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Swift Construction Website Design Services Proven to Increase Leads & Sales

5/10/2022

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Want more construction contracts and booked projects? It all depends on having a great construction website. 
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Your website is not an online brochure—it’s your 24/7 virtual sales rep, capable of generating a massive amount of leads and sales. Regardless if you’re in commercial or residential construction, your target audience expects a seamless, engaging website experience--75% of consumers have judged a company’s credibility based on its website design.

If your website is outdated, doesn’t attract traffic, doesn’t convert visitors into leads, or simply isn’t up to your satisfaction, you need professional construction website design services.

Swift Digital Marketing Agency specializes in designing websites for construction companies that not only look great but also rank well in search engine results and convert your visitors into clients. Let us help you redesign your website and turn it into your number one sales and marketing tool!

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CONSTRUCTION WEBSITES

Construction Website Design Services Proven to Increase Leads & Sales

Want more construction contracts and booked projects? It all depends on having a great construction website. 
​

Your website is not an online brochure—it’s your 24/7 virtual sales rep, capable of generating a massive amount of leads and sales. Regardless if you’re in commercial or residential construction, your target audience expects a seamless, engaging website experience--75% of consumers have judged a company’s credibility based on its website design.

If your website is outdated, doesn’t attract traffic, doesn’t convert visitors into leads, or simply isn’t up to your satisfaction, you need professional construction website design services.

Blue Corona specializes in designing websites for construction companies that not only look great but also rank well in search engine results and convert your visitors into clients. Let us help you redesign your website and turn it into your number one sales and marketing tool!

  • LET’S TALK: (216) 339-6041!
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Our Custom Construction Website Design Services

​From small general contractor website designs to large construction company websites, we have the website services for you.

  • CUSTOM MOBILE FRIENDLY WEBSITES The world has gone mobile—more than 50% of all general contractor website queries happen on a mobile device. Can your website handle it? We design your website with mobile in mind—optimized and coded for the most up-to-date mobile SEO practices.
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  • CUSTOM WEBSITE DESIGN SERVICES You get a website unique for your construction company—either completely custom or designed from the best-converting templates. Depending on the complexity, we usually create custom websites. Learn more about our Swift Website Design.
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  • LANDING PAGE DESIGN & OPTIMIZATION. What does it take for a landing page to convert a lead to a booked job? We know the answer. With the right components and copy, we can improve your site’s performance. Learn more about our landing page design and optimization services!
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  • WEBSITE COPYWRITING. Your website should be your construction company’s #1 sales and marketing tool. Does your website content represent your best pitch? If you need compelling, SEO-friendly copy and content for your website, learn more about our turnkey copywriting services!

What Does it Take to Have a Sales-Driving Construction Website Design?

Wondering why your competitors are outperforming you? It most likely has something to do with their website and what’s on it. The best construction websites are visible in search engines, mobile-friendly, fast, secure, and have an optim
al user experience.
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  • Your website needs to be visible – When we say visible, we mean in search engines like Google. Over 90% of online experiences begin with a search engine, so your builder or construction website needs to be optimized for the best search engine optimization (SEO) practices. When you choose our website design company, you’re guaranteed to have a website optimized for SEO.
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  • Your website needs to be mobile friendly – 52% of all U.S. online traffic now comes from smartphones and tablets, and 57% of users say they won’t recommend a business with a poorly designed mobile site.  If that’s not enough to convince you, Google also ranks mobile websites higher in the search engine results.
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  • Your website needs to be fast – When building construction websites (or any general contracting website) speed is essential. Website visitors need to see something happen on your site in under three seconds. If not, 40% of them will leave and go to another website. Even a one-second delay can cause a 7% reduction in conversions.
  • Your website needs an optimal user experience – Once your page loads, users form an opinion in 0.5 seconds. They expect to be able to find information easily and quickly—especially from a mobile device
  • Your website needs to be secure – Data breaches and hacked consumer information have been big topics of discussion recently—and your website visitors know this. If your website has any place where users can fill in personal information (even if it’s just a phone number and email address) it needs to be secure. Google also gives preference to secured websites in the search results.
  • If your website is missing one of these necessities, your bottom line will suffer—a single bad experience on a website makes users 88% less likely to visit that website again. 

    HOW MUCH DO WEBSITE DESIGN SERVICES COST?
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  • One question we get a lot is “How much does a website cost?”
    Truthfully, you can find websites for pretty much any price—but you get what you pay for.
    Here’s what goes into the cost of a website:
  • Hosting –  This is the service or company providing space on the internet for your website. Hosting providers include WPEngine (our recommendation if you have a WordPress website), GoDaddy, InMotion, and others.
  • Domain name – This is shown as www.yourcompany.com, and is usually a yearly payment.
  • Design – Some designs are free, other cost money.
  • Plugins and extensions – Typically, the more plugins you want, the more expensive a website gets.
  • The complexity of design – The more customized your website is, the more expensive it will be.
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Our web design services aren’t one size fits all—there are no cookie-cutter solutions, at least not from the best companies. A good website design agency will help you figure out the best type of website for your business. What’s important is that your website is beautiful, thoughtfully laid out, and lead-focused.

SHOULD I USE A TEMPLATE OR HAVE MY CONSTRUCTION SITE CUSTOM-DESIGNED?

Choosing between a template and a custom-designed construction site will depend on your needs and your budget. Most small businesses will do just fine with a proven template, but if you have a large company, have specific needs, or want a website that doesn’t look like any of your competitors’ you should go for a custom website.

WHAT’S THE AVERAGE LIFESPAN OF A  WEBSITE?

Your website is not a set-it-and-forget-it marketing asset. You need to continually update it to keep up with the modern customer’s expectations. When you’re building construction websites you always need to keep in mind that the average website has a life expectancy of 2-5 years, so be sure to pick a design and platform that won’t be too difficult to update.


  • A professional construction web design and marketing company, like Blue Corona, can help with this. Did we mention that we use years of data to guide our construction website templates? You’re guaranteed to get a high-performing, lead-driving website.​
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  • If your budget is limited, we have a huge library of website design templates and layouts proven effective for SEO and for converting visits into leads. Looking for something completely custom? We do that too. It doesn’t matter whether this will be your first website or a simple SEO tune-up of your existing website, you’ve come to the right place.
 
  • To put it simply, your website should be beautiful, thoughtfully laid out, and lead-focused. A professional web design and marketing company, like Blue Corona, can help with this. Did we mention that we use years of data to guide our designs? You’re guaranteed to get a high-performing, lead-driving website. ​
 
  • Why Clients Love Our Construction Websites​
 
  • You have a lot of choices when it comes to web design companies, so why choose us? As a business owner, your website should work for you. Since 2007, Swift has specialized in custom, sales-driving contractor web designs, including commercial and home construction websites. Our work ranges from highly customized, enterprise-level commercial web portals down to affordable residential contractor websites for small businesses—we guarantee you’ll find something you like. From design to content, our team will handle it all to give you a turn-key website:

WHAT’S INCLUDED IN YOUR WEBSITE DESIGN PACKAGES:
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  • Hosting and coding
  • Ready for a new construction website? Check out our website design portfolio and view some of our best residential construction websites and commercial construction websites. See something you like? Contact us today!​​
  • LET’S TALK
  • ENTER YOUR WEBSITE BELOW TO GET STARTED
  • LEARN MORE ABOUT OUR CONSTRUCTION MARKETING SERVICES AND INSIGHTS
  • Construction Marketing Services
  • SEO for Construction
  • Pay Per Click Advertising for Contractors
  • Internet Marketing Guide for Contractors
  • Essential Advice for Contracting Websites
  • More Blog Posts on Contractor Marketing
  • Graphic design
  • Advanced analytics tracking
  • Optimization for SEO
  • Existing content import
  • New content creation
  • Lead form creation and tracking
  • Website compatibility across all browsers and devices
  • Integration with social media pages
  • XML sitemap creation and submission
  • And more!​ ​

    ​Contact Swift: 

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SEO: "under the hood"

4/27/2022

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If search engine optimization is the process of optimizing a website for search, SEOs need at least a basic understanding of the thing they're optimizing!

Below, we outline the website’s journey from domain name purchase all the way to its fully rendered state in a browser. An important component of the website’s journey is the critical rendering path, which is the process of a browser turning a website’s code into a viewable page.

Knowing this about websites is important for SEOs to understand for a few reasons:

  • The steps in this webpage assembly process can affect page load times, and speed is not only important for keeping users on your site, but it’s also one of Google’s ranking factors.
  • Google renders certain resources, like JavaScript, on a "second pass." Google will look at the page without JavaScript first, then a few days to a few weeks later, it will render JavaScript, meaning SEO-critical elements that are added to the page using JavaScript might not get indexed.

Imagine that the website loading process is your commute to work. You get ready at home, gather your things to bring to the office, and then take the fastest route from your home to your work. It would be silly to put on just one of your shoes, take a longer route to work, drop your things off at the office, then immediately return home to get your other shoe, right?

That’s sort of what inefficient websites do. This chapter will teach you how to diagnose where your website might be inefficient, what you can do to streamline, and the positive ramifications on your rankings and user experience that can result from that streamlining.

Before a website can be accessed, it needs to be set up!

  1. Domain name is purchased. Domain names are purchased from a domain name registrar such as GoDaddy or HostGator. These registrars are just organizations that manage the reservations of domain names.
  2. Domain name is linked to IP address. The Internet uses a series of numbers called an Internet protocol (IP) address (ex: 127.0.0.1), but we want to use names like swift-dm.com because they’re easier for humans to remember. We need to use a DNS to link those human-readable names with machine-readable numbers.
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How a website gets from server to browser

  1. User requests domain. Now that the name is linked to an IP address via DNS, people can request a website by typing the domain name directly into their browser or by clicking on a link to the website.
  1. Browser makes requests. That request for a web page prompts the browser to make a DNS lookup request to convert the domain name to its IP address. The browser then makes a request to the server for the code your web page is constructed with, such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
  2. Server sends resources. Once the server receives the request for the website, it sends the website files to be assembled in the searcher’s browser.
  3. Browser assembles the web page. The browser has now received the resources from the server, but it still needs to put it all together and render the web page so that the user can see it in their browser. As the browser parses and organizes all the web page’s resources, it’s creating a Document Object Model (DOM). The DOM is what you can see when you right click and “inspect element” on a web page in your Chrome browser (learn how to inspect elements in other browsers).
  4. Browser makes final requests. The browser will only show a web page after all the page’s necessary code is downloaded, parsed, and executed, so at this point, if the browser needs any additional code in order to show your website, it will make an additional request from your server.
  5. Website appears in browser. Whew! After all that, your website has now been transformed (rendered) from code to what you see in your browser.

Talk to your developers about async!

Something you can bring up with your developers is shortening the critical rendering path by setting scripts to "async" when they’re not needed to render content above the fold, which can make your web pages load faster.

Async tells the DOM that it can continue to be assembled while the browser is fetching the scripts needed to display your web page. If the DOM has to pause assembly every time the browser fetches a script (called “render-blocking scripts”), it can substantially slow down your page load. It would be like going out to eat with your friends and having to pause the conversation every time one of you went up to the counter to order, only resuming once they got back.

With async, you and your friends can continue to chat even when one of you is ordering. You might also want to bring up other optimizations that devs can implement to shorten the critical rendering path, such as removing unnecessary scripts entirely, like old tracking scripts.

Now that you know how a website appears in a browser, we’re going to focus on what a website is made of — in other words, the code (programming languages) used to construct those web pages.

The three most common are:
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  • HTML – What a website says (titles, body content, etc.)
  • CSS – How a website looks (color, fonts, etc.)
  • JavaScript – How it behaves (interactive, dynamic, etc.)

HTML: What a website says HTML stands for hypertext markup language, and it serves as the backbone of a website. Elements like headings, paragraphs, lists, and content are all defined in the HTML.

HTML is important for SEOs to know because it’s what lives “under the hood” of any page they create or work on. While your CMS likely doesn’t require you to write your pages in HTML (ex: selecting “hyperlink” will allow you to create a link without you having to type in “a href=”), it is what you’re modifying every time you do something to a web page such as adding content, changing the anchor text of internal links, and so on.

Google crawls these HTML elements to determine how relevant your document is to a particular query. In other words, what’s in your HTML plays a huge role in how your web page ranks in Google organic search!

CSS: How a website looks

CSS stands for "cascading style sheets," and this is what causes your web pages to take on certain fonts, colors, and layouts. HTML was created to describe content, rather than to style it, so when CSS entered the scene, it was a game-changer. With CSS, web pages could be “beautified” without requiring manual coding of styles into the HTML of every page — a cumbersome process, especially for large sites.

It wasn’t until 2014 that Google’s indexing system began to render web pages more like an actual browser, as opposed to a text-only browser. A black-hat SEO practice that tried to capitalize on Google’s older indexing system was hiding text and links via CSS for the purpose of manipulating search engine rankings. This “hidden text and links” practice is a violation of Google’s quality guidelines.

Components of CSS that SEOs, in particular, should care about:
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  • Since style directives can live in external stylesheet files (CSS files) instead of your page’s HTML, it makes your page less code-heavy, reducing file transfer size and making load times faster.
  • Browsers still have to download resources like your CSS file, so compressing them can make your webpages load faster, and page speed is a ranking factor.
  • Having your pages be more content-heavy than code-heavy can lead to better indexing of your site’s content.
  • Using CSS to hide links and content can get your website manually penalized and removed from Google’s index.

JavaScript: How a website behaves

In the earlier days of the Internet, webpages were built with HTML. When CSS came along, webpage content had the ability to take on some style. When the programming language JavaScript entered the scene, websites could now not only have structure and style, but they could be dynamic.

JavaScript has opened up a lot of opportunities for non-static web page creation. When someone attempts to access a page enhanced with this programming language, that user’s browser will execute the JavaScript against the static HTML that the server returned, resulting in a webpage that comes to life with some sort of interactivity.

You’ve definitely seen JavaScript in action — you just may not have known it! That’s because JavaScript can do almost anything to a page. It could create a pop-up, for example, or it could request third-party resources like ads to display on your page.

Client-side rendering versus server-side rendering JavaScript can pose some problems for SEO, though, since search engines don’t view JavaScript the same way human visitors do. That’s because of client-side versus server-side rendering. Most JavaScript is executed in a client’s browser. With server-side rendering, on the other hand, the files are executed at the server and the server sends them to the browser in their fully rendered state.

SEO-critical page elements such as text, links, and tags that are loaded on the client’s side with JavaScript, rather than represented in your HTML, are invisible from your page’s code until they are rendered. This means that search engine crawlers won’t see what’s in your JavaScript — at least not initially.

Google says that, as long as you’re not blocking Googlebot from crawling your JavaScript files, they’re generally able to render and understand your web pages just like a browser can, which means that Googlebot should see the same things as a user viewing a site in their browser. However, due to this “second wave of indexing” for client-side JavaScript, Google can miss certain elements that are only available once JavaScript is executed.

There are also some other things that could go wrong during Googlebot’s process of rendering your web pages, which can prevent Google from understanding what’s contained in your JavaScript:

  • You’ve blocked Googlebot from JavaScript resources (ex: with robots.txt)
  • Your server can’t handle all the requests to crawl your content
  • The JavaScript is too complex or outdated for Googlebot to understand
  • JavaScript doesn’t "lazy load" content into the page until after the crawler has finished with the page and moved on.

Needless to say, while JavaScript does open a lot of possibilities for web page creation, it can also have some serious ramifications for your SEO if you’re not careful.

Thankfully, there's a way to check whether Google sees the same thing as your visitors. To see a page how Googlebot views your page, use Google Search Console's "URL Inspection" tool. Simply paste your page's URL into the GSC search bar:

From here, click "Test Live URL".

After Googlebot has recrawled your URL, click "View Tested Page" to see how your page is being crawled and rendered.

Clicking the "Screenshot" tab adjacent to "HTML" shows how Googlebot smartphone renders your page.

In return, you’ll see how Googlebot sees your page versus how a visitor (or you) may see the page. In the "More Info" tab, Google will also show you a list of any resources they may not have been able to get for the URL you entered.

Understanding the way websites work lays a great foundation for what we’ll talk about next: technical optimizations to help Google understand the pages on your website better.

How search engines understand websites. Imagine being a search engine crawler scanning down a 10,000-word article about how to bake a cake. How do you identify the author, recipe, ingredients, or steps required to bake a cake? This is where schema markup comes in. It allows you to spoon-feed search engines more specific classifications for what type of information is on your page.

Schema is a way to label or organize your content so that search engines have a better understanding of what certain elements on your web pages are. This code provides structure to your data, which is why schema is often referred to as “structured data.” The process of structuring your data is often referred to as “markup” because you are marking up your content with organizational code.

JSON-LD is Google’s preferred schema markup (announced in May ‘16), which Bing also supports. To view a full list of the thousands of available schema markups, visit Schema.org or view the Google Developers Introduction to Structured Data for additional information on how to implement structured data. After you implement the structured data that best suits your web pages, you can test your markup with Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.

In addition to helping bots like Google understand what a particular piece of content is about, schema markup can also enable special features to accompany your pages in the SERPs. These special features are referred to as "rich snippets," and you’ve probably seen them in action. They’re things like:

  • Top Stories carousels
  • Review stars
  • Sitelinks search boxes
  • Recipes

Remember, using structured data can help enable a rich snippet to be present, but does not guarantee it. Other types of rich snippets will likely be added in the future as the use of schema markup increases.

Some last words of advice for schema success:

  • You can use multiple types of schema markup on a page. However, if you mark up one element, like a product for example, and there are other products listed on the page, you must also mark up those products.
  • Don’t mark up content that is not visible to visitors and follow Google’s Quality Guidelines. For example, if you add review structured markup to a page, make sure those reviews are actually visible on that page.
  • If you have duplicate pages, Google asks that you mark up each duplicate page with your structured markup, not just the canonical version.
  • Provide original and updated (if applicable) content on your structured data pages.
  • Structured markup should be an accurate reflection of your page.
  • Try to use the most specific type of schema markup for your content.
  • Marked-up reviews should not be written by the business. They should be genuine unpaid business reviews from actual customers.

Tell search engines about your preferred pages with canonicalization.

​When Google crawls the same content on different web pages, it sometimes doesn’t know which page to index in search results. This is why the rel="canonical" tag was invented: to help search engines better index the preferred version of content and not all its duplicates.

The rel="canonical" tag allows you to tell search engines where the original, master version of a piece of content is located. You’re essentially saying, "Hey search engine! Don’t index this; index this source page instead." So, if you want to republish a piece of content, whether exactly or slightly modified, but don’t want to risk creating duplicate content, the canonical tag is here to save the day.

Proper canonicalization ensures that every unique piece of content on your website has only one URL. To prevent search engines from indexing multiple versions of a single page, Google recommends having a self-referencing canonical tag on every page on your site. Without a canonical tag telling Google which version of your web page is the preferred one, https://www.example.com could get indexed separately from https://example.com, creating duplicates.

