutaway to help tell a story. For instance, let's say you own a roofing company. While you may have yourself or a spokesperson in front of the camera talking about how your company replaces a roof you carefully inspect all of the underlying decking. While you are talking this would be a good time to cut away to footage of your crew that actually has the shingles stripped from the roof and are inspecting the decking. Basically you can use B roll to just get your message across by VISUALLY explaining and keep changing what's on the screen to help keep the viewer engaged. If you are new to creating videos it can be hard to figure out what would make good B roll for you to use. Michael Maher wrote an article on shutterstock that can help you with making b roll of the person you are interviewing for your video:
In that article Michael has some pretty good tips for getting b roll of the interviewee. But we think and know there are a lot more ways to get good b roll for your video. At Indiewire.com they recently posted this about other great ideas for getting b roll:
So those examples will give you some good ideas and starting points as to where and what to make your b roll shots of for your company video. Add Some Great MusicThe second thing to help make your marketing videos more engaging - MUSIC! We know we have mentioned this before in other posts, but it bares repeating. Take a horror flick for instance. There is always some dumb ass kid that is wondering around a haunted house and is getting ready to peak around the corner. How ominous would the scene be without the scary music? The same goes with your company videos, although you may not want to use scary music from a horror flick! So how do you go about selecting the perfect sound clip for your video? Here is a good snippet from an article done by Danny Greer at PremiumBeat.com:
Danny has some great tips about picking the right music for your video. We especially like his advice of making a rough edit and then finishing the video and making the video "match up" to the music. One word of caution - don't pick just any music to add to your video. Make sure you have the correct license and permission to use the music. Failure to do this can result in a couple of things happening, which are rather unwanted. One, YouTube will recognize that the music is copyrighted and allow advertisements on your video. The advertisements can and probably will be your competition! Secondly, repeated copyright infringements can get your videos deleted and your channel deleted by YouTube. There are several places that you can get totally royalty free music on the web. The YouTube audio library is one, just check if there is attribution required. You can also do a Google search to find a lot of places where you can get music. So there you have it. The top 2 ways to make your company's marketing videos more engaging. Just add some B roll and music and your videos should produce more sales and calls versus your competition that fails to use them :) via Blogger Tips For Making Company Videos Emotionally Engaging The following blog post The Must Have Basic Elements Of A Website Read more on: http://www.MDIMSolutions.com Your website is incredibly important. It will give your potential clients and future customers their very first impression of you and your business. For that reason you need to make sure that your site is appealing and easy to navigate with strong calls to action to get the most out of it and convert visitors to your site into sales. But what are the basic components and must haves of a website to get the most conversions? That's what we will cover in this short post. Mobile FriendlyFirst and foremost your site MUST be mobile friendly. You have no idea of what type of device people will be using to view your website. Phones, tablets and desktop versions must all be equally easy to navigate. Studies now show that over half of all searches are done on mobile devices. There is nothing worse than viewing a website on your phone and having to pinch to zoom and scroll sideways to read the content. Just a few short years ago you had to make a separate website that was for mobile devices and was rather expensive because of the double work involved. Not so much the case anymore. The easy way to overcome this obstacle and make you site mobile friendly is by making your site Responsive. With WordPress this is generally an easy task as many of the themes you have to choose from are now responsive right out of the box. Being mobile friendly is also a big ranking factor for Google. Attention Grabbing Visual AspectsWhen people first visit your website they need to see and be able to recognize your brand right away. You want to etch into their minds your company for the services that they need. One way that we like to accomplish this is with what is known as a slider. If you visit our Website Design page you will see an example of this. Something that you need to keep in mind is that if your site isn't attention grabbing, the visitor will simply click the back button and continue their search. You need to tell people who you are and why they should choose you over your competition for their business. Multiple high definition images as well as your own videos will help keep people on your site and get them to call you. How YOU Can Solve THEIR Problem!Don't sell yourself short on content. Your site needs to have enough content that explains what you do and how you can help solve their problems, as well as why YOU are the best choice. There is a lot of debate as to how many words you should have on a page. For SEO purposes, the more the better. But that isn't so for human readers. People have very short attention spans these days and want to get the information they need quickly and move on. Forget everything you learned about writing in school. Short paragraphs with only a couple of sentences work best so that people are able to "skim" your content. Easy To Find Contact InformationDon't hide your contact information. Make it very easy to find and in multiple places. In probably 95% of all instances, your website is there to help generate new customers and sales. If they can't find your contact info what good is your website? It's best to have a link to your contact page in the menu, on the sidebar and also inside your content where it makes sense. You also need to tell people what to do such as "Call Us!" or "Email Us" etc. Social Media IntegrationSocial Media is dominating the internet. People like to share content as well as see what their friends are sharing. By having social media icons on your site you are increasing the chances of visitors sharing your content. This actually has several benefits.
In ConclusionIf you are going it alone on building your own website, make sure that you have these 5 items on your site to get the most out of it for sales and conversions. Yes, there is a lot more to building a website, but these are the essentials. All of these are easy to implement, but you would be surprised at how many sites we run across that leaves out one, if not more of these necessary components.
