Search engine optimization (SEO) is the core of digital marketing. Still, the question is asked, “Why should you invest in SEO?” Over 93% of online experiences are happening every day due to search. More and more brand experiences begin with a simple query through search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
By not optimizing for search engines, you will lose relevant traffic from over two trillion searches launched every year on Google alone. To help, we’ve offered six ways to assist you in deciding if you need to invest in SEO.
6 Reasons for Deciding to Invest in SEO
Remember that keyword searches are about focused, intent-driven browsing. Your content should be clear, comfortable, and just right for the user when you optimize for intents. Likewise, considering an investment in search engine optimization forces you to consider all elements of your investment strategy. Here are six reasons to get started.
1. You need to save on advertising
Many businesses devote much of their marketing budget to advertising, but those dollars may be more sustainable when invested in SEO. If you need to save money on advertising, try allocating resources to SEO instead to increase your visibility. An increase in visibility will translate into more customers.
2. You need to increase conversions and lower bounce rates
I’m sure you’ve run into your fair share of aggressive ad campaigns that don’t bring you that laser-focused target customer that you had hoped for. Organic traffic from SEO brings in much higher quality traffic than unpredictable ad campaigns. At a much lower cost as well.
It may be time to invest in contextual, long-tail keywords in your search engine optimization and content creation strategy. As you do so, express yourself in an evergreen, future-proof voice so that all users who find your content experience value in your content.
3. You need more customers
A search result page usually contains under 10 positively-matched links. To make sure Google will place your site in one of these top spots, you may want to invest in helpful, search-optimized content instead of ads and social. Most users will not look beyond these first ten results when choosing a solution, so make sure you’re among the top picks.
4. You need to establish authority, trust, and loyalty
Most searches seek expert, authoritative, and trustworthy information. This is another reason to invest in well-researched, optimized content and use only phrases matching target intents. A good SEO strategy will demand that you create content that increases trust among your target customer and feeds the customer’s journey.
5. You want to grow your brand
Searchers often seek specific, highly relevant information, so you can increase the discovery and enjoyment of your site by optimizing to answer common queries. SEO can help solidify your brand platform by structuring your copy and taking advantage of query trends, giving you a competitive advantage and a USP.
Search engine optimization will require you to consider what a user is after when they say [best pizza near me] and structure your content to match. Brands are built on a sound approach to search engine optimization.
6. You need to create relationships and increase your rank
Search engines will better find and rank your content with links from those who found your site useful. Investing in smart SEO strategies for building links can help your content get found by potential advocates and increase its rank.
You’ve now seen 6 examples of reasons that an investment in SEO would make sense for you. If you want happier customers that value your online brand, we recommend you consider launching an SEO campaign.
To play devil’s advocate, we offer two ways for you to evaluate whether now is a good time to invest in SEO or not.
Key Questions to Ask Before Investing in SEO
Optimized search is about getting the user intent right the first time. It may be keyword-rich, focused, local, and just right for you, but does it delight your users? Search optimization encourages you to push the value envelope and make three considerations.
1. Do I have a budget for an intelligent SEO strategy?
By cutting spending in ad categories and prioritizing your position for top search queries, you may find you have some budget for search engine optimization. But, if your aim is to dominate the niche and top spot, consider giving your budget a much-needed boost.
2. Will my SEO feature a thoughtful, evergreen strategy?
On the search for the right answer or product for them, users want speed as well as human and helpful information. If your aim is to delight people with value while saving money on ad spend, bounces, and conversions, you should investigate your content with a professional and invest in SEO.
3. Do I have fair, measurable expectations of SEO?
If you know you want to make a connection with the problems, and passions that your users suggest with their queries, your next step is to consider if you can accept the positives and negatives of an SEO strategy. If you are able to appreciate that SEO will require smart investment, patience, and careful metrics, this makes it more likely that an SEO investment is the right choice for your business.
If you are saying yes to these two important questions, you may very well be ready to invest in SEO and optimized content. Get a FREE SEO audit from Avintiv Media to learn more.