"Avoid duplicate content" is an Internet truism, and for good reason! Google wants to reward sites with unique, valuable content — not content that’s taken from other sources and repeated across multiple pages. Because engines want to provide the best searcher experience, they will rarely show multiple versions of the same content, opting instead to show only the canonicalized version, or if a canonical tag does not exist, whichever version they deem most likely to be the original.

Distinguishing between content filtering & content penalties

There is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty. However, you should try to keep duplicate content from causing indexing issues by using the rel="canonical" tag when possible. When duplicates of a page exist, Google will choose a canonical and filter the others out of search results. That doesn’t mean you’ve been penalized. It just means that Google only wants to show one version of your content.

Learn more about canonicalization

​It’s also very common for websites to have multiple duplicate pages due to sort and filter options. For example, on an e-commerce site, you might have what’s called a faceted navigation that allows visitors to narrow down products to find exactly what they’re looking for, such as a “sort by” feature that reorders results on the product category page from lowest to highest price. This could create a URL that looks something like this: example.com/mens-shirts?sort=price_ascending. Add in more sort/filter options like color, size, material, brand, etc. and just think about all the variations of your main product category page this would create!

When we understand what makes their web browsing experience optimal, we can create those experiences for maximum search performance.

Ensuring a positive experience for your mobile visitors.

Being that well over half of all web traffic today comes from mobile, it’s safe to say that your website should be accessible and easy to navigate for mobile visitors. In April 2015, Google rolled out an update to its algorithm that would promote mobile-friendly pages over non-mobile-friendly pages. So how can you ensure that your website is mobile-friendly? Although there are three main ways to configure your website for mobile, Google recommends responsive web design.

Responsive design

Responsive websites are designed to fit the screen of whatever type of device your visitors are using. You can use CSS to make the web page "respond" to the device size. This is ideal because it prevents visitors from having to double-tap or pinch-and-zoom in order to view the content on your pages. Not sure if your web pages are mobile friendly? You can use Google’s mobile-friendly test to check!

AMPAMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages, and it's used to deliver content to mobile visitors at speeds much greater than with non-AMP delivery. AMP is able to deliver content so fast because it delivers content from its cache servers (not the original site) and uses a special AMP version of HTML and JavaScript.

As of 2018, Google started switching websites over to mobile-first indexing. That change sparked some confusion between mobile-friendliness and mobile-first, so it’s helpful to disambiguate. With mobile-first indexing, Google crawls and indexes the mobile version of your web pages. Making your website compatible to mobile screens is good for users and your performance in search, but mobile-first indexing happens independently of mobile-friendliness.

This has raised some concerns for websites that lack parity between mobile and desktop versions, such as showing different content, navigation, links, etc. on their mobile view. A mobile site with different links, for example, will alter the way in which Googlebot (mobile) crawls your site and sends link equity to your other pages.

Improving page speed to mitigate visitor frustration

Google wants to serve content that loads lightning-fast for searchers. We’ve come to expect fast-loading results, and when we don’t get them, we’ll quickly bounce back to the SERP in search of a better, faster page. This is why page speed is a crucial aspect of on-site SEO. We can improve the speed of our web pages by taking advantage of tools like the ones we’ve mentioned below. Click on the links to learn more about each.
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  • Google's PageSpeed Insights tool & best practices documentation
  • How to Think About Speed Tools
  • GTMetrix
  • Google's Mobile Website Speed & Performance Tester
  • Google Lighthouse
  • Chrome DevTools & Tutorial

​Images are one of the number one reasons for slow-loading web pages! In addition to image compression, optimizing image alt text, choosing the right image format, and submitting image sitemaps, there are other technical ways to optimize the speed and way in which images are shown to your users. Some primary ways to improve image delivery are as follows:

There are more than just three image size versions!

It’s a common misconception that you just need a desktop, tablet, and mobile-sized version of your image. There are a huge variety of screen sizes and resolutions.

Learn more about SRCSET

1. SRCSET: How to deliver the best image size for each deviceThe SRCSET attribute allows you to have multiple versions of your image and then specify which version should be used in different situations. This piece of code is added to the <img> tag (where your image is located in the HTML) to provide unique images for specific-sized devices.

This is like the concept of responsive design that we discussed earlier, except for images!

This doesn’t just speed up your image load time, it’s also a unique way to enhance your on-page user experience by providing different and optimal images to different device types.

2. Show visitors image loading is in progress with lazy loadingLazy loading occurs when you go to a webpage and, instead of seeing a blank white space for where an image will be, a blurry lightweight version of the image or a colored box in its place appears while the surrounding text loads. After a few seconds, the image clearly loads in full resolution. The popular blogging platform Medium does this really well.

The low resolution version is initially loaded, and then the full high resolution version. This also helps to optimize your critical rendering path! So while all of your other page resources are being downloaded, you’re showing a low-resolution teaser image that helps tell users that things are happening/being loaded. For more information on how you should lazy load your images, check out Google’s Lazy Loading Guidance.

Improve speed by condensing and bundling your files

Page speed audits will often make recommendations such as “minify resource,” but what does that actually mean? Minification condenses a code file by removing things like line breaks and spaces, as well as abbreviating code variable names wherever possible.

“Bundling” is another common term you’ll hear in reference to improving page speed. The process of bundling combines a bunch of the same coding language files into one single file. For example, a bunch of JavaScript files could be put into one larger file to reduce the amount of JavaScript files for a browser.

By both minifying and bundling the files needed to construct your web page, you’ll speed up your website and reduce the number of your HTTP (file) requests.

Improving the experience for international audiencesWebsites that target audiences from multiple countries should familiarize themselves with international SEO best practices in order to serve up the most relevant experiences. Without these optimizations, international visitors might have difficulty finding the version of your site that caters to them.

There are two main ways a website can be internationalized:

  • Language
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Sites that target speakers of multiple languages are considered multilingual websites. These sites should add something called an hreflang tag to show Google that your page has copy for another language. Learn more about hreflang.

  • Country
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Sites that target audiences in multiple countries are called multi-regional websites and they should choose a URL structure that makes it easy to target their domain or pages to specific countries. This can include the use of a country code top level domain (ccTLD) such as “.ca” for Canada, or a generic top-level domain (gTLD) with a country-specific subfolder such as “example.com/ca” for Canada. Learn more about locale-specific URLs.

Establishing authority so that your pages will rank highly in search results. Call Swift for more:

Swift Digital Marketing: (216) 339-6041


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Top Web Design

4/26/2022

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Let's talk about local SEO without physical premises. Not the Google My Business kind — the kind of local SEO that job boards, house listing sites, and national delivery services have to reckon with.

Should they have landing pages, for example, for "flower delivery in London?"

​This turns out to be a surprisingly nuanced issue: In some industries, businesses are ranking for local terms without a location-specific page, and in others local pages are absolutely essential.

​ I've worked with clients across several industries on why these sorts of problems exist, and how to tackle them. How should you figure out whether you need these pages, how can you scale them and incorporate them in your site architecture, and how many should you have for what location types?
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The basics of search engine optimization

4/26/2022

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Ever heard of Maslow's hierarchy of needs? It's a theory of psychology that prioritizes the most fundamental human needs (like air, water, and physical safety) over more advanced needs (like esteem and social belonging). The theory is that you can't achieve the needs at the top without ensuring the more fundamental needs. Love doesn't matter if you don't have food.

Our founder, made a similar pyramid to explain the way folks should go about SEO, and we've affectionately dubbed it "Mozlow's hierarchy of SEO needs."

The foundation of good SEO begins with ensuring crawl accessibility, and moves up from there.

Using this beginner's guide, we can follow these seven steps to successful SEO:
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  1. Crawl accessibility so engines can read your website
  2. Compelling content that answers the searcher’s query
  3. Keyword optimized to attract searchers & engines
  4. Great user experience including a fast load speed and compelling UX
  5. Share-worthy content that earns links, citations, and amplification
  6. Title, URL, & description to draw high CTR in the rankings
  7. Snippet/schema markup to stand out in SERPs

Search engines are answer machines. They scour billions of pieces of content and evaluate thousands of factors to determine which content is most likely to answer your query.

Search engines do all of this by discovering and cataloguing all available content on the Internet (web pages, PDFs, images, videos, etc.) via a process known as “crawling and indexing,” and then ordering it by how well it matches the query in a process we refer to as “ranking.” We’ll cover crawling, indexing, and ranking in more detail in the next chapter.

SEO is also one of the only online marketing channels that, when set up correctly, can continue to pay dividends over time. If you provide a solid piece of content that deserves to rank for the right keywords, your traffic can snowball over time, whereas advertising needs continuous funding to send traffic to your site.

Search engines are getting smarter, but they still need our help.

Optimizing your site will help deliver better information to search engines so that your content can be properly indexed and displayed within search results.

Google Webmaster Guidelines

Basic principles:

  • Make pages primarily for users, not search engines.
  • Don't deceive your users.
  • Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
  • Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging.​

Basic principles:
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  • Be sure you’re eligible for inclusion in the Google My Business index; you must have a physical address, even if it’s your home address, and you must serve customers face-to-face, either at your location (like a retail store) or at theirs (like a plumber)
  • Honestly and accurately represent all aspects of your local business data, including its name, address, phone number, website address, business categories, hours of operation, and other features.
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Local, national, or international SEO?

Local businesses will often want to rank for local-intent keywords such as “[service] + [near me]” or “[service] + [city]” in order to capture potential customers searching for products or services in the specific locale in which they offer them. However, not all businesses operate locally. Many websites do not represent a location-based business, but instead target audiences on a national or even an international level. 


Know your website/client’s goals

Every website is different, so take the time to really understand a specific site’s business goals. This will not only help you determine which areas of SEO you should focus on, where to track conversions, and how to set benchmarks, but it will also help you create talking points for negotiating SEO projects with clients, bosses, etc.

What will your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) be to measure the return on SEO investment? More simply, what is your barometer to measure the success of your organic search efforts? You'll want to have it documented, even if it's this simple:

For the website ____________, my primary SEO KPI is ____________.Here are a few common KPIs to get you started:
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  • Sales
  • Downloads
  • Email signups
  • Contact form submissions
  • Phone calls​

And if your business has a local component, you’ll want to define KPIs for your Google My Business listings, as well. These might include:

  • Clicks-to-call
  • Clicks-to-website
  • Clicks-for-driving-directions​

You may have noticed that things like “ranking” and “traffic” weren’t on the KPIs list, and that’s intentional.

“But wait a minute!” You say. “I came here to learn about SEO because I heard it could help me rank and get traffic, and you’re telling me those aren’t important goals?”

Not at all! You’ve heard correctly. SEO can help your website rank higher in search results and consequently drive more traffic to your website, it’s just that ranking and traffic are a means to an end. There’s little use in ranking if no one is clicking through to your site, and there’s little use in increasing your traffic if that traffic isn’t accomplishing a larger business objective.

For example, if you run a lead generation site, would you rather have:

  • 1,000 monthly visitors and 3 people fill out a contact form? Or...
  • 300 monthly visitors and 40 people fill out a contact form?

If you’re using SEO to drive traffic to your site for the purpose of conversions, we hope you’d pick the latter! Before embarking on SEO, make sure you’ve laid out your business goals, then use SEO to help you accomplish them — not the other way around.

SEO accomplishes so much more than vanity metrics. When done well, it helps real businesses achieve real goals for their success.

    Contact Us Today

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Search. Engine. Optimization.

4/26/2022

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Search. Engine. Optimization. A widely veiled topic that few understand. What’s important to know is that there are two categories. Local and National. For most small/medium businesses, Local SEO is what you should be focused on. National SEO focuses on optimizing your website and site content for organic search. We offer both, however we typically suggest that starting local is the best bet as you will start to feel the impacts to your business much faster.
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Top Website Design

4/26/2022

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Your website is your brochure to the world. Don’t DIY your first impression with your potential clients. Leave it to the experts at Swift Digital Marketing.

who will build you a blazing fast, secure website and streamline the whole process for you.

​We have build and hosting plans to fit most budgets, and our expert team of designers will make sure your brand screams quality from top to bottom. We look forward to making your next web project a reality.
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Marketing has always been about connecting with your audience in the right place and at the right time

4/25/2022

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With how accessible the internet is today, would you believe me if I told you the number of people who go online every day is still increasing?

It is. In fact, "constant" internet usage among adults increased by 5% in just the last three years. And although we say it a lot, the way people shop and buy really has changed along with it — meaning offline marketing isn't as effective as it used to be.

Marketing has always been about connecting with your audience in the right place and at the right time. Today, that means you need to meet them where they are already spending time: on the internet.

Enter digital marketing — in other words, any form of marketing that exists online.

At Swift Digital Advertising Agency:

​ Team, we talk a lot about inbound marketing as a really effective way to attract, engage, and delight customers online. But we still get a lot of questions from people all around the world about digital marketing.

So, we decided to answer them. Click the links below to jump to each question, or keep reading to see how digital marketing is carried out today.


  • What is digital marketing?
  • Why is digital marketing important?
  • Types of Digital Marketing
  • What does a digital marketer do?
  • Inbound Marketing vs. Digital Marketing: Which is it?
  • Does digital marketing work for all businesses?
  • How to Do Digital Marketing
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So, how do you define digital marketing today?

What is digital marketing?

Digital marketing, also called online marketing, refers to all marketing efforts that occur on the internet. Businesses leverage digital channels such as search engines, social media, email, and other websites to connect with current and prospective customers. This also includes communication through text or multimedia messages.

A seasoned inbound marketer might say inbound marketing and digital marketing are virtually the same thing, but there are some minor differences. And conversations with marketers and business owners in the U.S., U.K., Asia, Australia, and New Zealand, I've learned a lot about how those small differences are being observed across the world.


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Full service digital marketing

4/20/2022

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Flexible, Powerful: Our Custom Full-Service Digital Marketing Company. There’s no one right way to do digital marketing for businesses. In fact, even the right marketing strategy for your business might not be right all the time.

As your business needs to change, whether seasonally or permanently, your marketing strategy should change with it. That’s where our custom full-service digital marketing comes in!

This premier service is our most comprehensive, flexible, and data-driven digital marketing solution. We work directly with you to develop a Custom Marketing Plan with monthly campaigns designed to achieve your goals and operate within your budget.

No cherry-picking services – instead, we recommend and execute the tactics we believe will deliver the best results.

How Does Custom Digital Marketing  Work? 

Custom Full-Service Digital Marketing is a 2-Phase program: Planning and Execution. It works because we take the time to learn about your business, understand your market, review your existing web presence, and then develop a full marketing plan.

Phase 1: Discovery and Planning

Before we can do our best work, we need to learn as much as we can! Phase 1 includes:

  • Discovery Meeting – An in-depth strategy meeting to review your business goals, explore past marketing efforts, and brainstorm marketing campaigns.
  • Digital Presence Review – An exhaustive audit of your existing web presence. Includes a UX, SEO, and technical review of your website, a review of ad and social channels, your analytics data, and competitor analysis.
  • Custom Marketing Plan – The heart of our Custom Full-Service Digital Marketing services. We develop a full month-to-month marketing plan with defined monthly campaigns, timelines, service recommendations, tracking information, and deliverables. Our service recommendations may include:
​
  1. Content marketing: blogs, press releases, video
  2. Website updates and search optimization (SEO)
  3. Graphic design
  4. Google Adwords advertising / PPC
  5. Social advertising: Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and more
  6. Social posting
  7. Lead generation and email marketing
  8. Business listing setup and optimization
  9. And more!
  10. Marketing Assets Setup – We set up any necessary marketing channels, services, and data tracking needed to support your first campaigns.
​
Phase 2: Execution and Consultation

With your plan in place, we execute the approved campaigns, facilitating all setups, reviews, and approvals needed on a monthly basis. This ongoing service includes:


  • Additional Marketing Asset Setup – If we need it, we build it.
  • Execution of Monthly Campaigns –  Your campaigns become fully realized and put into action, including the creation of all assets, review, approval, tracking, and reporting on campaign performance.
  • Monthly Consultation & Reporting – A monthly meeting with your project manager to review campaign performance, outline recommended actions, and discuss upcoming campaigns.​​

Cal Swift Today: (216) 339-6041
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Web Design Done Right

4/19/2022

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Maximize your competitive edge

No matter your industry, you have a direct competitor — and it’s essential for your company to have a competitive edge. While you may provide a better product and a better experience, those unique selling points can become lost in an outdated, unusable website.

With our Website Design Services, you can ensure that your company maximizes its first impression with users. You can also make sure that your business stands apart from competitors in your industry, emphasizing that your product or service is the best.

For example, if you’re a pest control company looking to generate leads, it’s a tough market. You, however, can make it easy for potential leads to contact your company by investing in a website focused on the user experience.

That is an immense gain for your business, offering you the chance to increase your sales and market share with a design or a quick update to your website.


Contact us today!
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Why Your Business Needs Video Marketing

4/19/2022

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Although there have been plenty of types of marketing over the last century, video marketing has been among the most popular. This type of marketing is everywhere in current culture, since people are so used to seeing video on television and the web. Despite how prevalent this kind of marketing is, it remains a powerful tool in the marketer’s toolkit.

The Importance of Video Marketing

Video marketing is a flexible approach to reaching your audience. Once recorded, your video can be used in multiple formats, allowing you to use it in presentations, on your website, or in commercials. Another example of video’s flexibility is in how it can be filmed. Video can consist of a direct presentation of your product or include complex graphics and visuals.

Video Marketing ROIIn a report released by HubSpot, marketers found that the use of video marketing is on the rise. Approximately 81% of businesses used video marketing tool, which represented an increase of 18% from 2017. Why was there a rise in video? Because people spend more time engaging with digital video than they do with social media advertisements.

There’s a significant return on investment for video marketing because people are now spending more time watching digital video than ever before and are likely to spend more time with video than most other advertisement approaches.


How Video Marketing Influences Purchase Decision 

Judging by the return on investment that video brings, it should be easy to see how this marketing approach impacts the decision to buy your product or service. When you use video, people are more likely to see your advertisement, stay engaged with it longer, and enjoy it. People are particularly fond of long form content that has an interesting angle or perspective. More than ever, people enjoy interesting and unique content.

Millennial Appeal of Video MarketingBusinesses hoping to attract buyers should also keep in mind that video marketing is a powerful tool among millennials. Millennials have more buying power than ever before. The younger end of the millennial generation, those ages 17 through 28, are also more likely to watch video on digital devices than ever before. Creating digital video can not only help appeal to millennials who currently have buying power but improve your brand on an age group that will have buying power in the future.

Branding with Video Marketing

The use of video can help expand your brand like never before because it can be used in multiple channels. It’s estimated that 82% of Twitter users watch video content on their feeds, while YouTube alone has over a billion users that you could potentially be reaching. Approximately 45% of people watch video through Facebook or YouTube each week.