via Blogger The Must Have Basic Elements Of A Website 5/24/2016 Will Social Media Help With Your SEO?Will Social Media Help With Your SEO? was Social media and SEO. There has been a lot of discussions on other forums and between SEO's for years as to whether or not Social media properties can help with your SEO. In this short post we will cover what we know and understand about how social media effects your SEO for websites and videos, and ultimately, your bottom line. Social Media Benefits Besides SEOWhat we do know about social media is that people are using it. Social media isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Will Facebook go the way of MySpace? Maybe, maybe not. But you can bet your last dollar that there will be another platform to take it's place. So strictly from the standpoint of being able to expand your listening audience, you should most definitely be using social media. People are searching for reviews about your company before they choose you for the particular service that they need, and social media helps provide more reviews and exposure. We also need to look at social media from the search engine side of things, as far as helping to establish who you and your business are. By having multiple social media properties that are branded with your brand, you make it much easier for Google to identify your company and your brand. If you don't have any social media properties you are making it much more difficult for Google to justify your company and some suggest that the lack of social media properties are a negative signal to hold back your rankings. Now if you do have multiple social media properties like a company Facebook page, LinkedIn company page and so on, Google see's these pages and can connect them with your brand. Now when someone does a search for your company, hopefully not only will your website show up, but also your top social media profiles. One way that our company ensures that this is the case is by connecting all of the sites together where possible as well as adding schema markup on the website telling the search engines that all of your social properties are related to your website. Then there is also the fact that most of these social media sites have the ability to perform searches from inside their platform. This makes it possible for people to find your services right inside of which ever platforms you decide to use. Another point to take into consideration is that with social media profiles properly set up AND being active on the sites will also help drive traffic to your site, which is also known as Click Through Rate. Studies show that CTR is definitely a big ranking factor in the search engines, only behind backlinks. More people to your site should result in more sales as well, if you have a site with good calls to action. So there really are some great reasons that you should be using social media to help grow your company and ultimately your bottom line, whether or not there are any SEO benefits for your website. Social Media Likes And SharesNow on to what we do know about the relationship between social media and SEO. As we stated above, it helps reinforce your brand with Google. In our testing we find that this alone does help with SEO as it reinforces to Google that you or your site is not just another spam site. Most spammers don't go through all the trouble of creating multiple social profiles and creating a brand. What about likes and shares? We have tested both together as well as independently, and have seen some fairly dramatic results. With Likes, be it on Facebook or Google+, we really didn't see any significant gains. However with shares, that's a totally different story. With social shares we did see a dramatic increase in rankings in Google search. This was very easy to see with video rankings, which makes sense to some degree. We do know that when a video is shared on another profile that it becomes another embed. For quite some time embeds have been a great way to increase search engine rankings for videos. This is what happens when a video goes viral, it gets shared over and over and viewed over and over. But does the same thing hold true for websites? The short answer - yes, to some degree. With websites we did see better rankings over time, although be it not as fast or as dramatic as we have seen with video rankings. We did notice that the more Google+ shares that a site has does help it rank better in the searches over Facebook shares. One last point that we noticed from our testing is that social media profiles that were more active seemed to give us better results over social media profiles that were dormant or had very few posts. So from our testing, does social media help with your SEO - YES! But the important take away from this is that not only will social meida profiles help with your SEO, but also your Branding, as well as giving you more out reach points to bring in and attract more new customers and clients to your site. It can probably be best summed up by not looking at SEO and social media separately, but instead that the two work together and go hand in hand. If you aren't using social media as part of your digital marketing and are looking for an Atlanta SEO firm to get it done for you, be sure and click the previous link to check us out!
via Blogger Will Social Media Help With Your SEO? The post Utilizing Content Marketing For SEO As Well As Engaging Your Audience Find more on: http://www.mdimsolutions Content marketing should be a core part of your SEO strategies. Not only is it important for you or your business to be using it to help rank your website, but also to engage, inform and educate your audience, or potential clients. Content Marketing is a CORE part of our marketing strategies as it provides great results for SEO and attracting new customers. We will cover a lot in this article, the frame work of your posts, overcoming writers block and the SEO aspects of content marketing. First of all, who is going to write the content to go on the site. There are a couple of ways to go about this.
If you go with the first option of hiring a writer, or letting your local SEO agency write for you, they MUST understand your business. It is important that they have a full grasp of the services that your business provides as well as any products. This is important so that the writer can provide VALUABLE information to the readers. If you go with the latter option of writing the content yourself or someone inside your firm to write, then you don't have to worry as much about the knowledge of the company services or products. You do however want to make sure that you are writing valuable content that people want to read. The last thing that you want to do is to look at content marketing as a chore and to be just putting up content to add content. Sure it may help with your rankings, but then you are missing the other half of the equation of engaging customers and only getting half of the value of content marketing. Content Marketing "Frame Work"So you maybe saying to yourself - "I haven't written a thing since College, I have no idea as to where to start or how to structure my articles". Not a problem, I actually found a great article by Sonia Simone on CopyBlogger.com that lists the frame work of what makes good online content:
That's a great article from Sonia, and we really like point number 2. Giving your content personality. To many times people write dull, boring information that they hash out. Sometimes it can be difficult to write so that it's not boring with some topics, but like anything else, the more you practice, the easier it will come. It's also worth noting that later in the article she also writes that keeping SEO in mind is also important. Over Coming Writers BlockSo now you have the "framework" of making a good article. But what the heck do you do if you run into writers block? It happens to even the best writers. I'm sure Stephen King doesn't just sit down and blast out book after book without running into that wall every now and again. Over at HuffingtonPost.com we found a very useful article where they asked 15 different writers what they do to overcome writers block. One of my favorites from the article is #11 - Don Purdum that backs up our previous point of knowing your business inside and out -
That is a lot of great information, and can give you a lot to write about for sometime. I fully recommend you read that full article. There are so many different ways to overcome Writer's Block in that article from so many different people. It is kind of cool to see the different things that people will do to overcome writers block. So now you have the framework, over coming writers block and what to write about. Now let's get on with the SEO aspect of it. Content Marketing And SEOA lot of marketers forget about how important it is to take SEO into account for their content marketing. The biggest point I want to get across here is that writing for the reader and the search engines overlap. You can actually look at the services you provide, then look at what kind of search that service receives, then analyze the top searches for variations of that keyword and write your article around the keyword with the highest search. Ya, I know that read a little confusing :), but it's really not if you just stop and think about it. Basically all you want to do is write your article around your service keyword with the highest search volume. Over at KissMetrics, Neil wrote a post that ties everything in this article together beautifully about why content marketing is so vital to your SEO and how it overlaps with customer engagement:
BAM! That is a FANTASTIC ARTICLE! If you are doing your own content marketing, or even have someone doing it for you, YOU NEED TO READ THAT ARTICLE! It is full of a lot of great information and insights as to how content marketing is SEO and SEO is content marketing. And for the part that we referenced - "Content marketing consists of top-notch content, written for HUMANS!" is pure GOLD. In ConclusionIf you aren't using content marketing to engage more new customers as well as helping your web properties to rank in the search engines, then you are missing a rather large and awesome tool. Basically you are fighting against your competition with one arm tied behind your back. via Blogger Utilizing Content Marketing For SEO As Well As Engaging Your Audience The article Just How Many Websites Are WordPress And Why? See more on: MD Internet Marketing Solutions SEO Service WordPress websites. They are all over the internet. In fact there are almost 75 MILLION of them! That number now equals out to a whopping 26% OF ALL SITES ON THE WEB. So why is that? Why would so many people depend on WordPress for their CMS (Content Management System)? That's what we will cover in this post, and why we love the platform so much :) First of all, if you don't believe us that there are so many sites running on WordPress, go ahead and Google it! There really are some incredible statistics that you will find about the platform. Web Design With WordPressWe think that WordPress is the easiest to use and to fully customize for your own needs. There are so many Themes out there to make the site one of a kind. It is reliable and for the most part, secure, as long as you keep your site updated! Learn more about WordPress Security in a previous post here. There are also tons of free forums that you can find to ask questions, or get help from if you run into problems if you are going it alone. Of all those 75 million websites, they aren't just stay at home moms or dads that are blogging about their day at home, or how to cook some awesome meal on the cheap. In fact this one statistic we found pretty wild from Tom Ewer on ManageWP.com:
More businesses prefer WordPress. And from Tom's snippet above, if you don't know what PPC is, it stands for "Pay Per Click" for Adwords. We found that there are some MAJOR Fortune 500 companies that run their site on WordPress like UPS, EBay, Sony and Best Buy to name a few. So if you think WordPress won't work for your business, think again! Ease Of Editing By ClientsWe also like running WordPress not only for our own personal sites, but for our clients as well. Why? Because our customers find it very easy to go in and make changes when they need too. It is very easy to log in and change a page or a post. This may need to be done if your business has added or removed some services, or changed prices, etc. We understand that many of you may have never used WordPress before and don't know the difference between a page and a post. A page is usually just that. A page on your website about your services, your about information, contact information, disclaimers for using the website, etc. They don't usually get a lot of changes made to them. On the other hand posts - are exactly what this is. A short bit or snippet of information that can be used to help inform or educate your customers. Bob Dunn just made a post over the weekend on BobWP.com that explains a little more about how to make a post or page on a WordPress blog as well as showing some of the visual editor and other working parts of a WordPress Blog:
That is a really good post by Bob and does a great job of showing you and explaining to you the basics of the back end of a WordPress website. In fact the title of the post is a little misleading as he gives you so much more valuable information. Adding images and making the most of your pages and posts. WordPress And SEOLastly, we really like WordPress for the ease of performing SEO on the sites, or what's also known as "On Page Optimization". There are several plugins such as All In One SEO and Yoast that make things much easier. The first is probably more popular while the latter is more robust and also creates a sitemap for your website as well. A sitemap is just that, a map of your site for the search engines to crawl. Google also loves WordPress. Why? Well Google really likes logical architecture on a website and WordPress is designed logically. Google also loves text based websites, which is easy to do with WordPress. Google is also trying to make the web better for all of the mobile phones and tablets searching the web and WordPress can also be made to be "Mobile Friendly" much easier than other platforms, which will give you a boost in mobile rankings. While WordPress is very SEO friendly, it's not an end all, be all for your SEO needs for your website, but it's a good start. Final ThoughtsSo there you have it. WordPress is the preferred CMS on a boat load of Websites for good reasons. If you didn't think that it would, or will work for your business, then you need to rethink that. Just look at the examples of the big companies that are using it to run their businesses online. If you don't already have a website for your business, or need to update your existing site, be sure and check out our web design services.
via Blogger Just How Many Websites Are WordPress And Why? The blog post If You Think You Don’t Need YouTube Marketing Videos, Think Again! is republished from MD Internet Marketing Solutions SEO Blog If you don't think your business can benefit from the use of Video Marketing, and more particularly, YouTube videos, then you need to think again! We have been "preaching" for some time about how important video is to engage more customers, clients, make more sales and generally inform your audience about your services and products. YouTube has just recently released more statistics about their service this month, and these numbers just can't be ignored. Here are a few of the biggest stats that can be applied to businesses that were released at YouTube's Annual Brandcast event on May 5th.
If you think those numbers don't matter, or that your business can't get a piece of that pie, then go ahead and sit back and watch your competition that takes advantage of YouTube surpass you! These numbers also help prove that people want to WATCH the internet, not read it. There are some estimates that 1/3 of all online activity is now watching video. Is your company at the top of the food chain for your field of expertise? If it is, or if it isn't, video is a great way to help increase sales, which is what every company's goal is. Do you know that a one-minute video is the equivalent of 1.8 million words of text. You need to stop and ask yourself how long would it take for you or your staff to create 1.8 million words of content? Skyler Mills wrote an article on Grand Rapids Business Journal about he and a friend made a video and the resluts they had:
Those results are fantastic. And imagine how much reach and influence your business could have if asked by another if they could use it. It's also important to note that Skylar says for you to consider creating videos and the impact they can have, even with minimal video resources. Are we suggesting that you just create a spammy video with a couple of still pictures and no voice over? No. You will have to put some effort into the project. The important take away here is that even if your video isn't a Hollywood production, it can still ad value to your company. At Social Triggers they also have a post that gives some reasons that video is so much better than text:
So there you have it - if you still think you don't need to be marketing with video and YouTube, then get passed over by potential clients and customers that go to your competition that does use video. As always, if you are in need of YouTube Video Advertising for your business - be sure and contact us. We will be more than happy to give you a free consultation on how we can help increase your bottom line with Video :) via Blogger If You Think You Don’t Need YouTube Marketing Videos, Think Again! The following blog post Why Long Tail Keywords Are So Important To Your SEO is available on MD Internet Marketing Solutions Why Long Tail Keywords Are So Important To Your SEOKeywords - the basis for every SEO campaign. Target the wrong keywords and you will rank, but you may not see a decent ROI from your campaigns. Traditionally, SEO's have gone after just one to two keywords together to target. Then you have longer keyword phrases, and these are generally 3 or more words together that you are targeting. Longer keyword phrases can also be referred to as "Long Tail Keywords". Long tail keywords are a must to be targeting in your SEO campaigns. Why? Well we are about to give you several reasons as to why you should be going after them and how much it can benefit your business.
