Does SEO Work for Small Businesses?

Today, who is not present online, it is as if they do not exist at all. This rings especially true for small businesses who are always in need of ways to carve out advantages in an ever-increasing business environment. Does SEO work for small businesses? The answer is – yes! Large companies are not in as much of an advantage when it comes to SEO as many think. It’s actually quite the opposite. Anyone can use it and achieve high ranks on search engines. You just need to know how to use it properly. That’s all.

 

How SEO Works for Small Businesses?

 

No matter whether you are small or large, you have to fight for your customers. Here SEO can help you a lot. It works for all, small and large if you use it properly. Moreover, if you run a small business, SEO is probably the best way to compete with big businesses. It can bring you effects that you would probably never achieve by competing with big, strong companies via SEM or other paid channels.

 

SEO is a long-term oriented marketing tool. Therefore, you need to put a lot of effort and time into it. SEO allows you to equalize with much stronger competitors. Without it, you will not achieve much on the Internet. Through SEO you drive traffic to your website and convert leads into consumers. Here are a few tips on how to use SEO to compete with big businesses and beat them at the punch for your next online customer or enquiry. We at Talk Agency, have implemented them on our Central Coast SEO clients, and attest to their effectiveness.

 

SEO Tips for Small Businesses

 

You probably have already heard of many benefits that SEO brings. Yet, you feel powerless when you look at the number of leads and online visitors of large companies. However, do not lose your self-confidence. Search engines seek the most relevant content for readers. Therefore, give them what they want and you will achieve your goal to rank better and attract more customers.

The presentation below from Rand Fishkin outlines the strategies and ways to leverage small businesses advantages when competing against the bigger and more authoritative businesses:

 

 

Focus on your niche

 

Just as you are focusing on a particular group of consumers, you also need to find your online audience. Choose your niche. Do not waste money or assets in vain. If you cover too many areas, you will lose your focus, you will disperse your brand too much and you will not achieve anything. Customers will not take you seriously. A much better option is to focus on what is most important to you, on what you think will set you ahead of others, both in reality and online.

 

Specialise yourself in a smaller or narrow niche. This will make it easier to break through the online market. Also, you will uncover keywords that attract your ideal, dream customers rather than just tyre kickers. Consider focussing on one to three areas closely related to your business that will have a broad and cross-network of focused keywords in your web content. This will help in driving a much higher level of visibility in search engines.

 

Create content strategy

 

Do not write just what occasionally comes to your mind. Create a clear content strategy long before you start writing! Start with broader topics and them move consistently to more narrow, specific details. Introduce your visitors gradually to your story. Tell them what you are offering and why you are better than others. Give them a reason to stay as long as possible on your website. Peaque their interest so they continue reading your other articles, become your leads and finally, convert to customers.

 

Use proper, more focused keywords in your content. Use Google Analytics, KeywordTool.io or Keyword Eye, just to name a few, to find the best keywords for your content. Even better is if you use long-tail keywords. You will have fewer topics, but your content value will be much higher. Long-tail keywords are less popular than common keywords, but more focused on your target customers that tend to have a much higher intent to purchase.

 

Leverage local SEO

 

Target your local audience before branching out into bigger areas and search volumes. Local search is more relevant and useful for the end user, so will always convert at a higher rate into leads and/or customers. Imagine that you are the customer. What would you look at first in search result packs? Something that is convenient to you in terms of location is always going to win that race. This is especially important if you have a local business, such as a hairdresser, a local supermarket, or a footwear store, for example. Even if you operate in a larger geographic area, start with local SEO to drive initial results while your larger strategies develop and bed in.

 

To drive engagement and local SEO results, consider attending some local events, like art fairs or popular community gatherings, for example. Inform your potential customers about your offer, give them a discount or free sample of your product. Then write about that on your website. Share your impressions. Invite them to join you. Ensure local, high-authority inbound links with quality content and you will become popular with local audiences that need your product or service.

 

Personalised online appearance

 

The best way to beat large competitors is to ensure a personal approach to customers. Get to know them and let them get to know you better. Personalise your online appearance. Make friends of your audience. Write them in a friendly conversational tone, use common words, make personal, yet persuasive content. Use social media to attract more customers to your website.

