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Can You Manage Your Website’s SEO Strategy?

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Businesses need websites to promote themselves to prospective clients, and creating an effective site is a science, and indeed an industry, all its own. Whether you choose to build your own site or employ a specialist to do it for you, all your efforts will be in vain if you don’t get your website to the top of the search engine rankings. It’s hard to move on business and marketing websites for references to SEO and how important it is, but is it something you can manage yourself or is it the digital equivalent of brain surgery – best left to the experts?

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization; it simply means there are certain things you can do with your website that will result in search engines listing it closer to the top of the results list when someone searches for terms that are relevant to your business. That’s the simple part; the complication is how this is most effectively achieved. Different search engines use different algorithms (the combination of factors and how much weight is applied to each) to rank search results, and they are not inclined to transparency when it comes to providing details of their methods. Added to this, algorithms are regularly changed and updated according to a search engine’s development programs.

Tackling SEO yourself

There are some elementary steps you can take to lay the basis for a sound SEO strategy, based on some of the more static principles that algorithms take into account:

• Ensure your site has quality content and is well-written. This is a fundamental requirement, and algorithms place significant weight on the quality of your content.

• Include links to relevant, quality sites. Use sites that have the authority and high traffic for their subject area. The higher the quality and authority of your links the better your site will be rated.

• Get backlinks from other websites to your site. Again, concentrate on authoritative, popular sites. You will need to make connections with other website and blog owners, and you will need to add links to your site in exchange for them adding your link to their site.

• Use appropriate keywords in your metadata and content to highlight the relevance of your business to terms people are searching for.

It can be a time-consuming process to research where you want your site to be linked and agreeing on terms with the hosting site. There is no reason why, with time and dedication, you shouldn’t be able to accomplish this work yourself but remember to keep educating yourself about SEO methods and updates to the algorithms.

Professional SEO services.

Given the huge impact SEO has, it’s no surprise that there are a lot of companies offering marketing and SEO services. Some companies have experience and expertise that can be very effective in formulating a successful strategy. If you are contemplating this option, be sure to find a reputable company like Dymic Digital SEO, and avoid the scammers and the companies that are simply not very good at their job. If you’re contemplating this solution, do some research on the results of companies you are interested in and view their case histories. You can also consult forums and find out what other customers have thought about a company’s services.

Taking a middle path

If you have the skills, time and interest, you may want to deal with some elements of SEO yourself and leave the more complicated aspects to professionals. As long as you can work in harmony with your SEO company, this can achieve successful results. You need to be clear about what each of you is responsible for, and be open to the SEO advisers on every aspect of your strategy to ensure a good working relationship. If you have staff who are interested and capable, you could assign the best candidate to take charge of your SEO. You would need to facilitate appropriate training courses to enable them to be effective in the role and make sure they continue to develop their skills.

Assessing the success of your SEO strategy

Before you begin, whether you are doing it yourself or employing specialists, you need to know how well your website is performing. Use tools like Google Analytics to see how much traffic you’re generating, how many click-throughs and how many conversions. Once you have the figures, compare them every month to see what is improving and what isn’t, so you can adjust your strategy to aid in increasing site views and purchases or inquiries. Reviewing progress and results is a vital step, the same as with all your marketing activities, for without knowing what actions have increased sales, you can’t address any issues and find ways to fix them.

Where to go for help if it’s not working

If after repeated efforts you are still not seeing improved results, it might be time to engage a professional company. The competition for ranking position is fierce, and there are many other websites all clamoring to take the coveted page one positions. You will be at an advantage if you operate in a very focused niche because there will be far fewer relevant results to be retrieved. However, if you have a product or service with general appeal, you will be vying with hundreds or thousands of other businesses, and there are only a few who can make it to the front. If you are determined to or have no choice but to go it alone, you should at least do as much research as you can on optimizing your SEO so that you have the knowledge to make the right changes.

Don’t underestimate the power of SEO to make or break your company. Your website could be beautifully designed and full of exceptional high-quality content, but if it’s not marketed well, you’ll never get high levels of traffic visiting the site. Most people looking for products and services look to a search engine for information, and if you’re not on the first few pages (preferably page one) you’re unlikely to be seen, so give SEO the time and attention it merits.

