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Tag: SEO Tips

  • How To Improve Your SEO Content

    How To Improve Your SEO Content

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    Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

    It seems that as your business grows, so does your website. Of course, this growth is generally a good sign for your company and bottom line. But as your site admins do their best to keep pace, and those blogs, contact forms and product landing pages start to pile up, things can get messy.

    With hundreds or more pages to manage — and constantly changing algorithms and content trends to contend with — SEO issues can mount up. From dead links and oversized images to the gradual loss of content optimization, such problems often combine to slow loading speeds and hurt user experience. Ultimately, this can bump up bounce rates and make it much harder to turn prospects into buyers.

    If your website has grown out of control, an SEO content cleanup may be the answer. Done carefully, a thorough step-by-step cleanup can help bring order to the chaos, improve site speeds, and return your website to its former glory, complete with the UX and performance needed to magnetize your brand and attract more customers.

    Following a few basic cleanup steps can help get your website running in the right direction:

    Related: Essential Tips to Write Appealing Website Content

    Declutter your website structure

    How your site structure is organized matters a lot when it comes to improving your ranking in Google and optimizing customer engagement with your brand. By removing needless clutter and cleaning up critical structural elements, you can provide an almost immediate boost to site appearance and navigation, making it easier for visitors to find what they’re after while strengthening customer sentiment and connections that feed your bottom line.

    Cleaning up the site structure starts with simplifying the site menu. Because the menu is typically the first element customers engage with, keeping it focused and as minimal as possible is essential. With clear, easy-to-understand options at the top, visitors have a simplified reference guide to navigate and find exactly what they’re searching for.

    Once your menu is re-aligned, you can dive deep into your content. Depending on how much content your site has, this can seem like a Herculean effort, at least at first. But taking time to organize your blogs and product pages into categories, and analyzing each for relevance and search performance, can make the process much more manageable.

    When things are sorted, and page importance is organized, ranked and understood, you can better decide which posts to delete, which to keep and which can be tweaked and optimized for SEO.

    Separating the effective from the ineffective allows you to eliminate content redundancies while maximizing the reach and impact of working pieces. It also removes needless obstacles and helps refine and optimize user experience — a potential boon to site traffic and content KPIs.

    Related: How to Create a Startup Website That Delivers

    Find and fix those broken links

    Broken hyperlinks in blogs and web pages don’t just hurt user experience. They can also drag down site authority and, ultimately, your SEO. And as content begins to pile up, so does the number of 404 links cluttering up your website and putting your online brand in a bind.

    Broken links happen for various reasons, from incorrectly entered links and restricted page access to links and websites getting deleted after the text was linked up. Fortunately, finding and fixing these digital deadends is an easy way to delete dead weight and help restore search ranking and performance.

    A free tool like the Crawl Errors feature in Google Search Console or the Broken Link Checker plugin in WordPress can help identify 404 links across your site. Once you know where they are, fixing these links can be done in several ways: repairing the wrongly-entered link, replacing links that still exist but have since been changed or removing the links altogether.

    If the broken link goes to a page on your site (such as the Contact page) but appears in multiple places across your site, creating a redirect can also be an effective way to fix the problem, at least temporarily.

    Related: How To Maximize the Number of Linkable Assets on Your Website

    Give images the SEO treatment

    Great images bring an appealing visual element that attracts visitors and adds life to your content. When relevant and displayed correctly, high-quality images help boost clicks and user engagement rates and provide a burst of SEO energy that can lift your blogs and product pages to the top of search results.

    Over time, however, those images can often pile up, creating a bulky, unoptimized mess that reduces page load speeds and damages user experience. Fortunately, a thorough SEO cleanup can help tidy things up and maximize each photo’s potential across your website.

    Image compression offers an excellent place to start. Compressing images to more manageable file sizes helps reduce page load speeds, shaving seconds off the process while allowing visitors faster access to your blogs and landing pages. Faster page loads help reduce bounce rates and improve customer interactions, ensuring potential buyers stay put and engage with your brand for longer periods.

    Removing and replacing irrelevant and poor-quality images can also improve image SEO. By locating unnecessary and ineffective space fillers out of posts and inserting better, more attractive images, you create a more complementary mix of text and imagery that keeps more eyes glued to your content.

    Updating image alt text across your site can also provide a valuable SEO boost. Doing so allows you to incorporate focus keywords into each page and sharpen image SEO for essential topics and search queries.

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    Adam Petrilli

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  • Trying to Rank for a Keyword on Google? Don’t Fall for These 3 Myths.

    Trying to Rank for a Keyword on Google? Don’t Fall for These 3 Myths.

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    Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

    Over the past decade, I’ve experienced and navigated through dozens of Google updates and led SEO operations for many big brands. Throughout my SEO career, there has been no ranking factor that’s as debated as backlinks. The mystique around backlinks has led many people to believe that all you need is a high domain authority (DA) to rank competitively on search engines.

    This has led many people in SEO to use DA or domain ranking (DR) as the primary factor for search engine rankings. Backlinks are one of the most important ranking factors for search engines, and they are difficult to get, but that doesn’t mean they are the only factor that determines your rankings.

