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Ask Us Anything! New Bruce Clay Video Series Answers Your Digital Marketing Questions

Ask Us Anything! New Bruce Clay Video Series Answers Your Digital Marketing Questions was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

Digital marketing is tough. Anyone who wants to improve a website and raise its visibility in search knows that.

As a marketer or business owner, you have to make about a zillion decisions for your website along the way to prominence and profitability.

Naturally, questions come up that you need help answering. And you might not have the luxury of an expert at your beck and call.

Since articles and experts abound in digital marketing, it’s hard to know what answers to trust. That’s especially true with SEO questions.

Advice you find around the web may be conflicting, outdated, or just plain impractical.

So for marketers who are trying to figure out how to do search engine optimization, content marketing, PPC, search engine marketing, or social media marketing on their own, we would like to help clear up the confusion.

Announcing our new “Ask Us Anything” video series on YouTube!

Get answers from knowledgeable BCI team members (pictured: Bruce Clay and Virginia Nussey)

To answer your digital marketing questions, we’re launching a new video series.

Do you have a question about SEO, PPC, content, social marketing, or the intersections between them?

We invite you to submit your question here: BruceClay.com/Ask

Answers You Can Watch

To prime the pump so to speak, we filmed answers to some of the questions that we hear from blog readers, clients, and students in our SEO training courses.

Visit the Bruce Clay, Inc. YouTube channel and you’ll find 17 videos already queued up in our Ask Us Anything playlist!

Samples of Q&A topics that are ready to watch include:

How to Appear in Google Search Featured Snippets
How to Get Rid of Extra Pages in Google’s Index
What’s the ROI for a Social Media Campaign?
How Many Words Per Page for SEO?

And the list keeps growing …

Everyone Appreciates Answers that Get to the Point

Brief is best when it comes to video answers.

You might be struggling to decide a particular optimization issue. For example, should you use heading tags in your navigation menus? Yes or no?

When you’re unsure what to do, it can hold up your projects. At times like these, you just need a best-practice answer.

That’s why we keep the “Ask Us Anything” videos focused and brief. (Here’s that answer, in case you’re curious.)

Each video answers a specific SEO or digital marketing question in about two minutes. According to one commenter, the short length is the best part:

“I’ve watched every one of your AUA vids. I like that you keep them short and have multiple people answering Q’s. Keep ’em coming…”

–InternetDude

When you submit a question, we will:

Quickly determine whether it’s something we can answer. (We don’t guarantee we’ll answer every question.)
Choose the best person to answer it — from Bruce Clay himself to the many experienced, knowledgeable members of our team.
Film away!
Notify you by email if we post a video that answers your question.

The main goal of our “Ask Us Anything” videos is to provide reliable answers to SEO questions and other issues facing digital marketers.

Helping you understand the best practices better means that you can do your job more efficiently — with better results.

We hope you enjoy watching, learning, and getting your questions answered in our new video series!

Please subscribe to Bruce Clay Inc.’s channel and watch all of our video answers. And go ahead: Ask us anything!

50 Ways to Get Quality ‘White Hat’ Backlinks

50 Ways to Get Quality ‘White Hat’ Backlinks was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

Obtaining “white hat” SEO links is really only in part about the link itself. It’s also about serving the audience and community of the site that links to you … and real relationships.

People should link to you because you have earned the link, not because you bought or bartered for it.

It is our opinion that link building is less about the number of links and more about the number of linking domains from within your industry. Quality over quantity always.

Our list of 50 ways to get quality SEO backlinks is different from other link-building-idea lists in one important way. We stay focused on how you can add value for your ultimate audience through your website.

Then, with a little extra effort, you can get a link from other sites serving that same audience.

The List: 50 Ways to Get Quality Links to Your Site
1. Ask — It Sometimes Works

When it boils down to it, links are about relationships. The business you run may be of service to another business and its audience.

Think about link building first in terms of building a library of helpful content resources to link to.

Then think about people in your network that could use the resources you have to offer. It can be as simple as asking another business if a link on their site to yours might benefit their audience.

Example: A music website might have a great collection of music and articles on a particular singer or band. Form relationships with the artist’s fan clubs. Some may accept articles, and some will simply link to your great content. This would be a relevant link, and a win-win. Fan clubs love free information for their audience.

As another note here, if they just mention your site, maybe asking for a link to be added to that mention will make it more useful for you both.

Think about link building first in terms of building a library of helpful content resources to link to.
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2. Do Some Blogger Outreach

Since a big part of links is relationships, think about who you know.

Who in your industry would benefit from knowing about your website content and sharing it with their readers?

Some bloggers like to link out and some do not. Some will gladly curate and some need to write for themselves. Some are influencers and some are not.

Choose what is most appropriate for your content, and work with the bloggers as best fits your industry and content.

Forge relationships with those people. Face time could be an important part of this.

Do you attend the same industry events? Send a note ahead of time and plan to meet there. A few minutes over a drink or coffee could pay dividends for your content and link-building efforts.

3. Approach Colleagues Gently

Think of your current business network as a gold mine for getting links. However, depending on the industry you’re in, you want to tread lightly when asking for a link. A mere mention of the content you’re working on that might be a fit for their audience could work.

Example: If you publish a research report, even a competitor’s audience would appreciate reading it. This type of content is almost always attractive to others in your space.

And remember, never compensate anyone in your industry — even if they are influencers and you’d really like the link. This is against Google’s guidelines.

4. Write for Your Audience’s Audience

Your audience will be more likely to share your content if it helps expand their audience reach.

What would make your audience want to share your content with their audience?

An example is a newspaper journalist. When trying to get in front of the journalist, your content should be less about what things they (the journalists) like and more about what their readers like. This approach (what their readers like to read) is very powerful.

5. When You Have a Link, Stay Engaged

You might be surprised at which sites are linking to your site.

Do the research. Find the relevant domains that link to your site, and forge a relationship. If they have a quality site that’s relevant to your industry, stay in touch with them.

This is especially important if they are well connected and/or the site’s owner is an influencer within your industry. They might need guest bloggers, and you could potentially offer useful content to their audience. In your author biography, you can also include a link to your site.

6. Host a Contest

Recently I visited our Bruce Clay India office. The team took the opportunity to run a contest in which private consulting time with me was the prize. The content generated a lot of mentions and shares, drawing attention to Bruce Clay India and the contest page itself.

If you do something like this, your website might receive links from your social media followers (see No. 28 for why social links/mentions matter) and from your colleagues’ blogs and websites.

7. Host an Event

Think of ways you can enrich your local community with an event.

Example: You might host a business luncheon in the community to divulge some of your business-success secrets.

Then, tell people about your “mini-conference” through an events page. You will get some links to the page (and maybe some clients as well). Once the event has passed, consider doing a 301 redirect from that event’s page to your main events landing page.

8. Join Local-Focused Organizations

Your business is part of a local community. Being listed in directories, like the Better Business Bureau (BBB) and Chamber of Commerce, secures a link. Local listings also help your potential customers find and learn more about you.

And if you’re in good standing with organizations like the BBB, it can lend credibility as well. Also, is there a significant attraction in your area (such as a local kids camp) that gets a lot of links? Sponsor them and get a link on their website (see No. 10 for more).

9. Speak at Events and Have Something for the Audience

If you speak at community or industry events, offer something useful for your audience to download after the talk. Provide a link to the resource and encourage them to share.

Example: You may have the results of an informal survey, an ebook, or some other content on your website that would be helpful to the audience in some way. Create a shortened link that they can remember (for example, a Bit.ly link) and drive traffic to the page. They may, in turn, share it with others.

10. Do a Sponsorship

Do you want to make an impact on your community?

Sponsorships can do that and get your name out. Moreover, you can obtain links to your website from the organization you’re sponsoring, as well.

Think local softball teams, not-for-profit activities (like a beach cleanup), school scholarship funds and so on.

11. Reference an Industry Leader

Write content that references an opinion of someone in the Top 10 in your industry.

You may not even need to interview them. You can draw upon previous statements they made elsewhere (with attribution).

Identify the influencers in your industry who tend to either link to articles mentioning them on their site or share such posts on social media. These are the ideal targets.

12. Create/Review Case Studies

Write case studies that your audience can learn from.

You could identify major blunders that were turned around. Or hot breaking news stories (that involve terrible losses or even massive wins). This idea ties well into the “unicorn” approach we will discuss in No. 14.

Example: In the digital marketing community, a popular journalist who wrote a lot about Google for many years ended up joining Google as an employee.

Also remember that, similar to the nightly news, “dirty laundry” types of headlines are always read and quoted with links (narrative on society omitted).

13. Start a Blog

Having a blog is one of the basic tenets of attracting links. After all, the content you’re blogging about focuses on your business and brand. While a blog is essential to your SEO, it doesn’t stop there.

Blogs that tend to do best express strong opinions about matters in their industry, things that their clients care about and so on. That doesn’t mean every post is controversial. Every now and then, plan to tackle a topic that matters to your industry or business with gusto.

Example: Say you have a casino in Las Vegas. Every so often, you might tackle the topic of gambling safely, or express an opinion on the changing regulations you face.

14. Create Great “Unicorn” Content

“Unicorn” content is any article that strikes a community’s chord. You’ll know a unicorn article by the high level of traffic, comments, shares and backlinks it generates.

You’ll want to latch on to a unicorn. For example, take note of what your competitor’s unicorns are, and write your own unique content on that same topic.

A unicorn article stands out from the competition, meaning it’s better than other articles on the topic.

Take best advantage of each of your unicorns. Publicize them well within the community.

This content should ideally be published on your website. If you publish this type of content on a third-party website, include embedded links to your site. This includes useful “find-out-more-on-the-topic”-type content (in moderation).

One approach similar to this is creating “skyscraper content.” This is similar to unicorn work, except it’s on the level of an entire website. Find a great website, mimic it, do it better, add engagement, then see if links to that other site can be switched to links to your site instead (see No. 34 for more on this).

15. Consolidate Landing Pages

Do you have a handful of similar landing pages on your website that garner a lot of traffic and links?

Assume you have two great pages, one page on how to choose the right microscope for your job, and the other page on how to choose a microscope for your specific needs. You should consider combining the content from those two landing pages and 301 redirecting the page(s) to the chosen URL.

The popularity of those landing pages now combined gives you one powerful webpage that reaps the benefit of aggregate traffic and links. See: https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+do+a+301+redirect.

16. Help a Reporter Out

If you’re short on money for public relations, you can take matters into your own hands.

HARO (Help a Reporter Out) connects you with reporters who are looking for subject matter experts in your field. If you get interviewed for a story that will run on the web, it’s likely you’ll get a link to your website when you are cited.

17. Be Interviewed by Bloggers

Creating quality content these days means citing credible sources. One way that bloggers like to cite sources is through interviews.

Find out who the writers and bloggers are in your industry, and become top of mind for them.

Engage with their content online. Add value by commenting or resharing, and you’ll start to build a relationship.

Ask them what they’re working on, and let them know you’re available to offer quotes or interviews on “X” topics whenever they might need it. This will almost always guarantee a link to your website when you’re cited in the article.

