4 Awesome SEO Tips for Small Businesses

Every ambitious digital marketer always wants traffic. Most marketers work real hard daily to try to get this traffic. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one viable technique marketers rely on to attract organic traffic to their business websites. With a good SEO in place, search engines tend to send more organic traffic to such websites. This happens because more and more consumers are increasingly resorting to search engines particularly Google to search for information about products/services online. Marketers resort to SEO to cash in on these searches. This is why SEO has become one of the most important digital marketing techniques marketers rely on to get organic traffic. Technically, SEO is simply the process of increasing a website’s search ranking using on-site optimization and keyword-rich content. So, if you are looking to boost your website’s search ranking on Google search results via SEO, these here tips are very handy. They are all things you can do on your website to make it more SEO compliant.

1. Improve Page Loading Speed

Search engines usually consider user experience in their rankings. The faster a webpage loads the higher they rate a website in terms of quality. Google in particular takes page speed into consideration when ranking a website. If you tinker with the sizes of images and graphics on your website as well as the linking system, it affects the loading speed. Technically, marketers also use a practice of delaying load of resources or objects on the website until they’re actually needed. Doing so helps to save system resources and improves page speed.
 
2. Create Specially Dedicated Landing Pages

On your website, you can develop a dedicated landing page for each product/service that you want to promote. On each of such pages, you can include relevant keywords, such as the product name and category, in the title tags. That helps search engines to easily crawl and rank the page appropriately as related to each product/service you are promoting.

3. Include Relevant Keywords in Title Tags

Title tags specify the title of a webpage and identify them to search engines. This allows Google in particular to use a webpage’s title tags to really understand the page contents. It will therefore display the webpage accordingly in its SERPs. It is hugely important therefore for your webpages to include relevant keywords that are closely related to the product/service that’s shown on the webpage. This helps the webpage to appear on relevant search results of Google’s SERPs.

4. Acquire Quality Backlinks

Backlinks also help search engines to rank websites. This is why marketers deliberately acquire backlinks to their websites. Not just all types of backlinks, but quality backlinks. The quality of the website a backlink is from determines the quality of the backlink. For this reason, the number of quality backlinks to a website is one of the important components of SEO. They directly help its ranking. The number of quality backlinks a website earns gives search engines the right signals that indicate a website’s credibility and authority. Here is how it works. If for instance a reputable news, research or university website or a business organization links to your website via an article or blog post, Google will interpret that as a boost to your website’s credibility. Because backlinks are identified by search engines as incoming hyperlinks from one webpage to another webpage, when for instance a reputable online newspaper links to your website via a news article or blog post, the link is interpreted by search engines as a quality and authoritative backlink for your website. It thus helps the ranking of your website on the SERPs of the search engine.

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.

Best Places to Find Guest Blogging Opportunities Online

If you are a content marketer, the words guest blogging cannot be strange to you. Content marketers and bloggers guest blog to get backlinks and traffic to their websites. They need relevant and high quality content to communicate and enhance their websites and brands with good traffic. Every online business owner or marketer needs good traffic on their websites. Guest blogging/guest posting blogs stands out as one of the best ways to get this traffic. Guest blogging tends to compliment the direct blogs on your own business website. Where to guest blog to get the best results can at times be hugely challenging. Online, if you search well, you will find many online platforms providing guest post services. But, finding a great guest blog opportunity poses some challenges which most content marketers must have to grapple with if they are desirous to get the real benefits of guest blogging. Following are great places to find the best guest blogging opportunities on the internet.

Reputable and Authoritative Blogs

The reason you need to guest blog in reputable and authoritative blogs is rather obvious. It is because of the traffic such blogs already attract. There are many websites on the internet already having good traffic to help you find the best guest blogging opportunities for your own website. But, before settling to guest blog on any website, you must first be sure their blogging niche and their content are similar to yours. That is where you are likely to have competitive advantage as a guest blogger. Most importantly, you’ll also have to consider whether or not they’ll accept guest posting and on what terms and conditions. If they accept your guest posts, as well as allowing you to add backlinks to your website on your content, it is good for you. You can directly mail them your blog posts or write some useful comments below their posts with the relevant backlinks. That is about the only way you can take full advantage of the good traffic the authoritative blog is already having. If you habitually visit reputable and authoritative websites, you will be able to find the best guest posting opportunity with time.

On Social media

These days, social media is where nearly everyone is at 24/7 around the world. With over 4.5 billion active users, social media is one of the best platforms to push anything you want on the internet. Among the very popular social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and the likes, you can simply make a blog post and you will get massive reactions to your post. These social media platforms have a handful of features and in-house tools to find every bit of information you need and to enhance guest blogging. Through these platforms, you can search for and locate guest bloggers and websites that need writers to find the best opportunity. You can take your time to try your hands on different social media platforms to find some of the best guest blogging deals there are. One great advantage with social media is that most people who use the platforms love to find guest blogging opportunities from those already connected. Therefore, if you understand the awesome power of social media well enough and use it in the right way; you’ll derive great benefits from guest blogging on the platforms.