4 Amazingly Effective SEO Strategies for Content Marketing

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When it comes to generating web traffic and online brand awareness, few methods are more effective in the long-term than search engine optimization (SEO), which is simply the practice of optimizing your website and marketing efforts to facilitate higher rankings in the search engines. Since all of those search results are linking to content, the primary driving force behind any SEO campaign is content creation/marketing. Although site owners and marketers should always aim for quality over quantity, to a degree it really is a number game. The number of posts you have online at any given time will directly affect your brand’s visibility. With that said, here are four strategies you can use to achieve expansive results in any content marketing strategy:

1. Geo-Targeting and International Marketing

Sometimes, expanding into foreign markets is all it takes to tap into an extra group of visitors that you might’ve previously overlooked. This is worthy of being mentioned first because it’s something that many marketing campaigns fail to take into account. While global brands can benefit tremendously from international marketing – click here for more information on that – local brands should also be using geo-targeting techniques to increase the amount of traffic generated in the regions where they conduct business.

2. Guest Posting and Allowing Guest Authors

Another way to get your content in front of new eyes is to volunteer to post your content on relevant blogs and sites that allow guest posts. By guest posting on high authority sites and then linking back to a page on your own site, you’re not only attracting direct referral traffic but you’re also improving your SEO stats by increasing the number of high-ranking inbound links that point to your site. Likewise, posting an open invitation for guest authors will give your site fresh new content for free.

3. Infographics, Videos, and Other Media

You could be losing a large chunk of traffic by not producing and promoting infographics, videos, GIFs, sideshows, reports, presentations, and other forms of media content. Infographics can spread like wildfire if they contain a number unique and useful statistics, as they tend to be linked back to as resources by bloggers.

4. Focus on the Social Networking Side of the Coin

Finally, staying active on social media is a duty that no brand should neglect, especially if you’re trying to promote content to generate additional traffic and awareness. Having a post go viral on a site like Facebook or Twitter is a great way to build massive momentum and dozens of strong inbound links in a matter of days.

Content Marketing Has become the Crux of SEO

Not too long ago, SEO was ridden with sneaky, short-sighted tactics that often involved nothing more than seeking out random links from sites that match a set of criteria. However, in recent years search engines like Google have evolved past a purely metrics-based approach and are now able to more accurately discern what quality content reads and performs like. Since the goal of the search engine is to provide links to the most relevant content, it was only a matter of time before content quality became the core issue in SEO, so take note and adapt your SEO efforts to follow suit.

Top Marketing Strategies that Really Work

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article
Paying per click to Google isn’t how you make money. It isn’t how you make new, organic hits, and it isn’t how you make sales. Instead, it’s how you pay for a click. There is no guarantee how long that person stays there, whether it was a bot, or even a real person. When you market, especially as a small business, you need to be smart. You need to ensure that you are getting the right message out to the right people. You need to use these five marketing strategies that really work, instead of paying for ones that make every sale an uphill battle:

1. Improve Your SEO

The whole point of pay-per-click advertising is that it takes your listing to the top of the SERPs. This means you can cut out all the hard work and be the first result that someone sees when they search for a keyword you have chosen. The other way to get to the top spot is to improve your on-site and off-site SEO. There are many different methods and strategies for improving your SEO, and they continuously change as Google rolls out new and improved programs to fight against spam and to improve the quality of their links. Focus on improving your SEO, and you will be ranked more highly on relevant searches, without paying for everyone who clicks on your site.

Once you reach the coveted #1 spot, you’ll have organic hits coming in for years.

2. Social Media Marketing, With Emphasis on Social

Using bots and buying followers is a thing of the past. Not only is it pointless regarding your sales, but it can also make you look like spam. Instead, work on building up real relationships and real connections. Post great content that is shared and interacted with. Communicate not only with those who comment and message you, but to also engage with the community at large. The more genuine and real you seem, the better. Having a few repeat customers is better than battling it out for every new sale, and the same is true for your social communities. Real relationships will lead to sales; fake ones will make you look like spam, so work on improving your social media marketing strategy.

3. Daily Marketing with a One-Time Cost

The more people see a name and a brand, the more they learn to trust it. When you work in a neighborhood or small-town marketing by wrapping your vehicle will pay off greatly. Neighbors will see their neighbors use your service, and will call you up themselves. Similarly, just seeing your name over and over again will help them remember you, and trust you.

Start today by picking up some great used cars for sale, create the branding and the car wrap, and benefit from marketing yourself while you work. Create a few yard signs as well so that after you are done with a project, you can market your services on your client’s lawn (with their permission, of course).

Marketing is all about making connections. It is about creating relationships with your customers, even if they never see you in person. Use these proven marketing strategies, and benefit from the increased sales and repeat customers.