You might have heard of the term “off-page SEO” but what do you actually know about it? After today, you won’t ever have to wonder. Off-page SEO (or off-site SEO) refers to actions that are taken outside of your own website that has an impact on how your website ranks within search engine result pages (SERPs).
If you haven’t started with enhancing your on-page SEO, make sure you start there before diving into your off-page SEO campaign. If you’d like to know the difference between on-page SEO vs of-page SEO, we wrote a blog on that as well.
Off-page SEO is one of the most important aspects of your SEO campaign. There are a lot of variables that come into play when perfecting your off-page SEO campaign. Like anything in life, it comes down to a site’s popularity, relevance, trustworthiness, and authority. You can improve search engine rankings through other reputable places on the internet, such as sites, pages, people, social media, etc.
Creating popularity, relevance, trustworthiness, and authority
On-page SEO is doing everything you can to make your site awesome. You have a great looking and functioning mobile-friendly site, you’re writing great content and have a solid site structure. You’re off to a great start.
Off-page SEO, on the other hand, is focused around making your site an authority online so Google search engines rank you higher.
One great aspect of writing quality content is ranking higher in Google’s search engines. Getting relevant sites to link to your content is going to increase your chances of increasing your ranking. As important higher rankings are, you want to make sure that you’re creating trust and a sense of authority with your visitors.
A great way of building trust with your visitors is with reviews, which can be found off your site. Reviews affect your rankings, which is why you want to make sure you have plenty of 5-star reviews on as many third-party review sites as possible. Popular ones are Facebook, Yelp, and Google.
Before we dive too deep into off-page SEO, let’s go over why it’s a must!
Why is off-page SEO Important?
Off-page SEO is tremendously valuable as it tells Google and other search engines that your website is more important than others on the web. The majority of any company that knows what they’re doing with SEO will have their on-page SEO fully optimized. Off-page SEO, on the other hand, is much more difficult. Think of it as a tie-breaker for websites so search engines know the best site to rank on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Although we don’t know the lengths of the full algorithm Google uses to rank, Search Engine Ranking Factors study show that off-site SEO related factors likely carry more than 50% of the ranking factor.
Links and Off-page SEO
One of the most important aspects of off-page SEO is building backlinks. Google and other search engines use backlinks to indicate the quality of the linked content. A site with many high-value backlinks will usually rank much better than the same site with fewer backlinks.
There are three main types of links that can be used:
Natural links are given without any action being done on the owners part. Once a site has authority, other sites will want to link their content and pages to yours. Example: Entrepreneur.com is writing an article about an entrepreneur and they reference your company in their article backlinking it to your site.
Self-created links are created by the site owner when adding backlink from sites like an online directory, forum, blog comments, press release, etc. Just make sure you stay away from black hat SEO techniques.
Manual links are acquired through planned link-building initiatives. This can be done through many outlets. One major one is content syndication.
Links that have the most value are the ones that Google and other search engines will be ranking the highest. There are quite a few variables that define “value” to Google. Some of those are:
The authority of the linking site
The relevance of the linking site’s topic to the topic of the site that created the link
The “freshness” of the link
The number of other links on the linking page
The trustworthiness of the linking site
Non-link Off-page SEO
Links are by far the most popular term to talk about when discussing off-site SEO, but there’s much more that goes into off-page SEO. Nearly every activity that happens off your website is considered off-site SEO.
Other forms of off-site SEO are:
Social Media
Social media by itself is not essential for ranking high in search engines. It does assist with your rankings and more importantly, allows your visitors and customers to connect with you and your content. Your social media popularity will add to your brand’s credibility and trust factor, more so than your off-page SEO.
Social networks like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, and other various forms of social media, help to get your content out there. This can then lead to other sites wanting to link to your site if you have authority in your space.
NAP Citations
NAP citations are online mentions of your business and the contact information (Name, Address, Phone).
