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Tobias Gillberg is a Digital Marketing Manager, Search & Digital Disruptor, and Management Consultant Search. Tobias has completed his Bachelor of Science from the University of Gothenburg and Master's degree in Computer Science from Chalmers Tekniska Hogskola (Gothenburg Sweden). Tobias Gillberg specializes in Search Marketing (SEO, SEM), Reputation Management, Branding, and Influencer Marketing. He owns a private website called SEO Experts Miami, A location for management consultant Services. And as you’ve already guessed, we’re interviewing him for the Branex blog, so let’s start: Branex: Tobias, you have an experience of 12 years working with Fortune 500 clients as a Digital Marketing Manager; what do you think a Digital Manager should focus on in 2019? Tobias: Good question! There is so much happening right now and tongues are wagging about how digital really is coming together and how Social Channels correspond and really work together with your content/SEO strategy. I think that what some people have talked about since 2009, is finally happening. A real paradigm shift is taking place and Social and SEO intertwine yet further, as can be seen in Google’s latest update, the March update (I still prefer the name Florida) which has left the SEO community a bit baffled. It seems like Google has yet again turned up the heat on premiering GOOD CONTENT and RELEVANT content, cracking down on PBNs (personal blog networks) that accept almost all types of articles. I have seen drops in the SERPs where the links have mostly come from “link-buying”. I think it’s important to stick to the foundations for your SEO strategy. USE correct syntax and HTML, which is something I learned when I got into SEO in the mid-2000s and is the only rule that has remained intact. Use keywords or semantically related keywords, Good HTML H1, and H2 titles, and keep your website inundated with articles about digital marketing if your website is a marketing blog. What used to be known as Social signals and interlinking Facebook, LinkedIn, and WWW articles, are finally having a real impact on your overall traffic. I think it’s important to have a social presence BUT be selective about where you spend your marketing budget. If you are a B2B selling CRM solutions, it’s probably not the right maneuver to craft a really cool Instagram account with 200,000 followers; but perhaps you could work on your LinkedIn company page. In 2019, I would not launch any campaign without proper testing (A/B or whatever technique you prefer). Not testing and tuning as you go can be very expensive in terms of profit and leads lost. Increase your CTR work on CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization). If you are a bigger company, hire someone with UI/UX skills full-time to test and maximize conversions. I’ve always believed that a good Digital Marketing Manager takes in all aspects and facilitates work between departments. A great Digital Marketing Manager sees the entire picture and unites PR, Content, Social, SEO, UI/UX, IT, Dev, and traditional Marketing. They can make decisions and recommendations built on data and facts; NOT on their “gut feeling” or “we have always done this” or “What they think” of current implementations and strategies. I have worked as a consultant at companies where the marketing department had up to 80 people (not including developers, UI/UX, or Project Managers). They had been juggling 4-5 different projects where Social marketing and the fleet of millennials that are working on Social Media as  “FB experts” and “Instagram experts” have done their thing, without measuring the effectiveness of a post. The PR people were doing what they had always done, and without involving SEO or Social Media, so I believe that the biggest challenge for a Digital Marketing Manager in 2019 is to SEE and COMMUNICATE the entire picture. It’s a challenging and sometimes frustrating position, but I see better and better attempts. So a digital marketing manager will have to be an excellent communicator to avoid frustration and thwart competitive internal teams from working against each other rather than using excellent talent from each department to create something really awesome via joint efforts. In my team, there is no place for ego or trying to look good alone. TEAMPLAY is a keyword that feels relevant. If there is a Social Marketing Manager, an SEO Manager, and a PR Manager, they all have to work together seamlessly, and therein lies the biggest challenge for a Digital Marketing Manager. The Social Marketing Director wants to look good to the upper