What’s the Buzz?

Good blog content is current, it’s relevant to what’s going on in the world and specifically your industry.  Staying up to date on the trends emerging in your area of expertise as well as topics people are talking about is key in brainstorming content ideas that would do well on the world wide web. A great way to do this is to set up Google alerts and enable notifications across your social media platforms and forums. You can find inspiration for content topics in the unlikeliest places, especially if you give it a creative spin to make it relevant to your business and help it stand out in the midst of all the news people are bombarded with every day. If you are passionate about the topic and you enjoy writing the piece, readers will be able to tell and are more likely to return for more content.

Research Keywords

An interesting topic isn’t enough, though. Writing good blog content means producing good work. Anyone can write words, but you need the right words, a voice, and a point of view. Writing good blog content involves the strategic use of appropriate SEO keywords in order for major search engines to find your blog and rank it higher so people can find it. The experts of an SEO agency are masters at developing a content strategy the incorporates valuable keywords to ensure that articles and blogs are “fit to be found.” Keywords and interlinking go hand in hand as well. You want to make sure that the anchor text, or the keywords used to link to another page on the site, are relevant to the page you are linking to so Google can identify what that page is about and increase the ranking. If you want to learn more about keywords, check out the beginner’s guide to choosing keywords to help you get started.

Write Creative Headlines

A good blog post will have a compelling headline or an H1 tag. You want to use relevant and intuitive keywords you’ve researched in the title of your blog. Have fun with the title, but make sure it’s still informative. A straightforward title isn’t necessarily bad, but a clever title is more likely to spark someone’s interest and will make them more inclined to read the blog or article. The creative title attracts human interest and using keywords in the title attracts Google because it will know that the blog is relevant to a person’s search query.

Stay Committed

It can be a challenge to start writing good blog content and generate leads in the beginning. The best advice is to stick to it, check your analytics to see which pages are performing well and others that aren’t, and hone your content strategy. An SEO strategy to increase traffic to your site is like a garden that requires proper care, maintenance, and patience in order for it to grow and flourish. If you commit to your blog and adjust your tactics, your website will grow over time as well. Just remember blogs can be either formal or informal depending on the topic and your goals for the site; they come in so many varieties. Although we do recommend making your blog at least 250 words, check out competitors who are ranking higher than you and note the features in their content that boost their rankings. If you write a 250-word blog while a similar blog ranking on page 1 of the SERPs has a word count of 750 and features beautiful images, you might want to consider changing your strategy.

Shape up your business online with the SEO Diet and start developing a good blog content strategy to entice readers to your site.

Sources:

SEO Diet – Chapter 18: Blogs – Join the Conversation

Infographic added on June 30, 2020.

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How Google Analytics Work

Before we can understand how Google Analytics can improve business, we must know how Analytics works as a system. According to Google Analytics, they work with a JavaScript code embedded in the pages on your website. Once users visit your website and view a page, the JavaScript code references a JavaScript file which then executes a tracking operation for Analytics.¹ 

Understand the Analytic Information

According to the SEO Diet, web analytics programs let you track several things that will help you see what is going on with your business. You do not have to be a math wizard or have a degree to understand the numbers shown. Once you take a closer look into the analytical system in Google you can check the data for the day, the month, and the year to see where the site is doing well and where the site is struggling.  By showing the drops and increases in traffic, you can narrow down potential issues and focus your efforts to improve those pages or areas on your site that aren’t doing well. You can make changes to your website and determine if you want to improve your user experience or reach out to an SEO agency that can help organically improve a site’s analytics.

Create an SEO Strategy

An SEO strategy that tries a variety of tactics can be advantageous for your business. An SEO agency will be able to look at analytics for you on a monthly or even weekly basis. This will save you time trying to understand the whole analytical approach and what these numbers truly mean.

When creating a strategy, one thing an SEO agency will pay attention to is the bounce rate. It is a percentage of the number of visits where the user leaves the site without browsing any other page on that website, so ideally this number should be low. If a person is leaving the main page without exploring the site further, perhaps you may need to optimize the page with better keywords or include more interlinking.

Analytics can improve businesses in more ways than one, but you must have good idea of how to use that knowledge or hire a team of experts to implement effective tactics. You can learn more about what analytics can do for your business by grabbing a copy of the SEO Diet book here.

Sources:

Google – Tracking Code Overview

SEO Diet – Chapter 31: Testing and Tracking

Related Reading:

How to Do SEO

The post How Analytics Can Improve Business appeared first on The SEO Diet.

The Benefits of a Google My Business Listing

When someone searches for your business on Google, the information that’s used in the setup of your GMB profile is pulled from your GMB page and shown in the search results. There are several reasons why your business can benefit from a GMB listing.