All local businesses should be utilizing local listings. According to Moz, citations are one of the top 10 local off-page ranking factors. This is a great way to get into Google’s “3-pack.”
Brand Mentions
There are linked and unlinked brand mentions, which Google talks about in one of its patents. Google started to notice that many brands get mentioned without ever receiving links. They thought that brands who receive unlinked brand mentions should also be added to Google’s ranking algorithm, just like linked brand mentions would. You’d still want to prefer linked versus unlinked but both are now taken into account for ranking.
A couple of good options for linked brand mentions are:
Be on a popular podcast
Write guest posts for other sites
Launch a blogger outreach campaign
Press releases
Influencer marketing
Google My Business
Google My Business (GMB) is a free business profile from Google and essential to your local SEO strategy. Just creating a Google My Business profile won’t be enough. You will need to continuously optimize your Google My Business profile as it is the most important ranking factor to rank in the Google “3-pack” and the fourth most important factor for regular local organic search results.
If you’re a local business, this is an absolute must for you.
Reviews
Reviews are an incredibly important factor for ranking in Google’s “3-pack,” as well as ranking for local organic search results. The most positive and genuine reviews you have on your Google My Business profile will not only make you rank higher but add trust and comfort when visitors are researching your business.
Grow Your Business With SEO
If you’d like help auditing how good or bad your off-page SEO is, you can use our FREE SEO Audit resource.
You might have heard the term SEO but a lot of you want to know, “What is on-page SEO?” On-page SEO is the practice of individual webpages in order to rank higher in search engines, earning more relevant traffic. On-page refers to the content and HTML source code of a webpage that can be optimized, versus off-page SEO, which refers to links and other external signals.
One of the biggest factors that Google makes as it becomes more sophisticated is relevance. How relevant is your page or content to the search query? Google doesn’t want to give its user a bad experience by showing a page that has nothing to do with what they were wanting.
Think of it like you’re at a restaurant (Google), you order a hamburger (search for local hamburger restaurant) and the server (search engine) delivers a taco (local taco restaurant). Tacos are still delicious but it’s not what you ordered. Get the point…
With how fastpaced the world operates today, it takes a user about 50 milliseconds (ms) to form an opinion of your website. Even scarier is the average of 6-8 seconds before a visitor leaves your website. The more relevant and interactive your website and content are, the more the visitor will engage with your site. It’s all about the visitor’s experience.
What You Need to Know about On-page SEO
There are more companies now than ever before. It seems like everyone is blitzing to either launch a new online business or carry expand their business to online sales. Google averages over 40,000 searches every second, which equates to 1.2 trillion searches worldwide per year.
What are you doing to optimize your online presence so your brand’s voice can be heard? It all starts with the basics. You can’t plop your brand-new dream house on a piece of land without drafting the blueprint and then building the foundation. On-page SEO is the foundation for your SEO campaign. On-page enhancements will provide peak performance to your website which will result in greater visibility to your target audience.
Over the years, Google SEO has changed quite a bit. We’re currently working with ranking algorithms that include Hummingbird, Panda, Rankbrain and semantic importance within the page.
Meta Tags
One of the most important aspects of your on-page SEO is meta tags. Meta tags are snippets of text that describe a page’s content to search engines and crawlers.
Meta tags provide more relevance syncing between your content and a search query searching for similar content. You will get higher rankings if the relevance of your meta tag matches the user’s satisfaction.
Title Tags
The most important meta tag we’ll be discussing is your title tags. These tags have a drastic impact on your search rankings and are visible to the average user searching Google. The words will appear at the top of each tab in your browser for both organic results and paid ads.
If you’re working inside of WordPress, we highly recommend the Yoast SEO plugin. The SEO plugin allows you to create a custom title tag within each page very easily. Make sure to keep your title tags descriptive and short.
Think of this as you standing outside next to your competitors with billboards in your hands. What would yours say about your webpage versus your competition? Make sure to add in your relevant keywords and location if you’re a local business.
