Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category

How Google Decides What Your Search Rank Is

The most important part of creating a winning digital marketing strategy is to understand how Google ranks websites and determines your own website’s ranking.

Why is this important?

SEO (search engine optimization) is the foundation of a successful inbound marketing campaign! As a business owner, blogger, or marketer, you should want your website to rank as high as possible!

If your website is not appearing on the first page of search results, you could be missing out on valuable traffic. The easier it is for your target audience to access your site, the more likely you could be bringing in sales for your product or service!

Why Google’s Search Rank Is Important

Regardless of the type of business you own, you should care about optimizing your site. Your search rank is important for your business’ success.

If a potential customer types in the services they need and your site doesn’t pop up as a top result, that means your SEO may need some help! You could be missing out on traffic that could be converting.

Which search engine should you optimize your site for? The answer is evident – Google. Google owns over 86 percent of the overall search market!

As a clear leader, Google’s guidelines are important to follow. While there are other search engines out there such as Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Baidu, Google dominates.

How Google Ranks Websites

While the depths of the Google algorithm are unknown to the general public, you don’t have to be left scratching your head in frustration. Several aspects are known and should be considered when crafting content for your site.

The first thing to know about the ranking system is that it depends heavily on the user. Google’s algorithm aims to answer problems for the user in the most efficient, relevant, and quickest way possible.

Their metrics for ranking consider the users’ wants above all else, including ads and links.

Google Ranks Websites Due to User Intent

Google tries to produce the most relevant answer to the search inquiry. But, most searchers have many intents. To solve this issue, Google will show links to websites with the most popular user intents first.

For example, if you search for “jaguar,” the first result is Jaguar USA, an automotive company that produces luxury cars. While you may have specifically attempted to look up “jaguar,” the animal, most people are searching for the car.

Thus, Google recognizes that and bumps Jaquar USA to the top of the search results. If you scroll down the page, “jaguar” in reference to the animal, is ranked lower. This example represents user intent.

Another example is “apple.” If you type “apple” into Google, the first result is Apple Inc., the technology company, not the fruit.

Most users are looking for Jaguar, the automobile company, or Apple Inc., not their animal or the fruit counterparts. Clearly, it is evident users ultimately influence how Google ranks websites.

How Backlinks Impact How Google Ranks Websites

Backlinks are often key to any digital marketer’s SEO strategy. Backlinks connect one website page to another site.

Major search engines work simply – they count backlinks as “votes” for your page. Pages with a higher number of backlinks have more “votes.” The more “votes” for a page equate to a higher organic ranking!

The more high-quality backlinks a site contains, the more credible the site looks to Google. Some even argue that backlinks are Google’s #1 most important ranking factor above user intent!

As experts in the digital marketing industry, our team at Elevare understands the importance of a powerful SEO strategy. We offer a variety of traditional marketing and digital marketing strategies. Check out our tricks for crafting a powerful digital media strategy by using backlinks here, and some helpful tips for curating your own guide to SEO.

The More Time Spent, The Higher The Rating

The next major factor that plays a role in your site’s ranking is the time spent on the website.

Websites with a higher than average “time-on-site” metric often rank higher in Google’s search results. “Time on-site” is also referred to as “Dwell Time,” according to some experts.

This is important to Google as they want customers to stay engaged as long as possible. If people are spending lots of time on your site, then, it must mean they are finding the content valuable. They are learning, reading, and enjoying your content. In other words, it signifies people find your content valuable.

Google rewards sites that keep their customers on the website the longest! Google sees “time on site” as a positive ranking factor and will push sites with lengthier “on-site” times to a higher spot in search results.

This brings us to another factor Google weighs – CTR (click-through rate). We know that Google considers CTR heavily in their paid search quality score. It’s important to note the paid algorithm is different than organic search. However, CTR should be taken into consideration. The bottom line remains – relevant results drive more clicks.

Can You Buy Your Way To The First Page?

Determining the right SEO strategy can be intimidating, especially for new business owners! Yet, the only way to sidestep organic traffic is through PPC (Pay-Per-Click) results. PPC results are paid-for positions companies can buy through Google’s bidding platform.