management, the SEO. A Social/SEO/PR Marketing Manager of a Fortune 500 is not personally invested and they are playing with OPM (other people’s money) and make decisions that they wouldn’t in a situation where it was their money. I don’t want people like that in my teams. I want my teams to treat every dollar as if they are investing in their own business. Branex: AI is getting very popular, confide in our readers how AI will shape SEO and Digital Marketing in the future? Tobias: I think that AI will have a fundamental change in the personalization of the brand message. It’s already an important factor today in Searches and related searches. I think Amazon and Alibaba.com are good examples where their personalized suggestion tool on “You might also like…” is really helpful. I think retargeting is another great digital feature. What I wish for is a “turn of interest when a purchase has been made” and I have gone out and put down 10K on that Race bike” Branex: There are many factors which can help you rank your website on a search engine; so tell us how hosting and IP can be strong factors when it comes to choosing which index to rank? Tobias: A Great Digital Marketing Manager makes sure that proven techniques and basic On-Page SEO, and content curation with INTERESTING content get produced. 10 years ago, if you wanted to rank on the Google.co.uk index, you had to make sure of 3 things (Server location, TLD, links coming from which sites). It still rings true that a dotCOM tld performs better overall on all indexes, and it’s hard to rank a domain.co.uk on Google.com. Branex: Who do you consider your inspiration when it comes to the industry you work in? Can you name some of them? I’m trying to keep an eye on the Blackhat SEO community since many good guys started there. I used to read the Bluehat SEO blog and love the smart hacks. I used to read Jakob Nielsen’s blog, but after all the updates and with time, it seems like most of my old inspirations have grown up and gotten a real job and a suit and gone corporate. Branex: You have worked 12 years tirelessly as a Digital Director and SEO Director, what are the biggest fears you faced as an SEO Director? Tobias: Obviously, every SEO manager’s biggest FEAR is a heavy penalization from Google with a large drop in traffic. Another classic is the nuisance of 500 errors that block the entire site after implementing an htaccess redirect file, but it’s all about testing, testing, and not using aggressive SEO before having evaluated all outcomes and scenarios. Branex: There is this burning question which we find all over forums. Since you have a huge amount of experience in this field, so we're asking you the question. What are some common SEO mistakes in digital content production? Tobias: There are so many fundamental errors in brand-new sites being developed for huge companies today. I would say that the most common is not to use proper Header (h1,h2,h3) tags, but most people make the mistake of not even using relevant keywords on the website as well. For active sites with dedicated SEO personnel, that have crossed off the SEO 101 checkbox. I would say that it’s dull uninspiring content that no one is interested in reading and the content is a dull, repetitive story that was half newsworthy 2 years ago. Content creators are storytellers and copywriters are selling the product with tight text. There is a huge gap in copywriting and content writing where a content writer needs a deeper comprehension of the topic. Branex: SEO is changing every month as Google keeps updating its algorithm to make sure the best thing stays on top of the search. Tell us how organic search reach is affected by paid advertisement? Tobias: Google has really cemented the market with Google Ads and not just the classic SERP Adwords, but paid placements to treat more hidden  “Google Results” in the same way that they have taken on Airplane Tickets, Jobs, and Shopping. I believe that Google has a lot more verticals where they want to get in and take a piece of the market. I think that Real Estate, Cruises, and an extended Google Shopping are around the corner. To rank #1 for a keyword like “Flights to New York”, which is not really driving the traffic it used to since we have Paid ads + Paid Google flights, any business owner must find the whitespace keyword group and play along with Google. Long term, I think Google is taking on too big a role as being the Internet by scraping other information and using that, and a search is no longer unbiased, which was a big part of their initial success in the late 90s. It was a simple NO BS Search engine with great results.