Meta Descriptions
Search engines determine the page’s topic and the audience that will find value through your meta description. More importantly, the meta descriptions explain what users will find on the page.
When writing meta descriptions, keep in mind quality is still king (or queen). A very well written meta description can generate higher rankings in the search results, which will create a higher click-through rate for the user.
We recommend keeping your description between 165 and 175 characters long.
Add in your brand’s name, a keyword or two and what users will find on the page. This could be the first interaction visitors will have with your brand. Make it a great experience.
Heading Tags
Heading tags are a necessity for any success with on-page SEO. Your landing pages and blog pages should include multiple heading tags, ranging from the H1 to the H6. The most important heading tag is the H1.
The H1 heading is usually the page title or name of the page or post. On a category page, your H1 would be the name of that category. On a product page, your H1 would be the name of that product.
As you write your content, you can also use the H2 and H3 headings to introduce different sections of your page or content. An H2 heading is like a chapter in a book. The section you’re reading now is an H3 heading since it’s a sub-section of a chapter (H2).
It’s extremely rare for most content to get ‘deep’ enough to need the use of H4 tags and beyond unless you’re writing extremely long or really technical content.
Authoritative Content Importance
As we mentioned earlier in this blog, Google is looking to match its user to relevant content to provide a great experience to its user. Your content should clearly explain what you’re offering or what the page or post is about.
The internet is now more cluttered than ever, which is having Google constantly updating their algorithms.
You have to make sure you’re taking the time to write quality content that your target audience finds useful otherwise you’re being drowned out in the noise. You need to stand out from the competition with quality content. Content will always be king (or queen).
SEO and content creation do a lot of overlapping and they’re both needed to create an industry-dominating SEO campaign. After all, they compliment each other.
When creating content, don’t just write to write. You need to write being “the authority” in your field. You should relate to your readers so they feel safe and comfortable with you before ever making a decision to spend money on your products or services.
You want to focus on providing tons of value to them before ever swooping in for the sale. They can go to a used car lot for that type of experience.
If you want to improve your on-page SEO and increase your organic traffic, content must relate to a user and either provide value or offer a solution to their problem.
Internal Links and External Links
Links are detrimental to the success of your overall SEO. Earning high-quality links from authoritative domains will strengthen your SEO by a long shot. We’ll go into more detail when we talk about off-page SEO.
Internal links throughout your site and blogs will deliver a better user experience for your visitors and will also enhance your SEO.
Internal linking to other pages of your site will strengthen the keywords and have Google determine where to rank a particular keyword. The crawlability of your site will improve drastically when you internally link your pages, products, categories, and blogs. This will result in Google showing the site’s most important pages.
When you add a new link to your homepage, it becomes easier for Google to see that you’ve updated your site with new content instead of crawling the entire site again.
Internal links also provide a higher chance of your visitors to stay on your website longer. Google takes notice when there is more engagement across your site and relevant pages.
When doing internal links to other pages on your website, we recommend staying between 4-6 links. You want to make sure that these links open in the same tab so the user can see the flow.
When doing internal links to external websites, we recommend staying between 2-5 links. When these links go to external websites, you want to make sure they open up in a new tab so the user doesn’t leave your site.
When doing internal links, make sure you’re using anchor text that relates to the URL that it’s pointing to so you don’t get penalized by Google.
Optimize Your Images for SEO
When choosing what images to use with your site page or post, make sure they are unique and page relevant. Users are much more likely to react to an image before they begin reading a post.
With how popular Instagram has grown to be, our society is trained to look at images first.
Same as social media, when using images on your site, make sure you’re using the highest quality possible. Google and other search engines prefer higher resolution images.
You always want to keep page speed in the back of your mind when adding in images. Scale down your images below a 150KB file size to ensure that it doesn’t affect your website speed in a negative way.
When adding in an image, you want to make sure that you always add in the image alt-text. An optimized alt-text gives Google another clue on what your page is about. The alt tag should be used to describe what the image is about so it’s visible by Google’s crawlers.
