The basics of inbound marketing

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Inbound marketing is currently the most effective way of marketing your company online. In the past, during the early days of the internet, marketing was essentially about getting the attention of potential customers and hoping for purchasing decisions made in your favor. This involved buying ads and email lists etc and then waiting to see how these converted.

Inbound marketing focuses on creating quality content that aligns with your customers interests and yours. This will bring the customer to you. Most importantly it will bring the right customers that you can more readily convert and keep happy over time.

So how do you attract these customers?

Here are four ways to get customers to your content:

Blogging

It all starts with blogging. The plan is to create high quality content that your target market will be looking for that is aligned with your products.

SEO

Search engines are how most customers will find you. A proper SEO campaign will be needed to get your pages found. The right content will also help here as it will attract organic links.

Pages

The look and feel of your website needs to be on point. The design of a website, color schemes can all play into how a visitor responds to your message and products. The better the design and more that it is aligned to the image that you want to project, the more potential sales.

Social

The great thing about the social networking era is that the best content often can be popularized without much of a history. Once they respond and share your content online, proper engagement here will be very valuable to building the right brand image.

Examples uses of SEO tools

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Article Written by : Host Edition

There are so many applications and tools available in the SEO space that it is difficult to figure out what you can do with each tool. There are several industry professionals that give a list of each tool they use. However, the problem is, none of them will tell you what you can do with each tool. Here is a list of some of the tasks you can accomplish with many of the paid SEO tools available today:

Duplicate content

Looking for duplicate content on your website, or others are as simple as using Copyscape with each of your articles. What if you had thousands of pages? Checking an entire site is one area where a tool can speed up the process and save days of work.

Redirects

It is crucial to get a handle on all the redirects of a website. One small mistake can seriously affect the ranking of other pages. Once again a tool can aggregate all that information in one place. You can establish a baseline and then compare against that to make sure that there are no unauthorized changes.

Meta tags

Meta tags are still important. Use a tool and figure out which titles and descriptions lack length or content and fix them.

Log analysis

Very few people analyze web server logs. Instead, they look at Google crawl stats. However, if you use a good log analysis tool, you will be able to spot crawl issues before it appears on the search console. You might even be able to fix the issue before the next crawl.

Optimize your video for search

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Search engine ranking and SEO are key components of the planning process that goes into the creation of a new article or blog post. When you build new pages, search engine ranking is often critical for traffic and sales. The same level of planning should go into the creation of video content. Here are some important considerations when producing video content for YouTube:

The first 15 seconds are the most important of the video. The highest bounce rates for video are from content that does not hook the audience in that timeframe. A lot of YouTube channels lose viewers and have high bounce rates because of overly-long music and intro sequences.

Create longer videos that retain viewers for most of the video. The key to avoiding a bounce for longer videos is to craft the title of the video very carefully. Watch time is one of the main factors that affect how videos rank in YouTube.

Another positive engagement signal for YouTube is action taken at the end of a video. When a viewer subscribes to the channel towards the end of a video, it shows YouTube that the content was relevant and that the visitor wants to see more.

Also, use the video thumbnail to get viewers to start watching. You can’t use your first 15 seconds to hook the viewer without an audience. The title and thumbnail are the two elements that can drive higher click-through rates.

Finally, if there is a companion webpage for the video, then embed the video, and do so above the fold.

Three easy SEO wins to boost your site rankings

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In a large and complicated field like SEO, it is easy to forget the basics and look for big wins. However, if you focus on the fundamentals, you can show immediate and tangible improvements to clients. Here are some easy SEO wins:

Broken links

Over time websites shut down, are bought over, or simply move on to other things. The problem is that unless they tell us, the links to those sites remain. The problem here is that you can end up linking to a bad-actor or even questionable material. Avoid this by running regular broken link checks and remove links as soon as the website no longer exists.

Meta tags

Meta tags no longer have any bearing on ranking or keyword, which leads a lot of optimizers and marketers to ignore the tags. However, meta tags still determine what the visitor sees on Google in the search results.

Responsive design

Another easy win is to switch to a responsive layout. Responsive design adjusts the width, height, and dimensions of the website and its elements based on the size of the window. It is not a requirement or ranking signal for desktop search but is a ranking signal for mobile search.

Internal Linking

Google looks at internal linking as an internal reference on what a page is about. If you don’t use internal links, you risk losing out on some free link equity and setting anchor texts for your pages.

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What is an Omnichannel strategy

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Research shows that companies now need to compete more and more on customer experience. The primary differentiator is now the experience and not the product. Nowhere is this strategy clearer than with Apple, whose entire premise is the superior user experience of the company’s hardware and software. One strategy of creating a compelling experience is through an omnichannel loyalty experience.

The primary purpose of an omnichannel strategy is to build a proper understanding of your customer. The only way to do that is to gather and combine data across an entire spectrum of platforms and channels. The customer will reward the brand that credits the customer for actions taken across all platforms.

The key behind this is the loyalty program. It is not practical to track the actions of the customer across all channels at once without a single unifying tracker. The loyalty program is the single thread that combines all the data.

You can now provide a customized experience for the customer wherever they shop. When they enter a physical store, they can get offers as soon as they give the loyalty card at checkout. Also, you can send personalized offers for birthdays and other occasions across multiple channels at once. Other perks are discounts, free gifts, cash-back, or free samples to reward loyalty to the brand at different points.

Competition amongst brands is fierce, and the only way to remain competitive is to build brand loyalty and keep the customer happy through a superior experience.

