Likely Reasons Your Website Isn’t Appearing On Google Search Results

If you want your digital marketing strategy to be effective, first create a user-friendly website and have it hosted well. Next step is to optimize the website to improve its online visibility and search ranking particularly on Google SERPs. You need tactical use of Search Engine Optimization, SEO to get this done properly. If after a while you search for the website on Google search results and you cannot find the site, it proves there are issues with the website. There may be technical reasons the website isn’t appearing on Google search results. Following are the likely reasons why.

The Website has been Penalized

Your website can be penalized by Google if it discovers you are engaging in “unethical” or “black hat” SEO tactics. When Google penalizes your website for any unacceptable SEO tactics, it simple drops the website from appearing on its search results. That is close to blacking out your website on the internet. To prevent your website from Google penalties, make sure you do not purchase low-quality backlinks or stuff your website content with keywords. Both of these tactics are unethical in the eyes of Google and they usually attract penalties. To avoid these penalties, you can undertake a comprehensive SEO audit once in a while to be sure you are doing things correctly particularly in terms of your SEO tactics.

The Website has been Blocked

You can have your website blocked from searches if you are reckless with the use of meta tags on the site. It is meta tags that give instructions to Google what to do or not do on your website. So, when you use ‘noindex’ as a meta tag on your website, it tells Google bots not to index or display a webpage on Google search results. If you set ‘noindex’ to your entire website or certain webpages, it simply means the entire website or these pages will not appear in the search results. To prevent that from happening, make sure that webpages that you want to appear on Google search results don’t have ‘noindex’ in their meta tags.

Lack of Relevant Keywords on the Website Content

If you do not have related keywords in the content of your website, you are confusing search engines. This is because major search engines like Google use the keywords on your website to gain textual understanding of the products/services you are offering on the website. The right keywords help Google to display your website on its search results. So, when these relevant keywords are missing from your website, the website is not likely to appear on search results for related search queries on Google.

The Website is Rather New on the Web

If your website is new on the web, it takes quite a while say a few days or possibly a few weeks for Google to notice it and index it. It is only then the website stands a good chance of making it into Google search results. So, if you just launched your website, it is advisable to wait a bit for the website to be found and shown on Google search results. That is if the website is well optimized though.

The Website May Have Duplicate Content Issues

Google bots usually have a very sensitive nose for plagiarized or copied materials. Anytime they discover such materials on a website, there are bound to be consequences. They always know a duplicate content when they discover that same or similar web page is accessible at different URLs. When content appears as duplicate to Google, it refuses to index it. When faced with such scenario, Google usually chooses the content version that you set as the canonical. If however no version is set as canonical, Google usually decides in favor of quality. In such scenario, Google attempts to identify the best version of the page to index based on its judgement. If therefore your website content is copied from another website and really looks similar, Google may bypass it without indexing it. If that happens, chances are very high that your website will not appear on Google search results.

The Website Doesn’t Have Enough Quality Backlinks

In getting backlinks to your website, you must pay more attention to quality rather than numbers. The number of quality backlinks your website has tells Google the importance of the website. The more quality backlinks your website generates, the more the website appears important to Google and the more likely that Google will display the website on its SERPs. On the flip side, if your website is new and doesn’t have many quality backlinks, it may seem unimportant to Google. When that is the case, it may lead to the website not appearing on Google search results.

Why High Quality Backlinks are Important to a Business Website

Digital marketers recognize high quality backlinks as very important website ranking factors on the internet. Major search engines like Google are always on the lookout for high quality backlinks in their ranking efforts. When search engines identify a link from a high-quality website, they pay more attention to such links. That helps to increase the visibility of the website on the internet. High quality backlinks can directly help a business website to attract more visitors and more effectively promote its content. Following are specific ways backlinks can be of great importance to your business website.

1. Best Way to Get Inbound Links and Traffic to a Website: Backlinks are links from other websites that point to your website. They help to increase traffic and credibility for your website. This they do by directly helping your website to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). If as a business owner you deliberately target reputable and influential websites and blogs, submitting articles or blog posts to relevant directories or forums to generate backlinks, it can help to boost your online reputation. High credibility, visibility and reputation of your website usually translate to more inbound organic traffic to the website.

2. Earn Trust and Confidence for a Website: Backlinks from authoritative websites can help a website earn trust and confidence. That leads to increased traffic and web rankings. Links from high-quality sources can also help to promote your website content thereby encouraging users to visit it. To easily earn trust and confidence for your website, when selecting backlinks, it is essential therefore to take into account the business niche, target audience and content of the website.

3. Important Website Ranking Factor: For most search engines, backlinks are some of the most important ranking factors they consider. Not only do backlinks help a website rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs), they can also help improve a website’s domain authority (DA), domain rating (DR), and trust score. They are about the best quality indicators on the web in the eyes of search engines. However, you must always exercise some caution when seeking backlinks. It is not the number of links that matters most but the quality. When the sources if the links are credible and reputable, the links themselves are bound to be credible and reputable. It is such links that serve as good ranking factors for your website.  

4. Help to Improve Website Content: Dofollow links are the type of links that are quite essential for any website that wants to improve its search engine ranking. When search engine bots visit a website, they look at the links on the web pages. It is these links they use to determine how important the website is. If you use dofollow links in your content to guide search engines to reputable websites, it can help to improve the credibility of your own website content.

5. Help Websites to Show Up on the First Search Results Page: Technically, a backlink is a link from another website to your website. Backlinks are very important for SEO for your target keywords. The quality of these links when combined with the SEO for your target keywords can help your webpage rank higher in the SERPs of search engines. A higher ranking on the SERPs of search engines makes people more likely to click on your webpage. This translates to more inbound organic traffic and consequently more sales and more revenue for your business.