Optimize Page Speed for Google
As we mentioned at the beginning of this blog post, it takes a user about 50 milliseconds (ms) to form an opinion of your website. Speed is in 2019 and SEO is no different. If your website loads slow or a page doesn’t load right away, a user will find a website that will.
Nearly all mobile users will leave if a site doesn’t load within the first 3 seconds. Google is even ranking websites higher that load faster.
As time goes on, if you’re not making constant updates to your website, it will start to get slower with time. Below are some tips on how to speed up your website:
Minimize HTTP requests
Minify and combine files
Use a CDN (Content Delivery Network)
Use WP engine for your web hosting
Use a caching plugin
Add expires headers to leverage browser caching
Compress your images
Clean up your database
Compress your website with gzip
Fix all broken links
Reducing your redirects
Minify your CSS and JS files
Turn off all plugins you don’t use
Minimize round trip times (RTTs)
Put CSS at the top and JS at the bottom
If this is too technical, you can always get a FREE SEO Audit by our team to see what needs to be done to speed up your site.
Mobile Responsive
In 2019, this seems like a given but you’d be surprised that many businesses don’t have 100% mobile optimized websites. For your website to be found relevant and your on-page SEO to make an impact, your website needs to be mobile-friendly and responsive.
A mobile-friendly website will give the user the same experience of your site no matter what device they’re using. At AVINTIV, we custom develop our sites for all of the latest devices and web browsers to just ensure our clients are always giving their customers a great experience.
Google mentioned that starting July 1, 2019, mobile-first indexing is enabled by default for all new websites (new to the web or previously unknown to Google Search). Google is slowly notifying existing site owners that their site is having issues being seen.
As Google stated, “Mobile-first indexing means Google predominantly uses the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking. Historically, the index primarily used the desktop version of a page’s content when evaluating the relevance of a page to a user’s query. Since the majority of users now access Google Search with a mobile device, Googlebot primarily crawls and indexes pages with the smartphone agent going forward.”
If you’d like assessing how your On-page SEO is, use our FREE SEO Audit.
Search engine optimization (SEO) isn’t a marketing buzz phrase. It’s the strategy required to connect your brand’s online presence with your intended audience, and it drives your site’s design choices as well as its content development.
There is no off-the-shelf solution to SEO; your strategy must adapt to your industry, market segments, and brand. Here’s what you need to know to put search engine optimization into context.
The big-picture approach to SEO
All the elements of effective website design appeal to user experience (UX), user interface (UI), and search engine rankings metrics—the latter of which determines where your site appears on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Google’s goal is serving its users with the most useful, user-friendly content. Your goal is convincing Google that your site delivers while keeping that promise to your visitors.
It’s not enough to achieve high rankings if you’re attracting the wrong traffic. Google also takes into account how much time your visitors spend on your page (“dwell time”) and how often other sites link to your content as a source. Keywords and content must speak directly to your intended audience, and website design should be intuitive for your visitors.
How site architecture affects SEO
The website interface is dictated by server quality, aesthetics, and interactive design. Start-up businesses often begin in-house with template-based websites on shared hosting services, or with all-inclusive plug-and-play platforms. Very quickly they find themselves limited by server performance, content management, and potential for custom coding.
Fast loading times
Attention spans are short, especially among younger audiences who demand efficiency, quality, and integrity from their information sources. Sites that take too long to load have higher bounce rates and lower dwell times. Google takes into account load speeds, and so should you if you want to keep your visitors engaged. Servers, site design, media management practices all contribute to site speed.
Responsive design
All websites should translate seamlessly to whichever mobile device or platform the visitor is using. There is no excuse for a potential customer to have to scroll left to right to view the content on your sight (akin to a “keyhole” view) or click a “mobile version” link. Responsive content allows the user to scroll vertically, clearly read the text, and view scaled-down graphics and images with ease. Navigation menus also adapt to smaller formats on responsive websites. Truly “responsive” site designs communicate their status to Google crawlers, increasing their ranking potential.