 

Use both on-page and off-page SEO

 

Besides on-page SEO, such as title tags, quality content, meta description, keywords and all above-mentioned details, be sure to consider off-page SEO as well. The most significant elements of off-page SEO are link-building that drives traffic to your website, ranks you better and shows search engines if your content is relevant. Therefore, provide high-quality content, useful information, evergreen content or something engaging to encourage others to share your content. Also, it’s very important to leverage your geographical relevancy to Google’s eye. Links from other local entities are extremely powerful!

 

You may not have the big marketing teams and budgets of multinational companies, but you can still compete with them online by using SEO. Be creative, use SEO and soon you will have a much better ranking position on search engines and you’ll start to see the fruits of your labour.

 

Article first published here: Does SEO Work for Small Businesses?

Top 3 SEO ranking factors (2018 Edition)

As we start to approach the end of the year, we wanted to touch on ranking factors for next year – a favorite topic around most digital teams coming into Christmas. We, at Talk, consider that the three main SEO ranking factors in 2018 would be content, links, and RankBrain. So let’s take a deep dive into what these mean for your business and how you can prepare for SERP success in 2018.

 

Content as first SEO ranking factor

 

Content always has been one of the most important SEO ranking factor. You already know that your content needs to be quality and focused on your target audience, but some still struggle with what to offer their visitors and how to write content that will actually improve rankings without old-fashioned techniques like keyword stuffing.

 

They key is to get as specific as possible. Nicheing down is good and drives quality traffic. For example, if you run a fashion business, you can write about the latest fashion trends. You can even write about particular apparel such as skirts, shirts, shoes, hats or their daily combinations. You can also divide these groups into smaller subsets – say, elegant shoes, sports shoes, everyday shoes, etc. The point is to focus on your niche and to provide quality content. Focus on being distinctive when benchmarked against your competitors content. We always say content should be content that ‘can’t be found on Google’ it should be that unique. If you are not sure what to write, start with creating a content strategy that maps out who, what, where, how and why you’re writing. Then you will get an idea of just how many niche topics there are within a topic, and how detailed you can get. It goes without saying you should also be using all familiar SEO techniques such as title tags, meta description, keywords, long tail keywords, etc.

 

Visual content always attracts the most attention. Don’t forget to include images, video or infographics in your content. It looks more appealing and at the same time attracts more readers. In 2018, one of the key SEO drivers of organic traffic definitely will be embedded images. A picture paints a thousand words, looks nicer and can be a good basis for your link-building, which is the second SEO ranking factor in 2018.

 

Links as second SEO ranking factor

 

Appealing embedded photos in your content will encourage others to share your content within their networks. For example, if you create a nice image where you explain something that you are talking about in the text, others will use that image in their content. They can paraphrase what you said on the image, or supplement it with their own text, or maybe explain a photo differently than you. In any case, they will link your content. Their content will link others and your link-building will grow constantly. The end result is an improved ranking on search engines, a greater authority of your website and a growing number of visitors to your site.

 

If you are linked to authority sites or you have a wide base of backlinks, Google will notice that and will reward you with better ranking. Links drive organic traffic, so use them a lot, as long as they are quality, relevant links (the days of blackout mass link building are long gone). Be sure to also consider links or your internal linking structure. Lead your readers through your content by linking relevant content and creating chains. Keep them as long as possible on your site. This will make them loyal readers of your content (as opposed to your competitors!).

 

RankBrain as third SEO ranking factor

 

RankBrain is a machine learning artificial intelligence system that helps Google to sort content into relevant search results. It is just one part of Google’s search algorithm. As they said, the third-most-important SEO ranking factor for 2018. The video below from Eric Enge draws a clear picture of why Google decided to create RankBrain:

 

 

Google has already improved its algorithm so much that it recognizes various word variations and synonyms, and connects various data. Behind that were people who have made keyword lists and linked different databases. Now, however, the process becomes automated and the machine itself learns from data. This is the latest technological achievement from Google and is still very much developing. It is known that the machine improves itself over time and becomes better and better in its work. This means that search engines will be more precise in delivering proper search results. It also means that it will be harder to determine what should be done for better ranking and even harder to deceive the machine with black hat SEO. Quality content, quality UX and quality online PR are only becoming more important.

 

One of the key metrics in Google’s RankBrain is Click Through Rate (CTR). This is the percentage of users that click on your link at the search results page. The more people click your website link, the more value Google places on your site as an authority in your industry (as is referenced in the term that the user searched initially). In light of this, it’s worth trying to focus in on an emotive copy –  words connected with feelings such as happiness, anger, fear, and the like – they generally attract more clicks.