Now, I know what you must be thinking. Not again. I want to confess here that I am no fan of this SEO trends blog post myself, but when we run a business, we want our brand to feature in Google. This can be achieved by keeping up with the Joneses from time to time so that people don’t consider you too alien. Oh yes, I have this small secret. I can predict the future by looking at data. And I’ve done analyzing data from the year 2018. Now, I am ready to give away this information for free. It’s time to stop being a victim and start working smart to get featured in Google search results. If you follow these SEO trends, I am sure you’ll be able to beat your competition in the year 2019.

1. Find User Intent & Solve Their Problem

Everything that you do leaves an impact on your audience. If you want to impress your audience, meet them where they are. And if the audience seems more predisposed towards visuals, use more images in your content. If they show a proclivity for videos, make how-to videos and place them on the front page of your website. As an Entrepreneur, you must incorporate words and phrases which the audience is looking for. If the content of the website is perfectly written, but targeting the wrong audience, your business won’t grow an inch. If you look at any high-ranking website, you’ll realize that it all comes down to your audience. And if the content on the website is not enhancing the customer journey, why will the customers stick to the website? This is not just important, it is indispensable since Google is now more serious than ever about focusing on users’ intent.

2. Leap Over Google Search

No single man can achieve success. Similarly, just appearing on Google won’t do any good to the brand. The popular belief is that a rolling stone gathers no moss. But with SEO trends in 2019, you must consider other search engines too. Apart from Google, take DuckDuckGo and Bing into account, which hold a measured chunk after Google. Search is beyond the search engine itself. People are now searching on app stores. Podcasts and videos are getting more attention than simple search queries. It’s time to think beyond just driving users to your website. How to improve ranking with quality content? How to explode your website with sales just by using social media? In 2019, you must focus on optimizing for myriad devices. Responsiveness is not just a concept anymore, you need to act and follow a serious digital marketing strategy to gain maximum advantage. The entire search experience is all about expertise and control. The sweet spot occurs when we can create a point where the needs of the customer and the elements on our website overlap each other. This juncture is where the magic happens.

3. Structured Data is the Key

Now is the time to move from a mobile-only to an AI-first world. A structure is the ultimate key. Regardless of how good your AI is, if there is no structure, it will never force Google Search to move your page up in the ranking. Understand the vernacular of products and problems that people are facing and systematically arrange them. There must be contextual relationships between topics and the structures that you created. Using tags, metadata, and structured markup gives search engines the ability to link everything together.

4. Not Creating Valuable Content

Google Algorithm update for the year 2018 focuses on the quality of the content. By analyzing high-performance websites, we came to know that websites with exceptional content ranked higher than those with average content. This means there is no more sustaining your blog with average content. Think twice about publishing posts that don’t add any value to the users. What you need is to create content that is solving a problem for the customer. If you’re able to answer a question, you’ll be able to generate a lead. If there are only a few pages on your website, you must use content maps to leave an impact.

5. Showcase Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness

Keeping quality in mind, Google launched a metric to decide the ranking of the website. E-A-T also known as Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness is the key trend for the year 2019. Although the E-A-T algorithm is written for Google itself, it is an excellent medium to understand the E-A-T guidelines to know where Google is headed with its algorithm. The way an algorithm ranks a website is how much it adheres to the guidelines of Google. It turns out that the ranking algorithm is good at generalizing and if you can understand the workings of the algorithm, you can rank your website higher in the search results.

6. Invest in Technical SEO

More and more websites are popping up every day. In 2019, it will be more difficult to rank than it was in 2018. If you don’t have the pertinent skills, hire an expert SEO agency that can rank your brand in a sustainable way. However, there are some factors which you can handle yourself:

• Speed: Google is rewarding websites that take less than 1.7 sec to load.
• JavaScript: With a new year comes new JavaScript updates. If you don’t know Java, it is an appropriate time to learn.
• Progressive Web Apps (PWAs): From the year 2019 on, it will be necessary to learn how to get live on PWA. How to keep users busy with experience so that they can stick to the home screen?

7. On-Page Optimization is Not Dead Yet

We have seen incredible improvements in the on-page optimization and the results they provide for brands. Links might be important, but it’s necessary to share how you can leverage the power of On-page optimization:

• Content should answer the questions of the users.
• The internal site search must be smart to analyze the search query by the user.
• Ensure that customers can get their recently purchased items available with a few clicks.
• Using ChatBots to take care of customer service

8. Voice Search is at its Full Potential

The last decade was labeled the year of mobile. It’s not safe anymore to rely on text searches. Now is the time to optimize your website with voice searches. In the year 2019, you’ll get prominent importance if the website is optimized for voice search. The effective use of voice responses will help users from various countries translate the message and help the brands provide them with the services that they are looking for.

9. Watch Out for Machine Learning

There are changes in the algorithm of search engines where machine learning is impacting the way users search for data online. Just because machine learning won’t be something to ignore in the year 2019. Brands need to adopt machine learning algorithms and develop content which is unique for SEO. The testing, analyzing, and even reporting of data must be implemented by fully understanding the data science and how users are using various mediums to search data on the internet.

10. Optimize Websites for Featured Snippets

If you are willing to get ahead in the year 2019, you must check all the boxes, figure out the most trending topics, and craft the best blog posts for it. The snippets just like in previous years will feature the websites, and blogs providing the most valuable data to their users. If you’re able to solve more problems of the users, your brand will appear in the search results more often. To conclude, we can say that creating a website and not featuring it in Google search results is the same as writing a best-seller book and not making time to publish it. If you don’t optimize the website to rank in Google, you’ll be out of business soon.