Searches from mobile devices have surpassed those made on desktop and laptop computers, and the gap will continue to increase.
Ease of navigation
Visitors want to find the information they’re seeking without having to jump through hoops. Simplified navigation menus, clear page titles, and accurate, non-sensationalized blog headlines help shape your credibility with your visitors.
Metadata
The content contained in site title tags, URLs, and image metadata reinforces your site’s claim to its target keywords while making it easier for crawlers to interpret and categorize your website content. Less-experienced SEO managers often overlook these crucial steps.
Why quality content is important for SEO success
“Isn’t content just the medium for adding keywords?” It’s a common question and one that perfectly underlines the problems associated with internet SEO “gurus” targeting non-professional webmasters. Our philosophy is this: What’s the point of using the right keywords if your content doesn’t build relationships with your audience?
Good content, which may be written copy, infographics, video, or images, achieves the following:
Validates your claim to keywords by educating visitors on keyword-relevant topics
Engages your audience, increasing dwell-time and return visits
Establishes you as an industry authority, encouraging SEO-boosting backlinks and name mentions
Pulls your prospects through the buying cycle, cementing brand trust along the journey
Encourages visitors to fill out contact forms and newsletter forms in exchange for even more useful information
Educates your audience, empowering them to feel confident when they’re ready to convert
Effective, engaging content, especially when it’s organized in topic-oriented clusters, appeals to both users and search engine algorithms. Create content for the user—not rankings—in mind, and you’ll achieve both goals with optimal success.
An outside-the-box agency doesn’t use off-the-shelf solutions
Search engine optimization success requires top-to-bottom best practice implementation. There’s no single plug-in, tutorial, or template to fix existing problems, nor is there a one-size-fits-all manual for launching a new, perfectly-optimized website. But there is a way to get on the right track. Get a free SEO audit from Avintiv, and learn how you can increase your digital marketing ROI through targeted lead generation, sleek and efficient site design, and conversion-focused content.
Most of us have heard the rumors that websites that stick with HTTP and don’t adopt HTTPS will be marked “not secure” come July 2018. We first hard about this through a blog post published back in February by Chrome Security Product Manager Emily Schechter.
Over the past several years, Google has moved toward a more secure web and user experience and have been strong advocates for sites that adopt HTTPS encryption.
What is HTTPS Encryption
You may be asking yourself, “What is HTTPS encryption?” According to Instant SSL by Camodo, “Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is the secure version of HTTP, the protocol over which data is sent between your browser and the website that you are connected to. The ‘S’ at the end of HTTPS stands for ‘Secure’. It means all communications between your browser and the website are encrypted. HTTPS is often used to protect highly confidential online transactions like online banking and online shopping order forms.
Web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome also display a padlock icon in the address bar to visually indicate that a HTTPS connection is in effect.”
Instant SSL by Comodo also shares, “When you request a HTTPS connection to a webpage, the website will initially send its SSL certificate to your browser. This certificate contains the public key needed to begin the secure session. Based on this initial exchange, your browser and the website then initiate the ‘SSL handshake’. The SSL handshake involves the generation of shared secrets to establish a uniquely secure connection between yourself and the website.
When a trusted SSL Digital Certificate is used during a HTTPS connection, users will see a padlock icon in the browser address bar. When an Extended Validation Certificate is installed on a web site, the address bar will turn green.”
What Does This Mean for You?
What does this mean for your business? Beginning in July 2018, as Google Chrome launches Chrome 68, Chrome will mark all HTTP sites as “not secure.” This means that your website will not be shown on Chrome which now owns 58.4% market share. That means that you could potentially lose 58.4% of your traffic. A good way to find out that exact number is by going to your Google Analytics reporting and figure out how much of your traffic is coming from Chrome. Otherwise you can use the same amount of time in getting your website an SSL certification. If you need help with this, make an inquiry on our contact page and we’d be happy to assist you.