6. Help to Generate Leads and Revenue: Backlinks from reputable and authoritative sources can help to legitimize your website, improve the site visibility and increase the trust of potential customers. Increased customer trust translates to increased leads generation, increased conversions, increased sales and increased revenue ultimately.

7. Improve SEO Rankings: For your business to succeed online, it needs a robust online presence derivable principally from its search engine rankings. That helps to bring more organic traffic and leads to the website, and really great for its SEO rankings. Backlinks to websites can be highly valuable not only because backlinks provide websites with more visibility and credibility, but also because they help websites to generate traffic and leads, all because of the good SEO rankings derivable therefrom.

8. Help to Generate More Web Traffic: When it comes to generating traffic, quality dofollow links can generate more organic traffic to your website than social media campaigns or even paid ads. This is because Google usually factors in authoritative sites when ranking websites. This is why good dofollow links can directly help your website rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). If your website does rank high, it can result in more organic traffic, more leads, more conversions and more sales.
 
9. Search Engines are More Likely to Index High-Quality Backlinks: Search engines are more likely to index high-quality backlinks. This leads to higher rankings and SEO visibility. Backlinks from websites in your niche business are a valuable source of contextual information for potential customers. Therefore, the more backlinks you generate from reputable websites in your niche business, the better your chances of ranking high in search results. Ranking high in search results helps your business to achieve more online visibility.

10. Ensure Growth from Niche Audiences: Link building and backlinks for your website help your niche audiences to grow. You can build these links by creating informative and useful content for potential customers, developing beneficial relationships with influential bloggers and attracting backlinks from other high-quality websites in the same niche as you. By targeting these key audiences and building strong links between your website and others in your niche business, you can progressively grow your business. 

Best Online Tools for SEO Analysis

For Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to be really effective on a business website, it must be on-page and off-page. You will need to master some on-page and off-page strategies to be able to optimize your website for better rankings in the SERPs of search engines. Both strategies have their unique roles in the search results as well as organic traffic from search engines. Optimizing your website for search engines and letting search engines realize it is highly technical. It takes quite a bit of time too and you need the right online tools to get it right. Here are some of the tools that webmasters recommend very highly to help you with the SEO of your website.

On-Page SEO Tools

1. Google Tools: Prominent among these tools are PageSpeed Insights and Google LightHouse. These are some of the best tools to check website performance. They highlight performance issues and also make suggestions to fix them.

2. Proof Reading Tools: Copyscape tool helps to check the originality of your content. Grammarly tool helps to make corrections on your content for grammar and punctuation while WordCounter tool helps to analyze the keyword density in your content.

3. Google Keyword Planner: This tool is the best online tool for carrying out keyword research and searching for LSI keywords.

4. Ahrefs: This tool helps to analyze the keyword difficulty and search volume of the searched keywords.

5. Yoast SEO: This tool is great for page optimization, providing meta title, description and checking if your content is optimized against your main keyword. It also helps with increasing the readability of the content.

Off-Page SEO Tools

Next are some important tools that are great for off-page strategies.

1. Ahrefs: This tool helps to analyze your competitor’s website and to look for where you can conveniently create backlinks.

2. Social Media Tools: In this category are tools like BuzzSumo, BufferPublish, SproutSocial, Hootsuite, Canva, etc. These are tools that are very handy to market your content on social media.

3. Moz: Moz is an excellent tool that helps to provide a complete report about backlinks to a website.

4. SEMRush: This is another great tool that can help you to create a campaign and add your competitors to it along with your own website. It has capacity to analyze your competitors and suggest off-page and on-page changes.

Last Line

When it comes to effective SEO strategy, smart online tools are indispensable to marketers. These tools help to save time and other resources while delivering highly reliable results as well.

Effective Marketing Elements of eCommerce SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a technical process of organizing your business website to make it visible to search engines.  eCommerce SEO is the process of optimizing your web pages to rank high for essential business keywords. Marketers expect that before customers are ready to buy a product, they must have done some diligent research about the product using related keywords. Those keywords help search engines to include the product you are marketing on your website in their search results made available to such searchers. Therefore, to give your eCommerce business the best chance of converting prospects, it must connect with them during the research stage. eCommerce SEO makes that possible.

If you have an eCommerce store, find below specific tasks you can execute to improve your eCommerce SEO:

Technical SEO: These are specific tasks you can execute in your website’s backend to help search engines to quickly discover the site. You can for instance submit your sitemap to index your pages and make them crawlable by search engine bots. Other technical SEO tasks include how to improve user experience on the website and making it mobile-friendly. User experience on a website improves if the site is fast loading and easy to navigate. If for instance, you can increase the loading speed of your website, it helps to boost its rankings, navigability and usability. Because most internet users now access the web via mobile devices, if you focus on making your website mobile-friendly, it helps it to benefit from the huge search data now attributable to mobile devices.

Content Marketing: Without content, no web page can benefit from the ranking on search engines.  This is why quality and highly valuable content is one of the most vital criteria for ranking high for a keyword by search engines. Quality of your content and its relevance to certain keywords are hugely important in this ranking. So, if you carefully use specific keywords on your content, that is SEO which helps the content to be visible to search engines and for them to rank it in their SERPs. Search engines consider search intent by matching the keywords on your content with the keywords searchers are using in their searches. That helps search engines to determine if your content provides the information a searcher is looking for, then include the content in the search results they make available to the searcher. Regularly creating pieces of content that solve your visitors’ problems is vital for eCommerce SEO.

On-Page SEO: These are essentially SEO tasks you carry out on your web page. Some of such tasks include, adding your target keyword to the page URL, title, meta tags, subheadings, and any other aspects of your website visible to search engines. Header tags are most essential. This is because they serve to break down content to help search engines understand the content better.