Using regional subdirectories can significantly boost your SEO efforts by improving localization and targeting. This strategy helps search engines better understand the geographical focus of your content, leading to higher rankings in regional search results. Regional subdirectories allow you to cater content specifically to local audiences, which enhances user experience and increases engagement. Traffic gridlocks in New York City are rising exponentially. It has come down to the Department of Transportation having to roll out a Gridlock alert each year to ease out travelers who are on their way to work, shopping, or any other leisure activity. The gridlock alerts are normally rolled out for the busiest days of the year, mostly during the holiday festivities. However, this doesn’t mean that traffic in New York remains calm and smooth-flowing on other days. Even on uneventful days, the general public has to deal with this situation daily however they may resent it, and unfortunately, not a lot can be done to eradicate or at least remedy the situation. A probable solution may include recruiting more officials to help normalize the flow of traffic and ease the public suffering, to an extent. The officials are still picking their brains on offering the most viable solution to this dilemma. The business setting in New York pretty much dances to the same tunes. Businesses operating in the online space are usually the ones most affected and have to contend with a host of similar gridlocks when the online traffic ceases flowing to and fro from their website. Not only do these gridlocks hamper the business development process, but they also deter other interested members from landing on the website and completing a transaction. So the online marketers at Branex gathered around and put two and two together to find out what can be done to resolve this concern. What they did find out is that every business owner is working along the same lines, including attaining growth, revenue, more onsite visitors, and eventually boosting online conversions. Ideally, the situation appears highly lucrative and simple enough to achieve, however when one talks about international markets specifically for online businesses, it comes down to the search engine optimization efforts to bring in the most pain. Expansion in terms of SEO efforts is the most painstaking element that you will ever have to contend with. How you plan on expanding and considering the vehicles to monetize the results, greatly depends on your planning skills. URL structure, to start with, is a process for setting up a unique identity on search engines and is irreversible in most cases.  Normally what a business owner does is to set up a URL structure and the search engine optimizer leverages that structure to start casting their spell. However, when your business starts catering to more than one geographical location, things start to get rather nasty. In the case of expansion that covers multiple locations under a single umbrella, there is often a conflicting representation of what should be done. Businesses need to be proactive and determine a route for them that could work as displacement, minimizing the risks and costs attached therein. When opting to expand across multiple locations, an important consideration lies in determining the perceived linguistic and cultural barriers and most importantly, coming up with a way of content delivery that really counts and persuades the native audience to take action. All such stuff cannot be clubbed into one single web page. To effectively address the issue, we bring forward the existence of subdirectories or regional pages for businesses that wish to operate in more than one global location. Let’s see how subdirectories can really help businesses in bagging optimal performance in each of the regions they are operating in:

Prominent Reasons to Use Subdirectories

Subdirectories can help businesses, looking to operate across multiple geographical locations, show up in the regional search results. This can best be envisaged with a custom website development company that operates across Canada, USA, and Dubai. So the hypothetical regional URLs for such an agency would include:

• xyzagency.com
• xyzagency.com/turkey
• xyzagency.com/ae

A counter-argument might pop up here that the agency could have invested efforts in creating URLs with the regional TLD (top-level domain), but the use of multiple TLDs such as .com, .ae, .co, or .ca can result in a differentiated SEO strategy for each URL, which might even result in many varied outcomes. Using subdirectories makes the work a whole lot easier for the search engine optimizers and brings positive results to the front in less time. A search engine optimizer then works on each of the subdomains and targets them fully to achieve results among regionally searched keywords, such as the “best website design agencies in the United States”, or “best website design agencies in Canada” etc.

Franchises

Businesses using franchises as part of vamping up their regional presence can offer subdirectories to the franchise so that they can optimize their content marketing efforts in the region through the extension of the original domain. This also adds value and credibility to the overall business by not refracting its brand identity through multiple domains.

Multiple Separate Product Lines

Subdirectories can also be used to create separate product pages. With the help of subdirectories, a business has a better chance of building customer focus around a niche product line. The main reason behind doing so is to amplify the performance of product pages on search engines. So each product of a utensil company can have a separate subdirectory for silverware, cookware, and crockery, with focused search engine strategies applied to achieve targeted results.