    In this post, I want to cover the common fallacies and false beliefs held around domain authority and uncover why it is not enough to rank well for a given keyword.

    Related: 8 Ways to Qualify and Rank Keywords in Google Search Results

    What is domain ranking/domain authority?

    Before diving into the different intricacies, it’s important to understand what domain ranking is. Domain ranking, also referred to as domain authority, is a metric that helps indicate the authority of a site. More specifically, it is an estimate of how authoritative a site is based on the number/quality of backlinks. Backlinks are a very powerful ranking factor on search engines, and the domain authority of a site will help indicate how much authority a site has

    According to Ahrefs, domain ranking is a metric that indicates the relative strength of a website’s backlink profile. According to Moz, domain authority is a search engine ranking score that tells you how likely a site ranks on search engine results pages SERPs. Ahrefs’ DR ranking and Moz’s DA ranking are the two most popular ways to quantify domain authority. With DR and DA, a site is given a ranking from 0 to 100. The higher that number is, the more authoritative a site is.

    To give some context, here are the DR and DA rankings of some well-known sites:

    • HubSpot.com (DA 93, DR 93)

    • Nintendo.com (DA 91, DR 89)

    • Porsche.com (DA 88, DR 86)

    Fallacy #1: High domain authority guarantees that you will outrank competitors

    One of the most common myths about SEO is that high domain authority will immediately allow you to outrank competitors. It’s very easy to look at SERP results and immediately assume that higher DA sites are ranking better than lower DA sites. In most cases, correlation does not equal causation. The reason that many high DR sites still outrank other sites is that they perform all of the other on-page SEO and technical work in addition to link building. It doesn’t matter if you have a higher domain authority if the content you produce is poor and your site is slow.

    Here’s a great example that illustrates this. Below are metrics for the top five sites that rank for the keyword “email marketing agency” on Ahrefs:

    • Site 1: Clutch.co: DR 89, UR 20

    • Site 2: Soapmedia.co.uk: DR 59, UR 18

    • Site 3: Thebrainsmakreting.co.uk: DR 47, UR 13

    • Site 4: Digivate.com: DR 45, UR 15

    • Site 5: Digitalagencynetwork.com: DR 76, UR 13

    Although Clutch.co is outranking other sites, you can see higher DR sites are being outranked by lower DR sites. This isn’t an anomaly because there are other factors that account for why a site ranks well. If you look beyond the SERP results and click on the specific blog articles, you’ll find the higher-ranking ones offer more content, and they’ve optimized their on-page SEO better. You will see similar results for most other keywords because high domain authority does not guarantee your site to outrank your competitors.

    Related: 3 Ways to Make Your Content Rank Higher on Google

    Fallacy #2: You can rank for competitive keywords without topical expertise

    If you have a high DA site, and you write one blog post about a primary keyword, the chances of you ranking competitively are slim. It’s easy to rank for content that has low search volume and is not competitive, but that traffic is not going to move the needle. In order to rank for competitive keywords, you need to show Google that your site is an expert on a specific topic. To do this, you need to develop a library of content that’s topically related. Without this, you will be outcompeted by sites that have better and more content covering your niche.

    A great example of this would be a site like Marketwatch.com trying to rank for a keyword like “gestation period of a rhino.” Even though Marketwatch.com has a high DR (93), it’s not going to rank well for this keyword because it does not have anything remotely related to rhinos. If you look at the top results for this keyword, you’ll see tour sites and animal sites that have been publishing content for years.

    You can extrapolate topic relevance to higher-difficulty keywords like “best VPN” or “best CRMs.” Generally, the more difficult a parent keyword is to rank for, the more supporting blog posts you’ll need to build topical relevance and ultimately rank better for all keywords.

    Fallacy #3: You can make up for poor content with high DA

    Another dangerous practice of some high-authority sites is skimping out on content. Although high DA sites may get more impressions and clicks on search engines, readers will bounce quickly if the content is poor. If a site isn’t nailing searcher intent and optimizing its on-page SEO, having high domain authority will accomplish nothing. The vast majority of content teams understand this, but few thoroughly understand what poor content is. Understanding this is essential to prevent your site from falling into the trap of low-quality content.

    Examples of poor content include:

    • Thin content: Thin content is the most common form of poor content. There’s a place for thin content (like definitions), but most of the time, you should be producing more in-depth content. If you’re writing on a primary keyword (e.g., “What is content marketing?”), your content should be over 1,000 words. A good litmus test is to see the top-ranking pages for a keyword and compare the word count. If most of them are over 1,000 words, you know you need to produce something similar.

    • Content that’s regurgitated from other sources: A common criticism of SEO is that many sites on the SERPs regurgitate the same content. If your content has the same headers, same formatting and same ideas as other sites, it will be categorized as regurgitated content. If you’re going to take content from other sources, make sure to cite them, restructure them, and add your unique point of view.

    • Content that’s not well-written: A telltale sign of poor content is content that is not well-written. This encompasses AI-spun content, content with many grammatical errors and content that’s hard to read. If a reader lands on your page, and the writing is hard to read and unnatural, it’s poorly written.