To give you an idea of what I mean, let's look at the service our business performs as an example. "SEO" would be a rather short keyword to target. On the other hand "The Best Local SEO Consulting Services In Atlanta" would be a long tail. So why would it be better to try and rank for The Best Local SEO Consulting Services In Atlanta over just SEO? Well, number 1 - SEO would be much harder to rank for. The reason for this is that this is going to be a "Global" search term, where as with the long tail it has a geo modifier at the end, so that I am only competing with other SEO's in Atlanta and not all over the world. Secondly, commercial intent or buyer intent. With the keyword "SEO", the person performing the search could be looking for anything about SEO, such as "how to", or "what is". Our long tail keyword example has a lot better commercial intent. Click Here To Learn More About Keywords With Commercial Intent. Nowadays people aren't just typing their search either. People are able to just speak their search into their phones. With long tail keywords you are getting more natural speech patterns that happen from speaking your search. Ashley Faulkes wrote a post over on Mad Lemmings that explains more on long tails and also gives another example that I like:
The very last bullet point "There is often more specific user intent" can also be interpreted as a higher commercial intent. His first bullet point -"There is less competition" means - it is easier to rank for! So how do you come up with these long tail keywords?The Google Keyword Planner doesn't work so well for this. You also need to remember that the planner was also created for PPC, and NOT keyword research. If you are having a hard time analyzing and coming up with long tails on your own, the good news is that there are a few free ways of doing this. A great way is by using Google suggests. This method is probably best done on your laptop or desktop so that you can open a Word document or Notepad to keep up with the results. No go to Google and type in your 1 - 3 regular keywords. Once the results populate, scroll all the way down the page to the end of the ads and you should see something like this -
That is a goldmine for potential long tail keywords for you to rank for! 2 long tail keywords were produced here - search engine optimization atlanta and best atlanta seo company. Now you can also look through those results and see if there are totally different keywords that have appeared that are related to your niche. Next take those keywords and put those into the search bar and check those results as well. In no time you can have a rather large list of long tails to target! Sometimes, depending on your keywords, as you type your keywords into the search bar, Google will try and anticipate what you are searching for, so pay attention to those results as well. We also found these tools over at LongTailGenerator.com and Uber Suggest that may help you as well. You Don't Have To ReBuild Your WebsiteNow you may be thinking - "Great! Now I have to completely rewrite my website!" - I promise you that's not the case. Over at the Hosting news they just made a post that explains this:
That's pretty sweet! And easy as well. This can also make it possible for your website, or in actuality, your blog posts to rank for a lot more terms and drive a lot more traffic which equals - MORE SALES AND CLIENTS! In ConclusionSo to sum it all up, the biggest reasons you need to be using Long Tail keywords in your SEO campaigns are -
So get to it! Find some long tail keywords and start writing some blog posts to target them to get more traffic and more importantly - MORE SALES!
via Blogger Why Long Tail Keywords Are So Important To Your SEO The following post How Long Will It Take To Get My Site On Page 1? was How Long Before You Get Your Site To Page 1 With SEO?This is a question that we hear all the time, and is usually the very first question we hear from our clients, and we totally understand. Business owners want to know when they will see an ROI on their SEO efforts. The truth of the matter is that it will always vary depending on several factors. By looking at a few of these variables your SEO company should be able to give a "guess-timate" as to when you should start seeing results. In some cases it may only be just a few months and in others - maybe a year or more. Keywords And Location Probably the biggest factor in how long it will take for your SEO efforts to see results is the level of competition of your keywords, or keyword phrases that you are targeting. If you are an accident attorney in a big city, such as Atlanta, your journey to the top of the searches is going to be a long one. But if you have a lawn care business that is targeting a small suburb, such as Kennesaw (a small city of less than 30k north of Atlanta), you will have less competition and should see faster results to getting high rankings over the accident attorney that is targeting a much larger city. With keywords, if you are targeting very short 1 to 2 keywords for your search terms, generally it will take longer to rank as well, again depending on the level of competition in your niche. If you are going for longer tail keywords that are 3 or more words together, your chances of ranking faster increase. Longer keyword phrases are something that you should be considering anyway, since people are able to speak their search into mobile devices now. We will get into Long Keywords in another post. Niche Saturation How many businesses are competing for the same keywords and keyword phrases that you are? Using our example from above - an accident attorney, this is a heavily saturated niche. There are probably thousand of accident attorneys in the Atlanta area that would want to rank for "car accident attorney". However, if you have a brand new or cutting edge service or product, the playing field should be wide open and high rankings should come fast and easy, provided you perform your SEO correctly. Age Of Site How old is your website? Has it been around for a few years or is it brand new? This is also another factor. Google and other search engines will trust your site more and move it faster up the rankings if it is an older site. A brand new site tends to get held back until it develops some trust signals. Also with a brand new site you shouldn't ramp up your SEO strategies as fast as with an older site to keep from getting penalized from the search engines. It sets off red flags if your brand new website has 100's of links all of a sudden pointing to it. Penalized Website Has your website been penalized? If you have a site and it has been penalized by Google, then the chances are it's going to take longer to get your site ranked. Depending on how heavily your site has been penalized and what kind of penalty it is under, it may take