If you’re not using video marketing, you’re missing out on a powerful tool that might be able to help expand your brand and increase your customer base. 
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The Importance of Graphic Design in Digital Marketing

4/18/2022

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You are missing a huge communication opportunity if you are not incorporating visual content in your digital marketing. Graphic design is a key element of digital marketing. It is not just pictures and drawings. Graphic design is the art of communication that requires creativity and a systematic plan to solve a problem or achieve specific objectives. Effective Graphic designs highlight plans to discover what makes an image genuinely stand out and get shared.


This is also an effective way to engage with customers-. It builds brand awareness and influences the customer decision-making process. Integrating strategic content in your design will encourage prospects to become customers and this visual piece will guide your customers through your intended message.

​Build Your Own Identity

Your Graphic design establishes your own distinguished tone, style, and identity among competitors. Customers and potential clients become more familiar with your brand because this builds your identity and generate more awareness than taglines.

​These images are much easier to recall or retain in people’s memory so when they see it, they will be able to identify and distinguish you from the crowd before the brand name does so. It also builds a connection with your clients.

​Design Speaks Louder Than Words

It is true that “A picture is worth a thousand words”. Graphic design is important for any business that is looking to have a positive and lasting good impression. When it comes to spreading words about your business, the design always comes first and afterward, the words.

​You need to create something that gives people the wow factor. Your design speaks for your company and builds your brand- take for example apple’s logo, you don’t see a mission, vision or even tagline but seeing the apple logo alone is all you need to know that it is a product of Apple. This is how your design speaks better than words.

​Describes Your Company’s History & Philosophy

The graphic design is not just a combination of images, colors and different angles. This is deeply connected with the history and philosophy of many companies. It should not just amaze people on what an incredible design it is, it should also reflect the company’s organic identity. This usually tells a story about the company in a creative way.

​Boost Your Sales

It can definitely boost sales if you convey a thought-provoking, intelligently done and pleasing graphic design. Humans are visual creatures,  this is why people love good design, it spreads positive vibes about your business. Positive vibes play an important role especially those split seconds a prospective client has to make a decision to buy from you or not.

​Creates Credibility and A Professional Image

Having quality graphic designs also adds value to your company. You’re not just showing good designs that boost sales, you are also establishing your credibility and professional image. Having this image in the public eye will eventually turn more potential. The good publicity will be your key to gaining people’s trust and making them more comfortable to do business with you.

​It’s the Strength Behind Your Company’s Name

It may sound obvious but many people fail to see this. In our everyday routine, we notice most of the time, at least a company whose name is not known can easily be identified because of its graphic design. Creating your unique style is the way you can stand out for more visibility.


Small businesses usually can’t afford quality marketing and have a hard time gaining recognition.  A tip that can help will be to create a uniquely designed logo or business card, these can immediately catch people’s attention because it helps to establish your presence in the sea of competitors and ranks your business as a top of mind awareness in your industry. This is how vital graphic design is to your company.

​Conclusion

... This is simply the nature of people, we love to see images because it helps increase our chances of recollection.  Graphic designs have become essential to draw the attention of potential customers towards a business.

... Graphic design has become necessary in business and taking advantage of this can surely boost your sales. The first impression that a graphic design makes on viewers is of crucial importance in drawing their attention towards a business. Let us help you design your success. Contact us for your graphic design needs.
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Digital Marketer Presents

4/17/2022

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What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is the act of promoting and selling products and services by leveraging online marketing tactics such as social media marketing, search marketing, and email marketing.

When you get down to it, digital marketing is simply marketing.

It's how today's businesses are getting their message in front of their best prospects and customers.

Rule #1 in marketing is to make the right offer at the right time and in the right place. Today, your customers are online: hanging out in social media, staying updated on news sites and blogs, and searching online when they have a need.
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Digital marketing puts you in those same channels, so your best prospects can see you, learn more about you, and even ask questions to learn more about you and your products or services.

If you're new to digital marketing, it may feel overwhelming to think about mastering all the online marketing tactics used in digital marketing.

We get that...

And yes, there are different tactics you'll need to learn. But they all work together to create a foundation for your business: attracting prospects, nurturing relationships, and making offers your audience will appreciate and respond to.
​

Let's take a closer look at how that happens.


How Does Digital Marketing Work?

In many ways, digital marketing is no different than traditional marketing. In both, smart organizations seek to develop mutually beneficial relationships with prospects, leads, and customers.

But digital marketing has replaced most traditional marketing tactics because it's designed to reach today's consumers.

As an example...

Think about the last important purchase you made. Perhaps you purchased a home, hired someone to fix your roof, or changed paper suppliers at your office.

Regardless of what it was, you probably began by searching the Internet to learn more about available solutions, who provided them, and what your best options were. Your ultimate buying decision was then based on the reviews you read, the friends and family you consulted, and the solutions, features, and pricing you researched.

Most purchasing decisions begin online.

That being the case, an online presence is absolutely necessary—regardless of what you sell.

The key is to develop a digital marketing strategy that puts you in all the places your followers are already hanging out, then using a variety of digital channels to connect with them in a multitude of ways...

...Content to keep them updated with industry news, the problems they're facing, and how you solve those problems...
...Social media to share that content and then engage with them as friends and followers...

...Search engine optimization (SEO) to optimize your content, so it will show up when someone is searching for the information you've written about...

...Advertising to drive paid traffic to your website, where people can see your offers...

...And email marketing to follow up with your audience to be sure they continue to get the solutions they're looking for.
When you put all these pieces together, you'll end up with an efficient, easy-to-operate digital marketing machine. And while it looks intimidating to build that machine from scratch, it's as simple as learning and integrating one digital marketing tactic at a time.
​

Which is why we've put together this guide: To help you build or refine your own digital marketing plan without the false starts and missteps that come with doing it alone.

What Are the Benefits of Digital Marketing?

Having a strong digital presence will help you in multiple ways:
  • It will make it easier to create awareness and engagement both before and after the sale
  • It will help you convert new buyers into rabid fans who buy more (and more often)
  • It will kickstart word-of-mouth and social sharing—and all the benefits that come with them
  • It will shorten the buyer's journey by presenting the right offers at the right time

Learn the Strategies That Get Real Results

Be aware, the digital marketing scene is ever changing. Gurus, podcasts, and bloggers declare a tool or tactic hot one week and dead the next.
​

The truth is, digital marketing is less about "digital" and more about "marketing," largely because digital marketing has come of age. Its fundamentals have already been established.

At Swift, our objective is to clear the confusion about the tactics that work and how to use them to grow your business. We stand firmly against the so-called "gurus" who promote the next "shiny object" or "quick fix" that will reportedly kill email marketing, digital advertising, or search engine optimization.

Here, we're all about the fundamentals.

As you'll see in this guide, these 8 core disciplines of digital marketing will be critical to your business growth today, tomorrow, and for years to come. Each of these disciplines will be covered in depth in a chapter of this Ultimate Guide to Digital Marketing as shown below.

About The Ultimate Guide to Digital Marketing

Digital marketing isn't magic, and you don't need to be a computer whiz to be good at it. If you offer a product or service that the market desires, you can successfully market them in digital channels using the strategies taught in this guide.

The Ultimate Guide to Digital Marketing doesn't present hype about the latest flashy tactics in marketing—digital or otherwise. Instead, this resource covers foundational disciplines such as content marketing, social media marketing, and email marketing, always in the context of the goals that businesses care about.
​

These goals include acquiring new leads and customers, monetizing the leads and customers you already have, and creating communities of brand advocates and promoters.
Areas we serve

  • Philadelphia
  • Washington
  • Dallas
  • Baltomore
  • New York City
  • Tampa
  • Boston
  • Altanta
  • Pittsburgh
  • Charlotte
  • Detroit
  • Orlando​
​
Contact us today to start!
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The Ultimate Guide to Mastering the Basics of Effective Social Media Advertising

10/17/2021

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It's hard to imagine any company today could be successful and experience substantial growth without advertising their product or service and brand on social media.

Advertising is how businesses promote themselves and whatever it is they sell to their audience members — and with billions of people on social media, it's clear why businesses choose to advertise and promote themselves through this medium.

Social media advertising is a powerful marketing tactic that has the power to drive leads, boost revenue, increase brand awareness, and more. In this guide, we'll talk about why it's so effective, how to create a strategy for your business, and provide inspiration to help get you started.

  1. Social Media Advertising
  2. How Effective is Social Media Advertising?
  3. How to Create a Social Media Ad
  4. Social Media Advertising Examples

Social Media Advertising

Social media advertising is the process of targeting your buyer personas, audience, and customers and promoting your brand, product, or service via social media posts and ads to convert leads and increase revenue.


Now you might be wondering whether or not this type of advertising really works and if it's worth your time and monetary investment.

How effective is social media advertising?

Did you know there are over 2.38 billion monthly active users on Facebook? Or that there are over 500 million daily Instagram users?
​

And did you know 74% of global marketers already invest in social media marketing, which includes social advertising? Not to mention 70% of businesses say they generate leads on social media and 58% of marketers say social media has helped them boost their sales.

These are just some of the many stats related to social media advertising that prove its impact and importance among all types of businesses.

In addition to stats that support the effectiveness and impressive reach of social media advertising, this marketing tactic allows you to nurture your leads in real-time. You can communicate and engage with your followers and audience directly on the platform to nurture and build relationships with them.

The cherry on top? 

Social media advertising is more cost-effective than traditional advertising. With social media ads, you can easily set a budget and add to or remove from that set amount within the social platform you're using.


Now that you have a better understanding of the power of social media ads, let's cover the steps involved in making an advertisement on social for your business.
How to Create a Social Media AdHere are the major steps involved in creating a social media ad that you'll want to follow.

Use CRM and web analytics data to inform your ad campaigns and discover what ads are covering the most visitors into customers.

1. Think about your budget.One of the most daunting things about social media advertising is determining your budget. That's because there are so many unique and flexible options on every social platforms for your ads and campaigns.

For example, if you're looking to run a social campaign on Facebook with the Facebook Ad Campaign tool, start by setting a budget. Then, Facebook will run your campaign for you and spend your budget as evenly as possible throughout your selected time period (or until your budget has been completely used). You can then leave your Facebook ad campaign as is or add more money to your budget to continue.

To help you plan your budget, be sure to align your marketing objectives with your social media advertising strategy. Consider the amount you're comfortable pulling out of the larger marketing strategy to put towards your social ads.

2. Choose which type of social media advertisement you'll run.The landscape of paid social advertising is constantly changing; new technologies, channels, formats, and trends emerge every day.

That means there's no one-size-fits-all answer to which social channels you should advertise on. Ultimately, testing different channels is the best way to determine what works best for your business and audience.

Here are some of the most common types of social media platforms you can advertise through and which demographic of people you'll want to target through each:

FacebookAbout 69% of adults use Facebook — although 25-34-year-olds make up the greatest number of users on the platform, Facebook still has the widest age range of active users of any other platform. This includes teens and seniors — in fact, 62% of online seniors, ages 65+, are on Facebook.

Due to the fact Facebook ads allow you to reach audience members who haven't Liked your Page, you can see why the platform is such a popular one to advertise through — you reach the greatest population of audience members compared to other platforms by a landslide.

Instagram

Instagram is ideal if you're targeting younger generations. That's because 75% of 18-24-year-olds use the platform and 57% of 25-29-year-olds use it. Meanwhile, only 8% of people over 65-years-old are on the platform.

Twitter

Twitter is a good option if you're looking to target young to middle-aged adults with your social media ads. That's because 22% of adults in the U.S. use Twitter. 38% of users on the platform are between 18-29-years-old while 26% of users are between the pages of 30-49-years-old.

LinkedIn

It's no secret LinkedIn is a professional network — meaning, you'll likely want to stick with more formal, business, and career-related advertisements on the platform. This also means the demographic on LinkedIn you'll want to target includes current or soon-to-be members of the workforce.

There are over 660 million LinkedIn users and 37% of adults in the U.S. between the ages of 30-49 use the platform. And in terms of students and college grads, 51% of U.S. college graduates are said to be on the platform.

Snapchat

Snapchat is a platform you'll want to advertise through if you're looking to target a young crowd. The platform has around 210 million daily active users — about 90% of Snapchat users are between 13-24-years-old. 

3. Make your ad relevant.

Your ads should be relevant to your target audience and customers. There are a few ways you can ensure this is the case.

  • Use your buyer personas to target the interests and needs of your audience and customers
  • Conduct customer feedback surveys and focus groups to fulfill the needs of your target audience even when they aren't actively searching for solutions
  • Search engine optimize (SEO) your social content so it's more likely to organically appear when specific keywords and phrases are being searched (and use image alt text when you can)

4. Design a beautiful, eye-catching ad.

On social media, it seems as though there's a never-ending amount of new visual content. So, how do you make your social media ads stand out?

Your ads need to be engaging, beautifully-designed, and eye-catching — they should make someone who's scrolling through their feed stop in their tracks and want to take a closer look at your content.

You also want your ad to look on-brand so your audience members can easily associate the ad with your business. (This will help you continue to build brand recognition, too.)

Here are some of the elements you'll want to think about when designing an effective social media ad that grabs the attention of your target audience:

  • Images
  • Videos
  • Font
  • Colors
  • Written content and messaging
  • CTA buttons

5. Write copy that converts.

Every word and character you include in your advertisements count. This is especially true of social media ads which often have word-count and text limitations.
So, to ensure your copy converts all while being straightforward, direct, and short, you should:

  • Be compelling
  • Communicate your value proposition clearly
  • Be actionable
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And once you've created your social media ad, you'll want to make sure it's successful among your audience members — here's how to measure your ad's success.

6. Measure your ad's success.With social media advertising comes a multitude of metrics you should monitor to determine the success of your work. It's vital you focus on the social media metrics that matter most to your campaigns and business when doing this.

To help get you started, here are three of the most commonly-monitored metrics related to social media advertising you might consider keeping a close eye on:

Click-Through Rate (CTR) CTR is the number of clicks your ad has divided by the number of impressions it received (clicks/ impressions). The metric indicates the relevance of your content among your audience and the quality of that traffic.

Cost Per Conversion (CPC) Every campaign should have one core conversion goal (signups, app install, downloads, visits to blog posts). To calculate CPC, divide the amount of money you have spent by the number of conversions that resulted. This gives you insight into whether your ads are profitable and helps you project your future ad spending.

Conversion RateThe conversion rate of the number of visits to your landing page that result from your social media ads provides a good idea of the quality of the clicks you're receiving as well as the performance of your landing page. You can also benchmark your social ad traffic against the conversion rate of traffic from other sources.
Now let's review some examples of successful social media ads for a little inspiration.

Social Media Advertising Examples

  1. Dollar Shave Club Facebook Ad
  2. Dick's Sporting Goods Instagram Ad
  3. Postmates Twitter Ad
  4. Workhuman LinkedIn Ad
  5. Hopper Snapchat Ad

1. Dollar Shave Club Facebook Ad

Dollar Shave Club is a company that’s all about minimalism, efficiency, and ease which is why this Facebook ad is straightforward and simplistic, making it on-brand. The images included provide a clear look into what customers can expect out of a membership and their products.

Facebook is an ideal platform for sharing a generic ad like this one because of the wide pool of people who are active on the platform. After all, most adults — both male and female — shave and are therefore part of their target audience.

2. Dick's Sporting Goods Instagram Ad Dick’s Sporting Goods’ Instagram ad is promoting a pair of Adidas sneakers. The ad includes a series of photos displaying the shoes and athletes wearing them before/ after and during the workouts.

The ad is well-planned because it doesn’t feel like an ad — the visually-pleasing post looks like one that a friend of yours would post on the platform. In other words, this ad doesn’t feel like a disruptive ad, yet it still grabs your attention.

3. Postmates Twitter Ad

Postmates’ Twitter ad includes a short blurb of text explaining the deal they’re offering — this was required of Postmates because the platform has a Tweet text limit. They also used emojis so the ad feels conversational and casual.

The ad also has an attention-grabbing photo sure to stop any hungry Twitter user in their tracks. They make it easy for leads to click on the CTA to download the Postmates app if they choose, or continue scrolling through their feed.

4. Workhuman LinkedIn Ad

Workhuman, a human resources company, advertises their business on LinkedIn. Due to the professional nature of LinkedIn, and the networking capabilities the platform has, it’s ideal for an HR firm to advertise their services, job openings, and more.

The company created a sponsored ad on LinkedIn to promote their marketing job openings. The easy-to-understand ad caption, image, and CTA don’t feel disruptive or out of place on the professional network. And considering the frequency in which people log onto LinkedIn to identify job opportunities, it’s an ideal location for this type of advertisement.

5. Hopper Snapchat Ad

Hopper has a Snapc

hat ad that appears when users are looking through their newsfeeds. The ad works in the form of a multi-part Snapchat video — the video includes a woman describing how the airline flight price checking and booking site works.



She’s talking directly to the camera on her phone in a conversational tone that makes it feel as though you’re simply watching one of your friend’s Snapchat videos. At the end of her casual Snap video is a CTA that provides users the opportunity to head to the Hopper website or just continue working their way through their newsfeed, disruption-free.

Get Started With Social Media AdvertisingThe paid social advertising landscape is always evolving, to be a superstar paid marketer you need to be reactive to new channels, tactics and formats on an ongoing basis. Get started by planning your strategy so you can create your next social media ad. 

Social Media Advertising 

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The Ultimate Guide to SEO in 2021

10/13/2021

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What is the first thing you do when you need new marketing ideas?

What about when you decide it’s time to change the way you keep the books finally? Or even notice a flat tire in the car?


My guess: you turn to Google. But did you know that 89% of B2B buyers and 81% of online shoppers do the same? Faced with a problem, challenge or even a choice, they google it. Simply.

And so, it’s a cold, harsh truth that without at least some presence in Google, your business is unlikely to survive long.
In this guide, you’ll discover a strategy to build this presence — Search Engine Optimization (SEO.)

You’ll learn what SEO is, how it works, and what you must do to position your site in search engine results.
But before we begin, I want to reassure you of something.

So many resources make SEO complex. They scare readers with technical jargon, focus on advanced elements, and rarely explain anything beyond theory.

I promise you, this guide isn’t like that.

In the following pages, I’m going to break SEO into its most basic parts and show you how to use all its elements to construct a successful SEO strategy. (And to stay up-to-date on SEO strategy and trends.

Keep on reading to understand SEO, or jump ahead to the section that interests you most.

  1. What is SEO?
  2. How Google Ranks Content
  3. How to Build an SEO Strategy
  4. How to Measure SEO
  5. Local and Black Hat SEO
  6. SEO Resources

What is SEO?

At its core, SEO focuses on nothing else but expanding a company’s visibility in the organic search results. It helps businesses rank more pages higher in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages.) And in turn, drive more visitors to the site, increasing chances for more conversions.

When asked to explain what SEO is, I often choose to call it a strategy to ensure that when someone googles your product or service category, they find your website.

But this simplifies the discipline a bit. It doesn’t take elements like different customer information needs into consideration. However, it does reveal its essence.

In short, SEO drives two things — rankings and visibility.

Rankings

This is a process that search engines use to determine where to place a particular web page in SERPs.