 

In order to balance search results, RankBrain also has a second metric called dwell time. This is the time that visitors spend on your website after they clicked your link in Google’s search results. How long they stay on your web page mainly depends on the quality of your content and UX, but also on links that provide your visitors additional reading. The longer they stay on your site, the higher your ranking results.

 

Therefore, all 3 SEO ranking factors are related. However, as you see, quality content is the most important. It is a basis for the other two SEO ranking factors for 2018. If you fail in developing your content strategy, you will most likely fall flat in achieving your desired ranking results. If your content is quality, you will be linked by others and certainly will be ranked better by RankBrain through higher CTR and dwell time. Focus on all three as a combination, and you’re set for success without a doubt.

Article first published here: Top 3 SEO ranking factors (2018 Edition)

Top 5 WordPress SEO tips for higher rankings

Out of 1300 CMS’ available online, WordPress is – by far – the most popular CMS in the world. It offers more themes, templates, plugins, and support than any other, so naturally, more websites are built using WordPress than any other CMS. For that reason, is no surprise that WordPress is also the first choice for bloggers or any SEO agency out there. We at Talk are no exception!

 

That then begs the question. If more websites use WordPress, how do you get the SEO edge?

 

First WordPress SEO tip – Improve your Site Speed

 

Since it is important to ensure the best possible user experience, one of the first tasks is to provide a high-speed load of your website. The optimal load speed is below 3 seconds. Visitors will leave your site if it loads longer than that. Google will also rank you lower for that mistake.

 

Therefore, first check your website speed. You can use different tools for that purpose, Pingdom for example, or even better Google Analytics. If your speed is too low, you need to speed it up.

 

Here are a few tips how you can increase page load times;

• Install a caching plugin that creates static versions of your content
• Compress large images to improve your website load speed
• Delete all content that is not necessary and thin content to 300 words
• Find a quality hosting provider with data centres that are geographically close to as many of your users as possible

 

Also, don’t forget to optimize your website for mobile devices. Today, visitors more use their mobile for searching Internet than desktop computers, so keep it at the forefront of your mind when designing.

 

Set Permalinks and Create a Sitemap

 

Permalinks are URLs of your web content. They are shown in search results and the address bar. They include the URL of your web page and can include the title of your page or article. They serve for linking the content as well and are a vital part of a sound SEO strategy.

 

WordPress specify they allow you to change your permalink settings according to your needs. You can do that in the Settings menu. Use that option to adjust your default permalinks into ‘Post Name’. In this case, your permalinks will look like www.yoursitename.com/post-name. You can also use the option ‘Month and Name’, where your default permalink will look like www.yoursitename.com/2017/11/post-name. In both cases, your content will be better indexed by search engines, while readers will easier see what your content is about.

 

Another important element to SEO success with WordPress is to create a sitemap. Here you can use WordPress tools, such as the WordPress plugin Google XML Sitemaps. It will help you to easily make a sitemap of your content and thus tell search engines how to index your content. In addition, check your navigation through internal linking. Ensure your sitemap is transparent and has clear navigation. This will help you in your rankings. Those pages or articles that are linked to your other articles or pages get the highest rank on search engines. In this way, you provide additional reading for your audience and search engines like that. On the video below, Matt Cutts (former head of webspam team at Google) sheds some light on the subject:

 

 

However, watch out not to overdo it. Use less than 15 internal links of your most important content. But, make it relevant to the linked text. Do not just link it to make links.

If you want faster ranks for your new content, link it with older content that is already recognised as valuable and thus ranked highly.

 

Use WordPress SEO Optimised Themes

 

WordPress has so many themes that it can be difficult to select just one to use. However, if you want good SEO effects, don’t look just at design, but which is SEO optimised. SEO optimised Such themes have a fast load speed and clear, clean code. Therefore, look for a theme that has an open graph meta tag, a clear and transparent structure, the proper canonical URL meta tags, and clear meta title tags and headings. In addition, use WordPress SEO plugins for better effects.

 

Use Proper Heading Tags and Anchor Text

 

For better WordPress SEO effects, you should choose proper heading tags. You will see that you have different options, from heading 1 to 6. Heading 1 (H1) tag is a good choice for the title of the article. Don’t forget to make it clear, short and intriguing. Heading 2 (H2) is for additional headings, while Headings 3, 4 and others are used for subheadings. Using them in this way, you get much better visibility of your content and better rankings.