These sites often appear at the top of the search results, but not due to their fantastic SEO practices. You may be wondering why, if you can pay to appear first in the search results, would you not buy 1st place? Well, site owners pay for every click!

The top spot in the search results goes to the highest bidder, and this can get pricey fast. Being at the top could equal a huge pay-off, but for many, the price is just too high.

If you can’t afford to pay for the top result, what is your next step?

We have some good news for you. Organic search is the primary source of a website’s traffic! By optimizing your site, you can rank on the first page of Google without paying a high price.

So, What Should You Do?

As you craft your online marketing strategy, focus on the factors Google values most important: user intent, backlinks, dwell time, and CTR. These factors combine to create Google’s ranking system.

Google wants to provide searchers with the most relevant and valuable results. If your inbound and digital marketing strategy is not up-to-par, this could be negatively impacting your site’s ranking and costing you valuable sales opportunities.

To solve this issue, we created a free resource to help you check your marketing strategy. If your site is not ranking on the first page of the search results, your current digital marketing strategy may be lacking in more ways than one.

Use our free Ultimate Guide to Marketing Cheat Sheet to test the effectiveness of your marketing strategies. This guide will help you determine if your content marketing, social media marketing, and inbound marketing strategies are doing their job! Download your Ultimate Cheat Sheet here.

Driving more traffic to your website and boosting your ranking in search results is important!

Here at Elevare, we have a proven track record. Let us help you bring your site up in Google’s search results. Experienced in providing clients with powerful digital marketing strategies, our marketing team has helped boost websites significantly in search results!

Why Your Webpage Is Not Getting Traffic

Have you spent a lot of time, money, and effort creating a killer website? Does your site have a high bounce rate? Are you trying your best to attract visitors, but not seeing any results? Are you wondering why your website isn’t getting the traffic it deserves?

Some may think the answer is to buy more advertising.

But, many businesses don’t have the budget for that and want to utilize their organic search potential.

There are several reasons your website may not be driving large amounts of traffic. You are most likely making simple mistakes that have added up.

In this post, we will dive into the most common reasons you may not be getting site traffic. We will also share a few tips for maximizing your site.

Test Your Website’s Traffic: Use E-A-T

Your web design may be beautiful, but your content may not be what Google wants.

Start by analyzing your site’s content using E-A-T. E-A-T stands for expertise, authority, and trustworthiness and can have a big impact on Google’s algorithm.

While the depths of the Google algorithm for ranking sites are unknown, we do know their ranking system rewards sites with high expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, aka E-A-T. You must pay attention to these three categories when crafting content for your site.

Now, go evaluate the content on your site. Then, ask yourself the following questions.

Expertise: Does the author relay their topic well? Is the communication engaging? Do your authors have bios? Are you fact-checking your posts?

Authority: Are you a trusted expert? Do you have experience in your field? Does your content have high-quality backlinks? Are other people recommending your content?

Trustworthiness: Why should the user trust your site? Does your site load fast? Are there any typos? What are other websites saying about your site?

These may sound simple, but these three tenants form the foundation of SEO in 2021. If you aren’t satisfying these, your site is likely being penalized.

Here are a few more reasons why your site may not be attracting visitors.

Your website may not optimized

Google is a powerful search engine that desires to bring the best experience to its users. It wants to bring the searcher the best possible search result. If your site is not optimized for the user’s experience, it may not send traffic to your website.

If a potential client clicks on your site and your landing page takes forever to load, Google penalizes you. Google uses technology to measure site performance. It measures both desktop and mobile performances.

Google seems to weigh mobile performance more heavily than desktop. If your site is not optimized for the mobile user, this could be hurting your site.

Other things that may slow down your site performance include removing unnecessary or messy code, avoiding big fonts, and sizing images to the proper size.

Small steps like these will make your site look better to Google. In turn, the algorithm will then be more likely to drive visitors to your site.