Visibility

This term describes how prominent a particular domain is in search engine results. With high visibility, your domain is prominent in SERPs. Lower search visibility occurs when a domain isn’t visible for many relevant search queries.

Both are responsible for delivering the main SEO objectives – traffic and conversions.

There is one more reason why you should be using SEO. The discipline helps you position your brand throughout almost the entire buying journey.

In turn, it can ensure that your marketing strategies match the new buying behavior. Because, as Google admitted themselves — customer behavior has changed forever.

Today, more people use search engines to find products or services than any other marketing channel. 18% more shoppers choose Google over Amazon. 136% more prefer the search engine to other retail websites. And B2B buyers conduct up to 12 searches, on average, before engaging with a brand.

What's more, they prefer going through the majority of the buying process on their own. 77% people research a brand before engaging with it.

Forrester revealed that 60% of customers do not want any interaction with salespeople. Further, 68% prefer to research on their own. And 62% have developed their own criteria to select the right vendor.
What’s more, this process has never been more complicated.

Finally, Demand Gen’s 2017 B2B Buyer’s Survey found that 61% of B2B buyers start the buying process with a broad web search. In comparison, only 56% go directly to a vendor’s website.

But how do they use search engines during the process?

Early in the process, they use Google to find information about their problem. Some also inquire about potential solutions.

Then, they evaluate available alternatives based on reviews or social media hype before inquiring with a company. But this happens after they’ve exhausted all information sources.

And so, the only chance for customers to notice and consider you is by showing up in their search results.

Featured Resource
  • 22 SEO Myths to Leave Behind in 2020

How does Google know how to rank a page?

Search engines have a single goal only. They aim to provide users with the most relevant answers or information.

Every time you use them, their algorithms choose pages that are the most relevant to your query. And then, rank them, displaying the most authoritative or popular ones first.

To deliver the right information to users, search engines analyze two factors:

  • Relevancy between the search query and the content on a page. Search engines assess it by various factors like topic or keywords.
  • Authority, measured by a website’s popularity on the Internet. Google assumes that the more popular a page or resource is, the more valuable is its content to readers.

And to analyze all this information they use complex equations calledsearch algorithms.

Search engines keep their algorithms secret. But over time, SEOs have identified some of the factors they consider when ranking a page. We refer to them as ranking factors, and they are the focus of an SEO strategy.

As you’ll shortly see, adding more content, optimizing image filenames, or improving internal links can affect your rankings and search visibility. And that’s because each of those actions improves a ranking factor.

Three Core Components of a Strong SEO Strategy

To optimize a site, you need to improve ranking factors in three areas — technical website setup, content, and links. So, let’s go through them in turn.

1. Technical Setup

For your website to rank, three things must happen:

First, a search engine needs find your pages on the Web.

Then, it must scan them to understand their topics and identify their keywords.

And finally, it needs to add them to its index — a database of all the content it has found on the web. This way, its algorithm can consider displaying your website for relevant queries.

Seem simple, doesn’t it? Certainly, nothing to worry about. After all, since you can visit your site without any problem, so should Google, right?

Unfortunately, there is a catch. A web page looks different for you and the search engine. You see it as a collection of graphics, colors, text with its formatting, and links.

To a search engine, it’s nothing but text.

As a result, any elements it cannot render this way remain invisible to the search engine. And so, in spite of your website looking fine to you, Google might find its content inaccessible.

Let me show you an example. Here’s how a typical search engine sees one of our articles. It’s this one, by the way, if you want to compare it with the original.

Notice some things about it:
​
  • The page is just text. Although we carefully designed it, the only elements a search engine sees are text and links.
  • As a result, it cannot see an image on the page (note the element marked with an arrow.) It only recognizes its name. If that image contained an important keyword we’d want the page to rank for, it would be invisible to the search engine.

That’s where technical setup, also called on-site optimization, comes in. It ensures that your website and pages allow Google to scan and index them without any problems. The most important factors affecting it include:

Website navigation and links

​Search engines crawl sites just like you would. They follow links. Search engine crawlers land on a page and use links to find other content to analyze. But as you’ve seen above, they cannot see images. So, set the navigation and links as text-only.

Simple URL structureSearch engines don’t like reading lengthy strings of words with complex structure. So, if possible, keep your URLs short. Set them up to include as little beyond the main keyword for which you want to optimize the page, as possible.

Page speedSearch engines, use the load time — the time it takes for a user to be able to read the page — as an indicator of quality. Many website elements can affect it. Image size, for example. Use Google’s Page Speed Insights Tool for suggestions how to improve your pages.


Dead links or broken redirectsA dead link sends a visitor to a nonexistent page. A broken redirect points to a resource that might no longer be there. Both provide poor user experience but also, prevent search engines from indexing your content.

Sitemap and Robots.txt files

A sitemap is a simple file that lists all URLs on your site. Search engines use it to identify what pages to crawl and index. A robots.txt file, on the other hand, tells search engines what content not to index (for example, specific policy pages you don’t want to appear in search.) Create both to speed up crawling and indexing of your content.

Duplicate contentPages containing identical or quite similar content confuse search engines. They often find it near impossible to determine what content they should display in search results. For that reason, search engines consider duplicate content as a negative factor. And upon finding it, can penalize a website by not displaying any of those pages at all.

Featured Resource

  • How to Conduct a Technical SEO Audit

2. Content

Every time you use a search engine, you’re looking for content— information on a particular issue or problem, for example.

True, this content might come in different formats. It could be text, like a blog post or a web page. But it could also be a video, product recommendation, and even a business listing.

It’s all content.

And for SEO, it’s what helps gain greater search visibility.

Here are two reasons why:

  1. For one, content is what customers want when searching. Regardless of what they’re looking for, it’s content that provides it. And the more of it you publish, the higher your chance for greater search visibility.
  2. Also, search engines use content to determine how to rank a page. It’s the idea of relevance between a page and a person’s search query that we talked about earlier.

While crawling a page, they determine its topic. Analyzing elements like page length or its structure helps them assess its quality. Based on this information, search algorithms can match a person’s query with pages they consider the most relevant to it.

The process of optimizing content begins with keyword research.

Keyword Research

SEO is not about getting any visitors to the site. You want to attract people who need what you sell and can become leads, and later, customers.

However, that’s possible only if it ranks for the keywords those people would use when searching. Otherwise, there’s no chance they’d ever find you. And that’s even if your website appeared at the top of the search results.

That’s why SEO work starts with discovering what phrases potential buyers enter into search engines.
The process typically involves identifying terms and topics relevant to your business. Then, converting them into initial keywords. And finally, conducting extensive research to uncover related terms your audience would use.

We’ve published a thorough guide to keyword research for beginners. It lays out the keyword research process in detail. Use it to identify search terms you should be targeting.

With a list of keywords at hand, the next step is to optimize your content. SEOs refer to this process as on-page optimization.

On-Page Optimization

On-page optimization, also called on-page SEO, ensures that search engines a.) understand a page’s topic and keywords, and b.) can match it to relevant searches.

Note, I said “page” not content. That’s because, although the bulk of on-page SEO work focuses on the words you use, it extends to optimizing some elements in the code.

You may have heard about some of them — meta-tags like title or description are two most popular ones. But there are more. So, here’s a list of the most crucial on-page optimization actions to take.

Note: Since blog content prevails on mostwebsites,when speaking of those factors, I’ll focus on blog SEO — optimizing blog posts for relevant keywords. However, all this advice is equally valid for other page types too.

Featured Resource

  • Guide to On-Page SEO Strategy

a) Keyword Optimization

First, ensure that Google understands what keywords you want this page to rank. To achieve that, make sure you include at least the main keyword in the following:
  • Post’s title: Ideally, place it as close to the start of the title. Google is known to put more value on words at the start of the headline.
  • URL: Your page’s web address should also include the keyword. Ideally, including nothing else. Also, remove any stop words.
  • H1 Tag: In most content management systems, this tag displays the title of the page by default. However, make sure that your platform doesn’t use a different setting.
  • The first 100 words (or the first paragraph) of content: Finding the keyword at the start of your blog post will reassure Google that this is, in fact, the page’s topic.
  • Meta-title and meta-description tags: Search engines use these two code elements to display their listings. They display meta-title as the search listing’s title. Meta-description provides content for the little blurb below it. But above that, they use both to understand the page’s topic further.
  • Image file names and ALT tags: Remember how search engines see graphics on a page? They can only see their file names. So, make sure that at least one of the images contains the keyword in the file name.

The alt tag, on the other hand, is text browsers display instead of an image (for visually impaired visitors.) However, since ALT tag resides in the image code, search engines use it as a relevancy signal as well.

Also, add semantic keywords — variations or synonyms of your keyword. Google and other search engines use them to determine a page’s relevancy better.

Let me illustrate this with a quick example. Let’s pretend that your main keyword is “Apple.” But do you mean the fruit or the tech giant behind the iPhone?

Now, imagine what happens when Google finds terms like sugar, orchard, or cider in the copy? The choice what queries to rank it for would immediately become obvious, right?

That’s what semantic keywords do. Add them to ensure that your page doesn’t start showing up for irrelevant searches.

b) Non-Keyword-Related On-Page Optimization FactorsOn-page SEO is not just about sprinkling keywords across the page. The factors below help confirm a page’s credibility and authority too:

  • External links: Linking out to other, relevant pages on the topic helps Google determine its topic further. Plus, it provides a good user experience. How? By positioning your content as a valuable resource.
 
  • Internal links: Those links help you boost rankings in two ways. One, they allow search engines to find and crawl other pages on the site. And two, they show semantic relations between various pages, helping to determine its relevance to the search query better. As a rule, you should include at least 2-4 internal links per blog post.
 
  • Content’s length: Long content typically ranks better. That’s because, if done well, a longer blog post will always contain more exhaustive information on the topic.
 
  • Multimedia: Although not a requirement, multimedia elements like videos, diagrams, audio players can signal a page’s quality. It keeps readers on a page for longer. And in turn, it signals that they find the content valuable and worth perusing.

3. Links

From what you’ve read in this guide so far, you know that no page will rank without two factors — relevance and authority.

In their quest to provide users with the most accurate answers, Google and other search engines prioritize pages they consider the most relevant to their queries but also, popular.

The first two areas — technical setup and content — focused on increasing relevancy (though I admit, some of their elements can also help highlight the authority.)

Links, however, are responsible for popularity.

But before we talk more about how they work, here’s what SEOs mean when talking about links.

What is a backlink?

Links, also called backlinks, are references to your content on other websites. Every time another website mentions and points their readers to your content, you gain a backlink to your site.

For example, this article in Entrepreneur.com mentions our marketing statistics page. It also links to it allowing their readers to see other stats than the one quoted.

Google uses quantity and quality of links like this as a signal of a website’s authority. Its logic behind it is that webmasters would reference a popular and high-quality website more often than a mediocre one.

But note that I mentioned links quality as well. That’s because not all links are the same. Some — low-quality ones — can impact your rankings negatively.

Links Quality FactorsLow quality or suspicious links — for example, ones that Google would consider as built deliberately to make it consider a site as more authoritative — might reduce your rankings.

That’s why, when building links, SEOs focus not on buildinganylinks. They aim to generate the highest quality references possible.

Naturally, just like with the search algorithm, we don’t know what factors determine a link’s quality, specifically. However, over time, SEOs discovered some of them:
  1. The popularity of a linking site: Any link from a domain that search engines consider an authority will naturally have high quality. In other words, links from websites that have good quality links pointing to them, work better.
  2. Topic relevance: Links from domains on a topic similar to yours will carry more authority than those from random websites.
  3. Trust in a domain: Just like with popularity, search engines also assess a website’s trust. Links from more trustworthy sites will always impact rankings better.

Link BuildingIn SEO, we refer to the process of acquiring new backlinks as link building. And as many practitioners admit, it can be a challenging activity.

Link building, if you want to do it well, requires creativity, strategic thinking, and patience. To generate quality links, you need to come up with a link building strategy. And that’s no small feat.

Remember, your links must pass various quality criteria. Plus, it can’t be obvious to search engines that you’ve built them deliberately.

Here are some strategies to do it:
​
  • Editorial, organic links: These backlinks come from websites that reference your content on their own.
  • Outreach: In this strategy, you contact other websites for links. This can happen in many ways. You could create an amazing piece of content, and email them to tell them about it. In turn, if they find it valuable, they’ll reference it. You can also suggest where they could link to it.
  • Guest posting: Guest posts are blog articles that you publish on third-party websites. In turn, those companies often allow including one or two links to your site in the content and author bio.
  • Profile links: Finally, many websites offer an opportunity to create a link. Online profiles are a good example. Often, when setting up such profile, you can also list your website there as well. Not all such links carry strong authority, but some might. And given the ease of creating them, they’re worth pursuing.
  • Competitive analysis: Finally, many SEOs regularly analyze their competitors’ backlinks to identify those they could recreate for their sites too.

Now, if you’re still here with me, then you’ve just discovered what’s responsible for your site’s success in search.
The next step, then, is figuring out whether your efforts are working.

How to Monitor & Track SEO ResultsTechnical setup, content, and links are critical to getting a website into the search results. Monitoring your efforts helps improve your strategy further.

Measuring SEO success means tracking data about traffic, engagement, and links. And though, most companies develop their own sets of SEO KPIs (key performance indicators), here are the most common ones:

  • Organic traffic growth
  • Keyword rankings (split into branded and non-branded terms)
  • Conversions from organic traffic
  • Average time on page and the bounce rate
  • Top landing pages attracting organic traffic
  • Number of indexed pages
  • Links growth (including new and lost links)

Local SEO

Up until now, we focused on getting a site rank in search results in general. If you run a local business, however, Google also lets you position it in front of potential customers in your area, specifically. But for that, you use local SEO.
And it’s well worth it.

97% of customers use search engines to find local information. They look for vendor suggestions, and even specific business addresses. In fact, 12% of customers look for local business information every day.

What’s more, they act on this information: 75% of searchers visit a local store or company’s premises within 24 hours of the search.

But hold on, is local SEO different from what we’ve been talking all along?

Yes and no.

Search engines follow similar principles for both local and global rankings. But given that they position a site for specific, location-based results, they need to analyze some other ranking factors too.

Local search results look different too:

  • They appear only for searches with a local intent (for example, “restaurant near me” or when a person clearly defined the location.)
  • They contain results specific to a relevant location.
  • They concentrate on delivering specific information to users that they don’t need to go anywhere else to find.
  • They target smartphone users primarily as local searches occur more often on mobile devices.

For example, a localpack, the most prominent element of local results, includes almost all information a person would need to choose a business. For example, here are local results Google displays for the phrase “best restaurant in Boston.”

Note that these results contain no links to any content. Instead, they include a list of restaurants in the area, a map to show their locations, and additional information about each:

  • Business name
  • Description
  • Image
  • Opening hours
  • Star Reviews
  • Address

Often, they also include a company’s phone number or website address.

All this information combined helps customers choose which business to engage. But it also allows Google to determine how to rank it.

Local Search Ranking Factors

When analyzing local websites, Google looks at the proximity to a searcher’s location. With the rise of local searches containing the phrase, “near me,” it’s only fair that Google will try to present the closest businesses first.

Keywords are essential for local SEO too. However, one additional element of on-page optimization is the presence of a company’s name, address, and phone number of a page. In local SEO, we refer to it as the NAP.

Again, it makes sense, as the search engine needs a way to assess the company’s location.

Google assesses authority in local search not just by links. Reviews and citations (references of a business’s address or a phone number online) highlight its authority too.

Finally, the information a business includes in Google My Business — the search engine’s platform for managing local business listings — plays a huge part in its rankings.

The above is just the tip of the iceberg. But they are the ones to get right first if you want your business to rank well in local search.

What is black hat SEO?

The final aspect of SEO I want to highlight to you is something I also hope you’ll never get tempted to use. I mean it.

Because, although it might have its lure, using black hat SEO typically ends in a penalty from search listings.

Black hat practices aim at manipulating search engine algorithms using strategies against search engine guidelines. The most common black hat techniques include keyword stuffing, cloaking (hiding keywords in code so that users don’t see them, but search engines do,) and buying links.

So, why would someone use black hat SEO? For one, because, often, ranking a site following Google’s guidelines takes time. Long time, in fact.

Black hat strategies let you cut down the complexity of link building, for example. Keyword stuffing allows to rank one page for many keywords, without having to create more content assets.

But as said, getting caught often results in a site being completely wiped out from search listings.

And the reason I mention it here is that I want you to realize that there are no shortcuts in SEO. And be aware of anyone suggesting strategies that might seem too good to be true.

SEO Resources & Training

This guide is just a starting point for discovering SEO. But there’s much more to learn.
Here are online training resources to try next:


You can also pick SEO knowledge from industry experts and their blogs. Here are some worth reading:

  • SEMrush
  • MOZ
  • Yoast
  • BrightLocal (local SEO advice)
  • Search Engine Journal
  • Search Engine Watch
  • Search Engine Land
  • Bruce Clay Inc.

By increasing your search visibility, you can bring more visitors, and in turn, conversions and sales. 
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Blog SEO: How to Search Engine Optimize Your Blog Content

10/13/2021

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Search engine optimization, or SEO, is incredibly important for marketers. When you optimize your web pages — including your blog posts — you're making your website more visible to people who are using search engines (like Google) to find your product or service.But does your blog content really help your business organically rank on search engines?

In this article, you’ll find the answer to this question and more. Get ready for an in-depth exploration into the world of blog SEO, the factors that affect it, and tips to start optimizing your blog site for the search engines.


  1. Does blogging help with SEO?
  2. Factors That Affect Blog SEO
  3. How to Do Blog SEO
  4. Blog SEO Tips

Does blogging help with SEO?

Blogging helps boost SEO quality by positioning your website as a relevant answer to your customers' questions. Blog posts that use a variety of on-page SEO tactics can give you more opportunities to rank in search engines and make your site more appealing to visitors.


Although it's clear blog content does contribute to your SEO, Google's many algorithm updates can make publishing the right kind of blog content tricky if you don’t know where to start. Some blog ranking factors have stood the test of time while others are considered "old-school." Here are a few of the top-ranking factors that can, directly and indirectly, affect blog SEO.

​
Pro tip: As a rule of thumb, take time to understand what each of these factors does, but don’t try to implement them all at once. They each serve a specific purpose and should be used to meet a specific SEO goal for your blog. 


Factors That Affect Blog SEO1.

Dwell Time

Although dwell time is an indirect ranking factor for Google, it's a critical factor in the user experience — and we know that user experience is king when it comes to SEO. Dwell time is the length of a time a reader spends on a page on your blog site.

From the moment a visitor clicks on your site in the SERP, to the moment they exit the page is considered dwell time. This metric indirectly tells search engines like Google how valuable your content is to the reader. It makes sense that the longer they spend on the page, the more relevant it is to them.

However, there’s a reason this metric is an indirect indicator for SEO — it’s completely subjective. The search engine algorithms don’t know your content strategy. Your blog could be focused on short-form content that takes just a minute or two to read.