Four Tips on Hiring an SEO Agency for Your Startup

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article
In today’s business market, online brand visibility is key to getting your new start-up off the ground. No matter what type of products or services you are selling, the type of audience that you are reaching out to or your goals for your business future, it’s important to have a strong online presence in order to reach success. A strong visibility in search engines and the ability to showcase your expertise and knowledge about your industry online is key to building your customer base and improving customer retention and sales. One of the first steps towards building a strong online presence is search engine optimisation; search engines are one of the first places that customers will go when they are trying to find a brand like yours.

We’ve put together some top tips to help you choose the right SEO agency for the job.

Tip #1. Ask for Recommendations:

As a business owner, you probably spend some time networking and building relationships with other business owners and influential, experienced individuals in your industry. One of the best ways to find a good SEO agency is to simply ask around within your business circles for recommendations – chances are that you know somebody who’s hired an SEO agency before, and will be able to point you in their direction if they were satisfied with their work and believe they’d be a good choice for your needs.

Tip #2. Check Out Portfolios:

Before you make a final decision on an SEO agency, it’s important to take a look at their portfolio of past work to determine whether they are offering the kind of things that you are after. Most good SEO agencies, will display a portfolio that prospective new clients can easily access to get an idea of the kind of work that they do on a regular basis. Take the Lexel SEO agency in London as an example. They have a section on their site dedicated to case studies which their audience can browse through. This is something you should be looking out for whenever you visit an SEO agency’s website.

It’s also a good idea to look at how well any prospective agencies have been doing their own SEO; are they high up in search engine rankings themselves?

Tip #3. Understand What You Need:

When choosing an SEO agency for your business, it’s important to have a list of needs and requirements in mind to ensure that you make the right decision. For example, if you run a smaller, local business, then you’re going to prefer an SEO agency that specialises in conducting local SEO and improving your brand’s visibility within your local area.

Tip #4. Conduct a Background Check:

Finally, once you have determined a few SEO agencies that seem like a good fit for your needs, it’s a good idea to take a closer look into them. One of the best ways of doing this is to get information from past clients regarding their experiences with the company. You can often do this by simply searching for online reviews – third-party websites are the best place to look since you’ll often find more honest and reliable reviews there.

Did you find these tips helpful? We’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Off-Site SEO: Maximising Your Search Potential

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The world of web design is a complicated and often confusing one. Most companies will have a professional to handle their development, along with someone to handle their marketing. But, out of all of this, most businesses will need help with SEO most of all. It’s likely that this aspect of your website is already handled for you. But, this doesn’t mean that you’re doing everything you can. There’s a lot of work you can do off-site which will make a huge difference to the search rankings your pages are given. To help you with this, this page will be covering some of the ways you can achieve this goal.

StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article
Photo courtesy of Pexels

Backlinks

Over the years, search engines like Google have had to make their algorithms more and more complicated. This is the unfortunate result of people taking advantage of older methods to get their sites into unrelated searches. As a part of this, search engines like to make sure that your website is trustworthy before they display it to their users. Having links from other sites going to your own website will help to do this, as it shows that you are significant to them in some way. Building a backlink strategy that works will take some time, and you might need some help along the way. Thankfully, there are loads of resources available across the web to help you out.

Social Media

Social media has had a huge impact on the way that people live their lives over the last few years. Of course, though, on their own, they probably won’t do much for your SEO. Using a tool like this, you have the chance to spread loads of backlinks which will come from a reputable site. Along with this, having people visit your site from social media will be very likely to increase your website’s viewership. This will help to improve the ranking of your pages, as search engines will see that your site is popular.

Google Search Console

There are loads of tools out there to help you with SEO, and a lot of them are completely free to use. Google’s Search Console is a great example of this, and a must for any website looking to get good rankings. Using this sort of tool, you can have search engines re-index your pages as you make changes and improvements. Along with this, you can get detailed data and information about your keyword success. Using this data, you can start to make easy improvements to the SEO on your site, as well as being able to make sure your efforts are successful.

StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article
Photo courtesy of Pexels

The Benefits

Doing this sort of work is almost guaranteed to have a positive impact on your website. Along with increasing the amount of hits your site gets, it will also increase the chances of people buying from you. People trust websites with higher search rankings, and will rarely go onto the second page of a search engine. To stand out from the crowd, you have to make sure you’re at the top.

Hopefully, this post will inspire you to start working harder on your off-site SEO. A lot of business will ignore this sort of work, assuming that their current standing will last forever. It’s important to keep improving this area, though. Otherwise, search engines will stop favoring your website.