Some Benefits of Using Subdirectories

Some of the most prominent and cost-saving benefits that the use of subdirectories can bring to the table for a business owner include:

• One hosting fee for all your pages, including any additions that you keep adding to the main domain.
• One content management system that lets you manage all the pages from one central location.
• A subdirectory also allows you to insert targeted keywords in your URL structure, making them self-explanatory right from the first glance.
• Sometimes, the main website gets cluttered with information and becomes difficult to manage. With a subdirectory, business owners can create a smooth user experience for web visitors.

This not only creates a great user experience but also allows businesses to build their authority in niche markets. The authority that is built around the subdirectory pages further enforces the overall authority of the business, making it more prone to success. However, you will then be entitled to manage all the pages yourself, so that will come as an extra task to you when you might already be overwhelmed with your daily to-do list. Also, another difficulty that you might face in creating the subdirectories of your main domain is the creation of content. Since the idea behind using subdirectories is to make separate entries for each of your product lines, therefore every page should have unique, informative, and up-to-date content that can align your business strategy with your goals. Also, note that the website content is something that needs tweaking every now and then and may as well require a complete revamp if a need arises.

Conclusion

The use of subdirectories is a sole business decision that portrays the overall vision of the business leaders. It has also been seen that some business owners just don’t go with the idea of creating subdirectories, even when they promise better results in terms of search engine optimization and efficacy in lead generation. Sometimes, the business owner is just overwhelmed with tasks that are already crowding their plate, to spare a few minutes to look away. A viable option in such situations is to contact a digital marketing agency in New York that can provide you with targeted answers to your questions about the use and benefits of subdirectories for your product pages.

Nothing can be more exasperating than drooling futilely over someone sporting your dream shoes or jacket in the wild, only to realize to your dismay that you can never find it in the chaotic mess online. Without a viable style, brand, code, or distinguishing characteristic to anchor the visual search. An avid researcher would find digging up a piece of apparel or a product through text search alone, harder than excavating out a hidden underground city! Now imagine this; you love the floral dress a stranger is wearing to a party. Instead of having to swallow your pride and ask them about it. You simply take a picture, search for the dress entirely on the basis of the image, and get a number of results that include actionable information about the product. You can pinch yourself now since 2018 is promising to take visual search technology to unprecedented heights of success! It’s high time for entrepreneurs to position themselves in the new realm of marketing as we are moving quickly into the world of visual search. Recent improvements in visual search technology allow consumers to upload an image or take a picture of a product, and then use that image for their search. One of the greatest advantages of visual search is its freedom from textual language. It draws on images to surpass the semantic difference between keywords projected by marketers and those used by consumers. Instead of laboriously searching for the product you want. You can use an image of that product and immediately find the website from where you can purchase it. According to a Visual Search report by Moz, nearly 74% of consumers say that text-based keywords often prove ineffective when it comes to finding products online. While 67% of consumers claim that the quality of product images matters a lot while making a purchase. Slyce also asserts that “businesses that implemented visual search gained great advantages. Visitors who used visual search viewed 37% more products, started 68% more returns visits, spent 36% more time on the website, and had an average order value of 11% more than those visitors who did not use visual search”. If you want to make the most out of this innovative visual search technology. Follow these easy steps to make it easier for your customers to discover your products or services while providing them with a great customer experience.

Create High Quality Content

Keep in mind that your visual content must be of high quality if you really want to inspire confidence and encourage consumers to buy directly on the basis of the images they see. Authenticity matters a lot to readers and consumers alike. It can help you drive more sales. Desired.de recently implemented a visual search on their website. It simply gives users more suggestions about a product category by hovering over a product that catches their fancy.

Be Very Careful About Context

Even while focusing on quality, context should have precedence. Visual search works best when you understand how your consumers interact with your website. Your audience uses visual search differently on their mobile devices than they do via desktop or laptop. Make sure your visual content is consistently relevant to your target demographic. The UK-based eCommerce fashion brand ASOS recently launched a visual search on its native app. Now users can search for their favorite clothes and accessories using images. The brand wants its users to easily find the products they are looking for. If you are not sure what you want, or you have seen something that has inspired you, visual search gives you visually similar products.