You might also include pertinent information at the beginning of your blog posts to give the best reader experience, which means less time spent on the page. So yes, dwell time can affect SEO, but don’t manipulate your content to change this metric if it doesn’t make sense for your content strategy.

2. Page Speed

We mentioned earlier that visual elements on your blog can affect page speed, but that isn’t the only thing that can move this needle. Unnecessary code and overuse of plugins can also contribute to a sluggish blog site. Removing junk code can help your pages load faster, thus improving page speed.

If you’re not sure how to find and remove junk code, check out HTML-Cleaner. It’s an easy-to-use tool that doesn't require coding knowledge. It simply shows you the unnecessary code and lets you remove it with the click of a button.

I also recommend taking an inventory of your blog site plugins. Decide which ones you need to keep your blog running day-to-day and which ones were installed as a fix for a temporary issue.

Plugins that affect the front-end of your site are a threat to page speed, and odds are, you can uninstall more of these plugins than you think to increase your overall site speed.

3. Mobile Responsiveness

More than half of Google’s search traffic in the United States comes from mobile devices. On an individual level, your blog site might follow that same trend. There’s no way around it — optimizing your blog site for mobile is a factor that will affect your SEO metrics. But what exactly does it mean to optimize a website for mobile?

The industry rule-of-thumb is to keep things simple. Most pre-made site themes these days are already mobile-friendly, so all you’ll need to do is tweak a CTA button here and enlarge a font size there.

Then, keep an eye on how your site is performing on mobile by taking a look at your Google Analytics dashboard and running a mobile site speed test regularly.

4. Index Date

Search engines aim to provide the most relevant and accurate information available. A factor search engines use when determining what’s relevant and accurate is the date a search engine indexes the content. 

Indexing means a search engine finds content and adds it to its index. Later, the page can be retrieved and displayed in the SERP when a user searches for keywords related to the indexed page.

You might be wondering: Is the date the content was indexed the same as the date it was published?

The answer: yes and no. If a blog post is published for the first time, it’s likely that say, a Google crawler, will index that post the same day you publish it. But content can be backdated for several legitimate reasons, too, like archiving information or updating a sentence or two.

One way to positively affect this SEO factor is to implement a historical optimization strategy. This strategy works well on blogs that have been established for a few years and have a fair amount of content already.

By updating these older posts with new perspectives and data, you’ll be able to significantly impact your blog SEO without creating a lot of net new content. Site crawlers will reindex the page — taking into account the updated content — and give it another opportunity to compete in the SERP. It’s truly a win-win.

5. Recent Data

Recent data, another indirect ranking factor of SEO, should be included in blog posts. Recent data gives visitors relevant and accurate information which makes for a positive reader experience.

When you include a link to a credible site that has original, up-to-date data, you’re telling the search engine that this site is helpful and relevant to your readers (which is a plus for that other site). You’re also telling the search engine that this type of data is in some way related to the content you publish.

Over time, your readers will come to appreciate the content which can be confirmed using other metrics like increased time on page or lower bounce rate.

How to Optimize Blog Content for Search Engines

1. Identify the target audience for your blog.

No matter what industry your blog targets, you’ll want to identify and speak to the primary audience that will be reading your content. Understanding who your audience is and what you want them to do when they click on your article will help guide your blog strategy.

Buyer personas are an effective way to target readers using their buying behaviors, demographics, and psychographics. Without this insight, you could be producing grammatically correct and accurate content that few people will click on because it doesn’t speak to them on a personal level.

2. Conduct keyword research.

Now that you’ve selected your target audience and prepared a buyer persona, it’s time to find out what content your readers want to consume. Keyword research can be a heavy task to take on if you don’t begin with a strategy.

Therefore, I recommend starting with the topics your blog will cover, then expand or contract your scope from there. For an in-depth tutorial, check out our how-to guide on keyword research.

3. Add visuals.

Search engines like Google value visuals for certain keywords. Images and videos are among the most common visual elements that appear on the search engine results page. In order to achieve a coveted spot in an image pack or a video snippet, you’ll want to design creative graphics, use original photos and videos, and add descriptive alt text to every visual element within your blog post.

Alt text is a major factor that determines whether or not your image or video appears in the SERP and how highly it appears. Alt text is also important for screen readers so that visually impaired individuals have a positive experience consuming content on your blog site.

4. Write a catchy title.

The title of your blog post is the first element a reader will see when they come across your article, and it heavily influences whether they’ll click or keep scrolling. A catchy title uses data, asks a question, or leads with curiosity to pique the reader’s interest.

According to Coscheduler’s Headline Analyzer, the elements of a catchy title include power, emotional, uncommon, and common words. In the right proportions, these types of words in a blog title will grab your readers’ attention and keep them on the page.

Here’s an example of a catchy title with a Coschedule Headline Analyzer Score of 87:

The Perfect Dress Has 3 Elements According to This Popular Fashion Expert

  • Highlighted in yellow are common words. They’re familiar to the reader and don’t stray too far from other titles that may appear in the SERP.
  • “Expert” is an emotional word, according to Coschedule. In this example, the word expert builds trust with the reader and tells them that this article has an authoritative point of view.
  • Purple words are power words — this means they capture the readers’ attention and get them curious about the topic.
  • Another element in this title is the number three. This signals to the reader that they’ll learn a specific amount of facts about the perfect dress.​

5. Include an enticing CTA.

What’s a blog post without a call to action? The purpose of a CTA is to lead your reader to the next step in their journey through your blog. The key to a great CTA is that it’s relevant to the topic of your existing blog post and flows naturally with the rest of the content. Whether you’re selling a product, offering a newsletter subscription, or wanting the reader to consume more of your content, you’ll need an enticing CTA on every blog post you publish.

CTAs come in all types of formats, so get creative and experiment with them. Buttons, hyperlinks, and widgets are some of the most common CTAs, and they all have different purposes. For instance, you should add a bold, visible CTA like a button if you want the reader to make a purchase. On the other hand, you can easily get a reader to check out another blog post by providing a hyperlink to it in the conclusion of the current article.

6. Focus on the reader's experience.

Any great writer or SEO will tell you that the reader experience is the most important part of a blog post. The reader experience includes several factors like readability, formatting, and page speed. That means you’ll want to write content that’s clear, comprehensive of your topic, and accurate according to the latest data and trends.

Organizing the content using headings and subheadings is important as well because it helps the reader scan the content quickly to find the information they need. Finally, on-page elements like images and videos have an impact on page speed.

Keep image file sizes low (250 KB is a good starting point) and limit the number of videos you embed on a single page. By focusing on what the reader wants to know and organizing the post to achieve that goal, you’ll be on your way to publishing an article optimized for the search engine.


Now, let's take a look at these blog SEO tips that you can take advantage of to enhance your content's searchability.


Blog SEO Tips
  1. Use 1–2 long-tail keywords.
  2. Use keywords strategically throughout the blog post.
  3. Optimize for mobile devices.
  4. Optimize the meta description.
  5. Include image alt text.
  6. Limit topic tags.
  7. Include user-friendly URL structures.
  8. Link to related blog posts.
  9. Review metrics regularly.
  10. Organize by topic cluster.
  11. Publish evergreen content.
  12. Update existing content.


Note: This list doesn't cover every SEO rule under the sun. Rather, the following tips are the on-page factors to get you started with an SEO strategy for your blog.

1. Use 1–2 long-tail keywords.

Optimizing your blog posts for keywords is not about incorporating as many keywords into your posts as possible. Nowadays, this actually hurts your SEO because search engines consider this keyword stuffing (i.e., including keywords as much as possible with the sole purpose of ranking highly in organic search).

It also doesn't make for a good reader experience — a ranking factor that search engines now prioritize to ensure you're answering the intent of your visitors. Therefore, you should use keywords in your content in a way that doesn't feel unnatural or forced.

A good rule of thumb is to focus on one or two long-tail keywords per blog post. While you can use more than one keyword in a single post, keep the focus of the post narrow enough to allow you to spend time optimizing for just one or two keywords.

You may be wondering: Why long-tail keywords?

These longer, often question-based keywords keep your post focused on the specific goals of your audience. For example, the long-tail keyword "how to write a blog post" is much more impactful in terms of SEO than the short keyword "blog post".

Website visitors searching long-tail keywords are more likely to read the whole post and then seek more information from you. In other words, they'll help you generate the right type of traffic — visitors who convert.

2. Use keywords strategically throughout the blog post.Now that you've got one or two keywords, it's time to incorporate them in your blog post. But where is the best place to include these terms so you rank high in search results?

There are four essential places where you should try to include your keywords: title tag, headers & body, URL, and meta description.

Title TagThe title (i.e., headline) of your blog post will be a search engine's and reader's first step in determining the relevancy of your content. So, including a keyword here is vital. Google calls this the "title tag" in a search result.

Be sure to include your keyword within the first 60 characters of your title, which is just about where Google cuts titles off on the SERP.

Technically, Google measures by pixel width, not character count, and it recently increased the pixel width for organic search results from approximately 500 pixels to 600 pixels, which translates to around 60 characters.

Long title tag? When you have a lengthy headline, it's a good idea to get your keyword in the beginning since it might get cut off in SERPs toward the end, which can take a toll on your post's perceived relevance.

In the example below, we had a long title that went over 65 characters, so we placed the keyword near the front.


Headers & BodyMention your keyword at a normal cadence throughout the body of your post and in the headers. That means including your keywords in your copy, but only in a natural, reader-friendly way. Don't go overboard at the risk of being penalized for keyword stuffing.

Before you start writing a new blog post, you'll probably think about how to incorporate your keywords into your post. That's a smart idea, but it shouldn't be your only focus, nor even your primary focus.

Whenever you create content, your primary focus should be on what matters to your audience, not how many times you can include a keyword or keyword phrase in that content.

Focus on being helpful and answering whatever question your customer might've asked to arrive on your post. Do that, and you'll naturally optimize for important keywords, anyway.

URLSearch engines also look at your URL to figure out what your post is about, and it's one of the first things it'll crawl on a page.

You have a huge opportunity to optimize your URLs on every post you publish, as every post lives on its unique URL — so make sure you include your one to two keywords in it.

In the example below, we created the URL using the long-tail keyword for which we were trying to rank: "email marketing examples."


Meta DescriptionYour meta description is meant to give search engines and readers information about your blog post's content. Meaning, you must use your long-tail term so Google and your audience are clear on your post's content.

At the same time, keep in mind the copy matters a great deal for click-through rates because it satisfies certain readers' intent — the more engaging, the better.

3. Optimize for mobile devices.

We learned earlier that more people use search engines from their mobile phones than from a computer.

And for all those valuable queries being searched on mobile devices, Google displays the mobile-friendly results first. This is yet another example of Google heavily favoring mobile-friendly websites — which has been true ever since the company updated its Penguin algorithm in April 2015.


So, how do you make your blog mobile-friendly? By using responsive design. Websites that are responsive to mobile allow blog pages to have just one URL instead of two — one for desktop and one for mobile, respectively. This helps your post's SEO because any inbound links that come back to your site won't be divided between the separate URLs.

As a result, you'll centralize the SEO power you gain from these links, helping Google more easily recognize your post's value and rank it accordingly.

Pro tip: What search engines value is constantly changing. Be sure you're keeping on top of these changes by subscribing to Google's official blog.

4. Optimize the meta description.To review, a meta description is additional text that appears in SERPs that lets readers know what the link is about. The meta description gives searchers the information they need to determine whether or not your content is what they're looking for and ultimately helps them decide if they'll click or not.

The maximum length of this meta description is greater than it once was — now around 300 characters — suggesting it wants to give readers more insight into what each result will give them.

So, in addition to being reader-friendly (compelling and relevant), your meta description should include the long-tail keyword for which you are trying to rank.

In the following example, I searched for "email newsletter examples."

The term is bolded in the meta description, helping readers make the connection between the intent of their search term and this result. You'll also see the term "E-Newsletter" bolded, indicating that Google knows there's a semantic connection between "email newsletter" and "E-Newsletter."

Note: Nowadays, it's not guaranteed that your meta description is always pulled into SERPs as it once was. As you can see in the above image, Google pulls in other parts of your blog post that includes the keywords searched, presumably to give searchers optimal context around how the result matches their specific query.

Let me show you another example. Below are two different
search queries delivering two different snippets of text on Google SERPs. The first is a result of the query "no index no follow," and pulls in the original meta description:

The second is a result of the query "noindex nofollow," and pulls in the first instance of these specific keywords coming up in the body of the blog post:

While there's not much you can do to influence what text gets pulled in, you should continue to optimize this metadata, as well as your post, so search engines display the best content from the article. By creating reader-friendly content with natural keyword inclusion, you'll make it easier for Google to prove your post's relevancy in SERPs for you.

5. Include image alt text.Blog posts shouldn't only contain text — they should also include images that help explain and support your content. However, search engines don't simply look for images. Rather, they look for images with image alt text.

You may be wondering why this is. Since search engines can't "see" images the same way humans can, an image's alt text tells the search engine what an image is about. This ultimately helps those images rank in the search engine's images results page.

Image alt text also makes for a better user experience (UX). It displays inside the image container when an image can't be found or displayed. Technically, alt text is an attribute that can be added to an image tag in HTML.

Here's what a complete image tag might look like:


<img class="wt-blog__normal-image" src="image.jpg" alt="image-description" title="image tooltip">

When you incorporate image alt text, an image's name in your blog may go from something like, "IMG23940" to something accurate and descriptive such as "puppies playing in a basket."


Image alt text should be descriptive in a helpful way — meaning, it should provide the search engine with context to index the image if it's in a blog article related to a similar topic.

To provide more context, here's a list of things to be sure you keep in mind when creating alt text for your blog's images:

  • Describe the image
  • Leave out "image of... "— start with the image description instead
  • Be specific in your description
  • Keep it under 125 characters
  • Use your keywords (but avoid keyword stuffing)​


6. Limit topic tags.

Topic tags can help organize your blog content, but if you overuse them, they can actually be harmful. If you have too many similar tags, you may get penalized by search engines for having duplicate content.

Think of it this way, when you create a topic tag you also create a new site page where the content from those topic tags will appear. If you use too many similar tags for the same content, it appears to search engines as if you're showing the content multiple times throughout your website.

For example, topic tags like "blogging," "blog," and "blog posts" are too similar to one another to be used on the same post.

If you're worried that your current blog posts have too many similar tags, take some time to clean them up. Choose about 15–25 topic tags that you think are important to your blog and that aren't too similar to one another. Then only tag your posts with those keywords. That way, you won't have to worry about duplicate content.

Here at Swift, we use a Search Insights Report to map specific MSV-driven keyword ideas to a content topic each quarter. The process helps us target a handful of posts in a set number of topics throughout the year for a systematic approach to SEO and content creation.

7. Include user-friendly URL structures.

Before you publish your blog post, take a careful look at its URL structure. Is it long, filled with stop-words, or unrelated to the post’s topic? If so, you might want to rewrite it before it goes live.

The URL structure of your web pages (which are different from the specific URLs of your posts) should make it easy for your visitors to understand the structure of your website and the content they're about to see. Search engines favor web page URLs that make it easier for them and website visitors to understand the content on the page.


In this way, URL structure acts as a categorization system for readers, letting them know where they are on the website and how to access new site pages. Search engines appreciate this, as it makes it easier for them to identify exactly what information searchers will access on different parts of your blog or website.

Pro tip: Don’t change your blog post URL after it's been published — that’s the easiest way to press the metaphorical “reset” button on your SEO efforts for that post. If your URL is less descriptive than you’d like or it no longer follows your brand or style guidelines, your best bet is to leave it as is. Instead, change the title of the post using the guidelines we covered earlier.

8. Link to related blog posts.You may have heard that backlinks influence how high your blog site can rank in the SERP, and that’s true — backlinks show how trustworthy your site is based on how many other relevant sites link back to yours. But backlinks aren’t the end-all-be-all to link building. Linking to and from your own blog posts can have a positive impact on how well your blog site ranks, too.

Inbound links to your content help show search engines the validity or relevancy of your content. The same goes for linking internally to other pages on your website. If you've written about a topic that's mentioned in your blog post on another blog post, ebook, or web page, it's a best practice to link to that page.

(You might've noticed that I've been doing that from time to time throughout this blog post when I think it's helpful for our readers.) Not only will internal linking help keep visitors on your website, but it also surfaces your other relevant and authoritative pages to search engines.

For example, if your blog is about fashion, you might cover fabrics as a topic. Adding a hyperlink from a blog post about cotton to a post about the proper way to mix fabrics can help both of those posts become more visible to readers who search these keywords.

The search engines will also have one more entry point to the post about cotton when you hyperlink it in the post about mixing fabrics. This means the post about cotton fabric, and any updates you make to it will be recognized by site crawlers faster. It could even see a boost in the SERP as a result.


You can think of this as solving for your SEO while also helping your visitors get more information from your content.

9. Review metrics regularly.Google's free Search Console contains a section called the Search Analytics Report. This report helps you analyze clicks from Google Search — it's useful to determine which keywords people are using to find your blog content. You can also learn how to use Google Search Console by reading it

If you're interested in optimizing your best-performing older blog posts for traffic and leads like we've been doing since 2015, this tool can help identify low-hanging fruit.


Remember, many content marketers struggle with optimizing their blog posts for search. The truth is, your blog posts won't start ranking immediately. It takes time to build up search authority.

But, when you publish blog posts frequently and consistently optimize them for search while maintaining an intent-based reader experience, you'll reap the rewards in the form of traffic and leads long-term.

10. Organize by topic cluster.

The way most blogs are currently structured (including our own blogs, until very recently), bloggers and SEOs have worked to create individual blog posts that rank for specific keywords.

This makes things unorganized and difficult for blog visitors to find the exact information they need. It also results in your URLs competing against one another in search engine rankings when you produce multiple blog posts about similar topics.

Here's what our blog architecture used to look like using this old playbook:


Now, in order to rank in search and best answer the new types of queries searchers are submitting, the solution is the topic cluster model.

For this model to work, choose the broad topics for which you want to rank. Then, create content based on specific keywords related to that topic that all link to each other to establish broader search engine authority.

This is what our blog infrastructure looks like now, with the topic cluster model. Specific topics are surrounded by blog posts related to the greater topic, connected to other URLs in the cluster via hyperlinks:


This model uses a more deliberate site architecture to organize and link URLs together to help more pages on your site rank in Google — and to help searchers find information on your site more easily. This architecture consists of three components — pillar content, cluster content, and hyperlinks:


We know this is a fairly new concept, so for more details, check out our research on the topic, take our SEO training or watch the video below.

11. Publish evergreen content.

When planning and writing your blog articles, ensure it's evergreen content. Meaning, the content is about topics that will remain relevant and valuable over a long period of time (with only minor changes or updates). Let's look at a few reasons why evergreen content is so important:

  • It'll help you rank over time, not just in the near future.
  • It contributes to steady amounts of traffic coming to your blog (and website) long after it’s been published.
  • It'll help you generate leads over time as a result of the traffic it continually generates.