18. Interview Experts

A great way to attract links and traffic to an article is to interview experts yourself.

People like to be recognized for their expertise, and every expert has their own audience. The people you interview will usually share and link to the article on your website.

Try an in-depth article interviewing just one or two experts, or a “roundup” that features quotes from many. The more experts you can pull together in a roundup post, the better! For example, you might write an article on “What the Top 10 Digital Marketers Predict Will Be Most Successful in [X Year].”

19. Educate, Educate, Educate

Part of building your business into a brand involves thought leadership. You do indeed have a specialization and unique insights. Share those with your audience on your website to help them do something or understand a topic better.

This act of creating unique, quality, educational content benefits your website’s search engine optimization, too. Google wants to feature high quality webpages in its search results, and its ranking algorithm is designed to find them.

You do indeed have a specialization and unique insights. Share those on your website to build your brand.
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20. Offer a Webinar

As part of a low-key, educational approach to sales, webinars are great. People love free training.

You can embed the recorded webinar on a webpage with the transcript. This engaging content can drive traffic and links.

Consider partnering with someone in your industry who has a large audience. You can tackle different aspects of a topic together, and you’ll benefit from the partner’s wide reach.

21. Do Original Research on a Topic

Creating standout content that people want to link to and share takes time. Put your journalist hat on and take a deep dive into a topic to create a long-form webpage. Consider topics that have burning questions in your industry, or timely topics as well.

22. Create a Whitepaper

A whitepaper is a great way to demonstrate your expertise. Use them to show you’re aware of the challenges facing your clients and can offer solutions.

Example: Maybe you are selling a revolutionary new cleaning system. In a whitepaper, you could show how it is more cost-effective and friendlier to the environment than other systems. You can use this content asset to gather emails in exchange for the download.

Aside from gathering email addresses for drip email campaigns, whitepapers can rank on their own merit. A useful whitepaper also gathers links.

23. Create a Graphic

Graphics are big wins in the link world.

People like easy-to-digest visuals, and if you do it right, these can spread like wildfire.

One example is an infographic that shows trends in an industry, like the types of jobs available, their salaries, employment rates and so on.

To facilitate a link, make it easy for people to share by offering a link for attribution, and add your logo or company name to the image. Make sure that you take the same care creating visuals as you would with text content. That means everything is fact-checked and quality.

24. Create Videos

YouTube is the second largest search engine, aside from Google’s web search engine. In all cases, the power of a video link is massive and it must be a priority.

You can create a video, host it on YouTube, for example, and then offer a link for more information from the video that leads viewers to a page on your website.

Example: Let’s say you have a style-focused YouTube channel. You might create a video reviewing a new beauty product and include a link to a full review on your site within the video. That would let people learn more (and even buy the product with your affiliate link attached).

25. Be Mentioned in a Podcast

Consider putting your useful content in front of podcast creators. They, in turn, may mention that content in one of their episodes as a resource on the topic.

Example: Say there’s a podcast that tackles psychology issues, and you have an ebook on overcoming anxiety. A mention of the tips in your ebook on a podcast is like a verbal testimonial. It could carry a lot of weight with listeners and lead to people visiting your site and linking to your content.

26. Create and Promote Web Tools

Create useful tools that people can access on your site.

Example: Here on BruceClay.com, we offer some of our popular tools for free, integrated into our SEO Tutorial.

Use the tool’s name as the anchor text for the link when you link to the tools yourself.

27. Get a Mention in Wikipedia

Obtaining a link from Wikipedia does not pass link juice since all their links are nofollow. However, it CAN give your site a huge boost in traffic, and probably expert status.

Since the community at large maintains Wikipedia, obtaining a link may not be too difficult if you are truly worthy.

Example: Say you are a thought leader when it comes to software development. You might identify Wikipedia articles that talk about your involvement in software development. Or your thought leadership content could be a reference.

But be aware that Wikipedia frowns on self-promotion. Editors will likely reject any links that you try to insert on behalf of you or your business. Worse yet, if you are too persistent about adding links to your site, your website can be added to a spam list.

The key is in your approach. Focus on adding value with content, not links. For more information, read Wikipedia’s general guidelines for links.

28. Get Mentions in General

Online mentions (such as in social media or reviews) are important, too. They help search engines determine that people have an interest in what a brand is about.

Social mentions may not generate valuable links to a site. However, social mentions signal to the search engine how people are talking about a brand.

Example: Pizza Franchise-A may be mentioned more often and more favorably than Pizza Franchise-B.

29. Create Quizzes and Puzzles

People just love to take quizzes, and that engagement is an important step. Create a quiz that you can run on social media, where a click to the webpage for the right answer gains traffic. And as they finish your quiz, be sure to give them social icons to easily share your quiz with others.

If it is fun, then word may spread and links can be generated.

Example: If you run a dating website, you might create a quiz on “Your Perfect Soul Mate.”

30. Attract Links from the Right Neighborhood

Links from spammy sites can harm your website. Keep this in mind as you’re link building.

If your link profile has a fair amount of these types of links (think “Viagra”), it’s risky business. Google devalues these types of links in general (so no value to your site) and in some cases, penalizes them.

31. Get Listed in Online Directories

For getting listed online, think geography-specific directories that would be relevant to your business. Add your business link there.

Examples: YellowPages.com or Angie’s List, to name just a couple. In many cases, this may also include the BBB (remember No. 8 on this list), but there are many others you should consider.

32. Get a Link Audit

An SEO vendor or a consultant that is savvy in link building will have all the tools and data needed to decide if your backlink profile needs cleaning up. This will point you in the right direction on what to do next.

These audits can typically cover things like:

Link analysis from Google Search Console link reports.
Link analysis utilizing our proprietary tools.
Anchor text analysis.
Identification of links that need to be pruned, general link-pruning guidelines, and recommendations for how to submit for reconsideration.
Checking for any other possible “Penguin”-related problems, such as the “cupcake effect” or over-optimization

33. Buy a Competitor

A merger or acquisition has the potential to give you some great (or bad) links.

Suppose there’s an opportunity to purchase a competing and popular website in your same industry. If you buy it, then you will have the option to either consolidate the sites, thus combining links, or generate new link prospects from having an additional site.

Tip: We highly advise SEO services such as a link audit as part of your due diligence when acquiring a new domain (see No. 32).

34. Perform a Competitor Backlink Analysis

Find out the quality sites that are linking to your competition and try to hijack those links.

This is not as nefarious as it sounds, especially if your resource on a given topic surpasses the competitor’s page.

Contact the webmaster and ask them to consider your page as a more relevant source for their readers. Hijacking links is fair competition.

35. Reanimate Links on a Competitor’s Site

When your competitor has websites linking to them but the competitor’s page returns a 404 error, it creates an opportunity for you.

Example: Let’s say your competitor had an article on how to create a custom wood table, step-by-step, but it has been moved. Now that page looks broken to visitors. You are a furniture maker who has a great article on this (or you can whip one up).

Contact the webmaster and offer them a better link — to your relevant webpage — instead. Also remember to keep your links updated so that this doesn’t happen to you.

36. Evergreen Your URLs

Without changing your URLs, you can replace old content with newer, more relevant content. That way, any links to the existing page still benefit the site.

Example: If you have a page on Ford Mustangs with data from 2017, you might replace the content with the current year’s data. Do this each year.

37. Fix All 404s

A 404 “not found” error occurs when a user reaches a page URL that doesn’t exist. As we mentioned in No. 35 on this list, this creates a bad user experience.

A 404 error is especially problematic if the broken page has a lot of inbound links.

Just as you can find dead links to competitors and “hijack” them, your competitors can do the same to you.

Routinely run reports to identify any 404s. Then 301 redirect each 404 URL to its most relevant equivalent live page (if the page returning a 404 truly no longer exists).

In the interim, create a custom 404 page that can direct users to helpful content. This is recommended in Google’s guidelines.

38. Fix Your Site’s Quality

Another reason to address 404s and have good content is to raise the quality of your site. This is an indirect link-building technique.

The publishers of quality websites and the people in charge of building links for those websites will not link to a site that is not maintained. A low-quality website cannot be considered a link-worthy subject matter expert.

Again, the reason is user experience.

39. Link Prune

If your website has been hit with a penalty, sometimes the best option is to cut the junk.

See our link removal flowchart and recommendations for more:

We call this link pruning, and it’s something we offer with our penalty assessment services at Bruce Clay, Inc.

Perform Site Migrations with Care

PageRank cannot transfer from an old site to a new site until you can get the old pages re-crawled by the engines. To facilitate that, submit the old URLs to Google and Bing via an XML Sitemap file (see Google’s recommendations on this). The PageRank will transfer in a matter of days instead of months.

41. No Site-Wide Links

Sometimes a link to your website appears on every page of a site. For example, your website development company might put a footer link on your site such as “Created by XYZ” that points to their homepage. These links might seem helpful, but they do not send much traffic — and search engines may view them as spam.

Run-of-site links can look like an ad. If the links pass PageRank (i.e., they are followed), they may look like paid links. It’s not natural to link from every page to some third-party site.

There is no reason to have an excessive number of links from a third-party site unless it is an actual ad (and nofollowed).

We believe that it is the number of linking domains and not the number of links that has a high correlation to ranking. Choose wisely and get very few “right” links, so you do not look like spam.

42. Have One Redirect Jump Only

In recent years, Google representatives have said that no PageRank is lost for any 3XX redirects (301, 302, etc.). However, all redirects come with risk, and this risk can get larger if you have more than one redirect in place for a page.

Any given page may naturally experience a redirect in the case of a site redesign (or two or three) over the years. Here’s some basic information on how to properly implement a 301 redirect.

43. Silo Your Website

Once you obtain links, the next concern of link building should be to make the most of the link juice you receive.

You can magnify the PageRank flow of those incoming links by using siloing — a hierarchy structure of your URLs and content through linking.

For example, you might have a page that answers a common FAQ in your industry. But that landing page should also have a call to action that keeps that visitor engaged within your site, pointing to a relevant page on the same topic.

Here’s more information on SEO siloing:

The term siloing originated as a way to identify the concept of grouping related information into distinct sections within a website. Much like the chapters in a book, a silo represents a group of themed or subject-specific content on your site. The reason this grouping is such a high SEO priority is that search engines award “keyword” relevancy within their index based on the page and then the rest of the site with the most supporting relevant content. Well ranked websites are founded upon the concept that a website should physically be organized like a doctoral dissertation. A dissertation has a clearly identified title, abstract, table of contents, then content laid out to reinforce the overall theme of the dissertation as a whole, all with references and footnotes supporting the subject.

44. Post Answers on Question-and-Answer Sites

Quora is an example of a Q&A website that has nofollowed links. But the trust of those links is high, and you control the number of mentions based upon the number of answers you provide as the expert.

Another option is a forum. This is only good for industry credibility, and certainly not for links for search engines. Unfortunately, a forum is generally a place where someone that does not know the answer gets answers from others that do not know the answer.

Therefore, carefully look at the audience and the quality of the answers before joining a forum.