Off-Page SEO: Just as marketers can improve SEO for their eCommerce websites through many actions on their websites, they can also do things outside their websites for same purpose. One of the most prominent off-page SEO tactics is link building. This is a process of linking your website to other reputable websites in your niche to help its ranking. When other websites relevant to your niche link to your page, they help build web authority for that page. Search engines notice if that happens and they rank your website better for it. This is more so if the website linking to you already has a lot of high-quality backlinks to your pages. This too helps to boost your chances of higher ranking on the SERPs of search engines.

Last Line

If and whenever you decide to embark on eCommerce SEO campaigns, you can acquire more leads and customers through organic traffic from search engines. A great boost for your eCommerce business no doubt.

Tested Off-Site Optimization Techniques for Beginners

Off-site optimization is extremely important for the overall Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of every online business. If you are new in digital marketing, never you forget this. Every online business craves high ranking in the SERPs of search engines. Off-site optimization is handy to get it done. The strategy simply involves several procedures geared towards building back-links to a website. These back-links are critical in the search engine ranking process. Off-site optimization is a technique involving procedures off a website that relate to how the site is linked to external pages. If such links point back to your website, they are referred to as back-links. For search engine marketing, off-site SEO is such an important technique that marketers cannot afford to ignore. For marketers who are determined, it takes quite a bit of vigilance and diligence to get results from off-site optimization strategy. But if they manage to get it right, the high page ranking and organic traffic will come with time. These results when they eventually come do make a huge difference in the fortunes of the marketing efforts of marketers.

Here are some tested techniques of off-site optimization that expert marketers recommend.

Be Consistent and Continuous

Being consistent and continuous allows you to stay on top of your game of optimization. It is not enough just to have a high search engine ranking. You cannot stay there if you don’t do things continuously to keep you there. It takes quite a bit of effort on maintenance to keep you there. Even if it is normal and expected to drop down the ranks by a few positions from time to time, no marketer wants to drop off the first page of Google, ever. The reasons are rather obvious. Ranking high on the SERPs of search engines means high organic traffic. Besides, if you drop down on this ranking, it makes it easier for competitors to acquire your customers. No good marketer ever wants to be in such situation.

Tracking and Analyzing Data

To be able to manage your off-site SEO efforts well, you need to focus more on what benefits your ranking most in the search engines. You cannot do that effectively without data, reliable data. This data has to be obtained by diligent tracking and data analyzing. You need the right tools to do this effectively. In that quest, Google Analytics readily comes to mind. This is a very wonderful tool that can show you, who visits your website, where they come from, how long they stay on the site and many other analytics details you need for effective marketing. If you obtain the right info from your website’s analytic report, you can use the info to better manage your SEO campaigns and monitor your traffic efficiently. If for instance you happen to know your traffic source, you can concentrate more efforts in that area to get more traffic. If however such additional work and efforts do not make any significant difference in the number of visitors to your website, you can then move on to other areas to see what comes from those sources.

Article Marketing

Article marketing is arguably one of the best off-site methods of building back-links and perhaps one of the oldest. Article marketing predates even the internet. Before the internet, marketers were promoting their products by submitting their articles to newspapers and other forms of print media. The advent of the internet gradually took the shine off such practices. Marketers generally moved on to the internet to market articles. If you market articles on the internet, you can get high authority contextual back-links and traffic when you submit your articles to major article directories like Ezinearticles.com and Articlesbase.com. Article marketing is a good off-site optimization method but it takes quite a while, diligence and hard work to get good results. It has proven to be effective but certainly not an overnight thing. This is because you may get back-links fairly quickly but getting the right traffic always takes quite a while.

 

Get Help from Your Competitors

Sounds strange, right? Not quite! Yes, your competitors can be of great help to you in your off-site optimization efforts. You can actually spy on your competitors to get some valuable marketing information. You can get valuable info about your competitors’ websites from sites like Alexa.com and SpyFu.com, among others. From these sites, you can easily find high quality links by simply looking at what your competitors do in obtaining their back-links then follow them. You can take advantage of the paid subscriptions many of the sites offer which will give you more detailed analysis about your competitor keywords and paid ads.

Seek Only Quality Back-Links

As many experienced marketers very well know, in matters of back-links, more is not always better. Quality is. Google does not rank back links on the basis of their number. It ranks them on the basis of their quality. Google will rank your website highly only if your back-links are of high quality. It is therefore not a matter of the number of back-links you have to your website, but how qualitative the back-links are. For effective off-site SEO therefore, link authority is of immense importance. For this reason, high quality back-links from high quality websites like Forbes.com, CNN.com, BBC.com and suchlike high quality and authoritative websites can give your website a much higher SEO boost than thousands of low quality back-links from some crappy run-off-the-mill websites.

Effective Tips on How to Promote Your Blog

For most bloggers, blogging is essentially a business. You cannot hope to make it in any business if you don’t promote it. So it is with blogging. If you are a blogger and you want to excel in the fiercely competitive internet market-space, your promotion strategies, your products, and your brand’s reputation must excel. You must be able to deploy your knowledge and skills to promote your blog on the internet to do better than your competitors. Characteristically on the internet, the blogging environment is extremely competitive. For this reason, the more you deploy and commit your knowledge and skills to promote your blog, the better chances you’ll have to make it succeed. As the digital environment is constantly growing and technology advancements keep showing up almost every day, you must be able to take advantage of these changes to promote your blog to success.  Blogging success is dependent on many factors, and there’s a high degree of complexity when figuring out what works best for your blog. It requires your full attention, a lot of your time, energy, discipline and commitment and a great deal of patience. If you can muster and guarantee these things, you are well on your way to blogging success.

These here effective blog promotion tips if well deployed can help even an average blogger to gain some competitive advantage in his blogging niche.