All blog content — whether it's a long-form article, how-to guide, FAQ, tutorial, and so on — should be evergreen. Even the images you use in these posts should be evergreen. Check out this blog post for some examples of and ideas for evergreen content on your blog.

12. Update existing content.

To improve your SEO, you may assume you need to create new blog content. Although that's partially true, you should also focus a great deal of your time and energy on your existing blog content. Specifically, repurposing and updating your current content, as well as removing your outdated content.

This is because it takes a lot longer for a completely new piece of content to settle on the search engine results page (SERP) and gain authority, whereas you could update a piece of content and reap the benefits fairly immediately in comparison.

Not only will your updated content rank on the SERP faster, improving your number of visitors and leads, it also takes a lot less time and fewer resources to update an existing piece of content rather than create a brand new article.

Additionally, updating and repurposing some of your most successful pieces of content extends its lifespan so you can achieve the best results over a longer period of time (especially if it's evergreen content).

The final step entails removing your outdated content that's no longer relevant to your audience. Although your goal is to ensure your content is evergreen, some of it is bound to become outdated over time. This includes statistics, product information (if you have any listed in your blogs — as your products and business evolve), or information that changes across your industry over time.

Create Blog Content Your Readers (and Search Engines) Will Love

We don't expect you to incorporate each of these SEO best practices into your content strategy right away. But, as your website grows, so should your goals on search engines. Once you identify the goals and intent of your ideal readers, you'll be on track to deliver relevant content that will climb the ranks of the SERP.
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The Ultimate Guide to Brand Awareness

10/12/2021

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Have you ever heard people refer to themselves as “Apple people,” “Nike people,” or “Trader Joe’s” people?

This is what brand awareness can do for a brand: embed itself into consumer lifestyles and purchase habits so that they don’t have to think twice before becoming a customer — time and time again.

This guide will help you better understand brand awareness, establish it among your audience, and build campaigns that allow it to continually grow and change with your business. Let’s dive in.

Brand awareness represents how familiar your target audience is with your brand and how well they recognize it. Brands with high brand awareness are generally referred to as ‘trending,’ ‘buzzworthy,’ or simply ‘popular.’ Establishing brand awareness is valuable when marketing and promoting your company and products, especially in the early stages of a business.


Brand awareness might seem like a vague concept, and in truth, it is. For those marketers and business owners out there who like to gauge success with neat and tidy numbers, brand awareness will likely ruffle your feathers.

But just because it isn’t a metric that can be perfectly determined doesn’t mean it doesn’t carry value. Brand awareness is incredibly important for business success and overall marketing goals. Here’s why.

Why is brand awareness important?

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Brand awareness fosters trust.

In a world where consumers rely on extensive research and others’ opinions before making a purchase, brand trust is everything. Once a consumer bonds to your brand, they’re more likely to make repeat purchases with little to no forethought — which then bridges the gap between trust and loyalty.

Brand awareness establishes that brand trust. When you put a proverbial face to your brand name, consumers can trust easier.

Brand awareness efforts give your brand a personality and outlet to be sincere, receive feedback, and tell a story. These are all ways that we, as humans, build trust with one another. The human/brand relationship isn’t any different.


Brand awareness creates association.

When you’ve had a paper cut, I bet you’ve put on a Band-Aid. When you had a pressing question, I’m sure you’ve Googled it.

When you needed to make a few copies, I’m guessing that you Xeroxed them. And when you’ve packed for a nice picnic, I’m willing to bet you grabbed a Coke to drink.


Am I correct? Most likely. But ... notice how the some of the words above are capitalized. These are brands, not nouns or verbs.


That’s what brand awareness does. It associates actions and products with particular brands, subconsciously encouraging us to replace common words with branded terms. And before you know it, simple paper cuts or picnics are doing the marketing for us.

Brand awareness builds brand equity.

Brand equity describes a brand’s value, which is determined by consumer experiences with and overall perception of the brand. Positive experiences and perception equal positive brand equity, and the same goes for negative notions.

Here are a few valuable things that come from positive brand equity:

  • Higher prices due to higher perceived value
  • A higher stock price
  • The ability to expand business through product or service line extensions
  • Greater social impact due to brand name value
​
How does a brand establish (and increase) brand equity? By building brand awareness and consistently promoting positive experiences with the brand. Brand awareness is the foundation of brand equity.

Once a consumer is aware of a brand, they start to recognize it without assistance, seek it out to make a purchase, begin to prefer it over other similar brands, and establish a loyalty that not only spurs on other purchases but also inspires recommendations to family and friends.

That is why brand awareness is so important. It establishes trust with your customers, creates positive associations, and builds invaluable brand equity that allows your brand to become a household name and consumer staple.

How to Build Brand Awareness
​
  1. Be a person, not a company.
  2. Socialize.
  3. Tell a narrative.
  4. Make sharing easy.
​​
Brand awareness among your audience and the general public doesn’t happen overnight. It also doesn’t happen from a simple advertisement or marketing campaign.

Strong brand awareness is a result of multiple simultaneous efforts that extend beyond trying to get paying customers.
If you expect to raise awareness of your brand by running a few product advertisements on Facebook, you won’t get very far. Not only will the consumer be focused on the product (not the brand), but the ad will also lack impact beyond a simple sale.

Here are some ways to establish a solid brand awareness foundation and make a lasting impact with your audience:

1. Be a person, not a company.

When you get to know a new friend, what do you like to discover about them? I like to learn about hobbies, passions, likes and dislikes, and more. I also pay attention to how they speak, what they like to talk about, and what stuff gets them excited.

These are the traits your brand should determine and promote about itself. To leave an impact with your audience, you’ve got to define yourself as more than a company that sells stuff. How else would you define yourself?

What words would you use if you had to introduce your brand to a new friend?


2. Socialize.

Introvert or extrovert, outgoing or quiet, all humans benefit from social contact and spending time with one another. It’s how we stay connected, learn new things, and become known by others.

The same goes for your brand. If you only attempt to connect with others when trying to make a sale or get support, you won’t be known as anything beyond a business with a singular intention (and the same goes for a person).

To raise awareness of your brand, you’ve got to be social. Post on social media about things unrelated to your product or services. Interact with your audience by asking questions, commenting on posts, or retweeting or sharing content you like. Treat your social accounts as if you were a person trying to make friends, not a business trying to make money.
​

Research shows that over 50% of brand reputation comes from online sociability. Being social leads to greater awareness and simply being known.

3. Tell a narrative.

Storytelling is an incredibly powerful marketing tactic, whether you’re marketing products or promoting your brand. Why? Because it gives something real for your audience to latch onto.

Crafting a narrative around your brand humanizes it and gives it depth. And weaving this said narrative into your marketing inherently markets your brand alongside your products or services.

What should your narrative be about? Anything, as long as it’s true. It can be the narrative of your founder, the tale of how your business had its first product idea, or the little-engine-that-could story of how your small business made it in this big world.

People like hearing stories about each other. Authenticity is impactful, and it can lead to a big boost in brand awareness.

4. Make sharing easy.

Whatever your industry, product offering, or marketing strategies, make it easy for your audience to share your content. This could be blog posts, sponsored content, videos, social media posts, or product pages. It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as it’s shareable.

Word-of-mouth marketing is the most effective way to establish trust and familiarity among customers. If someone sees that a friend or family member is recommending a product or service, they’ll take notice of that product … and brand.

Is this a brand worth exploring? Do they have other great products I can rely on? What are their social accounts like, and what do they talk about?


If you make it easy to post about your stuff, consumers will raise brand awareness for you by simply clicking “Share”.
Brand awareness is about impact.

It’s about interacting with your audience in ways that don’t only ask for money, participation, or loyalty.

Imagine if you met a new person who wanted to be your friend. If they asked for any of the above, you’d probably laugh and walk away, right? Not only is that a shallow approach to friendship, but it also leaves no lasting impact on you.

The same goes for establishing and building brand awareness among your audience.

Brand Awareness Strategy

  1. Guest blog on other niche websites.
  2. Try co-marketing.
  3. Advertise everywhere.
  4. Hire a face or create a mascot for the company.
  5. Choose an image or symbol that represents you.
  6. Create a short, catchy slogan.

You already know how to start building your brand awareness from the ground up. Now, it’s time to put together a simple yet powerful brand awareness strategy that will keep the flywheel turning.

1. Guest blog on other niche websites.

Guest blogging is one of the best ways to increase brand awareness with minimal effort. You can take advantage of the traffic that’s already arriving at another website to get more eyes on your brand while offering helpful and relevant content.

In other words, you’re not just pushing out your product on people who aren’t ready to buy, but rather writing in your brand voice and presenting yourself as human first, company second. Another great alternative to guest blogging would be publishing sponsored content on niche websites.

2. Co-marketing.

Co-marketing is an excellent way to build brand awareness — not only because you’d be taking advantage of another brand’s audience but because it can highlight who you are and what you offer in the marketplace.

For instance, if your company sells dog leashes and toys, you could potentially partner with a dog walking app. The campaign itself could appear in any number of ways: You could create a shared offer (“download the app and get one free leash”) or host an Instagram live together. No matter what, partnering up with another brand could help you double and even triple your reach.

3. Advertise everywhere.

​
I know, I know: Advertising many not build brand awareness so much as it builds product awareness, but still — it’s one of the best tools you can use to get people to find out about your brand in a low-touch, unobtrusive way.

Consider Grammarly. It feels like just a few years ago, no one knew about Grammarly. Now it’s one of those brands that you automatically think of when you consider online proofreading software. That’s because they’ve launched robust social, video, and display advertising campaigns that appear nearly everywhere.

You might consider starting with online advertising, which includes paid social media and PPC. If you’re interested in truly appearing everywhere and launching more sophisticated campaigns at a mass scale, you can launch programmatic advertising campaigns.

4. Hire a face or create a mascot for the company.

This may not be doable for smaller companies, but if you do have the budget, consider hiring an actor or spokesperson to represent the company. What do you first think of when you think of Progressive? Flo, who’s even been termed “Progressive girl” for her fun and friendly personality.

This allows you to not only humanize your brand, as mentioned in the previous section, but give a sense of the friendly and knowledgeable service customers can expect to receive.

You don’t have to use a person, either. GEICO is a great example of this. The moment you see that friendly lizard, you know it’s GEICO. Creating an animated mascot may be a cost-efficient but equally effective way to give a face to your brand.

5. Choose an image or symbol that represents you.Nike is not even Nike anymore. It’s a check mark. The moment you see that check mark, you know it’s Nike. Or how about McDonald’s yello “M”? Or Apple’s bitten apple?

I’m not just talking about a logo, either, though it can certainly be part of your logo. But work with your branding team or a freelance graphic designer to create a symbol that you ubiquitously use in your marketing, advertising, and organic campaigns. You might also consider taking a note from Apple, McDonald’s, and Nike, and incorporating the symbol into your product packaging and design.

6. Create a short, catchy slogan.Extending the Nike example, you think of the brand immediately when you hear “Just do it.” Creating a short motto or slogan is a cornerstone of a strong brand awareness strategy and is an easy and simple way to increase brand awareness.

It’s definitely tough — imagine condensing everything you’re about in one short sentence. It must explain how you’re different, what you offer, and why customers should choose you. 

How to Increase Brand Awareness

  1. Offer freemium.
  2. Create free content.
  3. Sponsor events.
  4. Give your brand a personality.
  5. Produce a podcast.
​
Your brand awareness is now effectively off the ground, and people talk about you without needing to see an ad.
What about expanding your established brand awareness and building on that strong foundation? What can you do as a brand to campaign for awareness and constantly increase it?

Here are a few campaign ideas to boost your brand awareness beyond your initial strategy.

1. Offer freemium.

Freemium is a business model that offers a basic product or product line for free, only charging for any products deemed premium or enterprise-level. It’s a popular pricing strategy for software companies.

Offering a freemium option allows customers to get a taste of your brand and product before making a purchase. It’s a try-before-you-buy opportunity that can, technically, last forever (as opposed to a free trial period that some companies choose).

It’s common to offer a freemium option with the condition that the brand’s watermark will be shown on any public-facing parts of the product or service. This makes freemium a win-win situation: The consumer gets the product for free, and the brand gets free advertising when consumers use it.

Typeform is another great example of this. Typeform offers a freemium option of its survey software, but customers must include a thank-you page that features the Typeform logo and message.

Depending on your type of business and product offer, Freemium may be the best way to raise awareness of your brand among your audience.

2. Create free content.

Nowadays, creating content is easier than ever … which is a good thing because today’s consumers turn to the internet for any and all questions, concerns, and DIY projects.

Content is a fun way to raise awareness of your brand because it’s the easiest way to show personality and share opinions and positioning on issues — two major components that personify and humanize your brand.

Content doesn’t have to be in written form, either. You can also create videos, infographics, podcasts (which we’ll cover below), and more. Sure, written content like blogs and downloadable guides are arguably the easiest, but they’re definitely not the only option.

Content doesn’t have to live on just your website, either. Guest posting and sponsored content provide opportunities to get in front of new audiences and diversify the type of content you create.

If your brand isn’t creating content, you might be missing out on some major brand awareness opportunities. Content provides an amazing way to authentically connect with your audience while getting your brand name in front of people.

3. Sponsor events.

How many festivals, concerts, fairs, and exhibitions have you attended? These types of events are typically not possible without the help of brand sponsorships. (Take a look at a t-shirt, koozie, or string backpack you likely grabbed from the event. See any brand names?)

Sponsoring events is a surefire way to get your brand in front of hundreds, thousands, or millions of people that likely fall into your target audience. From banners to flyers to water bottles, your brand name will be everywhere if you sponsor an event.

Sponsoring an event also allows you to pin your brand name on an event that matches your personality, interests, and passions, meaning consumers will then associate your brand with that event and its aesthetic and character. It can also gelp your company build brand awareness among highly specialized and qualified audiences. Professionals don’t attend events just for fun. They attend to learn the latest developments in the industry.

It’s more than just being a booth in a sea of booths. By being a consistent event sponsor, you’ll cement yourself in attendees’ minds as a leader in the field. They key is to be consistent in your sponsorship.

Consider Red Bull. Red Bull is an energy drink, and without any brand awareness efforts, we’d simply consider it an energy drink. But, thankfully, Red Bull took their marketing to the extreme — literally — by consistently sponsoring extreme sporting events like cliff diving and motocross. They also sponsor athletes. Now, we inherently associate Red Bull with daring and adventurous … and believe that, if we drink it, we can be the same.

4. Give your brand a personality.

When you market your products and services with personality, you can’t help but boost your brand awareness because your brand will shine right through. Sure, your consumers will take note of the pants or pasta you’re marketing, but they’ll also experience your personality through your advertising.

This is a great strategy when mixing your traditional marketing campaigns with brand awareness campaigns. They don’t always have to be one in the same, but they definitely can be.
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Advertisements for their hygiene products are overflowing with personality and humor, and they still mention their products throughout. The advertisement not only makes an impact on its viewers, but a mere mention of the “Old Spice man” also sends consumers back to YouTube to watch the commercial … and to the store to buy some deodorant.

5. Produce a podcast.

More than one-third of Americans 12 and older listen to podcasts regularly. There’s no doubt podcasts play an important role in our lives … and marketing efforts.


Podcasts used to be a complicated process, only created by those with a studio and fancy microphone. Now, it’s easier than ever to create and release a podcast, and doing so can do wonders for your brand awareness efforts.

Why? Because podcasts, like written or visual content, provide a way to connect with your audience authentically. Instead of blatantly promoting your product or service (which we’ve agreed isn’t the best way to go about boosting brand awareness), podcasts give you the opportunity to educate, inform, entertain, or advise your audience and build trust by doing so.

See how these brands have chosen podcast topics that relate to their 1) overall brand message and 2) products or services? Doing this helps them relate the podcast back to their brand and continue to raise awareness, too.


Boosting your brand awareness through campaigns gives you a chance to dabble in marketing and advertising opportunities you’d otherwise not invest in — meaning new, powerful ways to connect with your audience.

How to Measure Brand AwarenessHow do you know if your brand awareness efforts are working? How do you know if you need to change direction, top the competition, or fix a crisis? Just like any other marketing metric, you measure it.

Wait … I thought you said brand awareness couldn’t be measured!

Aha! You’ve been listening. I appreciate that.

You’re right — brand awareness can’t be measured in the traditional sense. But, you can still review activities and metrics that’ll help you gauge where your brand stands in terms of popularity and consumer awareness.

Here are a few ways to gauge your brand awareness and learn where you can tweak your efforts:

Quantitative Brand Awareness Measures

These numbers can help you paint the overall picture of your brand awareness. To measure quantitatively, check out these metrics:

  • Direct traffic. Firstly, direct traffic is the result of people intentionally typing in your URL and visiting your website. Your direct traffic number will tell you how much your marketing is prompting people to visit your website. This is an important metric, as many consumers today discover brands through social media, advertisements, or by typing in keywords related to your brand or product. When consumers go directly to your site, it means they were aware of your brand beforehand.
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  • Site traffic numbers. This number just reflects overall site traffic, which will tell you how much of the general internet population is checking out your content and spending time with your brand. It won’t quite tell you where people came from, but that doesn’t matter, because they’re aware of your brand enough to check it out.
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  • Social engagement. Engagement can refer to followers, likes, retweets, comments, and more. It’s a reflection of how many people are aware of your brand and socialize with it, as well as how impactful your content is. For instance, sites like Sparktoro can give you a specific score for your Twitter impact.
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Qualitative Brand Awareness Measures

This step is where your brand awareness “score” gets a little murky. But these tactics can still help you gauge who and how many people are aware of your brand. To measure qualitatively, try:
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  • Searching Google and setting up Google Alerts. Doing this gets you up to speed with how your brand is being talked about online. It will alert you to any news or mentions by third-party press. As your brand grows, its internet real estate will expand beyond your website, so keep an eye on that.
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  • Social listening. Social listening is monitoring social media management tools for organic mentions and engagement. Who’s tagging your brand, mentioning it in comments, or using your hashtag in their posts? These tools can help you discover that. And the more your audience is discussing your brand on social media, the more they’re aware of it.
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  • Running brand awareness surveys. This process involves getting direct feedback from your customers and audience and can be incredibly helpful with not only understanding who knows of your brand but also what they think of it. You can release surveys through SurveyMonkey or Typeform and share them on social media or directly with your customers. This guide will help you create and promote them.
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These quantitative and qualitative metrics will help you understand your brand awareness among your audience and the general public. It’ll never be a perfect number, but keeping your pulse on this measure will help influence campaigns and stay connected to your audience. Regardless of how you gauge brand awareness for your company, avoid these common mistakes when measuring brand awareness.

This is a brilliant brand awareness move that capitalizes on customers’ love of personalization, and with it, Coca-Cola ensures it remains an unshakable American classic. This example shows how far personalization will get you in your brand awareness campaign, so try to personalize whenever possible. If your product isn’t disposable, consider giving customers the option to add their name.

Over to YouBrand awareness is a powerful (albeit vague) concept that can have a major impact on your marketing efforts, consumer perception, and revenue.