45. Rank in Search Engines

One of the best ways to become an expert in Google’s eyes is to create content that demonstrates your expertise and authority (Google PDF).

The better you do this, the more you become perceived as an expert. Once you start ranking for search queries time and time again, you will naturally be the site that people reference in their links.

46. Get Rating and Reviews

While you may not have much control over what ratings and reviews say, they do send links to your site.

Expanding on that thought, think about industry review sites that you can get to review your site or business. Are there local award contests? Does your local newspaper do a “top places to work” or a fastest-growing list?

All of these reviews can generate business and possibly links, especially if they come from a trusted resource.

47. Get Testimonials

What is your strategy for gathering testimonial reviews from your audience? Reach out to happy connections on a regular basis and ask for a testimonial on their website with a link to your home page.

48. Use Reciprocal Links with Care

There is much debate about reciprocal links (aka I link to you and you link to me back). The bottom line is that if you are linking between similar and relevant websites, it may not be a bad thing. Think of it as adding value to one another’s website.

Example: If you are a real estate agent, you might have a community resources page of helpful businesses in the area, such as local lawyers. By extension, one of those lawyers may also have a resource page or a blog article about helpful resources for their audience, like real estate agents.

49. Expand the Relationship with Existing Links

Websites that have linked to your website previously might link again. Is there another page on your website they might also be interested in linking to? Reach out and propose something.

50. On the “Do Not Do” List: Buying Links

White Hat means never buying links, never hiding links in widgets, and avoiding anything that would violate Google’s guidelines. See Google’s Link Schemes page for more:

Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site’s ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site or outgoing links from your site.

Remember, there is not really an “under the radar” approach that works for link building, certainly not for long. Google has years of fighting link spam; there’s likely nothing they haven’t seen before.

Can you do it and Google won’t catch you?

Maybe. But if a competitor catches you and reports you to Google, then you are toast.

Additional Notes and a Plan of Action for Link Building

Notice that we did not include some common myths about links such as commenting on others’ posts or even guest posts. These tactics make the other website the expert while giving you less fame and traffic than if you ranked yourself for that content.

Always avoid thin content sites (e.g., short pages) or sites where each page has many outbound links, especially if the linked-to sites are of poor quality. Assume this is the rule that applies to each of the techniques in this list.

So now what?

The recommended link-building process is obviously far more difficult than just reading a list. In general, there are a handful of things that need to happen:

Invest in what we refer to as a “strategic link analysis report” that talks about the linking opportunities, the risks and the estimated implementation costs. As part of your link building, these insights should balance the links’ SEO value with the traffic value with the contribution to expertise, authority and trust (refer to No. 45).
Finalize SEO campaign keywords. Variety is absolutely needed since building too many links with the same anchor text may be seen as spam. Select the keyword, select the landing page (new or updated) and then select the top-linking sites that you want a link from.
Research and finalize SEO campaign content. It could be a blog post, an image, an infographic, a video or something else, but it needs to be created before you embark on link building. Be sure to publicize the new content as appropriate.
Manage your existing link inventory and link prune the bad links while retaining the best links.
Go slowly, make sure links are relevant and on topic, and prefer respected sites as link acquisition targets.

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5 Reasons Your SEO Consulting Project Is Failing and How to Turn It Around – BruceClay

5 Reasons Your SEO Consulting Project Is Failing and How to Turn It Around – BruceClay was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

The relationship between a business and its SEO consulting firm is a delicate balance of give and take.

In order for an SEO strategy to deliver the best results, the SEO consultant must give accurate and useful recommendations, and the client must take that guidance and implement those recommendations.

This is a team effort where the consultant solves problems and mentors the client, and the client then learns and implements.

Seems fairly straightforward, but it’s not always so.

You have no doubt experienced this in your business. A project can have great energy at the outset. But as time passes, progress can be delayed and momentum stalled for a variety of reasons.

Here’s the good news: We’ve observed that there are five common roadblocks affecting SEO consulting projects that can absolutely be surpassed — once you know how to identify and push through them. Many potential failure points can be addressed even before the project starts, for maximum results.

In this article, I’ll list five common issues that threaten an SEO consulting project’s success AND how you can overcome them:

Misaligned expectations
Time constraints
Budget constraints
Lack of SEO knowledge
Website back-end and architectural issues

There are five common roadblocks that stand in the way of an SEO consulting project’s success (goats not included).

1. Misaligned Expectations

Misaligned expectations are a huge reason why consultants fail with their SEO projects.

This situation leads to scope-creep and client-satisfaction issues. It often disrespects the SEO team, and sometimes disregards the client’s desires for extra services.

Some clients — especially those that are already knowledgeable about SEO — may want to retain unyielding control of their SEO project. This is understandable when you’re a company that had an SEO team and strategy in place already. Issues arise, however, when that in-house team thinks they are better than they are and the consultant is ignored.

Generally, our favorite consulting scenario involves working closely with the client’s in-house SEO team.

But sometimes conflicting efforts or opinions between the consultant and the client’s SEO team lead to mishaps. A large amount of time may be lost due to drawn-out discussion or inaction. Eventually, the project may see little success. And even worse, with two cooks in the kitchen, sometimes neither can get things done.

At the end of the day, both the SEO consultant and the client want results.

The challenge for the SEO consultant is to create a list of recommendations that will have the greatest effect while aligning with the client’s expectations.

What roadblock does your SEO project face? Photo by Emran Kassim (CC BY 2.0)

Challenges on the client’s side may be that they have no power over the IT implementation team, or their influence is weak. But once they see and evangelize results within their organization, client teams will be more receptive to future recommendations.

The SEO consultant can sometimes help their client contact make progress within their organization.

Example: A national auto service chain we consulted for had a site speed issue, but their IT department didn’t think it was a priority. IT’s lack of cooperation was hindering the project. We finally included their IT team in a conference call, where we demonstrated how much faster competitor sites were compared to their own. Soon after, our speed recommendations were implemented and that project roadblock was cleared.

Solution: Ultimately, the best way to avoid misaligned expectations is to speak candidly about each party’s role in and ideas for the SEO project. Do this up front, followed by often. Keep focus on the KPIs for the project.

Clients should be sure to communicate their major pain points and goals. And they should celebrate wins.

Meanwhile, consulting firms need to create strategies that address these pain points. Remember, an SEO consultant becomes an important part of the client’s digital marketing team.

Taking unilateral action can alienate you. Instead, create a partnership between yourself and the rest of the team, so you are working together to achieve the business’s goals.

At the end of the day, both the SEO consultant and the client want results.
Click To Tweet

2. Time Constraints

Clients want the biggest bang for their buck. As such, they often don’t want to spend their staff resources to follow recommendations that appear minor or insignificant. Makes sense to me — focus on what drives the most traffic first.

For instance, clients often discount the value of editing meta tags — a page by page task that can seem time-consuming and trivial. And time consuming it is, but certainly not trivial.

Project roadblocks may be unexpected. Photo by Jefe Le Gran (CC BY 2.0)

Those who do see the value usually have seen positive results from optimizing titles and meta descriptions in the past. We have never seen it hurt, and almost always see solid improvement. What is especially helpful is if the client’s team understands how SEO really works at an advanced level.

Providing recommendations to a client with time constraints is difficult because, as with the budget barrier, everything must be justified in terms of the resources they are spending on the task.

Solution: Clients can request conversations, instruction and deliverables that show how SEO proves its value in terms of time commitment.

On the SEO consulting firm side, here are a few ways to justify value:

Make the recommendation and its explanation thorough. This gives a sense of confidence to the client that the work follows the best SEO practices.
Perhaps propose a proof-of-concept test that will prove the recommendations are valid.
Reference Google, Bing or other expert resources that align with the recommendations.
Have confidence in what you say and the client will, too.
Provide a comprehensive training class that shows the consulting agency’s expertise and teaches a proven methodology.

The best way to avoid misaligned client/consultant expectations is to speak candidly about each party’s role and ideas. Do this up front, followed by often.
Click To Tweet

3. Budget Constraints

No one likes spending money on what they believe is useless. And let’s face it, any project that takes months to see substantial results requires a leap of faith. You just must be a believer that SEO will eventually pay off.

A microscopic focus on the ROI of every individual recommended task, however, can disrupt an SEO project. By scrutinizing the cost and return on investment of each individual task that the consultant recommends, some business clients miss the big picture.

SEO often requires that many tasks reach completion for the needle to move, and often an individual task is little more than a piece in the puzzle.

For example, budget-wary business owners might incorrectly believe that:

Editing meta tags, rewording main navigation links and other detail tasks are too time-consuming and unnecessary for SEO strategy.
Their content is fine as is, which is really very seldom the case.
Their main problem is not having enough backlinks to their site.

Look ahead — don’t let your SEO project be blocked. Photo by B4bees (CC BY 2.0)

Since SEO success or failure results from a combination of efforts over time, it can be complicated to quantify (although some have tried to measure KPIs for SEO).

While SEO consultants understand SEO as a long-term game, client teams may not. They’re often more concerned with their monthly investment and how that translates to immediate results.

Solution: Budget-conscious clients almost always want recommendations to be justified in terms of ROI. On the client side, it’s important to remember that data analytics aren’t yet able to completely track customer journeys across the wide range of digital marketing touch points available.

SEO consultants, on the other hand, can help clients to feel more comfortable by presenting a clear, concise project plan. The consultant should be able to explain the value of each step of the SEO strategy — even when the costs and results cannot be precisely tied together.

SEO often requires that many tasks reach completion for the needle to move.
Click To Tweet

4. Lack of SEO Knowledge

Bruce Clay delivers SEO training.

Many clients don’t understand the art and science of SEO — after all, it’s not their only job.

They know they have a problem with their website and want more online visibility. And they’ve hired an expert to fix these problems.

However, a client should never feel “in the dark” about what the consultant is doing on their behalf.

The expert consultant should be willing and able to explain complicated topics in an easy-to-understand manner. You, as a client, should be comfortable that you can ask questions and receive clear answers that increase your knowledge of SEO. The consultant should be able to cite credible sources like Google and Bing to give more weight to their recommendations. And if the SEO consultant refrains from using unfamiliar industry jargon to explain processes, even better!

Lack of SEO knowledge can often be at the core of other common roadblocks, such as the time and budget constraints I talked about earlier.

Solution: Besides finding an SEO consultant who is able to provide the kind of Q&A described above, clients could also become familiar with at least the basics of search engine optimization. This will help them ask the right questions and see the value of the recommendations — and help prevent the marketing consulting project from failing.

For our own SEO consulting clients, we provide formal SEO training. Each new client gets a seat in the Bruce Clay SEO Training course at the start of their project. We’ve found that providing training is one of the best and fastest ways to get a client up to speed on how SEO works and why we recommend the things we do.

A client should never feel 'in the dark' about what the SEO consultant is doing on their behalf.
Click To Tweet

5. Website Back-End and Architectural Issues

Terrible content management systems don’t discriminate.

We’ve seen some of the world’s largest brands have a content management system (CMS) that is either outdated, broken or cumbersome to use. This is a problem because SEO implementation often requires flexibility to make proper changes.