Your website content may be of poor quality

Many B2B sites make this mistake. They assume their website ranking is low because they need SEO help. This is not always the case. There are many ways to increase your website traffic without SEO.

Poor quality content is often the culprit.

First, consider who is writing your content. Have you hired a professional content writer?

Often, your content may be too wordy, difficult to read, or over sales-y. This is a major reason many websites don’t get traffic – they aren’t appealing to the average reader.

If your writer is a real expert on a topic, they will be able to explain it in a way that is easy to understand and engaging. Your content must be concise and clear!

Keep in mind, the average reader is around a ninth-grade reading level. It is a good idea to keep your language simple, using limited adverbs and complex sentences.

To check this, there are several free apps you can use such as Grammarly for grammar, and Hemingway for content complexity. Copy and paste content from your site to see if it’s effective, too complex, or hiding typos.

You may need more content

But, you say, my site’s content is high quality. What do you I now?

Well, you may not have enough content on your site.

Are you producing new content every week, or at least every month? If your answer is no, you need to be producing content on a consistent schedule.

If you are struggling to come up with new content ideas, this is common. However, the content creation process doesn’t have to be daunting!

Start by taking out a pen and paper, or opening up excel to keep track of content ideas. Answer potential questions a client may ask about your product or service. Give examples of how to use your service. Offer useful content like cheat sheets or checklists for potential clients. These are all easy ways to curate more content.

Then, using your new content ideas, develop a consistent schedule. The frequency of your content schedule will depend on the specific business. But, a good rule of thumb is to create new content at least once a week. Then, test your content. Test which days of the week perform best. Maybe try out different types of content – some posts should be longer than others, for example.

Pushing out credible and consistent content will put your site in front of more eyes. It will help to establish your site as an authority in your respective industry.

If your business or start-up is new, building credibility is crucial for business. The more credibility you have, the more brand awareness there will be. As brand awareness increases, you will eventually generate more leads!

If you are regularly putting new, engaging, and high-quality content online, you are more likely to deliver to new customers.

Don’t sleep on the power of Inbound Marketing and optimizing your content marketing strategy. Are you creating blog posts? Have you considered email marketing? If you are stuck coming up with ideas or aren’t sure what Inbound Marketing is, check out this article.

Your digital marketing strategy may not be optimized

Last but not least, your SEO strategy may not be optimized. SEO is extremely important for increasing traffic to your site! Backlinks are often key to having a high domain authority.

However, the main issue many businesses run into is not that they aren’t using backlinks, but that they are using low-quality backlinks.

Stay away from sketchy means of attaining backlinks. This will penalize your site. If you buy backlinks or get links from low-quality, spammy sites, this could be hurting your domain authority even further.

You want to build backlinks with high-quality connections. Your links should be relevant to your site and applicable to your content. If you need some extra help crafting your SEO strategy try using a backlink checker tool, there are plenty of free options online.

We also recommend checking out this article for in-depth advice on building quality backlinks.

Increase website traffic to your website

At the end of the day, the key to gaining more traffic is producing quality content. If you are creating high-value content, which showcases your industry expertise, the traffic will come. It just may take time.

Have you tried everything but still aren’t seeing the results you desire? Check out our free Ultimate Marketing Cheat Sheet! Make sure you are checking all your marketing boxes.

Want an expert to help drive traffic to your site? We’re here to help!

SEO Works for Small Businesses and We Can Prove It

SEO works for small businesses, it really does.

You don’t need to feel intimidated by competing against large well-known brands. With a smart

Smart business owners typically weigh the pros and cons of an investment before fully committing to it.

When spending money on search engine optimization (SEO), it’s often a matter of how much to invest rather than why.

If you’re still questioning whether SEO is worthwhile for a small business, we have eleven reasons why SEO works for small businesses and why you won’t regret investing in it.

Quality User Experience

The goal of SEO is to provide online users with the best answers as quickly as possible. When your business optimizes their website and social accounts, it’s easier for people to find you online.

Ideally, there is a seamless flow of information from the company, to search engine, to the searcher.