it longer to get good rankings than a brand new website would. In some cases we have seen that it is more cost effective to go ahead and build a new website to start over when the previous site has been de-indexed by Google. Fresh And Unique Content How many pages are on your website? How many posts? Are you continually adding new posts to your site? These are big ranking factors as well and actually becoming more of a ranking factor. The greater the number of unique pages with good content indexed by Google will help you move faster. Also adding new blog posts to your site on a consistent basis is another factor. Google is giving more "weight" to websites that are continually adding good quality content to their sites. However, don't make the mistake of just adding content to your site to be adding content. Don't have duplicate content from your site, on your site. For instance don't take content from one of your pages and add it to a post. From all of our extensive testing, and the testing of countless other SEO's, the only time duplicate content becomes a problem is when it is duplicated on YOUR website from page to page, page to post, post to post, etc. Part of your SEO strategy should be making new posts on your site on a consistent basis. The amount of content needed will depend on your niche. For instance a landscaping company won't need as much as there isn't a lot of news about landscaping, and can probably get away with 2 to 4 posts a month. Other niches, like ours (SEO), will need more posts in excess of 3 or more posts a week. In short, the more you post unique content, the faster you will see results. Lastly on content, don't have thin content. Pages or posts with just a few hundred words is a no-no. We recommend your pages should have at least 1000 words, and prefer 1500 to 2000 words. Your posts should be a minimum of 800 and of course the more the better, with 1500 being fantastic. We realize this isn't always possible due to some topics and 500 words will suffice. Just don't make it a habit of creating short posts. Targeting Local or Global In general, if you are targeting locally, you will see better rankings faster over globally, or nationally. Back to our accident attorney as an example, "accident attorney Atlanta" will get better results faster than just "accident attorney" that would be targeting nationally. Trying to target "accident attorney" globally is one of those that would most likely take years. Search Engine Variables The search engines themselves are constantly changing. What worked to get sites ranked a few years ago doesn't work at all now. The search engines are constantly updating their algorithms to the tune of hundreds a year. These updates can either help or hurt your rankings. A new update can either move you up, or move you down a page rather quickly. For the most part, if you are only employing white hat techniques, these updates can help move you up the rankings. Final Thoughts So as you can see, there are a lot of variables as to how long before your site hits page 1. But really the question shouldn't be how long before your website hits page 1, but how long before you start getting more traffic to your site and more calls. After all, increasing your bottom line and ROI is what SEO is all about, right? If your SEO company is doing things like we do, they are not only concentrating on your website, but social media as well. Getting the word out about your services or products through social media is a fantastic way to help increase your brand authority and brand awareness. Social media sites like Twitter and a company FaceBook page are great for this as well as Web 2.0 properties such as Tumblr and BlogSpot. These are great places to reach out to new potential customers and clients and start making more sales. So if you are hoping to see results over night, sorry, that's just not the case. In any case, if your SEO company does things the way that we do, you should start seeing an increase in sales and customers in just a couple of months. The important thing to remember with SEO is that slow and steady wins the race. via Blogger How Long Will It Take To Get My Site On Page 1? Creating Your Own Marketing Videos On The Cheap was Creating Your Own Marketing Videos On The CheapHaving your own marketing videos for your business in today's online marketing world is a must. However you may not have the funds or budget right now to higher a professional to get the job done. Maybe you have a brand new company, or maybe business has been slow. These are not reasons for you to not be using video marketing to promote your business. The truth is, with today's technology, you can produce your own videos fairly inexpensively to promote your business and help bring in some much needed revenue. The first thing to think about is are you going to be on camera or not. If you don't mind being on camera - more power to you! Studies do show that when an actual person is in the video viewers tend to connect more on an emotional level. If you don't want to be on camera, that's not a problem either. You will just have to invest a little money in still images or purchase short video clips to get your message across. You can also make your own Power Point type pictures as well. If you choose to be on camera, a cheap alternative to buying expensive video equipment is just use your phone, granted you have a newer smart phone. Iphones work great for this. Just remember to turn your phone sideways as not to have a small picture. Another thing that is a must if you are using a smart phone is a separate microphone to capture the audio. Microphones can be purchased for under $20 bucks. If you are creating a voice over video using stills and clips you should invest in a good microphone to record with. We say that this is a MUST because no one likes video with poor audio. Also, If you can afford it you also want to have a stand for your phone or camera and not have someone hold the phone as not to make the video "shaky". Next, video editing software. Newer PC's come with Windows Movie Maker, and Mac's come with IMovie. Granted you can't do a lot with these programs, but you will be able to get a basic movie produced to convey your message. No matter which method you choose, you will probably have to shell out a little cash to get the job done. Matt Peri wrote a post on Social Media Examiner that gives more good tips on creating your own marketing videos on the cheap:
Pretty good post from Matt and he also demonstrates using a video editor that we have never really used - YouTube's own Creator studio. ONE WORD OF CAUTION: Do not just grab anyone's images on the web as not to incur copyright infringement letters from scum bag troll attorneys. Over at KissMetrics, they also made a helpful post for getting your own videos done for under $100 bucks!