 

Also, in line with above mentioned internal linking, you have to check your anchor text. These are the linked words in your content. Search engines use the anchor text and the linked source’s content to check the relevance of the links. You cannot use links just simply to build links on your website. You will be penalized by search engines if you do that. Links must be relevant to your content and you should link words that explain what is linked.

 

Optimise your Media

 

Visual content is more appealing, no doubt. You should use it as much as possible. It also really helps drive SEO results. You can use alt text in your images for better SEO effects. Through alt text in images, search engines determine the type of your web content. It also makes two links to your content, one through the title of the content and the second through alt text in the image. Your images will be ranked in the image search too. With WordPress, you get even more. When you upload the image, you can change its name. Use this! Write a suitable name for the image and alt text to explain search engines what your image is about. You also have an opportunity to add a caption and short description of the image. Hence, if you use media, you get a double effect – visually attractive content and better rankings on search engines.

 

These top 5 WordPress SEO tips are guaranteed to improve your ranking results. They will provide you the SEO edge over your competitors. And if you’re looking for more, be sure to check out 5 free WordPress SEO plugins for even stronger results.

The post Top 5 WordPress SEO tips for higher rankings appeared first on Talk Agency.

Everett Wilkinson: What is better SEO or PPC?

The question of whether SEO (search engine optimization) or PPC (pay per click) advertising is best for your company depends entirely on the goals you have. Is the service or product on offer something new? Does it take some level of education to be able to use? Do you have a reputation in the industry? These questions and more must be addressed before addressing if you go to the SEO or PPC route.

Let’s start out by looking at the difference between SEO and PPC.

SEO vs PPC

There’s more to SEO than just optimising your website and content so that it ranks highly in organic search results for your chosen keywords. There’s also the element of being the authority on the problem and providing the right solution. Google, Bing, and Yahoo also look at the way people interact with a website, including if they come back it, along with hundreds of factors such as backlinks.

Pay per click advertising is entirely paying for advertising space for some specific keywords on search results pages. However even a paid ad campaign such as a PPC campaign involves some search engine optimisation.

So is SEO Better than PPC?

Every long-term strategy for marketing needs to include some measure of search engine optimization. The main advantage of using SEO is that it tends to bring in better quality traffic. Many internet users have managed to train themselves to just automatically ignore sponsored links and adverts when using search engines and the internet as a whole.

There’s plenty of data on the subject that suggests people who come to your website naturally are more likely to trust you and your products/services. When you’re ranking high in search results it sends a clear message that you’re an expert in the field and a major name in the industry.

This doesn’t mean that SEO is free by any stretch of the imagination however. There is always a cost to SEO, whether you’re spending your own time by doing it yourself or your money by brining in an expert to do it for you.

SEO Myths

This doesn’t mean you should throw away PPC though. There are also advantages of PPC. A good PPC campaign can bring in a great return on investment, and there are times when the person who pays the most isn’t the top spot. The search engine wants to provide users with the best results for their search. They serve the searchers, and not the advertisers. If Google were to just give people, the highest bidder and they never solved their problem they would change search engine. It wasn’t kneeling to the highest bidder that crowned Google the king of the search engines.

The other main benefit of PPC is advertising on a website that is visited by the people you’re advertising to. If the potential customer sees your advert in their search results but doesn’t click on it, they are more likely to do so when they see it again on their favorite website.

Conclusion

The answer to if SEO is better than PPC remains the same; it depends.

Using pay-per-click advertising gives your business a great boost for their digital marketing and draws instant traffic. If you want to get the most out of PPC it helps to acquire the proper certifications and training. Google provide free training for businesses in Google Analytics and Google Adwords. If you’ve not got the resources or the time for this then you should hire someone else who already has the training. One disadvantage of PPC is that the traffic disappears when the ads do.

While search engine optimization remains very important it can take time to build up your page authority and climb the rankings. Rankings also change all the time, particularly in a competitive market. One of your competitors can become the authority in a second if they take their campaigning to the next level.

This is no reason to be discouraged however as using an SEO strategy across the long-term is the best choice for high quality leads. Improving SEO also improves PPC, so there are other benefits to correcting page content, backlinks, and everything else that comes with SEO.

Realistically both SEO and PPC can get you to the top of the first page of search results. They are just different in how they do this and the advantages they have. No matter which method you go with we wish you good luck!

First published on Everett Wilkinson: What is better SEO or PPC? from Everett Wilkinson