Behind the scenes, search engines constantly work to improve user experiences and provide correct answers. The person searching will find an answer and take the next step towards a solution—which means interacting with your business.

Optimal Reach

Investing in SEO also increases the reach of your business. As a website becomes optimized, it’s easier for search engines to navigate and understand your site’s content.

This higher understanding gives your website favor; resulting in search engines ranking you as their highest suggested result.

As an example, Water Extraction Experts has invested in adding relevant keywords to their website.

Search engines now have a better understanding of what the company offers, and it’s more likely to show people results for their business when those keywords are used.

This also helps to build a stronger connection between the company’s website, social accounts, and links across the web.

Now that Water Extraction Experts has an effective SEO strategy, the company has multiple results on the first page of this search. Included in the search are links to their website, contact page, and social media accounts.

Cost-Effective Marketing

SEO methods target users who are actively searching online, which means they are looking for specific products, services, or answers.

By creating optimized content, your business can reach people who are searching in the awareness, consideration, and decision stages of their purchasing cycle.

Once these users land on your page, you can lead them down the appropriate inbound marketing or sales funnel.

Marketing Agency Impact found that properly optimized websites result in organic search leads that have a 14.6% close rate compared to a 1.7% close rate for outbound leads.

Boosted Brand Awareness

As the saying goes, “Any publicity is good publicity.” When it comes to SEO, gaining exposure in search engines is your best opportunity for growth.

As you create more optimized, relevant content, your business will build credibility. This causes search engines to trust that your company provides users with high-quality content.

The more trust that you have from search engines, the more your business and brand awareness will grow. The cycle then builds again and again for each new piece of optimized content you produce.

Easily Trackable ROI

Once you begin investing in SEO, tracking your growing traffic will become addicting. While proper SEO methods are not an overnight solution for growth, they will add up in the long run.

Some businesses do see almost an instant improvement, but others can take a couple of months or even a year to fully see growth. The great thing about SEO is that you can quickly change tactics or use new keywords if a strategy isn’t working.

By keeping track of traffic, unique visitors, page rankings and keyword search frequency, it’s simple to see if your methods are going to be a good return on investment.

Improved Local Search

Local search SEO efforts are especially important for businesses with brick-and-mortar stores or services that rely on local customers.

This optimization tactic includes sharing company information and using keywords specific to your area. One way to boost local search is to add your business address and contact information across multiple platforms.

Another is to include keywords such as your city or business name, or “find near me”; considering that people now narrow searches specific to their location.

Because SEO works for small businesses, family-owned businesses are a perfect example of companies that need to invest in it.

Let’s say that ‘Betty’s Bakery’ in Boca Raton, FL makes incredible breakfast pastries but lacks the awareness to attract guests. By using keywords such as “breakfast in Boca Raton” or “Boca Raton best pastries”, Betty’s can attract more vacationers searching for a restaurant.

Efficient and Effective Marketing

As a marketing method, SEO one of the most effective tactics for growing business. While large companies have entire teams dedicated to SEO, it is not as hands-on as social media, blogging, or email.

Once a page is optimized for SEO, you can sit back and watch it bring in new customers.

Pages, however, do need to be tweaked and updated to reflect new keywords or updated strategies. Overall though, SEO is not as time-consuming as other marketing efforts.

It does, however, take time to learn the ins-and-outs of an effective SEO strategy. It’s smart for small businesses to consult with a marketing agency to get an SEO plan started.

Higher Search Rankings

How many times do you view the second or third page of results when searching online? Probably not much if you’re like many other online users.

This is why SEO works for small businesses and is so important. It’s the primary path to getting your business to the top of the first page.

Remember the cycle of quality content and trust we mentioned above? SEO starts this cycle to boost your visibility, credibility, and likelihood of rising through the rankings.

In the case of online search engine rankings, being #10 is much better than ranking #11; although you should still aim for that #1 spot.

Quality Sales Leads

Cold-calling is an essential sales method for some businesses, but why not let your website do the work for you?

With an optimized website, potential customers can find your services and reaching out when they are ready to purchase. While this process applies to businesses in the service industry, the idea behind it can work for any business.