Provide Relevant High Quality Content

If you want to please and satisfy your blog readers and future customers on a consistent basis, you must provide them relevant content that has high value that can earn their trust. Blogging is basically dependent on content. The more valuable content you post, the faster your blog will grow in awareness, reputation, and customer trust. Blog right consistently and people will begin to trust you. If people trust you, it becomes easy for them to do business with you and be happy to try your products/services because the barriers to purchase will be considerably lowered.

Optimize Your Blog

All blog content is expected to be targeted at an audience. Optimizing your content with the relevant keywords in your niche and targeted at that audience makes the content more effective. Welcome to Search Engine Optimization, SEO. With the right SEO on your content, Search Engines tend to rank it high on their SERPs. Of course, the best blogs usually occupy the first positions in the SERPs and they get more organic traffic. However because SEO is highly technical and can be very challenging for bloggers, hiring professional help to get it done is always a very viable option. If you want to do it yourself, you can only get it right through diligent practice and with trial-and-error approach. It takes good content, great connections, time, patience, consistency and a lot of commitment to have a good SEO on your blog.

Study and Understand Your Audience

You can better target an audience you know and understand. You can only market successfully to an audience you know and understand. It is this understanding you can leverage to sell them products/services. Put simply, it is difficult to make money as a marketer if you don’t know how to approach your future customers. That requires a good understanding of where they come from, how they act, what they want, and what motivates them to act. Through this understanding, you can have an idea of your ideal customer whom you can have in front of you as a target persona to market to. You get better results that way because your marketing and sales strategy will prove to be much more efficient and result oriented.

Leverage the Most Popular Social Media Networks

These days, nearly everyone is on social media around the world 24/7. If you are a blogger/marketer, you must figure out where your target customers love to spend their time on social media. That is where you must focus on to promote your blog. The very popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram are great places to promote from but success on each platform depends on the products you are marketing and the demographics you are targeting. You must therefore decide on which social media platforms work best for you and leverage them effectively.

Leverage Relevant Niche Influencers

A niche influencer is a person that is already well known and respected by your target audience. As a blogger, you have a duty to identify influencers who do not represent a threat to your business. What this means is that even if such persons directly endorse or even promote your products, there is no chance that they’ll convert your customers to themselves or direct them elsewhere. These are the kind of influencers you should make direct contact with and request collaboration. Most influencers have their own large followers/audience and you can leverage this audience to widely promote your content through their direct endorsements or content sharing. Be willing to offer influencers commissions if they help promote your products to make sales.

Build Strong Relationships

Most businesses thrive on good relationships. So is blogging. This is why networking is a very crucial part of your blogging experience. You can build strong relationships through a good network of customers, business owners, bloggers and influencers. Through this network, you can get good business advice, good ideas, encouragement and support. Your blog can benefit from quality backlinks, if others in your network, share, retweet, or link your blog posts in their own marketing activities. A strong relationship with your “close customers” is even more valuable. These are customers you can depend on to help you with different tasks such as surveys, word-of-mouth-marketing, and any other type of support you may need from time to time.

5 Inbound Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Blog

Most digital marketers now realize the real benefits of inbound marketing to their marketing activities. If properly annexed, inbound marketing usually brings the right people to your business website. That means traffic, good traffic in the main. The main goal of inbound marketing is to bring people who’re most likely to buy what you’re selling. That means the people who recognized the need for your product/service who tend to need just a little nudge to take the final step to buy. As at today, blogging is, by far, one of the most efficient and result-oriented inbound marketing strategies available to digital marketers, and its benefits are widely recognized by most marketers. If you don’t have a blog on your website, the time to create one is now if you really want to boost the inbound marketing strategy of your business.

If however you already own a blog and you are desirous to grow it, below are tried and tested inbound marketing strategies most bloggers are using to grow their blogs.

1. Boost Your Landing-Page Strategy

A good blog must have an effective landing page strategy to get results. This is because landing pages usually serve the purpose of helping to market your product/service. More specifically and with the right strategy, landing pages actively serve to encourage customers to take some desired action among other numerous benefits such as:

- attracting more traffic and conversions
- giving the first good impression to your website visitors
- making your visitors stay longer on your website
- generating more leads as a result
- helping to build credibility for your business
- offering the right solutions to your audience’s problems
- starting to build a mutually beneficial relationship with your audience

To get these results, you must make your landing page strategy an inevitable part of your overall inbound marketing strategies as a blogger. To do this right, be sure to pick a relevant and interesting topic in your niche your audience will love. Test different landing pages for maximum efficiency before you settle for what works best. Don’t forget to make a CTA button obvious to your audience by placing it correctly in your landing page. You’ll manage to get these results from your landing page if you don’t clutter it up with irrelevant massages.

2. Use More Long-Form Content

High quality and interesting content on a blog helps it to attract traffic. Additionally, the content should be long-form. This is because long-from content is more likely to become viral and gets much more links than regular-length blog posts. If the content is long-form, it has the potential to improve your website’s rankings on the SERPs of search engines. Through that, it will help to create organic traffic to your website, generate quality links for it, and consequently establish good authority for your business in its niche.

3. Use Captivating Headlines

This is rather obvious in content marketing. The more captivating your blog headlines are, the more attention they get and the more traffic they attract. If you are a blogger, the first thing your audience will see on your blog is the headline. It is the quality of this headline that usually determines whether or not people will click on the link and read your blog post. It is therefore advisable to always make sure you spend enough quality time thinking through your headlines and crafting one that will spark the reader’s interest.

4. Give Real Value to Your Readers

Most online surfers are always there to solve one problem or another. Your blog succeeds if it helps provide them with solutions. Therefore, if you want to succeed in your inbound marketing efforts, your blog must always give something of value in addition to quality content to your readership. Some of such things of value include downloadable materials such as research data, e-books, biz quizzes, online courses, and so on. Thus, your blog must be seen to be providing value and not just outright selling. Providing value is important because it helps to increase your brand’s reputation, increases the trust your audience has for your business, and the overall value of your brand.