We especially like what they put in their post about creating a script, which is something we didn't add in our important points in the beginning of the post. It's important to have a script, even if you are on camera. There are very few people that can just do a video on the fly without going on and on, or have repeated mistakes. If you are going to be on camera an easy way to read your script is to make bullet points and put them on a clip board underneath your camera and not to the side, and stand back far enough from the camera that no one can tell that you are reading. The closer you are to the camera the easier it will be able to tell you are reading. So there you have it. You CAN create your own videos if you are on a really tight budget. The most important thing that we want you to take away from this post is in the words from Nike - "Just Do It!". Take action! If you don't, you will be loosing customers and sales to your competition that is.
via Blogger Creating Your Own Marketing Videos On The Cheap How Much Should You Pay For SEO Services? is available on Ken Mandich's MDIMS Blog There are thousands of SEO companies out there, all with different pricing and payment models. Getting your website, videos and social properties found in the searches doesn't come cheap. But how do you know how much you should be paying for quality SEO services? That's what we are going to cover now... Getting rankings for websites, videos and social properties does differ. For instance, within our company, it doesn't cost as much to rank a video in YouTube or Google search results as a website does. So for this post we will solely talk about what it should cost just for websites. You need to keep in mind also that results don't happen over night either. You won't make one payment to your SEO company and see immediate results. It does take months to rank a website properly. Anyone that tells you that they can get you ranked within a month or so, you should run from. It is possible to get very quick ranking inside of Google, but these sites are quickly targeted by the search giant and quickly de-indexed (Google completely removes your website from search). The costs involved will also vary greatly depending on your field of expertise (or at least it should if you are dealing with a reputable SEO company). If you are a DUI attorney or Divorce attorney, the costs of getting high rankings will be much greater than that of a house cleaning business. If you don't believe us just go to Google Adwords tool and check to see the difference in what it costs for PPC between the two. It's pretty much industry standard that the least amount it is going to cost per month is $750. But as we mentioned above, could go much higher. If you come across an SEO company that charges a flat rate for everyone, say $600, ask yourself, "how can they?". If you use our example from above with the attorneys and a cleaning business, you can see that the costs of getting 2 entirely different companies to rank can be quite different. Some companies also offer a couple of different models, such as hourly or per project. Please Note: The ONLY Model That Our Company Uses Is MONTHLY. John Lincoln wrote a post on Search Engine Land that breaks these different models down and gives the pros and the cons:
That's a good article well worth the read because of the way that he lists the pros and cons. Because of point #3 in the cons of hourly is the reason we don't do hourly. The greatest take away from that article is where he states later, (and we have said this before) is that SEO does not have a "One Size Fits All". Another important factor to take into consideration is what are you getting with your SEO campaigns and what services are they providing. With our company there are some things that we do that are proprietary information, and we don't share. However there are several things that we do and share with our customers on a monthly basis. Katie Birkbeck wrote a post on Blue Corona about what your SEO company should be doing:
From our snippet of Katie's article, that's only what happens with on page or on site optimization. There is so much more that happens off page or off site optimization. So there you have it. If you are employing an SEO company on a monthly basis - at least $750 a month. As for hourly - $50 Plus. via Blogger How Much Should You Pay For SEO Services? 4/28/2016 Choosing Keywords With Commercial IntentThe following blog post Choosing Keywords With Commercial Intent is republished from http://www.MDIMSolutions.com Picking the right keywords to target for your SEO campaigns is crucial to get the best ROI. Pick the wrong ones and your site may rank, but you won't make any sales, or do whatever you want the visitor to do when they visit your site. Simply picking keywords and phrases that have high search volume may not be the best course of action. Again, you may get a lot of visitors, but still not make any sales because you are not ranked for phrases that have "Commercial intent" or "buyer intent". Keyword research is something that you can't rush. You need to carefully select the words that you want to rank for. If you add up all of the hours that my team and I spend doing keyword research for a campaign, it literally adds up to days between all of us. Instead of writing out a full post today, we though we would make this one a video, just to change things up a bit. Hopefully you don't mind to much having to look at the CEO of the companies face to much :) (I'm sure he will give me static for that when he reads this). Before you watch the video, let me remind you that if you do need an SEO company to take care of all of this for you, be sure and check us out to get you ranked in the search engines and get your phone ringing with new customers and clients!
Choosing Keywords With Buyer IntentChoosing Keywords With Buyer Or Commercial Intent
via Blogger Choosing Keywords With Commercial Intent The article What Should Your Business Videos Be About? was Sitting down to think about what your first, or next video for your company is going to be about, can sometimes seem just like writers block. What are you going to make your video about? What should I say? In this article we will cover a few things to make this easier so that you are creating videos that keep peoples attention and result in more conversions and calls to your business. In our previous article, "Optimizing Videos For Better Conversion Rates", we covered that you shouldn't just talk about all of your companies achievements, but instead address how you can help solve their problem. This is especially true with your first videos. To drive this point home we thought we would include a couple of videos from one of our favorite YouTubers, James Wedmore. James is a fantastic person to learn from if you are attempting to do your own Videos. The first is about the basic elements of all of your videos that you are selling from -
That video does a fantastic job of laying out EXACTLY how your videos that you make for sales should be created. James also did another video that is sort of along the same guidelines, but a little more advanced:
More good stuff from James, and as always, very entertaining! One thing that we would suggest is that you make a video for every different service that your business provides. Back to our Plumber as an example, you might want to create a different video for plumbing repair, another for hot water heater replacement, then another for septic system repair, etc. But after that, once you have all of your service videos created, what are you going to shoot videos about? We actually found a great infographic from MarketingProfs.com that can give you some great ideas - #10 is a GREAT option, if you have some willing customers. These types of videos can also be used to help with Reputation Management by getting them to rank in the searches as well, and possibly pushing back any negative reviews you may have. These videos are also good to throw in the mix as you are creating all of your different sales videos for your different services. Now you may be asking yourself "how am I going to get all of this done?", or "where am I going to find the time?". Yes, there is a large commitment of your time for the entire process. We totally understand, and that is why we are here. If you don't have the time or the patients to get high quality videos done on your own, contact us, and we will be more than happy to help you get your business booming with YouTube advertising :) via Blogger What Should Your Business Videos Be About? Do you have a Real Estate business? Are you a Realtor? Are you a Real Estate Investor? Maybe a Hard Money Lender? No matter what your Real Estate profession may be, you need to be using the power of internet marketing to grow your business!