In addition, sometimes the way a site is structured or designed does not allow the SEO consultant’s recommendations to be fully implemented — and sometimes they cannot be implemented at all.

Example: Sites using the Magento CMS often experience structural issues when organizing product categories. As a result, the CMS often creates duplicate content — two identical categories with links pointing to both pages. In the end, these pages compete for rankings and confuse the search engine and user experience.

What happens in cases like these is that the client usually won’t be receptive to the SEO consulting firm’s (our) recommendations because they simply can’t implement them with the current CMS in place. Understandably, the client may even get annoyed when the SEO consultant repeats the same instructions. The client often believes that there’s nothing that they can do about it.

As a result, the SEO consulting firm ends up backlogging important but not implemented SEO tasks. To-do lists for the client switch to smaller, more actionable changes that may not make as big of an impact but which reduce the friction of the project.

Solution: Discussions about the client’s CMS and potential implications to the project’s success should occur before the outset of the project. Both parties should be fully aware of what can and cannot be accomplished with their SEO consulting project within the limitations of the existing CMS.

Sometimes, the full scope of the limitation is not known until after the project begins. However, the proposed solutions should be on the table so that the client knows in advance that they may have to upgrade their CMS to fully realize SEO success.

Both the client and SEO consultant should be fully aware of what can and cannot be accomplished within the limitations of the existing CMS.
Click To Tweet

Summary

Both the client and the SEO consulting firm want the project to succeed. So it’s in everyone’s best interests to work as a team and see results.

Unfortunately, misaligned expectations, time and budget constraints, lack of SEO knowledge and back-end limitations may slow the project’s forward movement. An experienced consultant can often identify the roadblock and steer the project back on course.

Example: One of our clients, a beauty-products retail site, came to us with a small budget. We took them on as a client because we saw opportunity for them to expand their market. However, right away we had a scope-creep issue. They had big plans, moved fast, and wanted us to be involved in every move they made. For about two months, our analysts were working double what the contract paid for. In month three, we nailed down a project plan for the next 90 days that included goals and deliverables. Regularly we show the client this rolling 90-day plan so they know what to expect. Now, if they throw in a new request, we ask what part of next month’s project plan they’d like us to table to make room.

If your SEO project seems to have stalled, you may be experiencing one of the five common roadblocks I’ve outlined for why consultants fail. Whether you represent the consulting service or the client, I hope these observations will help you to turn things around.

If you’re ready to find an SEO consultant who understands the challenges and is committed to success, contact us to request a quote — we would love to discuss how we can be a great team member.

5 Reasons Your SEO Consulting Project Is Failing and How to Turn It Around

5 Reasons Your SEO Consulting Project Is Failing and How to Turn It Around was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

The relationship between a business and its SEO consulting firm is a delicate balance of give and take.

In order for an SEO strategy to deliver the best results, the SEO consultant must give accurate and useful recommendations, and the client must take that guidance and implement those recommendations.

This is a team effort where the consultant solves problems and mentors the client, and the client then learns and implements.

Seems fairly straightforward, but it’s not always so.

You have no doubt experienced this in your business. A project can have great energy at the outset. But as time passes, progress can be delayed and momentum stalled for a variety of reasons.

Here’s the good news: We’ve observed that there are five common roadblocks affecting SEO consulting projects that can absolutely be surpassed — once you know how to identify and push through them. Many potential failure points can be addressed even before the project starts, for maximum results.

In this article, I’ll list five common issues that threaten an SEO consulting project’s success AND how you can overcome them:

Misaligned expectations
Time constraints
Budget constraints
Lack of SEO knowledge
Website back-end and architectural issues

 

What roadblocks stand in the way of your SEO consulting project’s success? We’ve seen five common types (goats not included).

1. Misaligned Expectations

Misaligned expectations are a huge reason why consultants fail with their SEO projects.

This situation leads to scope-creep and client-satisfaction issues. It often disrespects the SEO team, and sometimes disregards the client’s desires for extra services.

Some clients — especially those that are already knowledgeable about SEO — may want to retain unyielding control of their SEO project. This is understandable when you’re a company that had an SEO team and strategy in place already. Issues arise, however, when that in-house team thinks they are better than they are and the consultant is ignored.

Generally, our favorite consulting scenario involves working closely with the client’s in-house SEO team.

But sometimes conflicting efforts or opinions between the consultant and the client’s SEO team lead to mishaps. A large amount of time may be lost due to drawn-out discussion or inaction. Eventually, the project may see little success. And even worse, with two cooks in the kitchen, sometimes neither can get things done.

At the end of the day, both the SEO consultant and the client want results.

The challenge for the SEO consultant is to create a list of recommendations that will have the greatest effect while aligning with the client’s expectations.

Challenges on the client’s side may be that they have no power over the IT implementation team, or their influence is weak. But once they see and evangelize results within their organization, client teams will be more receptive to future recommendations.

The SEO consultant can sometimes help their client contact make progress within their organization.

Example: A national auto service chain we consulted for had a site speed issue, but their IT department didn’t think it was a priority. IT’s lack of cooperation was hindering the project. We finally included their IT team in a conference call, where we demonstrated how much faster competitor sites were compared to their own. Soon after, our speed recommendations were implemented and that project roadblock was cleared.

Solution: Ultimately, the best way to avoid misaligned expectations is to speak candidly about each party’s role in and ideas for the SEO project. Do this up front, followed by often. Keep focus on the KPIs for the project.

Clients should be sure to communicate their major pain points and goals. And they should celebrate wins.

Meanwhile, consulting firms need to create strategies that address these pain points. Remember, an SEO consultant becomes an important part of the client’s digital marketing team.

Taking unilateral action can alienate you. Instead, create a partnership between yourself and the rest of the team, so you are working together to achieve the business’s goals.

At the end of the day, both the SEO consultant and the client want results.
Click To Tweet

2. Time Constraints

Clients want the biggest bang for their buck. As such, they often don’t want to spend their staff resources to follow recommendations that appear minor or insignificant. Makes sense to me — focus on what drives the most traffic first.

For instance, clients often discount the value of editing meta tags — a page by page task that can seem time-consuming and trivial. And time consuming it is, but certainly not trivial.

Those who do see the value usually have seen positive results from optimizing titles and meta descriptions in the past. We have never seen it hurt, and almost always see solid improvement. What is especially helpful is if the client’s team understands how SEO really works at an advanced level.

Providing recommendations to a client with time constraints is difficult because, as with the budget barrier, everything must be justified in terms of the resources they are spending on the task.

Solution: Clients can request conversations, instruction and deliverables that show how SEO proves its value in terms of time commitment.

On the SEO consulting firm side, here are a few ways to justify value:

Make the recommendation and its explanation thorough. This gives a sense of confidence to the client that the work follows the best SEO practices.
Perhaps propose a proof-of-concept test that will prove the recommendations are valid.
Reference Google, Bing or other expert resources that align with the recommendations.
Have confidence in what you say and the client will, too.
Provide a comprehensive training class that shows the consulting agency’s expertise and teaches a proven methodology.

The best way to avoid misaligned client/consultant expectations is to speak candidly about each party’s role and ideas. Do this up front, followed by often.
Click To Tweet

3. Budget Constraints

No one likes spending money on what they believe is useless. And let’s face it, any project that takes months to see substantial results requires a leap of faith. You just must be a believer that SEO will eventually pay off.

A microscopic focus on the ROI of every individual recommended task, however, can disrupt an SEO project. By scrutinizing the cost and return on investment of each individual task that the consultant recommends, some business clients miss the big picture.

SEO often requires that many tasks reach completion for the needle to move, and often an individual task is little more than a piece in the puzzle.

For example, budget-wary business owners might incorrectly believe that:

Editing meta tags, rewording main navigation links and other detail tasks are too time-consuming and unnecessary for SEO strategy.
Their content is fine as is, which is really very seldom the case.
Their main problem is not having enough backlinks to their site.

Since SEO success or failure results from a combination of efforts over time, it can be complicated to quantify (although some have tried to measure KPIs for SEO).

While SEO consultants understand SEO as a long-term game, client teams may not. They’re often more concerned with their monthly investment and how that translates to immediate results.

Solution: Budget-conscious clients almost always want recommendations to be justified in terms of ROI. On the client side, it’s important to remember that data analytics aren’t yet able to completely track customer journeys across the wide range of digital marketing touch points available.

SEO consultants, on the other hand, can help clients to feel more comfortable by presenting a clear, concise project plan. The consultant should be able to explain the value of each step of the SEO strategy — even when the costs and results cannot be precisely tied together.

SEO often requires that many tasks reach completion for the needle to move.
Click To Tweet

4. Lack of SEO Knowledge

Many clients don’t understand the art and science of SEO — after all, it’s not their only job.

They know they have a problem with their website and want more online visibility. And they’ve hired an expert to fix these problems.

However, a client should never feel “in the dark” about what the consultant is doing on their behalf.

The expert consultant should be willing and able to explain complicated topics in an easy-to-understand manner. You, as a client, should be comfortable that you can ask questions and receive clear answers that increase your knowledge of SEO. The consultant should be able to cite credible sources like Google and Bing to give more weight to their recommendations. And if the SEO consultant refrains from using unfamiliar industry jargon to explain processes, even better!

Lack of SEO knowledge can often be at the core of other common roadblocks, such as the time and budget constraints I talked about earlier.

Solution: Besides finding an SEO consultant who is able to provide the kind of Q&A described above, clients could also become familiar with at least the basics of search engine optimization. This will help them ask the right questions and see the value of the recommendations — and help prevent the marketing consulting project from failing.

For our own SEO consulting clients, we provide formal SEO training. Each new client gets a seat in the Bruce Clay SEO Training course at the start of their project. We’ve found that providing training is one of the best and fastest ways to get a client up to speed on how SEO works and why we recommend the things we do.

A client should never feel 'in the dark' about what the SEO consultant is doing on their behalf.
Click To Tweet

5. Website Back-End and Architectural Issues

Terrible content management systems don’t discriminate.

We’ve seen some of the world’s largest brands have a content management system (CMS) that is either outdated, broken or cumbersome to use. This is a problem because SEO implementation often requires flexibility to make proper changes.

In addition, sometimes the way a site is structured or designed does not allow the SEO consultant’s recommendations to be fully implemented — and sometimes they cannot be implemented at all.

For example, sites using the Magento CMS often experience structural issues when organizing product categories. As a result, the CMS often creates duplicate content — two identical categories with links pointing to both pages. In the end, these pages compete for rankings and confuse the search engine and user experience.

What happens in cases like these is that the client usually won’t be receptive to the SEO consulting firm’s (our) recommendations because they simply can’t implement them with the current CMS in place. Understandably, the client may even get annoyed when the SEO consultant repeats the same instructions. The client often believes that there’s nothing that they can do about it.

As a result, the SEO consulting firm ends up backlogging important but not implemented SEO tasks. To-do lists for the client switch to smaller, more actionable changes that may not make as big of an impact but which reduce the friction of the project.

Solution: Discussions about the client’s CMS and potential implications to the project’s success should occur before the outset of the project. Both parties should be fully aware of what can and cannot be accomplished with their SEO consulting project within the limitations of the existing CMS.