Forum Communities

The internet houses many forums and communities where people interact and exchange ideas freely. Out there, you will find many online platforms providing guest post services as well as allowing you to be in touch with many great guest writers. On these platforms, if you like, you can even buy guest posts according to your requirements. For usefulness, the only care you need to take in doing this is to be sure the posts are relevant to your content or niche industry. Also, after making sure the platforms are reputable and they rank highly on Google SERPs, you are good to go as a guest blogger.

Through Search Engines

On search engines you can practically search for and find anything you need online. All you need do is to just type a related keyword on your computer search console and pronto a search engine like Google will provide you with all possible information in a matter of seconds. Through search engines, you can diligently search for websites whose contents are similar to yours particularly if in the same niche industry. Search engines will help you to find high-ranking websites more efficiently to enable you get the best guest posting opportunity. You can then reach out to such websites to find out if they accept guest blogging. In addition you can start emailing them or commenting on their relevant posts. By commenting regularly on their posts, you’ll manage to create a strong relationship between you and them. Such relationship is usually very good for business. Your real challenge however is to get the proper knowledge of how to search on the search engines in the right way. If you can for instance search Google in the right way, the search engine will find you the right results that suit your guest blogging needs.

Effective Marketing Tips, Tricks, and Techniques that Yield Good Results

Marketing is the technique brands use to promote their products and/or services. It involves deliberate actions to make others aware of the products/services you are selling. Marketing activities could be general or deliberately targeted. What is common to both is that they are designed to attract leads and customers. Online, digital marketing has proven to be the most effective form of marketing. Traditional marketing, mostly offline compliments it effectively for marketers. Below are some of the most preferred techniques by marketers.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a marketing technique of partnering with product merchants to help sell their products while the affiliate earns commissions from the sales. Typically, affiliates promote these products or services on their blog, website, and/or social media channels. Affiliate marketing is one great way product merchants can leverage on the reach and promotional abilities of affiliates to market their products/services with minimal efforts. By this arrangement, every time a product is purchased through an affiliate link, the affiliate earns a commission as per agreed percentages.

Social Media Marketing, SMM

Since nearly everyone is on social media 24/7 worldwide, marketing through social media is now hugely important for digital marketers. With billions of social media users worldwide, getting out marketing messages through social media has become a great opportunity for brands to effectively market and attract leads, customers and even sales. Marketing is very easy on social media platforms because of their huge popularity and ease of sharing information. So, getting a free account for your brand on any or all the popular social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook Instagram, TikTok and Pinterest and marketing through them can be highly beneficial for your brand.
 
Digital Marketing Strategies

Digital marketing is a very effective online marketing strategy if you know what you are doing. The reason is simple. Because of the peculiarities of the Internet, the enabling environment for digital marketing is enhanced. Through the Internet, marketing messages manage to reach the widest audience possible by simply pressing a computer button. With it come good technological advances such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) that allows marketing to become more specifically targeted, automated and effective.

Traditional Marketing

If your target market consists of those who prefer to stay offline and read newspapers, traditional marketing is effective too if your marketing budget can accommodate the cost. Because there are still people out there who appreciate reading newspapers, watching local television channels, and listening to local radio stations, advertising your business through Newspaper articles, TV and radio commercials, and fliers are still very effective forms of marketing. In fact, traditional forms of marketing are at times your best bet if your target market is your local community. 

    
Brand Marketing

You must know how to market your brand well no matter the size of your business. This is because for marketing purposes, your brand is what helps people to easily identify your business. For this reason, you must pay keen attention to some rather seemingly intangible business things like your business name, business colors, logo, motto/mission statement, and why you are in business. These are the things that remain in the subconscious minds of your customers and potential customers that are helpful for your brand identity and recognition.  They help people to think about your business in a certain way directly related to your brand identity. Take your business logo for instance. One of the best ways to market your brand is through your business logo. The reason your brand logo must be unique and easy to identify and relate with to be useful. It is very effective marketing if you display your logo in promotional items like Face caps, T-shirts, blankets, handkerchiefs, napkins, table mats, coffee mugs, key chains or some other simple items people like to use or carry around.
 
Email Marketing, EMM

Email marketing may be old school but it is still a very effective form of digital marketing. Building a credible email list may be challenging but once in place it becomes a hugely valuable marketing asset. The larger this list, the more effective for marketing. If the list is segmented, so much the better! Once you settle for a marketing message, decide the recipients and press send. The message instantly goes to the inboxes of your recipients. Simple!

Search Engine Marketing

For search engine marketing to be effective, your business website needs Search Engine Optimization, SEO. That helps search engines to discover and rank your business/brand/products online. If your brand ranks high in their SERPs, it benefits from organic traffic which search engines send to it. For your business to benefit, you must use the right SEO techniques on your website/blog. SEO techniques involve the deft use of keywords on your website/blog to help your business rank higher in search results particularly on Google, the largest of them all.