Reaching out to these warm leads through a phone call or email is much easier and more effective when they already know about your company.

Ideal Audience Targeting

Reaching your ideal customers is easier with SEO since it’s possible to target age, location, gender, and interests through keywords.

Not only can this attract customers who may be more interested in your business, but it also increases the likelihood of qualified leads. With qualified leads comes a boost in sales, customer referrals, and loyal customers.

When choosing keywords to reach an ideal target audience, don’t be afraid to get creative. For example, instead of entering “plumber in wellington fl” with 685,000 results, a local business could use the keyword “friendly plumber in wellington fl” with only 293,000 results. Just one word can change your ranking!

Competitive Advantage

SEO works for small businesses and when your business invests in a solid SEO strategy, it makes you more competitive online.

If your rankings are below similar local businesses, SEO may be all you need to steadily rise to the top. While white-hat SEO isn’t a quick-fix solution, it will benefit your business and make you more competitive.

Build an Effective SEO Strategy

Investing in SEO is worthwhile for any small business that wants to improve their brand awareness, build quality content, attract new customers, and increase credibility.

If you’re ready to take the next step with SEO but want guidance on best-practices and how it can affect your ROI, contact us today for a free 1-hour consultation.

You can also fill out the short form below and we will get back to you as soon as we are able. Let us help you get started with the best small business SEO strategy for your business.

About Elevare

Elevare is an all-inclusive marketing and business development agency that offers the services and skills necessary to help businesses of every size to be successful.

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7 Top SEO Tips to Increase Your Sales and Leads in 2018

What Does SEO Mean?

When you enter a search term or phrase into Google, Bing, Yahoo or any search engine, you’re engaging in the forefront of search engine optimization (SEO). The websites that return in the results are ranked on how the search engine felt those websites’ content was relevant to you and your search.

This is called the SERP or Search Engine Results Page. But how is this decided? Through the use of ever-evolving algorithms. According to Google, these computer processes and formulas take your questions or searches and turn them into answers. Google specifically relies on more than 200 unique signals that guess what you might be looking for.

Are the Correct Keywords and Phrases Being Used?

Keywords are the backbone for SEO. This makes it crucial that you ensure the best ones for your content are being used. How to know what the best are means asking yourself if they are relevant to the content at hand.

For example, you wouldn’t strategically place keywords for a healthy, four-course meal when you’re writing about cupcakes. Do a few searches with the keywords you have in mind and see what results come back. Is the information related to what you’re writing about? Good. The odds are your keywords and phrases will be beneficial to your content ranking in search engines.

But if you’re still unsure if you’re coming up with the right keywords, use a keyword research tool. There are several tools out there to help you see how a keyword or phrase would rank in monthly searches, how many times each month it’s searched for, how niche it is, and so on.

Quality Content Is Key

It all starts and ends with content. If your content is quality, there will be a high demand for it. However, it needs to be linkable.

Content accessible through a paywall, any type of required log-in, or in an otherwise search unfriendly format won’t be in demand and search engines won’t care if it’s award winning as long as it’s sitting behind a wall.

It goes without saying that the content should be very specific to the specific topic being addressed. And keeping along the lines of specifics, the purpose of any page on your website should be clear in the title tag, URL, and image alt-text.

What is image alt-text? YouTuber Rebecca Vendetti’s channel Live Simple, Live Organic explains this in more detail.

How Long Is Your Content?

As you’ve likely realized by now, a lot has changed in the SEO game in recent years, and how long the word counts of your content is wasn’t spared. The days of being able to post a 300 to 500-word blog and have it pull weight in a SERP are gone. Now, the longer the article, such as 1,000 words or more, the more likely it is to rank. Take this blog post for example; as of this sentence, we have 473 words, leaving us nearly halfway to the goal with plenty more to cover. More and more of these longer articles are being shared on social media, engaging readers for repeat visits, and ultimately being seen as more competitive to Google and other search engines.