Improve User Experience and Customer Satisfaction

The technology that enables visual search is tailor-made to help users search through images even if they don’t know the product name or anything related to it, but only an image. They can simply capture an image of a product they like most with their cell phone’s camera and upload it on your website. This helps customers search for their desired product and also opens up all the similar products that they might like. It is easy and simple, saving valuable time of youraudience. It also improves the shopping experience of your customers. Having high-quality and well-optimized images on the product pages of your website serves to communicate a better picture to the search engine algorithm and the end users. AsiaOne, Asia’s leading news portal provides a visual search to help readers find and buy outfits or accessories they see on the website by simply hovering over the red shopping bag in the photo. AsiaOne is the first website in Singapore that created a new visual commerce platform with the help of the artificial intelligence company Visenze.

Helps Spear fishers to Find Their Desired Product

Visual search is indeed a powerful tool for customers who are looking for a particular product and want to find it quickly, called spearfishers. Visual search greatly helps spearfishing, as visual input provides better context than text-based keywords and delivers a more accurate set of search results. Let’s take the example of Heels.com. Their visual search feature allows shoppers to upload an image to find their desired product. This is a great example of an exact match application of visual search that takes customers directly to the product page they are looking for. Visual search helps reduce the number of steps the customers have to go through to find a particular product. Thus reducing the shopping cart abandonment rate. It will also eliminate the intricate process that usually frustrates and annoys customers.

Cross-Selling Similar Items

Visual search also serves as a great cross-selling tool. For instance, if your eCommerce store doesn’t have a specific item in stock. It has the ability to show similar or relevant items that might still prompt a purchase. It can help users to imagine how other items might complement it. If you are searching for a blue dress, but you see an image of a woman wearing a blue dress and a pair of blue shoes that completes the entire look, you might be motivated to buy more than one product. Let’s take the example of Urban Outfitters, their visual search software can identify 2D images from ads and catalogs. Thus removing search hurdles and engaging new customers. The visual search option can cross-sell similar items and encourage consumers to buy more products.

How to Add Visual Search Technology to Your Website?

Visual search works perfectly for users who are searching for one specific product. Visual search typically yields more targeted and accurate results that entice these highly qualified leads. To put it in a nutshell, visual search promotes better usability. Your users will get more accurate results and enjoy more positive experiences on your website. Removing unnecessary steps for your consumers should be a critical part of your usability testing. If you want to implement this innovative technology into your website. You can consider different options such as Visenze, Cortexica, Slyce, and more. You can also find specific niche options, such as Snap Fashion, which focuses particularly on fashion. All apps are tailor-made to improve user experience or augment your SEO. Once you have incorporated visual search into your website, it’s time to measure your results and continue tweaking.

Wrapping it Up

Visual images have a charismatic effect that can increase the number of visitors to your website. It can be said that visual data has a real potential to increase your website traffic. But it is not going to completely replace text-based search. You still need rich keywords and detailed metadata to get your images to show up in the search results. However, visuals are a more powerful tool to grab the attention of your audience. Being a digital marketer or business owner, you should create your identity on the visual web with the help of compelling images to appeal to your target audience as it is more customer-friendly. And it’s a rising marketing trend that you should follow to take your business toward new heights of success.

Social media and search engines are the two powerhouses that dominate the online world in terms of traffic generation for your website. Just as wheels without chains leave you pedaling, similarly a digital strategy without optimization will leave your business going nowhere. Irrespective of the size of any business, the current trend is to take it online, and for all the right reasons. The online world is literally a treasure of different audiences that businesses are willing to reach to grow and prosper. Reaching your target audience requires effort. Targeted efforts in the right direction will give meaningful results. But many times it’s witnessed that business owners fail to receive optimum returns on investments despite trying, mainly because their efforts were not in the right direction. Certain forces are there that combine to make a digital strategy that is proven to bring relevant traffic to you. Traffic that is filtered for conversion. But how do you attract that traffic? The answer is rather simple, through social media and search engine optimization. Everything that you do depends on these two traffic generators as part of your digital strategy and should be done strategically. In this article today, I will be touching upon factors that will allow you to optimize your efforts towards achieving an online traffic win for your business, both through social media and through search engines. Also Read: B2B Digital Marketing Trends for Brand Strategists

Optimizing for Search Engines

The search engine king Google has stated both in public meetings and in its search algorithm updates that ‘content’ is the most important factor when it comes to determining the organic rank of any website on the search engine. A piece of content that is loved by the search engine is both high quality and informational. The following steps will guide you on how to optimize your content to rank high on search engines.