5. Do Some Niche Guest Posting

Guest posting remains one of the most important inbound marketing strategies available to bloggers. It is good for quality backlinking to your website. However, you must take adequate care to ensure you only do guest posting on quality websites because links quality is very important to search engines. For this reason, having a solid amount of links back to your website is a good idea, but the quality of such links is hugely important. If generally you deliberately do more guest-posting on the quality websites that are in the same niche as yours, you’ll be able to increase your traffic and reach potential customers much more efficiently than doing link building on just any website. For bloggers who want to grow their blogs, guest posts bring a lot of value for their businesses. This value includes providing backlinks, increasing the website’s ranking, promoting brand authority and communicating effectively with the audience that may turn out to be good leads and trusted customers.

Effective Affiliate Marketing Tips for New Bloggers

Blogging has become a hugely effective tool for affiliate marketers to drive purchase-intent traffic to their website and affiliate offerings. The reason most affiliate marketers and actively involved in blogging. Even if you are new to blogging, what you do to get results must be similar to what experienced bloggers do. Even though affiliate marketers are expected to effectively promote different products and get a commission without having to deal with any physical products or even customers, many usually have great difficulties getting purchase-intent traffic to their affiliate offerings. One practical way around that difficulty is blogging. A good blog can help improve traffic and even sales/revenue for most affiliate marketing efforts.

New bloggers are best advised therefore to concentrate on using their blog to attract good traffic. This they can do by improving their domain authority, performing keyword research on purchase-intent keywords, writing reviews on products/services and joining new affiliate programs. Doing these things consistently will enable them to use their blog to effectively increase their chances of making more affiliate sales and increased commissions.
 
Even though experienced marketers usually volunteer many blogging tips for affiliate marketing, these here tips are particularly suitable for new bloggers who want to maximize their affiliate marketing efforts using their blogs.

Don’t Target Highly Competitive Keywords

If you do so, you’ll be beaten black and blue by more experienced bloggers who are already fully into such keywords. It is an avoidable mistake for new bloggers doing affiliate marketing to target highly competitive keywords early on. Once a keyword is lucrative, chances are always very high that many other bloggers, some very experienced bloggers at that, are already writing blog posts about the keyword. It is usually very difficult if not impossible for new bloggers to make any impact with such keywords. If you start with such competitive keywords immediately, you risk poor ranking. When that happens, it can be quite demoralizing and could even stunt your blogging efforts in totality.

What then is best to do? Just target low difficulty and less competitive keywords! By using such keywords, chances are very high that your blog posts can age and increase rankings over time. As you garner more blogging experience with even some initial traffic, you can then muster more confidence to target more competitive keywords going forward. It is best to aim for higher volume and lower difficulty affiliate keywords. Such keywords give you the best chance of driving more traffic to your website and making more affiliate sales as a consequence. To locate such words, you can do keywords research on online tools like Ahrefs.

 

Target Recurring Affiliate Sales

Recurring affiliate sales are a dream income stream for many affiliate marketers. New bloggers who have attained some level of domain authority and keyword research can rank competitively for many affiliate keywords. That is when it is best for them to target recurring affiliate sales. For new bloggers, having passive affiliate sales is OK but having recurring monthly affiliate revenue is much better.

Even though the commonest affiliate marketing model with most bloggers is to promote an affiliate product/service and getting a commission after a sale, that income can be passive. But, the recurring traffic you get by ranking well usually ensures you get more sales month in month out going forward. Now, that is great for affiliate income! Recurring affiliate sales are like the icing on the cake and they tend to improve greatly on the passive income model. With recurring affiliate sales, you are paid commissions indefinitely for each new customer you refer. That by all calculations is much better than getting a one-time commission for each sale. Your commissions come in steadily each month a customer you referred pays for a product indefinitely. Targeting affiliate programs like these instead of one-time commissions can skyrocket the affiliate revenue from your blog.

Increase your Domain Authority

Domain authority refers to the authority your blog commands in cyber space. Digital marketers measure domain authority by way of rating on a scale from 0 to 100. It indicates the quality and number of sites that link back to your website. The nearer your rating is to 100, the better your website is ranked in Google SERPs. This is important because backlinks are a ranking factor that Google uses to rank sites. The higher your domain rating therefore, the easier it is for Google to rank it for affiliate keywords. If you are a new blogger, you can improve your domain rating by doing guest posts and getting backlinks to your website among other blogging activities to help your ranking. Technically, this appears to be the most efficient way to increase your domain rating because it helps you get initial backlinks to your website and this can attract more natural backlinks to the site.

When your domain rating is high enough, you can start ranking for some important keywords. This helps to increase the traffic to your website significantly. Thus, if your website has a clean backlink profile and high domain authority, its commercial valuation as a valuable web property increases. This is so because domain authority is one of the main factors that buyers take into consideration in pricing a web property. The higher it is, the more valuable the web property is.

6 Ways to Improve Domain Authority for your Website

Domain authority is a technical marketing metric digital marketers use to rate their websites. It appears to have first been developed by Moz but it is now widely used by many SEO tools. The rating helps website administrators predict where their website will appear on SERPs. The higher the rating, the better the chances that a website will be rated highly on SERPs because the Domain Authority (DA) of a website is based on a range of factors which search engines rely on to determine search rankings. Marketers can by deliberate efforts therefore improve the domain authority of their websites through these factors.

Here are 6 simple ways to improve the DA of a business website.

1. Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly

Some Google reports now attribute up to 60% of web traffic to mobile devices. Now that’s some huge chunk of traffic no serious marketer can afford to lose out on. What to do? Just make your website mobile-friendly enough to give the site a very good chance to benefit from some of that valuable traffic. By doing so, you will not only make the user experience on your website better, you will also improve its domain authority. You can improve the mobile-friendliness of your website through its design and layout which many experienced webmasters are not likely to ignore in this age and time if you are unable to do it yourself.

2. Increase Social Engagement

Most website owners know that social media appears to be where nearly everyone is at these days doing one thing or another 24/7. Exploring ways to increase social engagement of your website therefore becomes highly imperative. If for instance any web page of your website has been liked, shared, and commented on several times on social media, that page is more likely to get organic links to your website as well as more branded searches. That helps its ranking a great deal. If you use social media to interact fully with users interested in your content, it will improve your DA. An improved DA helps to drive more traffic and improves your search ranking.
 
3. Improve Page Speed

Page speed is one of the vital factors contributing to the use-friendliness of your website. Page speed impacts where your content ranks in search results, which in turn impacts your DA and Bounce Rate. You can do some in-house tests on your website to determine its loading speed. If for instance your web pages consistently take more than two or three seconds to load, it is a pointer that you have a problem. You can by deliberate action improve loading speed of your website pages by taking a look at the following factors:

Check the website design and hosting provider.
Ensure there are not too many widgets and plugins.
Optimize your Theme or Content Management System.
Make sure the Images and Video files are not unduly too large.

If widgets, ads, or large images and video files are responsible for slowing down your website speed, you may choose to remove them altogether if you cannot reduce their sizes enough to improve the loading speed of the site.

4. Write Linkable Quality Content

Writing linkable content is one of the best ways to get backlinks. If you can create high quality content on your website that other websites will want to link to, that’s linkable content. Such content if SEO optimized can organically generate links on its own. You attract backlinks to your website by regularly providing original, useful, and relevant content in your niche/industry. That is the type of content that most likely generates good backlinks, improve your search ranking, and boost your DA score. Some of the best linkable content most popular with marketers are, Product reviews, Video content, Long-form blog posts,  How-to guides and informative web pages,  Original images, visuals, and infographics among others.

5. Encourage Guest Posting

If you encourage guest posting, you can determine where you want your backlinks to be. If your content is good enough and linkable, it helps to improve your DA since DA calculators do take into account the quantity and quality of backlinks. That makes it imperative that you must encourage only backlinks from legitimate, authoritative, and reputable websites. If you guest post on such websites and leave a link back to your website, it helps your DA score. Inevitably, consistently writing quality guest posts generates good backlinks. Such posts further help you to build highly beneficial relationships with other authoritative websites. Your relevant content out there on such websites shows users that you’re some kind of expert/authority in your industry/niche. That on its own helps to improve your website search ranking and it is good for business.

6. Improve Internal Linking and Backlinks

Internal links are links on your website that link to other pages on the site. They help search engines and other users to navigate the site. Backlinks are links to your website from other sites. Both types of links have marketing and search advantages the reason they are both vital to your DA and search ranking. However, backlinks are not that easy to get since it is not your website that’s providing them. What you do on your website helps to get them from other sites. So, if you consistently write high quality linkable content and guest posts, you can be rest assured that you’ll get high-quality backlinks as a consequence.

Last Line

The above steps will not only help to boost the DA score for your website, they’ll also make your website more user-friendly and enhance your search ranking. Irrespective of whether your aim is to improve your search ranking, optimize your website for users, or compare yourself to your competitors, improving your domain authority, DA is one useful metric you cannot afford to ignore on your website. However, DA only predicts success but does not guarantee it. But, it offers a useful signpost to measure your website with. Website success depends on some other factors among which DA is only an important one. 

4 Ways Influencer Marketing Can Benefit Your SEO Strategy

Influencer marketing is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies available to digital marketers. This is because it characteristically delivers such good results that you can hardly get from any other marketing strategies. If you have a direct marketing strategy of increasing your search engine ranking, influencer marketing is one of the easiest and most effective marketing methods to get the best results. A high SEO ranking can directly help to differentiate your business from its competition. The higher your business ranks in SERPs, the better your brand grows. However, you can hardly get these results if the influencer(s) you choose to work with aren’t right for your type of business. Therefore, before you start any influencer marketing campaigns, you must make sure the influencer(s) you settle for are right. Make sure the strategies you deploy to reach your influencer marketing goals are ethical at all times because there are strict penalties set by Google and other major search engines for websites that try to be overtly manipulative in their strategies. Allow that to guide your activities as you market along. Here are some of the best ways influencer marketing can benefit your SEO strategy.

1. Create Unique and High Quality Content
 
For most marketers, content creation can be hugely challenging. It has to be done all the same because you need to create good content to attract organic traffic to your website. If the content you create is good enough, it will help your website to rank well on the SERPs of search engines. To be good enough your content must fit into what major search engines like Google consider in content such as readability, keyword usage, and overall content quality. In addition, the number of its social media shares and audience engagement are also very significant ranking factors for websites that search engines consider. So, to regularly create content that your readers love, it won’t only be just high-quality; it must be unique to boot. Influencers can play a massive role in creating your website content that is widely shared to their large audiences. Some influencers can directly help to create sponsored content and share it widely for you. In some cases, influencers can ask their followers to create content suited for your brand and add your business’s branded hashtag to it. Such content is called User-Generated Content, UGC. The more of such contents that are produced for your brand the higher the awareness that your brand benefits from the efforts.