Sometimes, the full scope of the limitation is not known until after the project begins. However, the proposed solutions should be on the table so that the client knows in advance that they may have to upgrade their CMS to fully realize SEO success.

Both the client and SEO consultant should be fully aware of what can and cannot be accomplished within the limitations of the existing CMS.
Click To Tweet

Summary

Both the client and the SEO consulting firm want the project to succeed. So it’s in everyone’s best interests to work as a team and see results.

Unfortunately, misaligned expectations, time and budget constraints, lack of SEO knowledge and back-end limitations may slow the project’s forward movement. An experienced consultant can often identify the roadblock and steer the project back on course.

Example: One of our clients, a beauty-products retail site, came to us with a small budget. We took them on as a client because we saw opportunity for them to expand their market. However, right away we had a scope-creep issue. They had big plans, moved fast, and wanted us to be involved in every move they made. For about two months, our analysts were working double what the contract paid for. In month three, we nailed down a project plan for the next 90 days that included goals and deliverables. Regularly we show the client this rolling 90-day plan so they know what to expect. Now, if they throw in a new request, we ask what part of next month’s project plan they’d like to table to make room.

If your SEO project seems to have stalled, you may be experiencing one of the five common roadblocks I’ve outlined for why consultants fail. Whether you represent the consulting service or the client, I hope these observations will help you to turn things around.

If you’re ready to find an SEO consultant who understands the challenges and is committed to success, contact us to request a quote — we would love to discuss how we can be a great team member.

The Valuable SEO Advice That Fulfilled One Contest Winner’s Dream – BruceClay

The Valuable SEO Advice That Fulfilled One Contest Winner’s Dream – BruceClay was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

This post comes from one of our international partner offices, Bruce Clay India, which Bruce visited this month to meet with the team and deliver his SEO Training course.

On 12th February 2018, Dhananjay Kumar from Max Life Insurance​ fulfilled his five-year long dream of meeting Bruce Clay in person. Dhananjay, who was the lucky winner of Bruce Clay India’s SEO Contest, arrived at BCI’s Gurgaon office to claim his prize — an exclusive 30-minute Q&A session with the Father of SEO, Bruce Clay.

Contest winner Dhananjay Kumar with Bruce Clay at the BCI office in Gurgaon

Dhananjay, who calls himself a big fan of Bruce Clay, is passionate about SEO. With an eager clasp of hands and the words, “Can’t wait to get started,”  he shot off questions for Bruce, which the SEO guru answered with his characteristic composure and just the right dose of humor!

The excerpt below contains Bruce’s SEO advice on issues from overcoming compliance restrictions to press releases, voice search, local market confusion, PWAs and more.

Dhananjay: Being an insurance firm, we cannot use words like Best, Top and other superlatives. How do we rank for such superlative terms?

Bruce: You have a compliance issue. Therefore you cannot use the terms “Best Insurance Company” or “Top Insurance Policy” anywhere on your website or ads. We have the same problem in US with Banking and Insurance companies where you can’t use words like cheap, best, etc. You need to check with your compliance team on what else should you not use.

If you remember linear distribution from the SEO Training, you can use the word ‘best’, but not to describe your business or product. Get the two words ‘your business’ and ‘best’ in proximity without violating the compliance. It can be done by saying things like, “Many insurance companies claim to be best but not us.” It can be used in the schema description, meta title and meta description of the page.

Also check with your compliance team if using the ‘taboo’ words (Best, Cheap, Top, etc.) in meta titles, meta descriptions and meta keywords violates compliance in India or not, and act accordingly.

Dhananjay: Can we rank on our competitors’ brand queries?

Bruce: You can, but it’s unethical and ill advised. You cannot use a person’s brand against them. If you do, they can take legal action against you.

If you want rank for your competitors’ keywords legally, you can use your competitors’ brand names in a review. But you can’t sell anything on that page or even try. Also, you might be obligated to link to the competitor’s website.

Dhananjay: How effective are press releases?

Bruce: Press releases are an awareness tool to create buzz about a product, a company or even a keyword. For example, your company creates a new type of insurance. A press release will encourage some people to go online and search for it on Google. If you are the only one with that type of insurance, it will help you get more traffic. Social media and press releases are mechanisms that excite people to make them search. Once they search, your PPC and organic handles the rest.

Dhananjay: Google hasn’t given any recommendations for voice search, so how do we leverage voice search? What could be the best SEO strategy for voice search?

Bruce: First of all, search for your product by voice. Sometimes, accents also make a problem for voice search. The phone can’t understand certain words in different accents. Voice search may not work best internationally. Hows, Whats, and Wheres — use long-tail, question-based, 4+ word queries. Ensure that you answer the Hows and Whats of your product within your content.

Mobile, voice and local are the big three focus points. Google’s search index is now mobile-first, so that’s very important. We know voice search is important as the top three products sold last Christmas were all voice products. Local is important because it helps Google make money. Remember that local helps national, so strengthen your local first. So focus on all the three areas for best results.

Dhananjay: A fraud site with a similar domain name as ours used to rank in our place. We set that right with the help of legal. However, they claimed 70% of our local listings, and I am unable to fix it.

Bruce: Your lawyers can indicate that there is “Market Confusion” (it’s the proper term) over the domain name and make them surrender their product.

If you find that a company with a similar domain name is taking away your traffic, you can claim that domain. For local listings, you can indicate to Google that your local addresses/listings have been hijacked. A Google representative should be able to help you with getting the domains/listings back. You can also file a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) complaint with Google, a form that is easily available online. All you have to do is give Google your copyright number or your trademark number to file the DMCA (just to be on the safe side).

Dhananjay: How does PWA (Progressive Web Apps) fit into our SEO strategy?

Bruce: PWA is still changing. There are two types of design decisions you can make, as I mentioned in the Masterclass — Appy or Webby. The general feeling is Webby. The general way in which PWA works is this: when someone opens a website for the first time, it’s installed. It installs an envelope and loads the content in the envelope. The next time Google will know it’s a PWA and will load the content. The content will still be responsive.

To learn more about PWAs, type “site:google.com Progressive Web Apps” on Google.

 

Dhananjay looked thrilled after his interaction with Bruce and receiving his valuable SEO advice. And why not? After all, how many people have the privilege of meeting the most well known proponent of SEO on the planet!

If your company is stuck with how to do SEO or digital marketing, or is facing compliance issues, you can drop the Bruce Clay India team a note at sales-in@bruceclay.com.

Siddharth Lal is the managing director of Bruce Clay India, established in 2009 and based in Gurgaon, India.

The Valuable SEO Advice That Fulfilled One Contest Winner’s Dream

The Valuable SEO Advice That Fulfilled One Contest Winner’s Dream was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

This post comes from one of our international partner offices, Bruce Clay India, which Bruce visited this month to meet with the team and deliver his SEO Training course.

On 12th February 2018, Dhananjay Kumar from Max Life Insurance​ fulfilled his five-year long dream of meeting Bruce Clay in person. Dhananjay, who was the lucky winner of Bruce Clay India’s SEO Contest, arrived at BCI’s Gurgaon office to claim his prize — an exclusive 30-minute Q&A session with the Father of SEO, Bruce Clay.

Contest winner Dhananjay Kumar with Bruce Clay at the BCI office in Gurgaon

Dhananjay, who calls himself a big fan of Bruce Clay, is passionate about SEO. With an eager clasp of hands and the words, “Can’t wait to get started,”  he shot off questions for Bruce, which the SEO guru answered with his characteristic composure and just the right dose of humor!

The excerpt below contains Bruce’s SEO advice on issues from overcoming compliance restrictions to press releases, voice search, local market confusion, PWAs and more.

Dhananjay: Being an insurance firm, we cannot use words like Best, Top and other superlatives. How do we rank for such superlative terms?

Bruce: You have a compliance issue. Therefore you cannot use the terms “Best Insurance Company” or “Top Insurance Policy” anywhere on your website or ads. We have the same problem in US with Banking and Insurance companies where you can’t use words like cheap, best, etc. You need to check with your compliance team on what else should you not use.

If you remember linear distribution from the SEO Training, you can use the word ‘best’, but not to describe your business or product. Get the two words ‘your business’ and ‘best’ in proximity without violating the compliance. It can be done by saying things like, “Many insurance companies claim to be best but not us.” It can be used in the schema description, meta title and meta description of the page.

Also check with your compliance team if using the ‘taboo’ words (Best, Cheap, Top, etc.) in meta titles, meta descriptions and meta keywords violates compliance in India or not, and act accordingly.

Dhananjay: Can we rank on our competitors’ brand queries?

Bruce: You can, but it’s unethical and ill advised. You cannot use a person’s brand against them. If you do, they can take legal action against you.

If you want rank for your competitors’ keywords legally, you can use your competitors’ brand names in a review. But you can’t sell anything on that page or even try. Also, you might be obligated to link to the competitor’s website.

Dhananjay: How effective are press releases?

Bruce: Press releases are an awareness tool to create buzz about a product, a company or even a keyword. For example, your company creates a new type of insurance. A press release will encourage some people to go online and search for it on Google. If you are the only one with that type of insurance, it will help you get more traffic. Social media and press releases are mechanisms that excite people to make them search. Once they search, your PPC and organic handles the rest.

Dhananjay: Google hasn’t given any recommendations for voice search, so how do we leverage voice search? What could be the best SEO strategy for voice search?

Bruce: First of all, search for your product by voice. Sometimes, accents also make a problem for voice search. The phone can’t understand certain words in different accents. Voice search may not work best internationally. Hows, Whats, and Wheres — use long-tail, question-based, 4+ word queries. Ensure that you answer the Hows and Whats of your product within your content.

Mobile, voice and local are the big three focus points. Google’s search index is now mobile-first, so that’s very important. We know voice search is important as the top three products sold last Christmas were all voice products. Local is important because it helps Google make money. Remember that local helps national, so strengthen your local first. So focus on all the three areas for best results.

Dhananjay: A fraud site with a similar domain name as ours used to rank in our place. We set that right with the help of legal. However, they claimed 70% of our local listings, and I am unable to fix it.

Bruce: Your lawyers can indicate that there is “Market Confusion” (it’s the proper term) over the domain name and make them surrender their product.

If you find that a company with a similar domain name is taking away your traffic, you can claim that domain. For local listings, you can indicate to Google that your local addresses/listings have been hijacked. A Google representative should be able to help you with getting the domains/listings back. You can also file a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) complaint with Google, a form that is easily available online. All you have to do is give Google your copyright number or your trademark number to file the DMCA (just to be on the safe side).

Dhananjay: How does PWA (Progressive Web Apps) fit into our SEO strategy?

Bruce: PWA is still changing. There are two types of design decisions you can make, as I mentioned in the Masterclass — Appy or Webby. The general feeling is Webby. The general way in which PWA works is this: when someone opens a website for the first time, it’s installed. It installs an envelope and loads the content in the envelope. The next time Google will know it’s a PWA and will load the content. The content will still be responsive.

To learn more about PWAs, type “site:google.com Progressive Web Apps” on Google.