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.

How to Improve Your Small Business Website Design

If you want your business website to excel, it must have a design that feeds your website user experience, functionality and appropriately complements your content. This encompasses its fast loading speed, easy accessibility, aesthetics, layout and easy navigation. Professional webmasters can help you design a business website if you are unable to do it yourself to meet these standards. A high-performing content on a well-designed website helps to guarantee exceptional user experience. For this reason, no matter how awesome your content is, it risks getting unnoticed on the web if it lacks a good design, layout, and navigation.

Here are a few things you can pay good attention to if you want to improve on your website design for better performance.

Make a Plan

If you resolve to improve your website design, you must have identified issues with it you plan to resolve. First is to sit back and create a plan detailing how you’re going to deal with these issues. Many of these issues have to do with how customers relate with and interact with your website. Map your customer journey on your website and put plans in place to improve the pages they are viewing, time they spend on the site, content they prefer to read and what offers they’re going to convert on. This is the knowledge you need to help you decide who really your customers are and how you can sell them.

Organize Your Website Navigation

How easy it is for customers to navigate your website hugely helps its conversion efficiency. Essentially, great landing page, site maps and internal links help customers to quickly access what they are looking for on your website. They help users to easily dive deeper into very important areas of the site like what your business is about, your services/products, blog content, pricing, promos, discounts, etc. You can greatly enhance the navigation of your website by avoiding poor design practices, such as overloading your navigation with vague or confusing hypertext. These together with lack of proper organization can greatly hamper your website visitors from easily finding where they want to go and what they want. To enhance customers user experience on your website, you must pay good attention to how easy it to navigate the site.

Make Your CTA Conspicuous

Your call-to-action CTA buttons must be conspicuous on your website to ensure no visitor fails to notice them. CTAs help to guide your visitors to places on your website that will help them convert. What exactly are these conspicuous places? Marketing experts recommend the first column of your navigation, which is one of the most popular places for CTAs to be put. You can position these CTAs to link to a free guide where visitors can learn more under sections needing action and at the bottom of your website pages. That can be great for conversions.

Showcase Product Reviews

Customers experience with products helps others to make their buy decisions. That experience comes by way of product reviews which you can showcase on your website and around the products you are selling. Most buyers gain more confidence by merely looking at these reviews. If they see a product which others say it does what it promises to do, it prompts buyers to buy it. How marketers showcase reviews depends on the products they are marketing and the versatility of their business websites. It could be in form of texts or videos even though video testimonials are generally more effective because of their captivating visual content. Naturally, media tends to hold users’ attention longer and establishes a stronger human connection because people hear voices and see real people’s faces real time.

Don’t Ignore Sitemaps

Sitemaps on a website help its navigation and generally enhance user experience. It is these maps that display the main places that users can visit and to dive deeper into areas where your products and prices are displayed. The aim is to help direct new and returning customers to key areas of your website where they can convert. What really matters therefore is to improve your website with sitemaps in such a way that with just one click, users can easily access these key and important places in your website where they can do business with you.

Optimize the Website for Mobile Devices

As at today, you risk losing out from a huge percentage of web traffic if your website is not optimized for mobile. A good way around that is to make sure your site performs well on mobile devices and larger displays because from Google reports, about 80% of web users now access the web from mobile devices like smartphones. As a marketer, that is one huge chunk of traffic you cannot afford lose out of. Many more people are now doing business online any and everywhere and on the go. Their main gadgets of choice are smartphones.

Minimize Browsing Distractions

Browsing distractions as the name implies are time-wasting for web users. Therefore, on your website, you must do away with any elements that can distract users. Some of such elements are complicated animations, overly long content and chunky/gaudy website images/gifs. The attention span of most web users is notoriously short. So, what you want your visitors to see should be easily visible to them short of unhelpful distractions. All you want is to avoid anything that creates distraction or visual confusion for users trying to convert. If you are not getting conversions, your business struggles.

Make Product Prices Easy to Find

This is inevitable because it is products you want to sell anyway. If buyers cannot access your products and their prices easily, they quit your site and look elsewhere. If buyers spend quality time finding your products and they are required to spend more time looking for the prices, you risk losing such buyers to your competition. Online shoppers are notoriously hasty as most marketers very well know. To avoid frustrating buyers and risk losing them to your completion, be sure your products and their prices are easy for them to find on your website.

Use the Right Stock Images

When choosing stock images to use, strive to avoid the cheesy and poorly lit stock photos that are common on the internet. Buyers are very smart people and many are everywhere online. Many recognize cheap and common stock photos when they see them. Some of such photos that are well choreographed with fake and exaggerated smiles won’t help your business. They affect the credibility of your business if many other websites feature the same images. Users subconsciously project their negative experiences onto these stock photos, reducing confidence and adding friction to the conversion process. If convenient, try to use original photos on your website. You don’t need too much expertise to do this. These days, even smartphones can give you good photos you can use on your website.