Here are some stats from the NAR© that EVERYBODY in any type of Real Estate profession needs to pay attention to -
With those kinds of numbers every Realtor needs to be taking advantage of all the different platforms available on the internet to reach out to potential buyers and sellers. If there are those kinds of numbers for Realtors, don't you think that every other Real Estate profession can benefit from the use of the internet as well?! We can tell you from experience that - YES IT CAN! Our company, MD Internet Marketing Solutions, was formed from a group of Real Estate Investors. After spending tens of thousands of dollars on various other forms of marketing like yellow letters and post cards, radio, newspapers, and bandit signs, nothing gave the return on investment compared to the internet. Now our Real Estate SEO services are the only form of marketing that they use. Why? Because it flat out works BEST with the GREATEST ROI. The beauty of internet marketing is that you are in front of a potential buyer or seller at the very moment that they are looking for you. This goes for every Real Estate profession. With yellow letters, mailers, or refrigerator magnets with calendars and a realtors number on them, or radio, news papers - any of that stuff - YOU HAVE TO HOPE THAT YOU ARE GETTING IN FRONT OF THE CLIENT AT THE EXACT MOMENT THEY ARE READY TO SELL OR BUY OR WANT YOUR SERVICES! With internet marketing YOU ARE in front of them at the exact right moment that they are looking for your services! The potential buyer or seller or investor, starts searching the internet for keywords or keyword phrases for the services that your business provides. With a good website and proper SEO performed on the site so that it shows on top of page 1 - BAM! There you are - right on time! A few years ago all you had to worry about was JUST a website. Now days it is way more than just your site, but social media as well. YouTube videos, FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn and a bunch of other sites to get the word out about who you are and what you do and how YOU can help solve someone else's problem. To learn more about how social media can impact your real estate business, scroll down to check out a previous post on using Social Media for Real Estate. If you don't already have a website, we can build you a mobile friendly, high converting website to get your phone ringing. It is important that your website IS mobile friendly. The reason is that over half of all searches are now done on mobile devices! If you have a website and it isn't mobile friendly, we can help you with that as well. Don't have any videos? No social media properties? We can handle that as well. Not only do we set them up, but also optimize them so that they appear higher in Google search as well as the social media platforms search as well. So if you have any kind of Real Estate business, be sure and contact us for all of your Real Estate website design, Real Estate videos and Real Estate SEO needs! We promise there is no greater ROI on any kind of marketing or advertising! The blog post Using Social Media For Real Estate Professionals Read more on: MDIMS It's a common belief that all any real estate business needs is a website and - BOOM - you will have a thriving business. If you have top rankings for your site for keywords for your field of expertise, yes, it will help tremendously on the amount of leads that your Real Estate business will bring in. However, in today's day and age, if you don't have a social media presence you are missing a lot of potential clients. Depending on your Real Estate profession will make a difference on which social media platforms will perform best for your business. For instance FaceBook, it works well for Real Estate agents. For Real Estate investors trying to find motivated sellers - not so much. We have found that FaceBook does work well for investors that are selling Lease Options. If you have read a few of our posts you will know that we are big fans of Video Marketing. You can check out our previous post on Video Marketing Here. YouTube videos work for any type of Real Estate business, and also help your potential clients to connect with you more on a personal level if they are able to see your face. Twitter is another platform that works well for all types of Real Estate Business'. With twitter you can grow your following by tweeting and retweeting tweets that are relevant to your business, then occasionally tweet about your Real Estate services. There are two major things that we look at on how social media can help grow your business.
Don't just take our word for it. Here is a video by another company that explains in detail how great Social Media is - So how do you go about using Social Media in your marketing efforts? Realtor.com made a post about using social media. Although their post is geared more towards Realtors, any Real Estate business can put these tips into practice to help grow their business (actually these are good tips for any service based company):
There it is again - the use of Video! We especially like that saying "a video is worth a thousand pictures"! If you are attempting to handle all of your Social Media marketing on your own, you will probably want to do a little investigating first as to which platforms will work best for you. Once you figure that out you will probably only want to focus on 1 to 3 at most. Any more that that will be to much for you to handle. Placester.com made a really long post worth reading about advanced marketing techniques for your Real Estate business, here is a small portion from it that we found important to this post:
There is no denying how important Social Media is to your business. If you aren't currently using it - you need to be, or get passed up by your competition. If you need any help with your Social Media efforts, building of a website or getting it found in the searches, be sure and check us out for all of your Real Estate SEO Service needs :) via Blogger Using Social Media For Real Estate Professionals Is your business using video to reach all the people that are looking for your services? If it's not, you are missing a huge audience!
Check out these stats - these are directly from YouTube themselves - YouTube has over a billion users - almost one third of all people on the internet YouTube reaches more 18-34 and 18-49 year olds than any cable network in the U.S. The percentage of Generation X that uses Youtube - 58% The percentage of Baby Boomers that use YouTube - 43% And this stat is just crazy - over 500 YEARS of YouTube videos are watched on FaceBook EVERYDAY! And with people’s short attention spans these days, more people would rather watch a video than read text. What we love most about YouTube is that a highly relevant, highly optimized YouTube video can show up in Google search as well! This is tremendous in the fact that it gives you 2 places on Page 1 of Google giving you more chances of getting the customer over your competition. This can also help with your reputation management and push bad reviews back to page 2. There is so much that can be done with video. You can shoot a video just using your office for a back ground, shoot it with a green screen behind and put whatever background you want, and even make videos with what are known as white board drawings. The important thing to remember with any of these types of videos is that you convey to the viewer how YOU can help solve their problem. Viewers really don't care about how many awards your company has, or how many years you have been in business and all of your great achievements you have had. What they care about is how you can help them. Video also helps the viewer connect with you on a more personal level. It can also convey more trust, especially when someone significant inside your organization is on camera, such as the owner. However, if you don't want to be on camera, you can always hire a spokes person to be on camera. Usually we suggest a woman for this since men and woman alike tend to trust women more over males according to marketing surveys. Also with video you can add music. This allows you to create more "emotion", by adding rock, or more up beat music. That is something that you just can't do by reading or writing text. YouTube is our favorite platform, and there are a couple of reasons.