2. Increased Brand Visibility
 
Every digital marketer must always factor in stiff competition in its marketing strategies. That is the nature of online marketing. Marketers must always find ways to overcome such daunting challenges to have successful marketing campaigns. Traffic and engagement on a website are some of the critical factors used by major search engine particularly Google for SEO ranking. For this reason, if you are unable to bring traffic to your website and ensure that there’s enough engagement on it, your ranking would be affected. This is where influencer marketing becomes hugely imperative. It greatly helps your brand visibility. Much more than any other digital marketing strategy, influencer marketing can bring massive traffic and engagement to your website. That is why influencers are called influencers as a result of their ability to influence their huge followers/audiences to take desired actions. By working with influencers therefore, you give your content more spread and credibility. Thus, with a broad content reach, you inevitably attract more visitors to your website. That is good traffic. The more traffic you get, the higher your SEO ranking. The more visibility you get, the more the engagement you get as well.  More engagement also means more website traffic and that helps to boost your SEO ranking.

3. Build Brand Authority and Credibility

Even though there are no reliable metrics to determine brand authority and credibility, you can closely observe a few factors that makeup brand authority. These factors relate to how people perceive your brand to determine if they can trust you or if your information is accurate and verifiable. People can make informed decisions on these factors from your website traffic, engagement rates, reviews, on-site activity, purchase rates and such related factors. It is best to maintain real credibility across this various range of factors. When your website commands some brand authority, it helps its SEO ranking. Influencers have great potentials to improve your credibility when their own influence rubs off on your brand. They can use their credibility and influence to give real positivity about your brand through their large audiences. It is hugely important to make full disclosure to your readers when your content is sponsored through influencers. That helps to enhance your sincerity and credibility. By marketing with credible influencers therefore, you greatly enhance your business ranking and reputation.

4. Build High-Quality Backlinks

As most digital marketers very well now, link building is a very effective SEO strategy, despite the huge challenges involved in getting credible links. Influencer marketing comes in very handy to tackle these challenges. One major factor that can influence your ranking on search engines is the quality of your links, be they internal links or backlinks. The authority of websites that link to you is a major factor search engines take into account to rank your website. To rank high enough therefore, you need to get high authority websites to link to your website. Doing so does not come easy though. Again, you can rely on influencers to help generate good backlinks to your website as a way of boosting your website rating.

By working with credible influencers, you stand a very good chance of having access to several high-authority websites. Now that’s a huge plus for your back linking activities.  Influencers can create content on these websites and link the post to your website. That becomes one good backlink. In addition, influencers can deliberately share your links as a way of helping to build your link profile. If they do this, chances are very high that many in their huge audiences will do same. Increased sharing of these links means increased popularity for your brand. With the help of search engines the probability becomes greatly enhanced that your website will fall into high authority domain websites’ hands. If these websites like your content and attach some premium to it, they may choose to add the link to some content on their own websites where it is relevant. The good traffic these high-authority websites receive will thereafter rub off on your website through such backlinks.

SEO Content Optimization Best Practices

For most marketers, content remains key to any meaningful online engagement. This is exactly why content optimization remains hugely important particularly for search engine marketing. That is how Search Engine Optimization, SEO derives its relevance. To compete favorably online, businesses should focus on content optimization. This they can do by ensuring that their content is written in such a way that it can effectively engage their target personas. However, to engage these personas, the content has to first reach them. SEO helps search engines to locate and rank content searchers are looking for. If marketers infuse their content with the right keywords, tags, titles, links and images, it helps SEO. With Google as the dominant search engine on the internet, optimizing your content for Google’s ranking algorithms is the best way to go. If properly done, your business stands to benefit from increased traffic and conversions, lower bounce rates, higher search rankings and enhanced discoverability.

These here are about the best practices that can help in optimizing your content for better SEO.

Diligent Keywords Research

Keywords research is hugely important for SEO because keywords are the real foundation of SEO.  You can take advantage of free online tools for your keywords research. Doing so will help you to discover the right keywords searchers are using online to find your type of business. Once you get the right keywords, you can deliberately use them in your content for the benefit of search engines. That is what SEO is all about. Relevant online keyword tools can help you to find the best keywords related to your demographic. If you deploy these keywords in your content correctly, it helps your SEO.

High Quality Value-Filled Content

Marketers don’t just write content for writing sake. Marketing content is always written for a specific purpose and must be full of value. It is valuable content that helps to drive engagement, leads, customers and sales. Online, if your business consistently puts out quality content, your brand manages to gain some reputation for providing unique and quality content. That helps to attract more followers and a bigger audience. Your content can serve this purpose well if you optimize everything in the content.  These things are comprehensive but range from the keywords to the length of each blog post, web page or article. Expert marketers advise that blog posts should contain a minimum of 300 words to about 2500 words in order to rank well in search engines.

Earn Quality Backlinks

Google algorithms take backlinks into consideration when ranking content.  Links can thus make a considerable difference to your search rankings and SEO. You can earn backlinks by interacting with high-quality web platforms and institutions. If these links are from reputable, high-authority institutions like universities and research institutions, websites and reputable publications, so much the better. Strong and high quality backlinks do not only increase credibility for your content, they also help it to rank high in Google SERPs.

Generate Data to Drive Your Strategy

With the help of online analytics tools, you can collect as much data about your web traffic as you can. Through this data, you can discover striking patterns relating to volume of traffic, bounce rates, popular content, and much more insights into visitors’ behavior on your website. The data also allows you to gauge the effectiveness of your CTAs. You can depend on this data to design your marketing strategies and campaigns factoring in content SEO by optimizing your web copy for maximum engagement. If through this data you can generate reliable user-behavior reports, it is one great way to know which content is effective and which is not. With that, you can always redesign or rejig your strategy and marketing campaigns for better results.

Top Tips to Market your Service Business Online

Service businesses thrive on new clients and referrals as well as repeat business even amidst stiff competition. How to get and sustain these business channels is always a very huge challenge but with digital technology and online marketing, many service businesses do get by and even make good business. Some 80% or more of people seeking to do business with a service provider first look online to make contact with the type of service they are looking for. The reason digital marketing is hugely essential if you want to run a successful service business. Digital marketing enables service businesses to create strong brands on the internet, market effectively and efficiently, engage/interact freely and directly with clients and potential clients and nurture leads, all of which help them to maximize their ROI. 