Creating High-quality Content

Do not confuse high-quality content with content that uses heavy language in it. High-quality content that is lauded by search engines is information which is relevant to your audience, such, as that helps your audience in completing any specific task and directly addresses their pain points. Instilled with originality, thoroughness, and clarity, the content becomes a hot cake for the search engine. High-quality user-centric content not only allows the search engine to rank you better. But also leverages education to your target customers by informing them about the services you have to offer to them.

Include keywords

Keywords are the small search terms that the common man types in the search bar of any search engine. These are the queries that help the search engine identify the kind of information the user is searching for, allowing them to display relevant results. for example, “best digital services provider in the USA” is the keyword that someone types in the search box. The search engines match the search query with the content on web pages, displaying all those that contain the term. Remember, keyword inclusion should be such that looks natural. The use of keywords in content repeatedly leads to a penalty for the web page, as Google discourages unnecessary keyword stuffing and does not hold the practice in high regard. For example, for a content piece of 500 words, any keyword should ideally be used, twice.

Optimize Images

Not only does the content of a web page help the search engines in determining the page rank. But also the images that are used in a website design. Ideally, search engines do not read or crawl images that are there on any website. But if Alt Tags are provided to images, then the search engine identifies them and receives a better understanding of what the page is all about, thus improving organic rankings. Alt Tags are tags that describe the image in 2-3 words, in any website design.

META Tags and Short URLs

Don’t forget to include the META tags in your website design. META tags are small descriptions that go into the backend coding of your website design and help the search engine find and recognize the web page. Ideally, META tags include a page title, which is a 60-character long description of the page, coupled with a long 200-character long description and a few keywords that determine the relevancy quotient of the website to the search engine crawler. Along with that keep your website URL concise. The ideal URL length for search engines is 59 characters only.

Optimize for Social Media

Optimizing for social media is a common question that is rolled out for digital solution providers quite often. Before moving on to discussing the most common questions. Please make sure that social media is a channel that routes interested, relevant traffic towards your business website. This routing becomes possible for businesses who actively engage with a target audience over their social channels and keep posting relevant content. This induces customer likes, shares, and mentions, building up segments of interested prospects for the business.

Common Questions to Optimize Social Media Channels

Let’s take it forward from here and see what those common questions are:

1. How many social channels should a business participate in?

Social media participation is carried out to achieve a variety of goals. It could be building brand awareness to lead generation or simply building online credibility that supports sales. According to the Edelmann Trust Barometer, your target market requires seeing content about your company at least 3-5 times a day to believe in its credibility. This automatically translates into distributing your content on a variety of social channels. But since every social channel is targeted towards a specific group of audience. Therefore before finalizing the social networks you want to participate in, don’t forget to check the buyer persona of your target market. their demographics, psychographics, and the type of your offering will finalize the social media you want to participate in. For example, the content which goes on Facebook is more casual as compared to the corporate content on LinkedIn. Once you select a social network to participate in, it trickles down to the number of posts you should make in a day.

2. What should you publish on different social channels?

Creating and posting for multiple social channels doesn’t mean that you are required to create unique content for each of them. But the smarter idea is to re-purpose the content that suits the audience present on each social network. For example, a long 30-minute video demonstrating the usage benefit of your product can go on YouTube. However, pinpoints extracted from that video and transformed into a banner can quickly gain the attention of users on Facebook or Twitter. To provide your content with the best chance of being shared, you can use a mix of varied tactics. It can start with an image that goes with your content to #Hashtags, a call-to-action banner/button, or even the use of an entire video to name a few. Certain social channels also allow the tagging of friends and groups that can further distribute your content in front of a relevant audience, increasing the intensity of your efforts, exponentially.

3. When to post on your social channels?

Determining the best time to post on social channels can be a daunting task. The simple answer could be to post according to the clock of your target audience. These days, many businesses operate internationally, thus experiencing hours of time differences. An ideal time for such a business is to post when its target audience is online on social channels that increase visibility. Marketers globally use a variety of techniques to determine the best time for posting on social media. They could be:

• Trial and error
• Use of posting tools
• Industry reports or
• A/B testing method

Automate for Convenience

Automation of social media was not considered a good practice until recent times. To nurture positive results, the social media posting procedure needs to be scaled and requires a platform. Studies have proved that the majority of digital marketers have automated their social media postings for increased convenience. Sproutsocial, Hootsuite, and Buffer are some of the commonly used platforms used for social postings.