Google beats Amazon for product-search reach

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It isn’t too much of a stretch to assume that Amazon has an outsize role in both discovery and completion of shopping online. According to a survey run by Kenshoo, we can safely say that Amazon has a large share of online shopping discovery market.

According to the survey, shoppers consult Amazon first 56% of the time when looking for products online. That is the largest by far and is much farther ahead than any of its other rivals. However, when it comes to shopping and discovery in general, Google is ahead of Amazon, 85% to 72%. 72% is still a massive percentage of all product discovery online. The number could be far higher when you consider that some of the destinations that Google will surface in a product search will be Amazon product pages.

The numbers are consistent across other countries where both Amazon and Google operate. The only difference in the US is that Facebook takes a larger role compared to other countries.

There are some other interesting facts in the survey results:

The first is that 22% of shoppers will not look anywhere else if they find a product they want on Amazon. The online shopping giant has a frictionless ordering process, and that ease of use and the convenience of Amazon Prime make it unlikely shoppers will look elsewhere.

Even more, worrying for other online retailers is that “even if they find something that seems right on another site, they will usually look on Amazon to find alternative ideas, compare prices or gather more information before making a purchase.”

Image compression tools

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Often, most users upload images without any consideration of size or disk space. Uploading large images was not an issue until Google made page load speed a ranking factor. One of the best ways to improve both loading times and page speed is to optimize your images. Image optimization is also something that non-technical users can do with very minimal software. Here we look at several tools that you can use to optimize your post and site images.

Optimizilla

There are two advantages to using Optimizilla. The first advantage is a real-time preview that shows an approximation of how the image will look after optimization. You can use a slider to adjust the level of quality to a point you consider acceptable. Also, you can batch process up to 20 images at a time.

TinyPNG

The interface is a lot like Optimizilla and also processes 20 images in a single batch. The only difference is that you can export directly to a DropBox account.

Compressor.io

Not a great tool. It does the usual image compression but offers no batch conversion options. It is good enough if you want to convert a single image. However, when you plan to optimize an entire site, it will take too long.

Tests show that TinyPNG has the best compression ratio for roughly the same level of quality. The fact that it also processes images in batches of twenty makes it the best of the tools available for image compression.

 

Uses for keyword research

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In 2013 Google launched its Hummingbird update to the search engine’s algorithm. With the launch, Google began a transition to a focus on topics and entities from keywords. Moving towards topics and entities led to less emphasis on keyword research. However, there is still a lot of value that an organization can gain. Here are few:

Dominating a niche

Websites that serve a specific niche will find keyword research useful. There is no better way to cover every single angle of a topic than using keyword research to surface all possible permutations of each keyword phrase. There is no better tool to get topic ideas for writing exhaustive blog posts.

Answering questions

A lot of questions get ignored during keyword research due to the low search volume. However, there is still a large audience for answers to a lot of these questions, and Google does a good job of associating similar questions with an answer.

Content improvement

Use keyword research to expand the breadth and depth of your content. Do not rewrite your posts unless it requires some form of correction. Look at how people search for the same topics now and expand your posts to cover the new phrases.

Improve site navigation

The words people use to describe something can change over time. Look at how people search and change the anchor text links in your navigation to make them more relevant in this day and age. People look for words they use when describing something, if they don’t find it, they will go elsewhere.

 

How to use Chrome’s DevTools for SEO

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You can spend hundreds and thousands of dollars on tools for your SEO audits. These SEO tools will fit into your workflow and automate the bulk of your every day SEO tasks. However, if spending that kind of money is not practical, Chrome itself provides one the best tools you can use for you SEO audits. Navigate to More Tools > Developer Tools to open the DevTools panel.

You can use Chrome to check the content elements of your page, even those rendered using JavaScript. This check is useful because Google can now render and index JavaScript content.

Another useful tool is to find content that is hidden using CSS. Google does not count any hidden content and if this is a good way to find any important content that is hidden.

Using the inspect option the menu, you can verify the ALT descriptions of each of the images on the page.

Check the status of HTTP headers using the Network panel of the DevTools panel. You will see any error messages, the x-robots and other tags.

Probably the most useful tool in the list if the ability to use the Device Mode to emulate any device. You can use the device changer to emulate any type of device, like a smartphone or tablet and see how the page renders for those devices.

Everyone knows that page load speed is important now. Using Chrome you can see the page load speeds on your connection and how much each element of the page contributes to that speed, making it easy to identify the bottlenecks.

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Quick and easy SEO tactics

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When you don’t have dedicated SEO staff, it falls on either the owner or the webmaster to look after optimization. Fortunately, it does not take massive SEO campaigns to see benefits. Most businesses have done almost nothing regarding SEO, and for those, there is plenty of low hanging fruit. Here are some quick and easy tactics you can use to give your business a boost online:

Google My Business – This is something that most businesses ignore and could be a competitive advantage for those that sign up. Google My Business is where you edit the details and provide images for your business listing online. Many businesses do not even have operating hours posted online.

Update profile – If you do have a profile on Google My Business, take the time to ensure that all the information is current. Addresses, opening times, days and branding can change over time. Keep updating all the information regularly.

Google Search Console – Another wasted opportunity for those that do not use the data from the console. You can get a lot of useful data about your domain at no cost, directly from Google. Inbound links, index status, and crawl errors are just some of the data you can get about your sites and domains.

Site Speed – The loading speed of pages has a bearing on how well your pages rank. There are plenty of tools (including Google’s) that can tell you what the page load speed of your site. If you do have speed issues, you can fix them quite easily.

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