 

Dhananjay looked thrilled after his interaction with Bruce and receiving his valuable SEO advice. And why not? After all, how many people have the privilege of meeting the most well known proponent of SEO on the planet!

If your company is stuck with how to do SEO or digital marketing, or is facing compliance issues, you can drop the Bruce Clay India team a note at sales-in@bruceclay.com.

Siddharth Lal is the managing director of Bruce Clay India, established in 2009 and based in Gurgaon, India.

7 Mobile-Friendly Navigation Best Practices – BruceClay

7 Mobile-Friendly Navigation Best Practices – BruceClay was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

It’s now 2018, and we are officially living in a mobile-first world. In fact, Google has begun the switch to a mobile-first index — which means Google will rank your website based on your mobile content, relevance and UX.

Your mobile navigation (menus and internal links) contribute to all three and must work for users and for SEO.

Good mobile navigation makes it easy for people to find what they need, without bogging down page speed or cluttering the screen. It also needs to keep PageRank flowing to the important pages that you want to rank well in search.

Site navigations historically included everything on a site in huge, multi-tiered lists. On mobile, that approach doesn’t work. It looks cluttered. It requires scrolling. And it causes your visitors to bounce away.



7 Mobile-Friendly Navigation Best Practices

7 Mobile-Friendly Navigation Best Practices was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

It’s now 2018, and we are officially living in a mobile-first world. In fact, Google has begun the switch to a mobile-first index — which means Google will rank your website based on your mobile content, relevance and UX.

Your mobile navigation (menus and internal links) contribute to all three.

Good mobile navigation makes it easy for people to find what they need, without bogging down page speed or cluttering the screen. It also needs to keep PageRank flowing to the important pages that you want to rank well in search.

Site navigations historically included everything on a site in huge, multi-tiered lists. On mobile, that approach doesn’t work. It looks cluttered. It requires scrolling. And it causes your visitors to bounce away.

Here I’ll lay out seven mobile-friendly navigation best practices that make life easier for people visiting your business site on a mobile device:

Keep mobile navigation short and sweet.
List the most important pages first.
Think of search as part of your navigation.
Make your navigation intuitive.
Be thoughtful about fonts and contrast.
Design for touch.
Design for the multi-screen mobile user.

Note: All of the mobile navigation tips mentioned in this article are equally applicable to separate mobile sites, responsive design sites, and sites that dynamically serve web pages. If you’re not sure what that means, or which mobile platform is best for you, read our Cheat Sheet for Mobile Design.

7 Mobile Navigation Best Practices for UX & SEO

1. Keep Mobile Navigation Short and Sweet

Many mobile phone screens are only 720 pixels wide in portrait mode.

Designing mobile navigation means designing for a small screen size. With limited real estate available, there’s no room for clutter. Get right to the point then cut the fat.

Ask yourself, what links need to be included to help your user complete priority tasks? What elements from the desktop navigation aren’t relevant in the mobile environment?

To save your user from decision paralysis, we recommend you limit your mobile navigation to four to eight items on the top level. Your mobile navigation menu is not the place to link to every page in your site.

To keep it short and sweet, you may even consider adding a top-of-page logo that navigates to the homepage and leaving the Home button out of your navigation all together (as on the BCI website, below).

Comparison of BCI’s desktop and mobile navigation

Some mobile navigations require multi-level navigation to aid user experience. This is more common with ecommerce websites. If you must go there, keep it as simple as possible. Don’t add more than one sublevel of dropdown functionality.

If your navigation must include more items, a vertically oriented navigation activated from a menu icon is the best option.

If your mobile user’s typical needs are very limited, consider using a static navigation that runs across the top of your design, like we see on the GameStop mobile site:

GameStop uses static navigation across the top of its mobile-friendly view.

A navigation that requires horizontal scrolling probably won’t be mobile-friendly. Some sites have the resources to design a sleek image-based carousel type of interface, such as what Google uses for certain search results. That might be an exception, but consider your audience.

2. List the Most Important Pages First

Your website users don’t have a lot of time — or patience. How can you help them get to the right place faster?

To design your mobile site navigation, first think about:

What are your most important pages?
What are the top category pages outlined in your siloing strategy?
What are the most common actions taken by site visitors using smartphones?
What pages of your website most effectively satisfy a mobile user’s needs?

The answers to these questions influence not just which items go in your main menu, but also which links and calls to action you should put on each page.

You’ll want to keep your main navigation menu consistent throughout the site. It should point to the top four to eight landing pages (such as main category pages).

A short-and-sweet mobile nav is a win-win for SEO and your users. It preserves the flow of link equity to your most important pages while also helping users get around.

Once users arrive on a page, contextual links can move them to wherever makes sense. These links can be added within the body content of each page in a comfortable way.

For instance, a long blog post may have multiple sections and thousands of words. Have mercy on your mobile users — don’t make them scroll to find what may be pertinent to them. Some ideas:

Show a TL;DR summary at the top of a long article. If readers want more detail, they’ll scroll down.
Give anchor links at the top that jump a reader to the different sections below (as I did at the top of this article).
Include useful calls to action and links to related pages within the body copy where they make sense.

The mobile navigation model I’m describing — a short, consistent main menu coupled with contextual links that vary per page — actually supports siloing better than the massive structured menus of old. A parent only links to its children, maintaining a clear hierarchy and intuitive flow. Internal links allow PageRank to flow to topically related pages naturally.

When it comes to mobile users, quicker is always better! It will take some work for you to make each page deliver the most appropriate navigation options. But you’ll improve user experience and no doubt your ROI by giving visitors a more direct path to what they need.

While we’re on the topic of “quicker,” remember that fast mobile pages make for a better user experience. Google announced that page load speed can factor into your Google search rankings, so a streamlined navigation helps with mobile SEO.

You can test your mobile page speed with Google’s mobile speed test (or use our SEOToolSet).

3. Think of Search as Part of Your Navigation

Mobile users look at search as navigation, and you should too.

Consider Amazon.com. On mobile, Amazon doesn’t even bother with the category dropdown (although it’s there under “Departments” if someone wants it). What’s prominent at the top of the mobile view is a simple “Search” box.

Even with its massive catalog, Amazon doesn’t expect users to navigate through menus to find what they need. Most of the time, customers just type in a product name and go directly to buy it.

The Search box is Amazon’s most mobile-friendly navigation option.

On mobile, your search box is often the most direct route to what a user needs.

Set it up and make sure it works well!

4. Make your Navigation Intuitive

Your customers work hard enough; navigating your site should not be work.

To make your navigation intuitive, menu language should always be written in a way that lets the user know what to expect. It should be clear what the item does if it’s a dropdown, and exactly where it goes if it’s a link.

If you are using symbols to convey information to your users, make sure they are clear, conventional symbols. For instance, if your menu items drop down, use an intuitive symbol like a plus sign (+) or an arrow (>) to let your users know a click will reveal more options.

Another best practice example would be using a magnifying glass to indicate a search feature.

If you are using a toggle menu, use three stacked lines — the icon highlighted in the example below — to help the user locate and access your main nav.

REI’s menu opens from a hamburger icon.

TIP: A hamburger-style menu icon like this often gets more clicks if it also has the word “menu” below it (according to A/B testing. If your design has room, you might test this to see if it makes your mobile site more intuitive and increases clicks/conversions.

The goal is for your mobile navigation to make life easier by limiting thinking, scrolling and clicking.

About Breadcrumbs in SERPs

It’s worth noting that since 2015, Google has displayed URLs in its mobile search results differently than it does in desktop SERPs. The change replaces a web page’s URL with a description of the page’s location in a breadcrumbs-like format. If this doesn’t scream of the importance of siloing and clear hierarchy, nothing does!

Now, rather than showing a page URL, Google’s mobile search results display a breadcrumb path beneath each title.

For example, mobile search results for “history of Google” include a Wikipedia result showing how the URL appeared in the past versus the current breadcrumb style:

How Google’s mobile search result URLs have changed

TIP: You can control how your breadcrumb URLs appear if you add schema markup to the HTML on your pages. Refer to Schema.org’s breadcrumbs structured data for details and Google’s help file on breadcrumbs. (For more on this update and what it means, see our post Google’s New Mobile Breadcrumb URLs: Making the Most of Your Site Name & URL Structure.)

5. Be Thoughtful about Fonts and Contrast

Your website users shouldn’t have to zoom to read any of the text on your mobile website, including the text within your navigation.

Tiny text that requires zooming creates a bad user experience, and neither your website users nor Google or Bing like poor user experiences.

All of the text on your mobile site needs to be large enough to be read on a variety of devices without zooming. This principle needs to be a top priority that you consider as you build your mobile-friendly CSS (cascading style sheets) to control the appearance of text on various devices.

To make your navigation text easy to read, choose a font that naturally adds enough space to distinguish between letters and is tall enough to be clearly read in a menu.

Your font size and style also depend on your brand’s style guide and what fits your unique demographic. For instance, a young audience may not struggle with smaller or condensed fonts as much as an older demographic would. The way you handle formatting such as bullet styles, capitalization, margins, captioning, and so on should also reflect what’s attractive to your audience and comfortable for them to read.

Once you decide, set up your CSS and create a written style guide to keep your content consistent.

For designing the look of your mobile navigation, best practices can’t give you a one-size-fits-all recommendation. What’s important is that every word on your mobile site can be read easily without zooming. I recommend you perform user testing to see first-hand whether your font is tripping up users.

Also, make sure there’s sufficient contrast between your text and its background. WebAIM guidelines offer rules for color contrast (recommending a minimum ratio of 4.5 to 1). You can try their contrast checker tool to see how your text treatment measures up.

Google gives a few examples of what different contrast ratios look like:

Text needs contrast against the background for readability on a phone. (Per Google)

In addition, Google points out that “classic readability theory suggests that an ideal column should contain 70 to 80 characters per line (about 8 to 10 words in English). Thus, each time the width of a text block grows past about 10 words, consider adding a breakpoint.”

This tip applies to body text; consider a shorter maximum length for your menu options.

Not sure if your text is easy to read? Run your site through Google’s Mobile Friendly Test tool.

6. Design for Touch

Tablet and smartphone users rely on touchscreens to get them around websites. While a pointy mouse arrow allows users to precisely select items in tight spaces, the average finger requires a larger target to press. Many users don’t hit a touchscreen exactly where they are aiming.

Google recommends building mobile pages with a minimum touch target size of 48 pixels with a properly set viewport (more on that later). And touch targets should be spaced about 32 pixels apart, both horizontally and vertically.

Buttons and touch targets should be big enough to be mobile friendly. (Per Google)

Build navigation buttons with a target smaller than 40 pixels and your user experience plummets. Visitors end up sloppily navigating to the category above or below the one they want.

Don’t frustrate your users!

Since people are so bad at hitting their tap mark much of the time, it can also help to incorporate touch feedback into your navigation. Your feedback could be a color change, a blink of color, a font change or another visual cue.

Even if it’s subtle, this feedback can improve user experience by helping to reassure users that they’ve selected the right item. Take a look at the example below from Search Engine Land:

Color changes show which menu item is touched on SearchEngineLand.com.