Follow these techniques for establishing and building awareness for your brand, and you’ll find yourself with a loyal audience that recognizes your brand among competitors, chooses your products time and time again, and recommends their friends and family do the same.

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You Might Be Wasting Your Time Fighting the Algorithm Updates. Here's What to Focus on, Instead.

10/12/2021

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If you're working in digital marketing for a business with an online presence (which, let's be real, is most businesses these days), there's a good chance that you live in dread of the infamous "Google algorithm update."

Many marketers see this periodic switch-up in Google's algorithm as a lurking nemesis out to slash their metrics and banish traffic.

The typical response? Every time Google comes out with an algorithm update, SEO specialists and thought leaders try to decode and decipher the algorithm's secrets to find out what makes it tick. The idea is that, if you can figure it out, you can reorganize your SEO and content strategy to regain (or surpass) your pre-algorithm rankings.

This might seem like the best plan of attack. However, I believe this metrics-hungry, beat-the-algorithm mentality just ends up hurting companies in the long run. It's inefficient, it distracts from the true purpose of SEO, and it ultimately wastes your company's time and money.

My take? While algorithm updates shouldn't be minimized (because they can negatively effect businesses), they also shouldn't be feared. I believe we should work with the algorithms, not against them, ultimately creating a win-win: a better experience for users and a more successful web presence for deserving businesses.

Let's explore how to do that next.

Algorithm Updates Improve User ExperienceBecause the digital landscape is constantly changing, businesses have to accept that these algorithm updates aren't going anywhere. They are happening, and will continue to happen, indefinitely. And that is okay … and what we, as search engine customers, should want too!

The first step in working with Google algorithm updates is to understand why they happen in the first place. These updates are designed to create a better internet experience for both businesses and consumers.

The idea is to make browsers "smarter" so that internet users are able to find what they're looking for faster, and with less effort.

Sounds great in theory, right? Under this model, businesses find the right customers and vice versa. If it's an improvement for the user, it should be an improvement for you.

The problems start when we begin to analyze and crunch numbers after a post-algorithm-update …  

Don't Get Caught Up In The Metrics GameFor many SEO managers, numbers are everything — total organic clicks, bounce rates, keyword rankings, impressions, the list goes on. And for good reason! This data helps us to understand what's going on on the other side of the screen.

However, when this data becomes the end goal, we get into trouble. A lot of times, from an SEO standpoint, there's a tunnel-vision focus on metrics and traffic, which leads to tilted strategies purely bent on maximizing the wrong numbers.

But, here's the thing — higher rankings on Google aren't necessarily great for business. Yes, they look great on a quarterly report. Yes, they're easy to track. But do impressions necessarily convert to leads? No. These numbers turn into a sort of meaningless trophy rather than a useful tool.

Let's take a look at an example to highlight what I mean.

Lower Traffic Could Mean Higher Revenue

Over a period of time, I worked with a business that had two sides to their site: user-generated content, and professionally-generated content. The user-generated content was produced in higher volumes, but also tended to be lower quality.

Every time there was an algorithm update, the user-generated side of their business was impacted negatively. They lost significant chunks of their traffic, time and time again. However, the company's overall revenue simultaneously increased.

Why? Because the other side of their business was benefiting. The high-quality, professionally-generated content was favored by the algorithm because it was closer to what internet users were actually looking for. Therefore, it benefitted when its lower-quality competitors were demoted.

To me, this is the perfect argument for why businesses should spend time creating a great product rather than putting a laser-focus on SEO hacks or metrics. If you create an effective website with relevant content, the clicks will come organically.  

Stay Focused on the UserUltimately, the solution sounds too good to be true — stay focused on who the user is and what the user wants to find on your site.

Rather than asking yourself, "Do we deserve to be #1 because we have the most keywords or the best backlinks?", ask yourself, "Are we the best solution for what the user would want? Do we deserve to be #3 from a user standpoint?"

The way Google algorithms are headed, I believe that focusing on the actual service or product over the minutiae of SEO is the secret to creating a successful business.

This is what I termed "Product-Led SEO" in my book with the same name. This approach upends the whole premise of marketing the product to promote adoption.


Instead, the shift focuses on getting a great product into the hands of users who get excited enough to become marketing agents on the product's behalf. In this paradigm, there may also be innate triggers within the product that encourage sharing, thereby forcing the hand of the user.

Algorithm Updates Aren't Your EnemyIn the end, Google Algorithm updates are a fact of life. The sooner everyone can accept this and learn to work with the updates, not against them, the sooner they will find successful strategies.

The key to "going with the flow" is to take a good, long look at which direction the water is going. And, from everything I've seen, the proverbial algorithmic river is flowing straight towards the direction of Product-Led SEO. In my opinion, every good SEO strategy will follow.

Start by talking to users. Get in touch with what your customers want. What are they looking for? What do they like? What makes them click on a CTA? What cues do they use to navigate a site? Once you have a good handle on the needs of the user, you can begin to create a site that naturally rises above the algorithmic chopping block.

When your site becomes more effective, and you are able to connect with the right customers, everyone wins. This is the whole point of algorithms, and finding the harmony between the two will help ease a lot of stress and boost business.

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What is an A/A Test & Do You Really Need to Use It?

10/12/2021

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What's worse than working with no data?

Working with "bad" data.

As marketers, we love to test headlines, call-to-actions, and keywords (to name a few). One of the ways we do this is by running A/B tests.

As a refresher, A/B testing is the process of splitting an audience to test a number of variations of a campaign and determining which performs better.

But A/B testing isn't foolproof.

In fact, it's a complicated process. You often have to rely on testing software to pull the data, and there's a high probability of receiving a false positive. If you're not careful, you could make incorrect assumptions about what makes people click.

So how can you ensure your A/B test is operating correctly? This is where A/A testing comes in. Think of it as a test to the test.

An A/A test involves driving two or more groups of people to identical versions of a piece of content. Instead of discovering an uptick in conversions, the goal is to find no difference between the control and the variations.

The idea behind an A/A test is that the experience is the same for each group, therefore the expected KPI (Key Performance Indicator) will also be the same for each group.

For example, if 20% of group A fills out a form on a landing page, the expected result is that 20% of group B (who are interacting with an identical version of the landing page) will do the same.

Differences Between an A/A Test and an A/B Test

Performing an A/A test is similar to that of an A/B test; an audience is divided into two similarly sized groups, but instead of directing each group to different variations of content, each group interacts with identical versions of the same piece of content.

Here’s another way to think about it: have you ever heard the idiom, "Comparing apples to oranges"? An A/B test does exactly that — compares two different variants of a piece of content to see which performs better. An A/A test compares an apple to, well, an identical apple.

When running an A/B test, you program a testing tool to change or hide some part of the content. This is not necessary for an A/A test.

An A/A test also requires a larger sample size than an A/B test to prove a significant bias. And, due to such a large sample size, these tests take much longer to complete.

How to Do A/A Testing

Exactly how you do an A/A will vary depending on the testing tool you use. If you're a Swift Enterprise customer conducting an A/A or A/B test on an email, for example, Swift will automatically split traffic to your variations so that each variation receives a random sampling of visitors.

Let's cover the steps to run an A/A test.

1. Create two identical versions of a piece of content — the control and the variant.Once your content is created, identify two groups of the same sample size you would like to conduct the test with.

2. Identify your KPI.A KPI is a measure of performance over a period of time. For example, your KPI could be the number of visitors who click on a call-to-action.

3. Using your testing tool, split your audience equally and randomly, and send one group to the control and the other group to the variant.Run the test until the control and variation hit a determined number of visitors.

4. Track the KPI for both groups.Because both groups are sent to identical pieces of content, they should behave the same. Therefore, the expected result will be inconclusive.

A/A Test Uses


A/A testing is primarily used when an organization implements a new A/B testing software or reconfigures a current one.\

You can run an A/A test to accomplish the following:

1. To check the accuracy of an A/B testing software.

The intended result of an A/A test is that the audience reacts similarly to the same piece of content.
But what if they don't?

Here's an example: Company XYZ is running an A/A test on a new landing page. Two groups are sent to two identical versions of the landing page (the control and the variant). Group A has a conversion rate of 8%, while Group B has a rate of 2%.

In theory, the conversion rate should be identical. When there is no difference between the control and the variant, the expected result will be inconclusive. Yet, sometimes a "winner" is declared on two identical versions.

When this happens, it is essential to evaluate the testing platform. The tool may have been misconfigured, or it could be ineffective.

2. To set a baseline conversion rate for future A/B tests.

Let's imagine that Company XYZ runs another A/A test on the landing page. This time, the results of Group A and Group B are identical — both groups achieve an 8% conversion rate.

Therefore, 8% is the baseline conversion rate. With this in mind, the company can run future A/B tests with the goal of exceeding this rate.

If, for example, the company runs an A/B test on a new version of the landing page and receives a conversion rate of 8.02%, the result is not statistically significant.

A/A Testing: Do You Really Need to Use It?

To run an A/A test, or not — that is the question. And the answer will depend on who you ask. There is no denying that A/A testing is a hotly debated topic.

Perhaps the most prevalent argument against A/A testing boils down to one factor: time.

A/A testing takes a considerable amount of time to run. In fact, A/A tests typically require a much larger sample size than A/B tests. When testing two identical versions, you need a large sample size to prove a significant bias. Therefore, the test will take more time to complete, and this may eat into time spent running other valuable tests.

However, it makes sense to run an A/A test in some cases, especially if you are uncertain about a new A/B testing software and want additional proof that it's both functional and accurate. A/A tests are a low-risk method to ensure your tests are set up properly.

A/A testing can help you prepare for a successful AB testing program, provide data benchmarks, and identify any discrepancies in your data.
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Although A/A tests have utility, running such a test should be a relatively rare occurrence. While A/A test can run a "health check" on a new A/B tool or software, it may not be worth optimizing every minor alteration to your website or marketing campaign due to the considerable amount of time it takes to run.
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Winter Wonderland In Paris

10/5/2021

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Research shows that you can tell a lot about someone's personality, politics, status,  just from looking at their cloth

9/29/2021

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Your clothes tell a story about you.


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​Fashion is an Art


​          If you've ever watched the rehearsal process of a play, then you know just how powerful clothes are. Even in the very early stages of a project, professional actors will come to practice in certain clothing pieces that make them feel more like their character.

Perhaps it's an old pair of shoes, a long and heavy skirt, or a bandana that helps them get just the right swagger, grace, or edge. A few weeks later, when they're closer to opening, they'll have an actual dress rehearsal with their real costumes.

​It's pretty amazing to see how the right clothes bring the performances up to a whole new level and transform the actor into the character! As business professionals, we can actually learn a lot from this.
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Like it or not, your clothes and presentation communicate volumes about you as a person. The question is not whether you care about fashion, it's more about what you're communicating intentionally or unconsciously through your fashion choices.

Just as the actor in the right costume moves and speaks differently, so does the everyday person.

Your clothes tell a story about you. If you want to show that your work is clean, sharp, and to the point, you need to dress in clean lines, sharp creases, and (yes) points on your shoes and tie.

Even the way you wear your glasses speaks volumes about you and your work!
 Clothes You Wear Actually Change the Way You Perform
If you've ever watched the rehearsal process of a play, then you know just how powerful clothes are. Even in the very early stages of a project, professional actors will come to practice in certain clothing pieces that make them feel more like their character.

Perhaps it's an old pair of shoes, a long and heavy skirt, or a bandana that helps them get just the right swagger, grace, or edge.
A few weeks later, when they're closer to opening, they'll have an actual dress rehearsal with their real costumes.

It's pretty amazing to see how the right clothes bring the performances up to a whole new level and transform the actor into the character! As business professionals, we can actually learn a lot from this.
​
Like it or not, your clothes and presentation communicate volumes about you as a person. The question is not whether you care about fashion, it's more about what you're communicating intentionally or unconsciously through your fashion choices.

Just as the actor in the right costume moves and speaks differently, so does the everyday person.

Your clothes tell a story about you. If you want to show that your work is clean, sharp, and to the point, you need to dress in clean lines, sharp creases, and (yes) points on your shoes and tie.

​Even the way you wear your glasses speaks volumes about you and your work!
Fashion design is the art of applying design, aesthetics, clothing construction and natural beauty to clothing and its accessories. It is influenced by culture and different trends, and has varied over time and place.

"A fashion designer creates clothing, including dresses, suits, pants, and skirts, and accessories like shoes and handbags, for consumers. He or she can specialize in clothing, accessory, or jewelry design, or may work in more than one of these areas.

About the fashion designers. They work in a variety of different ways in designing their pieces and accessories such as rings, bracelets and necklaces.

Because of the time required to bring a garment onto the market, designers must at times anticipate changes to consumer desires.

Fashion designers are responsible for creating looks for individual garments, involving shape, color, fabric, trimming, and more. 

Fashion designers play a major role in our world. Their talent and vision play a big role on how people present themselves. They influence society and the way they choose to express themselves. 

Designers conduct research on fashion trends and interpret them for their audience.

Their specific designs are used by manufacturers. This is the essence of a designer's role; however, there is variation within this that is determined by the buying and merchandising approach, and product quality;

for example, budget retailers will use inexpensive fabrics to interpret trends, but high-end retailers will ensure that the best available fabrics are used.

Some clothes are made specifically for an individual, as in the case of haute couture or bespoke tailoring. 


Other high-end fashion designers cater to specialty stores or high-end fashion department stores.

​Large designer brands which have a 'name' as their brand such as Abercrombie & Fitch, Justice, or Juicy are likely to be designed by a team of individual designers under the direction of a design director.


Designing a garment

Some fashion designers sketch their ideas on paper, while others drape fabric on a dress form, another term for mannequine.

When a designer is completely satisfied with the fit of the toile (or muslin), they will consult a professional pattern maker who then makes the finished, working version of the pattern out of card or via a computerized system. 


History: The Chéruit salon on Place Vendôme in Paris, 1910

Fashion design is generally considered to have started in the 19th century with Charles Frederick Worth who was the first designer to have his label sewn into the garments that he created.

Before the former draper set up his maison couture (fashion house) in Paris, clothing design and creation was handled by largely anonymous seamstresses, and high fashion descended from that worn at royal courts.

Worth's success was such that he was able to dictate to his customers what they should wear, instead of following their lead as earlier dressmakers had done.

The term couturier was in fact first created in order to describe him. While all articles of clothing from any time period are studied by academics as costume design, only clothing created after 1858 is considered as fashion design.


It was during this period that many design houses began to hire artists to sketch or paint designs for garments.

The images were shown to clients, which was much cheaper than producing an actual sample garment in the workroom. If the client liked their design, they ordered it and the resulting garment made money for the house.

Thus, the tradition of designers sketching out garment designs instead of presenting completed garments on models to customers began as an economy.


During the Make{able} workshop, Hirscher and Niinimaki found that personal involvement in the garment-making process created a meaningful “narrative” for the user, which established a person-product attachment and increased the sentimental value of the final product.

Otto von Busch also explores half-way garments and fashion co-design in his thesis, "Fashion-able, Hacktivism and engaged Fashion Design".

World fashion industry

Seven countries have established an international reputation in fashion: France, Italy, United Kingdom, United States, Japan, Germany and Belgium.

The "big four" fashion capitals of the fashion industry are Paris, Milan, New York City and London with Paris often being considered as the World's fashion capital.


Most fashion houses in the United States are based in New York City. On the US west coast, there is also a significant number of fashion houses in Los Angeles, where a substantial percentage of high fashion clothing manufactured in the United States is actually made. 

Beverly Hills, particularly on Rodeo Drive, is globally renowned for its fashion design and prestigious shopping. Burgeoning industries in Miami, Chicago, Dallas, and especially San Francisco have developed as well.

A semi-annual event held every February and September, New York Fashion Week, is the oldest of the four major fashion weeks held throughout the world. 

​Parsons The New School for Design, located in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Lower Manhattan in New York City, is considered one of the top fashion schools in the world.

There are numerous fashion magazines published in the United States and distributed to a global readership.

Examples include Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Cosmopolitan.


American fashion design is highly diverse, reflecting the enormous ethnic diversity of the population, but is largely dominated by a clean-cut, urban, hip aesthetic, and often favors a more casual style, reflecting the athletic, health-conscious lifestyles of the suburban and urban middle classes.

Red carpet fashion: Italian actors Gabriel Garko and Laura Torrisi wearing designer formal wear at Venice Film Festival, 

If you’re working on a fashion-related online store project, or thinking of putting one up on your own, looking through a showcase of websites may help you get some ideas and inspiration.

As a clothing  designer, appearance is importance . Everything you show to current and prospective customers has to demonstrate your sense of style. This is an aesthetically pleasing web design for high fashion  is mportant.

With that in mind, appearance is not the only factor you should take into consideration when designing your site.

To be a successful marketing tool, a clothing retailer’s website has to not only attract the eyes of visitors, but also create an easy process for browsing and buying merchandise.


This page will give you an idea of why and how you can combine attractiveness and functionality to create a successful website for your business, as well as a few other considerations to keep in mind.
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Keep reading if you want to learn more, or if you're searching for professional web design services.

What makes a fashion website great?

Web design is a lot more than just the fonts and colors you see on a web page—it also impacts the functionality of your website.

A dynamic website provides necessary information, enables communication, and builds trust for your brand. Web design for stores must do the same by ensuring a few key things.

Brand consistency. Visiting your website should feel like walking into a virtual store. It should include the same sense of style, colors, tone of voice, and general personality your store provides.

​Remember, your website is your online introduction, so it should give people a sense of what they would experience in person.

Searchability: Good design makes a website easy to navigate and easy to search.

Web design is a complex process.

Simple navigation is the key. Certain design elements make the site easier to navigate. Consider creating a few main categories with drop-down menus that have more specific results.

This gives your site a less cluttered appearance and reduce the time it takes users to find the pages they are looking for.


Search boxes are also a great tool. If a potential customer already knows that they want a specific style, a search bar will help them find it. 

If you are an established brand, you already have a logo and color scheme that people associate with your company and values. You probably also have a certain aesthetic or style within your designs. 

If you are still working on establishing your brand, your website can be a great place to start. Make your color and logo decisions before launching your site, and then use them as guidelines for the rest of the process.

You want to give your visitors a cohesive idea of what your brand stands for.


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Inspirational designs, illustrations, and graphic elements from the world’s best designers.

9/27/2021

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Professional web design starts with really understanding the client’s business and brand.  After all, a website represents a very significant voice for the brand.  And, that voice should be front and center in a great website. ​

Web Design For Chocolate Companies Picture
The word chocolate can be associated with many words: dark, white, milk, hot, sweet, spicy. As one would expect, chocolate website often use an appetizing brown dominant color.

The quality of product photography on chocolate websites is remarkable. Images are often large and dominant and are given a lot of both horizontal and vertical space. In fact, chocolate, especially gourmet chocolate, is often very visually interesting. The ingredients that go into it can also be very aesthetically pleasing.

​But they all have in common this fascinating sweetness everyone loves.