Go Forth and Start Experiencing

So now that you know the winning practices that will optimize your business for the best use of social media and search engines, I believe you are in a better position to go forth and start experiencing an increase in online traffic and reach of your business website. Let me know if you have any questions in mind by posting a comment in the section below.

Dream of the skies, and you might be able to catch some stars. Dream for your roof and you will only catch up with the switchboard. Dreaming is such important for human beings. If you don‘t dream big, how can you achieve big? The same applies to your local business. If you don’t have an address in a particular city, how can you get business from that city? Here are some tips that can jumpstart your business even on a local level. Follow these and help local people avail your services. The first thing you need to consider is that when going for local organic results outside your city, you need a well-thought-out plan and a highly relevant landing page. If you succeed in developing a solid landing page and follow the practices mentioned in this blog, you will definitely be able to list your business even if you don’t have business in the city. Start with the city page… But what exactly is a city page? The city page strategy is nothing new, however, it is one of the most overlooked and poorly executed tactics. Let us give out some specifics that can help you understand the importance of city pages and how to create awesome city pages.

Elements for Creating a Highly Successful City Page

1. Use Relevant Title Tags

Here, we would suggest you create location-based tags that include your business name. For instance, Branex is a New York-based digital agency that operates in other states, too. So, for us, an ideal thing to do is to create a landing page for California State and rewrite our title as Branex – A California-based digital agency. This will not only tell the Google spider that we are offering services in California too, but it will also help people in California to avail our services. We suggest creating a title of 50 – 60 characters.

2. Meta Description

One of the clichés that you hear when you go to SEO experts. But the trick is not to stuff it with keywords. Instead, you need to write something that is compelling to the user. Something that will make them click on your website if they are looking forward to availing your service. For this, find a problem and solve that problem in your Meta description. For instance, we can help you build a website that drives traffic and converts users into potential customers.

3. The URL Structure

Of course, some things don’t die. And one of those things is creating a relevant URL structure. The old-school theory still lasts pick your top keyword and use that in your URL structure. For instance, if you are a web design company from UAE you can place your URL structure as City name + keyword. Here is how: Web Design Company in UAE – www.companyname/web-design-company-in-uae

4. Use H1 Tags Wisely

If you have engaging content on your page, headings can increase your chances of listing in Google page results faster. Pick out words that are relevant to the customer. Ask yourself, what you will look when you are willing to avail your service and use that as your heading.

5. Internal Linking is Important

This is often a great practice to link your pages internally. By linking your relevant pages with other pages, you help Google organize your website for better ranking. Plus, it will help your customers to understand your business and get more out of your service. For this, you can start by linking your case studies with your relevant blogs. This will help you build trust with your audience and let Google know that you are doing something that matters. Also keep in mind that linking from within the content of appropriate pages on your site is generally more valuable than links from your navigation or footer (although, linking from your navigation is still usually a good idea).

6. User-friendly Navigation

One of the most important things you need to focus on is creating landing pages that give a good feeling. Try to study the city you are planning to target and use some images that are relevant to the city. Secondly, and most importantly, keep the navigation as simple as possible. Do not use complex pages and ask to use the brains of your customers. Make the pages self-sufficient. Make sure you put all the answers out there so your user doesn't need to think, ‘What to do next?’

7. Use Persuasive Content

No matter how great your design is, if you are not listing down some local benefits on your website, users won’t give that much attention. You need to pick some facts about the city and include them in your content. How can your service help the locals in the city? Take this idea and build your content based on this information. This way, your content will not only be informative to your user, but you will be regarded as an authority by people as well as users.

8. Testimonials

Over 70% of Americans say they look at product reviews before making a purchase. This is known as social proof can act as a catalyst to your audience. When people hear or read from people who are in the same locality, they feel comfortable doing business with you. Use the testimonials as a motivating agent to jump-start your website. This will not only be a benefit to the users, but it will help Google to place you in the line of local stars. You can easily be reviewed by other relevant people. And this will overall add to the matter of trust in the hearts of your customers.

To Bottle it All Up

Listing yourself in local SEO is one of the most daunting tasks you can start, but if you follow the above-mentioned tips, you will surely start with an edge over your competitors. Use the tips above and let us know how much you have succeeded. We would love to share your story with our audience.