With word counts carrying more and more weight, many companies are moving toward long form content, but what counts as long form? Well, it doesn’t have a strict definition but is generally accepted as whitepapers, ebooks, and any other content that has several thousand words plus images, videos, and other media attached. If you decide to go with long form content, that’s great, but don’t feel obliged to do so. Blog platform Medium found the most engaged blog posts took seven minutes to read and were about 1,600 words in length.

Have Your Images and Graphics Distinguish Themselves in the Masses?

Not every company has an in-house graphics or photography department, but creating your own to go with content will pay off in the SERPs. Not only does it create a better user experience for your readers, but it also sends a quality signal to the search engines about your website as a whole. While you don’t have to recreate the Sistine Chapel with your own images and graphics, keep in mind the image size in terms of loading on the page and what is the correct file format to use.

Why Use Onsite SEO

Being virtual friends is a hallmark in the digital age and being friends with search engines is a great thing. Well, you can’t really be friends with a search engine, but you can make your website and its content search engine friendly and educational.

To know if your website will be useful for a searcher, search engines ‘crawl’ the site to learn and understand the pages, including the structure of the site as a whole. The more information you have on your website, the more chances they have to understand what your company is about.

Using concise and relevant keywords and phrases are the best way to educate the search engines.

Reach Even Further with Offsite SEO

Offsite SEO accounts for the majority of rankability for a specific keyword. A quick refresher on what offsite SEO is the process of getting links to your content on other pages, sites, and blogs or link building. The more links for your website that are rooted in other sources, the better your offsite SEO will be.

The main benefit of off-site SEO is it shows how other websites and visitors view a particular website such as yours. This view is garnered through references from links, mentions on social media, and how often it is bookmarked and shared by like-minded readers.

Use Social Media and Other Forms of Digital Marketing

The better your content quality, the more Google will push it. Likewise, the more people that see and click to your website, the more your ranking in SERPs goes up, more traffic flows to your website, and you gain more exposure overall.

Social media is ever important. Through Social Media, people can share and engage with your posts, essentially acting as free brand marketers for your business, blog, and products. It’s a good practice to return that favor and share content from other similar businesses as well. This may sound counter-intuitive but it gets your company noticed on a larger scale.

Even more of an unseen advantage lies with offsite SEO, acting as a form of link building. Bookmarks, while not carrying as many factors weight as they used to, are still a good way to pick up steady traffic to your website.

Citations are also a great way to boost traffic to your site and your business, while making sure that the right information about your company is showing up in the SERP.

Check out our blog: “Why LinkedIn Should Be Part of Your Marketing Strategy“

How Long Does SEO Take to Work? Have Patience

SEO tends to be a “long game”. Achieving the first page results with SERP ranking could take 3, 6, or even 12 months. This all depends on your industry, how many competing business exist in your geographical location, and utilizing best practices that Google has brought forth regarding SEO.

The good news is that changes to your SEO strategy can be noticed in as soon as two weeks.

The benefit to properly executing SEO on your website greatly outweighs the time it takes to achieve results. People that are looking for information similar to a subject you’ve published online or to find professional help that your business can provide, will now be able to find your information in abundance.

Not only will you show up higher than your competition or other publishers, but you will show up multiple times. Here is an example of a company who uses best SEO practices AND local citations to saturate the first page of Google.

Water Extraction Experts SERPS

It is even possible to see how many times a month web users search a keyword that is related to your subject matter or business services.

This is a great way of being able to calculate the amount of potential customers you will reach with proper SEO practices and marketing.

Check out our blog: “What to Expect Your First Year of Inbound Marketing“

Elevare Can Help You with SEO Best Practices

If diving into search engine optimization seems like a daunting task, Elevare has your back. Our team has worked with search engine optimization on many websites through the years and is well versed in the latest best practices to get your website in the top ranking.

Whether you’re looking for a simple site audit of your current keywords and phrases, creating and optimization citations, or needing professional help on setting up Google Analytics, our search engine optimization service will get you where you need to be.

Remember, SEO takes time, so the sooner you get started, the better your digital presence will be. Together, we can launch your company to new heights.