Video marketing is something that you can do on your own. Probably the biggest tip we can give you if you choose to make your own videos is to get an external microphone. Nobody likes to watch a video where the audio sucks. We do not recommend that you create videos without at least a voice over as YouTube, Google and the other search engines see these videos as more spammy. If you don't feel comfortable creating your own videos, or don't have the equipment, or the time, be sure and visit our main website for more on our Video Marketing services in Atlanta and our Video SEO services. It's extremely important to make sure that your website functions properly for your visitors, as well as the search engines. If you build your website for just the search engines, then it won't be user friendly and people will quickly hit the back button to find another site. There is a careful balance that must be maintained for Users and Search Engines. If you get it right, you will get the traffic and sales that you are looking for. We are going to cover a few different things to keep in mind when building your site or adding a page.
Probably the most important tip that we can give you now for creating web pages is to just write in a normal speech pattern and don't worry to much about stuffing keywords. Years ago it use to work well to repeat the same keyword in your content over and over again, then create another page that targeted another keyword and do the same thing over. Now days the search engines frown upon this and will actually penalize you for doing this. The best thing to do is just write a good page with content of at least 800 words to 2000 (the more the better). Instead of using the same keyword over and over, use LSI keywords. LSI keywords are kind of like synonyms of your main keyword. This correlates into our next subject, making sure your website is "Mobile Friendly". Google announced back in April of 2015 that your site needed to be mobile friendly, otherwise it would suffer in the searches. Everyone was calling this "Mobilegeddon", and really didn't turn out to be that big of deal. What it turned out to be was that if your site wasn't ready, it really only impacted the mobile searches, which is still important, but we will get to that more in a minute. Now it turns out that Google is again updating this algorithm and rewarding sites that are Mobile Friendly. This update is rolling out over the next few months. Google does stress though that good quality content will still rank in the searches. Okay, so enough about the search engine part of your web design. Now let's look at it for the users standpoint. As far as content - keyword stuffing sucks, and you need to be writing your content for the end user. If you don't your users won't be satisfied and click the back button and go to someone else's site. This is bad for two reasons, 1- You aren't getting a sale or getting the user to do what you want them to do and 2 - it increases your bounce rate which is a negative ranking factor when someone hits the back button and continues their search. Now Mobile Friendly for users. Have you ever gone to a website on your phone or tablet and have to pinch to zoom a site or continually scroll sideways to read the content? Isn't that a pain? If your site is Mobile Friendly, it gives you kind of a stripped down version of your site, or automatically resizes it for the screen size, making it more user friendly. Here is the big kicker and why you should make sure your website is Mobile Friendly. MORE THAN HALF OF ALL SEARCHES ON GOOGLE ARE DONE WITH A MOBILE DEVICE! And with more people using their phone for search, they are also speaking their search into their phone, which makes our first point come into play. So if your website is keyword stuffed, or not mobile friendly, be sure and check us out for the best web design services in Atlanta. The world of business has really changed over the past 20 years. 20 years ago the phone book, news papers, radio and television were the best places to advertise for more customers and clients for your business. In fact, they were pretty much your only options. Now there is the Internet and it has really changed everything.
Who even uses a phone book anymore? In fact I don't even have one in my house, and neither do most of the people that I know either. Years ago when we had an Auto Body shop the costs of advertising in the phone book was about $1k a month. Now with a budget of $1k for your marketing efforts you can really crush it on the web, and bring in far more customers than the phone book ever could. Websites and Search Engines have taken the place of the phone book. People used to get their news from newspapers. Now they get their news from FaceBook. Television marketing - YouTube blows them away. Almost 1/3 of the planet is watching YouTube videos and reaches more 18 to 49 year olds than any cable network in the United States. Now days almost everyone has a smart phone. Even people over the age of 70 now have smart phones. This gives them instant access to any services that they may need at their finger tips. If they need a plumber in a hurry, chances are they are going to search something like "emergency plumber", and if your business isn't listed in the top spot, there is a potential customer that you are losing to your competition that is at the top. That brings us to the purpose of this post. Why it is so important to not only have a website, but also be using other social media platforms to reach your potential customers and clients, and use SEO techniques to make sure you are at the top of the searches. The old saying of "Build It And They Will Come" just isn't so when it comes to any of your social media properties, whether it be your website, YouTube video, company FaceBook page, etc. If you just build a website it will just sit there and collect digital dust. The reality is that your internet properties have to be on page 1 of the searches to get any real results. This is achieved by performing search engine optimization techniques, on your website and social properties as well as what's known as "off-page". It's important that your website be properly optimized to rank in the searches, but not overly optimized. If you don't have the proper structure to your website and keywords and LSI keywords (LSI is kind of like synonyms) sprinkled through out your content, you won't rank. If you put your keyword in the content to many times (over optimization), this can incur a penalty for your site from Google pushing it farther down in the rankings, or possible being de-indexed all together. The same holds true for all of your other web properties as well. Here is what this post is all about, with the proper SEO Consultant, you can get your website, videos and other social properties to the top of the searches. In fact studies show that somewhere between 60% to 70% of all clicks go to the TOP 3 search results on page 1 of the organic searches. The rest goes to adwords at the top of the page and the other 7 listings on Page 1. Most people don't even go to page 2. That's why we say, in fun, "The Best Place To Hide A Dead Body Is On Page 2 Of Google Results!" So if you are on page 2 or farther back, your web property is sitting there, collecting digital dust. So as you can see, you must be performing SEO services to your properties to get them to the top of the searches, more importantly to the top 3 positions on Page 1, otherwise you are missing a lot of business. If you don't have an SEO Consultant in Atlanta, please visit our contact page to find out how we can help expand your business. Until next time :) |
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