If you are using multi-tier navigation, it’s also important that you make sure your dropdowns are activated by touch — not mouse over. Clearly, hover navigations work just fine in the desktop experience, where hovering is a possibility, but they leave mobile users stuck.

Another touch-friendly option is to design a supplementary navigation that uses images and exaggerated graphic buttons. This type of navigation can be a great homepage asset that gets your visitor headed in the right direction quickly.

Vintage clothing site RustyZipper.com uses large graphic “button” with text labels for mobile-friendly navigation.

It’s important to note that graphic buttons like these should only be a supplemental option used alongside a toggle navigation or a static top navigation. You need to have a consistent navigation that the user can access at the top of every page.

While you may be able to include this graphic navigation at the bottom of your mobile pages, it’s not optimal or practical to use these big graphic buttons as your primary navigation. And always consider the load-time performance impact of images and buttons.

Be Careful with Popups

You also want to avoid intrusive interstitials — those popups that monopolize the screen when a visitor clicks through from a search result. In January 2017, Google rolled out an intrusive interstitial penalty for mobile search.

Per Google, “Since screen real-estate on mobile devices is limited, any interstitial negatively impacts the user’s experience.”

Example of an intrusive interstitial popup (credit: Google)

Be careful to use interactive forms and popups courteously. Some best practices for these include:

Apply a delay or time interval between views so you don’t annoy your visitors.
Reduce the amount of screen space your element covers.
Try a bar or box that scrolls in from the bottom or side.
Avoid covering the middle of the mobile screen or obstructing your navigation elements at the top.
Let no be no. If a user closes a form, don’t display it again within a reasonable period of time (perhaps a week later).

7. Design for the Multi-Screen Mobile User

Chances are good that interested website visitors come to your website using multiple devices over a short period of time.

To help them feel confident they’re in the right place, it’s smart to give your mobile and desktop sites a consistent visual theme.

Your mobile and desktop navigation, however, do not have to be — and sometimes should not be — identical twins.

While the colors, fonts and themes you use for your mobile and desktop navigation need to be consistent to reinforce your branding, the similarity may end there.

Your mobile navigation needs to help users navigate around your website and accomplish tasks. Consider the content your smartphone users need and the tasks they are looking to accomplish, and then build your mobile navigation specifically for a smartphone user.

What mobile-specific calls to action need to be built into your navigation to aid user experience?
Does it make sense to include a “Call” button or a store locator?
Can a mobile user easily find essential information like your address, directions, phone number, hours of operation, or other facts?

Remember: Space is limited, mobile needs are unique, and on-the-go patience is minimal.

Because website visitors will use a variety of devices and screen sizes, specify a viewport using the viewport meta tag.

Websites need a scalable meta viewport for correct display on smartphones.

Common mobile mistakes include having a fixed-width viewport that doesn’t scale for all devices, or assuming too wide of a viewport, which forces users on small screens to scroll horizontally.

Mobile-Friendly is Customer-Friendly

Creating a mobile-friendly navigation means creating a customer-friendly navigation that gets your personas moving in the right direction right away.

If you build an intuitive navigation that is easy to use, your website users will be headed toward conversion happiness in no time. Build a navigation that is frustrating or confusing, and they’ll be headed back to the search results and straight toward someone else’s website.

To keep your inbound visitors smiling, follow these best practices to make your mobile-friendly navigation:

 Short and sweet whenever possible

Easy to read

Task-oriented

Prioritized with what’s most important listed first

Accessible and placed consistently across all pages

Clear, straightforward and expected

Vertical if scrolling is required (never use horizontal scrolling!)

Easy on the eyes

 Finger-friendly

Fast

Be a leader — share this post with friends or colleagues who are as interested in UX as you are. For more resources like this one, subscribe to our blog.

Editor’s note: This article is based on an earlier post written by Chelsea Adams for the Bruce Clay Blog.

Bruce Clay’s Predictions for Digital Marketing in 2018

Bruce Clay’s Predictions for Digital Marketing in 2018 was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

Do you remember the buzz and flurry of activity around Y2K? Possibly not, but it was a fire drill of activity to avoid disaster. This year may seem similar as things evolve rapidly in the realm of search.

For example, sites that have put off mobile readiness — thinking that most of their traffic comes from desktop, so why bother with mobile? — will find themselves in crisis this year.

Marketing teams across the board will face receding budgets as the C-suite becomes increasingly unwilling to dole out money without solid proof that it delivers results (per Gartner’s Oct. 2017 CMO survey).

As a result, I expect to see a focus on attribution tools and better data reporting as the industry scrambles to connect the dots of customer journeys and justify marketing spend.

Predictions for digital marketing in 2018 are fairly easy to make — at least compared to the last 13 years of annual prediction posts I’ve written. I am sure that most in the SEO industry who follow Google see these trends already progressing.

In a nutshell, the hot buttons SEOs know now will stay hot.

Make the right moves this year, informed by Bruce Clay’s 2018 digital marketing predictions.

Here are my predictions for mobile first, voice search, content, linking, speed, SEO, ecommerce, machine learning, virtual reality and video, to help you make more informed decisions this year.

My Digital Marketing Predictions for 2018

Mobile First: Google’s mobile-first index will become a bigger player starting around February. I expect that there will be a significant “disturbance in the force” when companies that have rested on their brand realize that the indexed content has changed enough to disturb their rankings.

For sites that are not mobile friendly, Google may continue to index the desktop version and hold off moving it to the mobile-first index. However, I don’t expect their rankings to hold since mobile user experience is the search engine’s top priority.

I anticipate Google will roll out mobile-first faster than expected. But even the preparation for it is changing the search engine’s index — which impacts rankings.

For instance, businesses trying to speed up their sites may remove large images, eliminate non-essential content, and modify other elements including links. Just altering the navigation menu to simplify it for mobile users changes a lot. All of this fluctuating content will affect the index and (combined with other changes) potentially create a flurry of lost-traffic panic.

Sites that have put off mobile readiness — thinking that most of their traffic comes from desktop, so why bother with mobile? — will find themselves in crisis this year.
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Voice Search: Right behind mobile, I predict voice search will be a major SEO focus in 2018. This is not because it impacts ecommerce so much as it impacts information and news sites.

Users will ask questions, and many sites are not well optimized to provide answers to questions. The traditional phrase-centric search will become archaic, and optimization will need to be about spoken Q&A instead of who used the keyword best.

Virtual assistants (such as Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant) and smart devices (such as Amazon Echo, Google Home) will continue improving their ability to interpret spoken language through machine learning. That’s a given.

But voice searches are still imprecise in many cases, and users often have to restate questions in different ways to get useful information. For example, try this:

Can you find your product with a voice search if you don’t mention your brand name?
When you do a voice search for your business or products by name, are they correctly understood or mistaken for something else?

Businesses should test voice searches and make sure their online information is sufficient to give people multiple ways to find them (by name, by type of business, by location, by specialty, etc.). In addition to all the local SEO factors, local businesses in particular need to consider how to be found for various descriptive terms through voice search while the technology is maturing.

Businesses should test voice searches and make sure their online info is sufficient to give people multiple ways to find them.
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Content Focus: Content is next in line for a major 2018 emphasis, but now more of the same. The creation of intelligent content that answers people’s needs is the role of the content writer (more so than the SEO), so empowered content teams with SEO tools will dominate this area.

This will be a period of significant growth in the development of content teams with tools and training, enabling an army of writers many times larger than the SEO team to start doing SEO themselves as the content is created.

As a sidebar, I expect the usage of WordPress, which currently runs 29.3% of all websites, to multiply this year, with a massive number of sites redesigned using WordPress. There will soon be a new era of Active WordPress Plugins (AWPPs, to coin a term), which actively give guidance while you’re working in WordPress (like a digital assistant for WP). They will empower content writers to do more SEO themselves, leading to better-optimized content on WordPress sites.

This improvement will be countered by the possible late-2018 release of WP Gutenberg, a new editor interface for WordPress that’s currently in the testing phase. In my opinion, it will be difficult for Gutenberg to gain favorable recommendations for use if it takes away plugin-derived revenue from the web design and hosting companies.

Linking: Links have always been a headache for Google — they empower the search results, but they are also heavily spammed.

As good as the Penguin filter is, which has been running within Google’s core algorithm for over a year now, we see that unnatural links still work way too often in the search results. There’s room for improvement.

Unnatural links still work way too often in the search results. There’s room for improvement.
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I predict Google will issue a major update to the algorithm sections that deal with links to better filter spammy, off-topic links.

Search engines will also be adjusting to a diminished number of links from and within mobile sites (due to sites becoming more efficient for mobile, as discussed under Mobile-First, above) as well as other undisclosed mobile-first algorithmic factors. I predict Google will examine the speed and popularity of the linking page to determine the probability of the link’s being seen and clicked. Eliminating any link unlikely to be clicked because of poor performance will become critical as the link patterns are reviewed. All of this certainly should change how we acquire links in 2018.

Speed: Another factor for digital marketing in 2018 will be the increased adoption of Progressive Web App (PWA) technology to achieve faster site speed. Both app and website developers will embrace this hybrid approach that is easier to maintain and promote while delivering impressive speed for users. There’s a lot of resources out there for details on PWAs; this recent post by Cindy Krum is one of my favorites.

Coupled with a rise in PWA usage will be a diminishing regard for Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), certainly wherever bandwidth is acceptable. If pages are fast enough and fully responsive, then AMP is not needed (a point Google’s Gary Illyes made during a keynote in June).

By the holiday season a year from now, I predict AMP will be a non-issue for most websites. The AMP project was all about speed anyhow, and as internet speed in general increases, the need for AMP will diminish — even if, as Google has promised, the odious problem of masking the publisher’s URL in search results gets fixed in the second half of the year.

Coupled with a rise in PWA usage will be a diminishing regard for Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP).
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I expect speed to be seen as a cloud issue this year, as well.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and similar cloud-based platforms will expand. Meanwhile, Content Delivery Network (CDN) usage will decrease. Serving up a website’s static resources from the cloud provides greater speed and efficiency than doing it from nodes, as CDNs do, except for sites with a significant quantity of large files (such as high resolution images). CDNs are certainly becoming less important, and by year end, CDNs will be seldom used. While CDNs solved a significant conversion issue in the past, with higher speed networks and server technology changes, they will be unnecessary by the end of the year.

SEO: So what about traditional technical SEO?

It continues and actually becomes more important. As easy links stop working, companies will increasingly turn to other parts of the algorithms — specifically content as well as on-page structure, navigation, internal linking and better compliance with SEO practices.

Building a site’s expertise, authority and trustworthiness (E-A-T) will dominate this focus and become more critical across the board. The winning companies will be the ones with the best trained staff already working on an SEO-aligned content-based strategy aggressively. Between equally helpful content, the tie-breaker will be E-A-T, and we’ll see fewer sites ranking without it. This is likely to benefit established brands in the rankings.