• Visibility in SERPs. Your information will populate in relevant search queries.
• Visibility in Google Maps. Localized searches will place your business on Google maps, which will allow people to find the location of your business, as well as directions to it.
• Business Information Consistency. As the owner of your GMB listing, you can update and share your correct business information and update it as needed. If your phone number or hours have changed, you can change it in your GMB listing and it will reflect almost instantly.
• Review Management. You can communicate with people who review your business by being able to respond to negative reviews or thanking the customers who have praised you.

Verifying Your Google My Business Listing

To be able to manage your business listing, you have to verify it first. The verification process helps Google make sure that the right person has the access to edit the information. You cannot update the information on your business listing until you’ve completed the verification process.

You can verify your GMB listing by:

• Postcard
• Phone
• Email
• Instant verification

If you need additional help with verifying your GMB listing, you can visit the Google My Business Help page.

Updating Your Google My Business Listing

Be sure to update and complete your GMB as much as possible, including the interior and exterior photos of your business.¹ You want all the information portrayed on your listing to be up-to-date and accurate. You should also be responding to reviews on a regular basis, whether they’re positive or negative reviews. This not only exhibits your engagement with customers, but it also serves to improve customer experience with your business.

If you want more local SEO secrets and SEO tips that are sure to improve the organic rankings of your website, get the SEO Diet book and start working on your SEO strategy today.

Sources

1. Laratro, J. (2018) SEO Diet – Chapter 7: Submitting Your Site. Fort Lauderdale, Florida

The post Why You Should Have a Google My Business Listing appeared first on The SEO Diet.

What Is an SSL Certificate?

SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer. To find out if a website has an SSL certificate, look at the address bar and see if the website starts with HTTPS – the “S” means that the connection is secure. While that S should be in the URL of every website you come across, you should definitely ensure it is on any site that asks for personal data.

What Does an SSL Certificate Do?

SSL is the standard security technology used to establish an encrypted link between a web server and a browser. This link ensures that all data passed between the web server and browsers remain integral.¹ Not only does an SSL protect transactions being made on your site and keeps customer information private, but it also helps you build trust with your customers and search engines like Google.

Do SSL Certificates Affect SEO Rankings?

As talked about in Chapter 1 of the SEO Diet book, Google started giving a boost to the websites that purchased an SSL certificate and switched their site to HTTPS in 2017.² Thus, Google has made the push to encourage a safer internet. In July of 2018, Google’s Chrome browser began marking all websites that have not migrated to HTTPS as “not secure.”³ That being said, this encryption is counted as one of the hundreds of factors to boost search engine rankings of a website.

Check out the SEO Diet for more information on SSL, ranking factors, or other SEO secrets.

Sources

1. ServerGuy – Why Google is Forcing You to Have SSL Certificates on Your Websites
2. Chapter 1: Website Design Choices and Their Impact on Traffic – Joe Laratro – SEO Diet  
3. Chromium Blog – A secure web is here to stay

Updated on April 2, 2020

The post Why You Need an SSL Certificate appeared first on The SEO Diet.

As Google says themselves, “You want the answer, not billions of webpages, so Google ranking systems sort through the hundreds of billions of webpages in our Search Index to give you useful and relevant results in a fraction of a second.”¹ Search engine algorithms are the who, what, where, when, and why of search engine rankings.

To put it simply, a search engine algorithm is a set of rules that the search engine uses to determine the significance of webpage. By significance, we mean whether or not the page provides useful information in regards to the relevancy of the searcher’s query.

There are two major search engines: Google and Bing. While there are many other smaller and more specialized search engines, there are a few things that all search engines have in common: relevancy. Search engines want to show users the most relevant content possible.

How Does Google’s Algorithm Work?

Google uses several different factors in determining whether or not a webpage is useful for your query:¹

• Analyzing your words
• Matching your search
• Ranking useful pages
• Considering context
• Returning the best results

Google favors informative sites. Their algorithm consists of finding websites that read naturally and also convey useful information. When it comes to SEO and ranking strategies, you may think that if you use a keyword plenty of times that Google will find your page and include it in the SERPs. However, this tactic could backfire. Overusing a keyword or phrase can signal to Google that you’re trying to manipulate the algorithm, rather than provide good content.²

Google uses hundreds of different factors to return the best content on the web from your fingertips to your search results, so their algorithms avoids returning sites that provide poor user experience or may identify as spam.

How You Can Get Better Rankings on Google

While there is no one-strategy-fits-all approach, you can always keep some things in mind to help you speak to Google’s algorithms and get better rankings.

1. Make pages for users, not for search engines.
2. Make a site that’s easy to navigate.
3. Create useful content, such as pages that are clear and accurate.
4. Use meta data such as title tags, header tags, meta descriptions, and alt tags.
5. Continue to produce fresh quality content.

For more information regarding search engine optimization and how to obtain organic results, check out the #1 SEO book, SEO Diet, written by Joe Laratro. Learn how to shape up your business online by one of the leading experts in the search engine marketing industry today.

Sources

1. Google – How Search Algorithms Work
2. Introduction – Joe Laratro – SEO Diet

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