    Related: 6 SEO Myths Every Business Owner Should Ignore

    Avoiding these types of content on your site will help improve the quality of your writing and give you a better chance to rank on SERPs, regardless of your domain authority. Some advanced content teams use a variety of internal checklists and software to ensure that their writing is up to par; you can create and use a similar process for your content operations.

    As illustrated by some of the examples above, domain authority is not the be-all-end-all ranking factor for SEO. Although backlinks are a very important part of SEO, they’re not enough to overcome little to no effort in content and optimizing your site. If you’re trying to rank for a specific keyword, take the best possible measures instead of relying purely on backlinks. Make sure your site is fully optimized, you have enough content to cover the topic and that your content is high quality. By continuing to invest in all aspects of SEO, you’ll give yourself the best shot possible for ranking for any keyword you desire.

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    Dmitry Dragilev

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  • 5 Ways to Improve Local SEO

    5 Ways to Improve Local SEO

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    Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

    Search engine optimization (SEO) is constantly evolving like any other industry. The struggle to stay on top of the ranking takes more than a post in a month. To stay rated and relevant, you must put in the time and conduct the research.

    Being easily searchable, informative and consistent is more crucial than ever for small businesses, and for that, businesses need local search engine optimization. It’s simpler than you might think to master local SEO. Here are five quick techniques to boost local SEO and make your small business rank above its rivals.

    Related: Struggling in Local Search? Here’s What Your Local SEO Strategy Needs

    1. Ensure the consistency of your NAP

    Name, Address, and Phone Number (NAP). Your local SEO approach may succeed or fail based on these three simple facts. Make sure to display this information on your website prominently.

    As it will show at the bottom of every page, the footer is an excellent location for your NAP. You can also make your NAP visible on service area pages and your contact page’s body.

    Consistency is key. Your essential company details must be consistent wherever potential clients may find you online.

    Related: 5 Tips to Improve Your Local SEO in 5 Hours

    2. Enhance the on-page content

    You can demonstrate that you are the industry leader in your field for the service you offer by using the content on your site. Along with your services in your region, include specifics like street names and landmarks.

    Explain to the customer why they would require your services in that particular location. Your customer’s user experience will be improved the more you sound like you belong.

    Related: This Important Website Feature Is Crucial For Your Business

    3. Get listed in local directories

    Getting featured in local directories is a fantastic additional strategy for enhancing your local SEO. There are a lot of web directories that are specifically designed for businesses in certain regions.

    Your chances of being discovered by potential clients looking for companies like yours are increased by having a listing in these directories.

    4. Optimize header tags

    Check out this resource on the best practices for using header tags if you haven’t already looked into the topic. By developing localized service pages, you have now gained more space to construct highly targeted header tags with local-based keywords.

    Good header tags provide a general picture of the page’s overall structure and what to expect as visitors browse through the content. It would look odd if you simply loaded keywords into the header tags.

    Related: How Should You Optimize for Branded Keywords?

    5. Create relevant backlinks

    Backlinks are one of the most significant ranking elements for any website, and it is the connections to your website made by other websites. Google views backlinks as endorsements — the higher the backlinks, the more they appear in search results.

    Prioritizing quality over number is crucial while developing backlinks. Look for chances to receive backlinks from reputable websites related to your business.

    Related: What Are Backlinks and Why Do You Need Them for Your SEO?

    Style preference for SEO

    • Use dashes with a space on either side.
    • Avoid serial commas: Cabbage, tomato, and potato.
    • End quote marks should be placed inside commas and periods, and there must be one space following a period.
    • Single quotes should only be used around other single quotes.
    • Include your personal hyperlinks and avoid placing citations or URLs in parentheses below the article.
    • Sparingly use one-sentence paragraphs. The ideal paragraph length is two or three sentences.
    • Subheads should have the same parallel format. They all need complete sentences if the initial heading is a full sentence. Subheads shouldn’t contain links. Just use them in your text. After the first word in a subhead, do not capitalize the following words.
    • If you must use “he,” use “she” as well. Pluralizing your pronouns will help you avoid this formulation, at least occasionally.
    • Never use the pronoun “they” to refer to a firm, organization, or government body.
    • Maintain consistency: If you begin with the pronoun “you,” don’t change it. It’s best to avoid using “we,” “I,” “he/she,” and “you” in the same sentence. Throughout the sentence, use the same verb tense. Keep in mind that the present perfect tense shows continual, habitual action.
    • Look for repetition of the same points, words, or themes.
    • All numbers less than ten (apart from percentages) are written out. Numbers 10 or more are represented by numerals.
    • Numbers are always used to express years. With numbers, use “greater than” rather than “over.” Instead of writing “percent,” use the % symbol.
    • Verify quotes using trustworthy sources.
    • Lay out any acronyms and abbreviations other people may not be familiar with on the first reference, followed by the abbreviation in parentheses.
    • In names for the first reference, use the complete name. Only the last name should be used in subsequent references.

    Final thoughts

    For promoting your local online business, you must include local SEO. You can increase your visibility in local search results by claiming and optimizing your Google My Business listing. By getting listed in local directories and adding location pages to your website, you can draw more clients to your company.

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    Sean Boyle

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