As cited above, there will be considerable activity impacting the content in the Google index. A great amount of the algorithm is based upon the index’s having a reasonably large and steady population of content pages. The advent of the mobile-first index, query changes towards questions, a massive SEO content change (in kinds, volume and number of competitors), the diminishing access to links both internally and inbound (backlinks), and other easily identified factors all add up to a massive index change this year — and that will destabilize rankings.

Factors all add up to a massive index change this year — and that will destabilize rankings.
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Ecommerce: Google will step up as a major competitor in ecommerce this year. Google’s ecommerce site Express.Google.com has a network of manufacturers and resellers already in place. I believe it is poised to rival Amazon.

I order a lot of products online, and I think there is room for a second major service. Consider that as Amazon gains usage, people are going straight to Amazon.com. That threatens Google’s search business.

Machine Learning: Due to machine learning, Google’s ability to figure out what the user wants is advancing at lightning speed.

As Google’s algorithm learns to map user intent to each search query more and more accurately, sites must match that intent in order to rank.

Consider this – as Google figures out that a query requires purely information, your ecommerce site will lose rankings for that keyword. Sites that used to perform well for head terms need to pay attention to what is being ranked and forget what used to rank, including themselves. Getting an ecommerce site to rank for an information keyword is much harder now.

As a result of Google’s machine learning, rankings lost may be next to impossible to regain. In a competitive keyword field, the profile of the website silo (associated themed pages), and not just the ranking page, must match user intent.

As a result of Google's machine learning, rankings lost may be next to impossible to regain.
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I’ll give a personal illustration. Google recently upended its search rankings for the query [search engine optimization]. This query is popular with do it yourself (DIY)-minded searchers, rather than people looking to consume SEO services. The algorithm detected this in 2017 and rapidly shifted rankings to favor news and information sites, not just the most in-depth answer to the query. As a result, our SEO Tutorial hub page fell from the middle of Page 1 to #15 in just a few months for this specific query.

Marketers will need to take user-intent cues from Google by watching what results are shown as the SERPs fluctuate this year. Doing so will help you avoid futile keyword targets and find new search queries to optimize for in order to match your site content to the right user intent.

VR: Virtual reality (VR) and especially EEG controls will continue to grow throughout 2018. The technology enables remote conversations to feel like everyone’s in the same room.

Beyond chat rooms (e.g., Facebook’s experimenting with a VR hangout app), imagine business meetings leveraging VR to pull remote workers together in one place. Conversations and examples would jump to life better; collaboration could be virtually face-to-face, all without travel expenses. It will be the business applications that monetize VR and propel it forward, so watch for opportunities there. We are considering it for our classroom SEO Training course.

Video: It’s about time for Google to seriously leverage the revenue opportunity of YouTube (which it owns). I expect to see many more video results co-mingled with organic listings this year.

I expect to see many more video results co-mingled with organic listings this year.
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Video production for marketing purposes will grow exponentially. Video has been expanding as a marketing tool for years now, ever since Google first started blending results in Universal Search.

But companies in every niche are now investing in video production at record levels. A mid-2017 HubSpot survey found that the top two content distribution channels that respondents planned to add during the next year were both for video: YouTube and Facebook Video. We’re considering this as an option for our training materials, too.

Last thoughts as we launch into 2018

Google is in the business of making money, and they are banking on/assuming that search advertising is primarily how that happens. On a mobile device, that could mean less exposure for organic results. I expect PPC to be taking budget from SEO when this occurs.

As for how marketing is going to do in a year of shrinking budgets, that is a tough situation. Digital marketing is getting more complex, and ROI is still difficult to measure. Social media is a big cause of the current wariness, since companies have tired of throwing money across various social sites without seeing tangible results. The attribution problem is still not solved, and companies will require more proof that marketing is working.

If results can be measured, then digital marketing will get more buy-in and more investment.

That is enough new for now. If you would like a hand with your digital marketing strategy for 2018, let’s talk.

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Are Writers Expected to Do SEO? New WordPress SEO Tools to Support Content Writers – BruceClay

Are Writers Expected to Do SEO? New WordPress SEO Tools to Support Content Writers – BruceClay was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

We’re in a time when writers carry a heavy responsibility. They produce the fuel — SEO-ready content — that marketing engines need to drive sales forward.

Content marketing requires a LOT of content. In fact, 72% of marketers surveyed said relevant content creation is the most effective SEO tactic.

It makes sense, then, that writers should be equipped with tools that help them make informed SEO decisions along the way to making relevant, optimized content.

At the beginning of each year I share my marketing predictions, and last year I wrote:

“New tools will help content marketers produce targeted, high-quality content at the time of publishing. Content writers demand more data and become more technically bold as easy-to-use tools provide traffic and competitor SEO stats, ushering in a new generation of targeted high-quality content.”

Admittedly, this led to the WordPress SEO plugin that we developed and announced last October. After all, if you predict something you should also act on it!

What a plugin like Bruce Clay SEO for WordPress does is give writers and publishers a tool to create targeted content that is reasonably search engine optimized. Writers are empowered with website and web page analytics data in a familiar environment in a user-friendly UX. Writers get competitive analysis of the targets they are aiming to outrank with their own content. And writers get all this at the point of publishing allowing for streamlined analysis within the World Wide Web’s most popular publishing platform.

This is critical because …

Original Content Is Becoming Harder to Produce

Marketers are increasingly turning to content as a way to market to ad-averse digital natives. As a result, the amount of content available on every topic possible has grown exponentially. Content works at every stage of the customer journey from brand awareness to lead generation. And everyone knows that content is needed to be in business today. This has led to content burnout.

It’s obvious that today’s best writers have a growing need for SEO skills to help them analyze data and decide what content needs creating.

Content burnout or overload has happened as so many topics have been covered in-depth online. Original content is harder to produce because so much has already been written on so many topics. Targeted content is in some ways easier to produce because of the amount of tools available and the lower volume of existing content online, but to produce both original and targeted content is still difficult.

Is Too Much Content a Bad Thing?

This content economy has positive implications for SEO. The more quality content you have on a site covering one particular topic, the more likely you are to rank high on search engine results pages (SERPs). We believe that authors need SEO to become first among equals.

Creating a massive amount of quality SEO content makes it hard for the competition to keep up. As long as your body of quality content is continually increasing, companies with smaller budgets or that begin producing later will find it difficult to ever catch up to your site in terms of domain authority.

But if you are new to the web, not all is lost. What helps new bloggers is that even though much content exists online, most of it never gets any attention. In a study of a million articles, 75% of 100,000 randomly selected pieces had no external links and fewer than 39 shares.

A 2015 study by BuzzSumo and Moz analyzed the shares and links of over 1 million articles to see the format of content that get relatively more shares or links.

We believe that writers who are able to produce great written content with search marketing value have a huge advantage. By properly optimizing their content for search, writers are gradually adding SEO to their normal content-focused duties.

Are Writers Expected to Do SEO?

At one point, 85% of B2B marketers reported they couldn’t connect their content marketing activity to business value. This led to a number of reputable organizations making it a priority to determine what the ROI of content marketing was, and what it should be.

Now we know a lot about the ROI of content marketing, like:

Content marketing brings in 3x leads per dollar spent vs. traditional outbound marketing.
Companies with blogs produce an average of 67% more leads per month.

Even with all the information about content marketing ROI, only 21% of content marketers say they are successful at tracking content ROI.

Understanding the ROI of SEO has additional challenges because there are a number of ways SEO affects revenue, and a number of ways to “do” SEO.

We believe it is vital to provide authors with feedback on their work — traffic, time on page and bounce rate — in order to increase quality and SEO awareness.

Additionally, ROI from an SEO campaign often extends well after the campaign is over, making it even harder to track. Years ago, a study showed 43% of marketers couldn’t measure the ROI of their SEO. Imagine if every writer had access to data to see how popular their articles are and how much new traffic their content is bringing to a business!

As a writer, having access to the tools that show you how you’re performing provides focus and direction when deciding what pieces to create next to contribute to business objectives.

How Content Writers Are Doing SEO

The content marketing industry is becoming more data-driven as it matures. This means leading writers have adapted by becoming more technically savvy, using tools that provide data to justify why a particular piece of content is needed, as well as tools to show how it’s performing after publishing.

This Whiteboard Friday video details how bloggers should SEO-optimize their posts. A good portion of the video is devoted to teaching bloggers how to do research during the pre-writing process. The premise of the video is this:

Pick a goal for the post
Choose an audience
Find 3-5 long-tail keyword phrases
Scope the competition
Create the post

Only the last step has anything to do with the creation process; all of these SEO suggestions take place before the first word is written. As a result you would almost never find a content writer job description without SEO as a need-to-know skill.

As our dependence on data increases, writers need to continue to access as many data sources as possible to create new SEO content. Not only do writers need to know where to find data, they also need to understand how to use this data to create meaningful content that resonates with their target audience.

What Was Missing

Writing quality content may not be enough. The tie breaker we see over and over is a deftly search-optimized page. Tools have evolved to allow writers unprecedented access to data, yet there’s still plenty of room for improvement, especially in the area of SEO content tools.

Hunting for data on multiple websites, scouring through months of Google Analytics data and typing queries into Google itself eats up precious time that could be spent creating content that’s going to bring more traffic and revenue to a site.

WordPress, the world’s most popular content management system, boasts over 50,000 plugins. But with all its flexibility and power, the platform is still lacking. WordPress is a content management system and not an SEO tool. Let me repeat that. WordPress is obviously about content management and not SEO.

Here are some of the things we’ve found that most WordPress content creators still need:

Ability to optimize for more than one keyword
Content performance data
Visual map of keywords within a post
Customized keyword analysis based on the actual page content
Automatic tracking of which posts/pages are succeeding in search results with rankings and traffic data
Mobile-friendly scoring, mobile errors and page speed statistics
Duplicate content flag
Content reading level score of your post compared to the top-ranked competitors
Gamification for authors and contributors through author-specific post metrics (top posts, rankings, visitors and more)
Access to rich, integrated research and analysis tools

Many of the tools added to the WordPress platform are not adequate for a writer taking SEO initiative. Most data is not in one place and is not readily available to an author or publisher. If these tools were condensed into a single place within WordPress, then more writers would create quality content that is highly-targeted and data-driven. Because the tools and processes are scattered and time-pressed writers don’t often have the time to go to multiple websites to gather all the information, SEO success may suffer.

There Is an Easier Way

It’s obvious that today’s best writers have a growing need for SEO skills to help them analyze data and decide what content needs creating. In fact, it is a very big part of every writer’s job already and will become even more so in the future.

But hunting for data on multiple websites, scouring through months of Google Analytics data and typing queries into Google itself eats up precious time that could be spent creating content that’s going to bring more traffic and revenue to a site. The solution is to bring data to writers in the content publishing environment.

Adding SEO into the publishing workflow is the surest way to improve the distribution and visibility of labor-intensive content investments — that’s why we’ve been working hard to finish our coming Bruce Clay SEO plugin and bring it to the WordPress community.

If you’re looking for a solution that will quickly provide insights to writers and publishers looking to get answers without going through half the internet to find them, sign up for the early preview release of our SEO plugin for WordPress. It will give you answers to your most pressing SEO needs within WordPress, saving hours of frustration.

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