Below are top tips that can help your service business to leverage multiple marketing channels to become trusted service providers and win new business.

Position your Business as a Go-To Expert

Everyone likes to do business with trusted experts in any field of service. Thus, it is your known expertise that helps to propel your service business particularly on the internet. People like to consult with others when in search of a good service business. For this reason, if you position your business well enough as an expert in your chosen service, you benefit from these referrals and recommendations.
 
Market with Different Content Types and Formats

It shows expertise and great knowledge if you are able to market online with different content types and formats. For instance, if you set out your content on Blogs and Articles, they help your rankings in Search Engines. Some direct content consumers may have preferences for reading blogs while some others may prefer short marketing videos or even podcasts. Whichever channel you choose, be sure it vividly introduces your business and its services without any ambiguities. Doing so can greatly help your brand visibility as a useful resource for your clients and potential clients. 

Build your Brand on Social Media

For cheap and cost-effective marketing, get your business on social media. Social media provides a fast and veritable avenue for you to build your brand, grow your online presence and engage with your current and potential clients in a cost-effective manner. For best results, just get your business on the most popular social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Instagram. If you post quality content regularly on these platforms, it gets shared quickly and widely thereby helping to build your brand visibility and authority. Through this content on social media, you can tactically share links to your blogs and links to all news coverage about your service business. That helps your business visibility a great deal.

Don’t Ignore Links Building

Backlinks help to confer authority on your business website in the eyes of search engines. When other authoritative sites link back to your website, it is vital for Google ranking. You can get quality backlinks from comments on other articles and publications, deliberately securing links on non-media sites, such as universities, listings or professional bodies relevant to your field of business. If you have any opportunities to showcase your talent as a guest content contributor particularly on sites with high domain authority, that’s great. Such efforts help to secure backlinks for your business and a credible way to support your business profile, support and grow your online presence.

Address Common Concerns with your Blog

Yes indeed! A blog is as effective as the problems/concerns it sets out to resolve for clients and potential clients. If you know your service business well enough, you can always think of the questions that can crop up from time and time from your clients. A good blog can use such concerns/questions as the basis for more content. A series of blogs tackling common queries/concerns will help clients find your business when they are asking those same questions on Google. Ultimately, doing so can go a long way to help your business to rank higher in Google SERPs for its area of expertise.

Showcase your Results

Yeah, every service business is entitled to some bragging rights. If you’ve rendered a perfect service in the past, you can showcase it. This should however be done with some anonymity to protect client confidentiality. Showcasing your past results can help to build trust and confidence in your business. Good recommendations and testimonials are great to help potential clients who may have similar needs see what you’ve done in the past and how well you did it. That alone can make more people to contact your business if they need similar services.

Online Marketing Tips for Small Business Startups

You have a great business idea? That’s cool. If it is an online marketing business idea, and it is unique and promising, you could be on to something great as an entrepreneur. You are on your way to being your own boss. That gives you some measure of independence and power as a business owner. If you launch the business successfully on the internet, that’s great. That is the right way to go. You’ll be saving yourself from the initial huge capital outlay needed to rent office spaces and all, if the business were to have a physical space.

 
 
Here is a step-by-step way to go if your small business is a startup.

Plan and Prepare

Plan and prepare for vigorous marketing online. That entails a lot. Design a website with a good structure in place. This structure includes searcheable URLs, website titles, internal links, etc and should meet the requirements of successful SEO optimization. The website should be flexible, user-friendly and well optimized for mobile devices. It should be able to prominently display good ads banners, contact information and calls-to-action features.
 
Launch the Business

When launched, it the ideal time to grow your online presence and build your brand. That requires skillful online marketing efforts. As soon as the website is live, online marketing measures should be used to build the brand. That aims to make the brand known and to deliberately guide users to the website. You can now promote good content out of it, do affiliate marketing out of it and enter into any other sales/partnership deals out of it.

Attract Leads and Sales

Next is to attract leads, customers and sales. That calls for more marketing efforts. To reach as many users as possible and as quickly as possible, branding campaigns with banners should be deployed on high-reach pages of the website. This is the time to take all marketing steps that help to attract interested parties to your products and your brand. These efforts help to bring increased traffic to the website, leads, customers and sales. You can in addition use social media campaigns including how-to videos in order to increase engagement and attract more traffic to the website. To benefit from free organic traffic, the website must be optimized with good SEO and backlinks to make it visible and attractive to search engines.

Maximize Sales/Profit

This is the ultimate. Everyone is in business to make sales and profits. How you are able to maximize your sales and profits determines how successful your business is. To enhance this, you must continuously track your traffic, analyze metrics and take all measures to keep boosting your traffic with an effort to maximize sales and profits. That means more advertising, more optimizing and more monitoring of your traffic results. This you can do by using traffic analysis to find out where the most valuable traffic is coming from. That helps you to determine where best to concentrate your marketing activities/resources and through which channels. With continuous monitoring of your traffic in combination with quickly implemented optimization measures, you can ensure that the marketing measures you are using contribute to constant profit maximization.

Concluding Thoughts

All start-ups no matter the scale are by no means easy. That is why you need a well-thought-out business plan, financial potential and professional online marketing skills to see you through. If your mind is open to continuous learning, you can quickly acquire the right marketing skills to help your business succeed online. What you really need is to deploy marketing skills on your website to increase sales by skillfully converting your website visitors into paying customers. That is the good news. Every business you see doing great out there today was at some point a startup just like your own. 

Get your hands on it right away. Good luck!