​#SwiftDigital
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Help Your Business Soar with our Favorite SEO Strategies

9/27/2021

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SEO allows customers to find your company easily in search engines, which means more website traffic, more conversions, and more revenue for your company.

Unlike traditional advertising campaigns that target large audiences over a set period of time, SEO empowers your business to reach potential customers while they're actively searching for you, year after year.

For example, when you decide to target a keyword with your content, that content is always available for users to read — essentially meaning they can convert at any time around the clock.
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For this reason, SEO online marketing is also a great strategy if you have clients around the world. Time zone doesn't affect the results of SEO since it's strategies are virtually always in place, and always working to bring your business more customers.

That's the ultimate advantage of SEO — you can reach your customer base any time, any day. The customers and leads can keep coming in, even when you're not actively running an ad campaign. Even on holidays!
​

But that's a pretty big overview. How can you achieve this kind of online growth for yourself?
Technical SEO

Swift Marketing  Agency is here to help! Our team of experts knows what it takes to create successful SEO strategies. You can call 216-339-6041 or contact us online for help getting started today!

If you'd like to learn more about SEO strategies, you can keep reading below! On this page, we'll take a look at the three most impactful SEO strategies you can use to get more traffic, earn more customers, and close more sales than ever before.

No matter your industry, these SEO strategies can work for you.

How do SEO strategies help your business?If you're not sold on the idea of SEO, let's first talk about how the SEO strategies we talk about can help your business succeed.

One huge benefit from SEO is that you'll be able to improve the ranking of your website's pages in search engine results pages like Google. If you don't rank well in results pages, it's highly unlikely that your target customers will find your website, let alone buy your products and services.

SEO can help get you to the top of search results which means more potential customers will see your website pages, visit your website, and purchase your products.

However, these results don't happen overnight, and in order to see results, it's recommended that you implement more than just one of the strategies mentioned below. In fact, some strategies go hand-in-hand, which means it's difficult to have one without the other.

For example, if you implement multimedia on your website, you'll also need to implement alt tags so that Google is able to read your multimedia. Another example would be if you implement an extensive content plan, you should also be sure to implement multimedia so that your content is engaging and interesting.

When you pair more than one SEO strategy together, you're bound to see results for your business!

How many SEO strategies should I use?

There is no hard-and-fast number for how many SEO strategies you should use for success. And in fact, every industry is different and every specific business needs a different campaign.

That being said, if you're already ranking highly for some of your target keywords, but are looking to rank even higher, your campaign might require fewer strategies to succeed.

The number of SEO strategies your business requires depends completely on your business goals, where your campaign currently stands, and your budget.

1. Content production

Content marketing is one of the most popular marketing strategies today. That's because content is essential to SEO success.

Want to learn about our content marketing services? Watch the quick video below!

The term "content" refers to any text, image, video, or interactive that you publish on your website.
Picture

Infographics are collections of visualized data that tell a story.

The idea behind an infographic is that statistics can be broken down into visual, manageable chunks.

Then, you can reorganize those chunks into sections that tell a compelling story.

Most infographics follow a simple template that helps them succeed:
​
  • What's the topic?
  • What makes the topic noteworthy?
  • How have others used the topic?
  • What success have they seen?
  • How can the reader use the topic?
​
By answering these five questions, you can create an infographic for any industry.

Infographics are ideal for earning links back to your site from credible sources. This boosts your site's overall SEO power since links are a major ranking factor in search engine results.

This content also works well on social media, where users can easily share it with their friends and followers. And once they do, you stand to earn even more links, and you gain a huge amount of brand awareness.

The only downside to infographics is that many companies are already creating them, which makes it difficult to stand out.

But you can stand out by creating a high-quality graphic that uses data, design, and storytelling to form a cohesive product.

Many of the infographics online don't follow these rules, and that's why they don't get great results.
​

But if you can show your target audience that you're dedicated to quality, you'll earn some form of reward for your work. 
Digital Marketing Budget Allocation Today


But if you can show your target audience that you're dedicated to quality, you'll earn some form of reward for your work. 
Downloadable content is one of the best forms of lead generation you can use to earn more from your website.
​

Like infographics, downloads follow a formula to provide the best value to your target audience.

  • Identify a question your customers frequently ask
  • Address the question from as many angles as possible
  • Explain the reasoning behind your solutions
  • Demonstrate how someone can use those solutions
  • Address the outcome and how someone can improve it
​
This process requires a lot more work than an infographic because you have to write extensively about a topic.

Downloads also require visual aids and links to other sources to validate their legitimacy. This takes people away from your download, but it also provides them with supplemental information that helps them get a good grasp on the subject.

You can create downloadable content by exporting information from programs like Microsoft Word or Publisher into PDFs.

That places everything in one simple package so you can post the PDF to your website and gate it.

"Gating" your PDF means placing it behind a few form fields that users need to fill out before getting your download.
The most common form fields used for gating are: Name and Email Address. 
​
Once you have this information, you can add it to your email marketing platform. Then, you can include these users in your campaigns and send them more information based on the download they got from you.

That keeps them in your sales funnel, which lets you help them move towards eventually becoming a customer.

With blog posts, infographics, and downloads, you have a high-quality content strategy that'll help your business grow year after year.

Still, they can't succeed on their own. Your content needs another ingredient to thrive in the SEO world. ​
2. Keyword optimization

Keyword optimization is essential for ranking well in search engines.

Without it, your content can't rank for search terms related for your business.

Fortunately, a lot of keyword optimization is common sense. When you write with the goal of helping a reader, you'll naturally use the keywords that describe the topic of the page.

Using keywords naturally is crucial, though. If you intentionally use keywords as many times as possible on a page, even where they don't make sense, you'll actually lose SEO power with that page.

At the same time, you don't want to get completely sidetracked by another idea and avoid using your keyword altogether. This can also provide a poor user experience if you go off on a tangent instead of sticking to the matter at hand.

You can prevent both of these scenarios by carefully editing your pages before you post them on your site.

We recommend editing once per piece of content. That's just enough time to find any serious flaws in a piece without overthinking the tiny details.

This way, you can keep the ball rolling, and keep producing more content.
​

Look for grammar mix-ups, spelling errors, complicated sentences, jargon-heavy paragraphs, and keyword usage.
If anything feels off, change the content so that it's up to your business's quality standards.

This helps your pages rank in search results for the terms that matter to your business.

Keywords aren't only meant for body text, though. By using them on key areas of your pages, you can really help your pages climb in search engine results.

Title Tags

Title tags are the names of your site's pages. They're also the first part of your page that Google reads, meaning they're the first bit of context Google can understand.

This means title tags need keywords. Otherwise, Google won't know when or how to rank your page when someone searches for the corresponding keyword.

This is also helpful for drawing clicks to your site.

After all, if you have a title tag saying "Women's Running Shoes for Sale" and someone just searched "buy women's running shoes," then they know they should click to your site.

Title tags provide opportunities for more ideas than just keywords, though.

Numbers, lists, dates, prices, brand names, power words, and other strategies all contribute to getting more clicks from search engines.
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So instead of "Women's Running Shoes for Sale," you could try "33% Off Women's Running Shoes," "Women's Nike & Adidas from $20," and other ideas to get visitors to your site with as few words as possible.

But the title tag isn't the only opportunity you have to get clicks. Fortunately, you also have meta descriptions.
Meta descriptions

Meta descriptions are one- or two-sentence accounts of what someone can find on your page.

They don't play a direct role in SEO, but they can improve your click-through rate (CTR) by encouraging search engine users to click.

As a result, meta descriptions work as quick sales pitches for each page.

They can cover ideas like:

  • What's on the page
  • Why someone would read it
  • The result someone can get from it

This isn't an exhaustive list, but it's a great jumping-off point if you're learning about SEO for the first time.

After you have your meta description up and running, you can tweak it occasionally to test what gives you the best CTR.
Maybe it works best for you to start a meta description with a question.

Maybe it's better to lead with your keyword.

Maybe you can get more clicks by using fewer words.

You can supply definite answers to those ideas by creating, tracking, and changing the meta descriptions on your pages.

With your title tags and meta descriptions in place, you're effectively using keywords to promote your pages.
But there's still another SEO strategy you can use to improve your site.

3. Multimedia

Multimedia is one of the most important parts of SEO.

It makes pages easier to read, engages readers more effectively than text, and keeps people on your site longer.
But there's a catch to multimedia — Google's algorithm can't actually "see" it.

To fix that, you should include alt descriptions for all of your multimedia. These are brief text descriptions of an image, video, or audio clip that Google uses to better understand the page.

Those alt descriptions let you use multimedia effectively for both users and search engines.

With that in mind, most multimedia breaks down into a few different categories.

We'll talk about each of those categories in detail. Images are the most common form of multimedia.

You can use them to break up text to keep people engaged and provide captivating visualizations for readers.

As the header image for this section shows, your images don't always have to pertain 100% to your topic. You can use images for humor just as well as you can use them to make points or add emphasis.

Regardless of how you choose to use images, you're helping your readers with them. 

The biggest advantage of images is that they break up walls of text so your site visitors can scan and read more easily.

In fact, this has become crucial since most Internet users don't read much anymore. Instead, they scan a page to find what they want.

If they can't find what they want, they leave.

This makes images all the more important.

By using them at key points on your pages — like the beginning or at major points in the middle — you make it easier for someone to find what they want at a glance.

At the very least, you can make a page more entertaining so visitors can enjoy themselves on your site.
​

But images are just the beginning. They do a great job keeping your readers engaged — but other formats take engagement a step further. 

VideosToday, every Internet-savvy company wants to jump on video as a marketing medium.

Those are huge improvements over text-only content. They're even advancements past text-and-image content.
So why is video so effective?

The biggest advantage is that you can condense entire pages of text into a few minutes of engaging, visualized explanations. All you need is a decent camera, a willing speaker, and editing software.

A lot of companies who experiment with video marketing start by using the cameras on their phones.

This is a great way to get basic product demonstration videos, office walkthroughs, employee interviews, and other videos to use on your site.

It's always a plus to have at least one person at your company who's comfortable speaking to a camera, too. That adds a face to your business that makes it more relatable, and viewers can come to "know" who's speaking.

If you want to add production value to your final video, you can also use editing software.

Editing software can be pricey, but free options exist.

iMovie is probably the most robust free software, and Adobe Premiere is the gold standard of paid products. It's hard to justify spending on video marketing if you've never used it before. But like other marketing strategies, video is an investment.


The more time and money you invest into it, the better your results will be.

Better results mean lots of advantages for your company's website, including more traffic, more conversions, and better brand association. At the end of the day, you can recoup the investment of video marketing by converting viewers into customers.

You'll likely earn your cost of investment back within a year, although your timeframe may vary depending on your company, industry, and other marketing initiatives. 

With our team, you'll earn the results you need to grow.

Search trafficRanking is a valuable SEO metric, but measuring your site’s organic performance can’t stop there. The goal of showing up in search is to be chosen by searchers as the answer to their query. If you’re ranking but not getting any traffic, you have a problem.
But how do you even determine how much traffic your site is getting from search? One of the most precise ways to do this is with Google Analytics.

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Are you ready to launch your company's SEO strategy?

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  • Philadelphia
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Call  (216) 339-6041 or contact us online today!
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Contact us today to start!


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How to Research Keywords for Your SEO Strategy

9/24/2021

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While Google keeps us on our toes with all the algorithm updates they keep rollin' out, one thing has stayed pretty consistent for inbound marketers looking to optimize their websites for search: keyword research.
Well, the need to do keyword research has stayed the same. How you actually do it hasn't.


What Is Keyword Research?

Keyword research is the process of finding and analyzing search terms that people enter into search engines with the goal of using that data for a specific purpose, often for search engine optimization (SEO) or general marketing. Keyword research can uncover queries to target, the popularity of theses queries, their ranking difficulty, and more.

 Why Is Keyword Research Important? 

Keyword research provides valuable insight into the queries that your target audience is actually searching on Google. The insight that you can get into these actual search terms can help inform content strategy as well as your larger marketing strategy. However, keywords themselves may not be as important to SEO as you may think.

More and more, we hear how much SEO has evolved over just the last 10 years, and how unimportant keywords themselves have become to our ability to rank well for the searches people make every day.

And to some extent, this is true; using keywords that exactly match a person's search is no longer the most important ranking factor in the eyes of an SEO professional. Rather, it's the intent behind that keyword, and whether or not a piece of content solves for that intent (we'll talk more about intent in just a minute).

But that doesn't mean keyword research is an outdated process. Let me explain:

Keyword research tells you what topics people care about and, assuming you use the right SEO tool, how popular those topics actually are among your audience. The operative term here is topics -- by researching keywords that are getting a high volume of searches per month, you can identify and sort your content into topics that you want to create content on. Then, you can use these topics to dictate which keywords you look for and target.

For an inside look into how Ahrefs can aid you in your SEO keyword research, check out our case study and exclusive interview here.

By researching keywords for their popularity, search volume, and general intent, you can tackle the questions that the most people in your audience want answers to.

How to Research Keywords for Your SEO Strategy

I'm going to lay out a keyword research process you can follow to help you come up with a list of terms you should be targeting. That way, you'll be able to establish and execute a strong keyword strategy that helps you get found for the search terms you actually care about.

Step 1: Make a list of important, relevant topics based on what you know about your business.To kick off this process, think about the topics you want to rank for in terms of generic buckets. You'll come up with about 5-10 topic buckets you think are important to your business, and then you'll use those topic buckets to help come up with some specific keywords later in the process.

If you're a regular blogger, these are probably the topics you blog about most frequently. Or perhaps they're the topics that come up the most in sales conversations. Put yourself in the shoes of your buyer personas -- what types of topics would your target audience search that you'd want your business to get found for? If you were a company like for example -- selling marketing software  you might have general topic buckets like:


  • "inbound marketing" (21K)
  • "blogging" (19K)
  • "email marketing" (30K)
  • "lead generation" (17K)
  • "SEO" (214K)
  • "social media marketing" (71K)
  • "marketing analytics" (6.2K)
  • "marketing automation" (8.5K)

See those numbers in parentheses to the right of each keyword? That's their monthly search volume. This data allows you to gauge how important these topics are to your audience, and how many different sub-topics you might need to create content on to be successful with that keyword. To learn more about these sub-topics, we move onto step 2 ...

Step 2: Fill in those topic buckets with keywords.Now that you have a few topic buckets you want to focus on, it's time to identify some keywords that fall into those buckets. These are keyword phrases you think are important to rank for in the SERPs (search engine results pages) because your target customer is probably conducting searches for those specific terms.

For instance, if I took that last topic bucket for an inbound marketing software company -- "marketing automation" -- I'd brainstorm some keyword phrases that I think people would type in related to that topic. Those might include:


  • marketing automation tools
  • how to use marketing automation software
  • what is marketing automation?
  • how to tell if I need marketing automation software
  • lead nurturing
  • email marketing automation
  • top automation tools ​

And so on and so on. The point of this step isn't to come up with your final list of keyword phrases. You just want to end up with a brain dump of phrases you think potential customers might use to search for content related to that particular topic bucket. We'll narrow the lists down later in the process so you don't have something too unwieldy. 

Although more and more keywords are getting encrypted by Google every day, another smart way to come up with keyword ideas is to figure out which keywords your website is already getting found for. To do this, you'll need website analytics software like Google Analytics. Drill down into your website's traffic sources, and sift through your organic search traffic bucket to identify the keywords people are using to arrive at your site.

Repeat this exercise for as many topic buckets as you have. And remember, if you're having trouble coming up with relevant search terms, you can always head on over to your customer-facing colleagues -- those who are in Sales or Service -- and ask them what types of terms their prospects and customers use, or common questions they have. Those are often great starting points for keyword research.

Step 3: Understand How Intent Affects Keyword Research and Analyze Accordingly.

Like I said in the previous section, user intent is now one of the most pivotal factors in your ability to rank well on search engines like Google. Today, it's more important that your web page addresses the problem a searcher intended to solve than simply carries the keyword the searcher used. So, how does this affect the keyword research you do?

It's easy to take keywords for face value, and unfortunately, keywords can have many different meanings beneath the surface. Because the intent behind a search is so important to your ranking potential, you need to be extra-careful how you interpret the keywords you target.

Let's say, for example, you're researching the keyword "how to start a blog" for an article you want to create. "Blog" can mean a blog post or the blog website itself, and what a searcher's intent is behind that keyword will influence the direction of your article. Does the searcher want to learn how to start an individual blog post? Or do they want to know how to actually launch a website domain for the purposes of blogging? If your content strategy is only targeting people interested in the latter, you'll need to make sure of the keyword's intent before committing to it.

To verify what a user's intent is in a keyword, it's a good idea to simply enter this keyword into a search engine yourself, and see what types of results come up. Make sure the type of content Google is closely related to what you'd intend to create for the keyword.

Step 4: Research related search terms.


This is a creative step you may have already thought of when doing keyword research. If not, it's a great way to fill out those lists.

If you're struggling to think of more keywords people might be searching about a specific topic, take a look at the related search terms that appear when you plug in a keyword into Google. When you type in your phrase and scroll to the bottom of Google's results, you'll notice some suggestions for searches related to your original input. These keywords can spark ideas for other keywords you may want to take into consideration.

Want a bonus? Type in some of those related search terms and look at their related search terms.

Step 5: Use keyword research tools to your advantage. Keyword research and SEO tools such as Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Ubersuggest can help you come up with more keyword ideas based on exact match keywords and phrase match keywords based on the ideas you've generated up to this point. This exercise might give you alternatives that you might not have considered.

How to Find and Choose Keywords for Your Website


Once you have an idea of the keywords that you want to rank for, now it's time to refine your list based on the best ones for your strategy. Here's how: 

Step 1. Understand the three main factors for choosing good keywords.Before choosing keywords and expecting your content to rank for them, you must curate keywords for three things: 

1. Relevance


Google ranks content for relevance. This is where the concept of search intent comes in. Your content will only rank for a keyword if it meets the searchers' needs. In addition, your content must be the best resource out there for the query. After all, why would Google rank your content higher if it provides less value than other content that exists on the web?

2. Authority


Google will provide more weight to sources it deems authoritative. That means you must do all you can to become an authoritative source by enriching your site with helpful, information content and promoting that content to earn social signals and backlinks. If you're not seen as authoritative in the space, or if a keyword's SERPs are loaded with heavy sources you can't compete with (like Forbes or The Mayo Clinic), you have a lower chance of ranking unless your content is exceptional. 

3. Volume


You may end up ranking on the first page for a specific keyword, but if no one ever searches for it, it will not result in traffic to your site. 

Volume is measured by MSV (monthly search volume), which means the number of times the keyword is searched per month across all audiences. 

Step 2: Check for a mix of head terms and long-tail keywords in each bucket.

​If you don't know the difference between head terms and long-tail keywords, let me explain. Head terms are keywords phrases that are generally shorter and more generic -- they're typically just one to three words in length, depending on who you talk to. Long-tail keywords, on the other hand, are longer keyword phrases usually containing three or more words.

It's important to check that you have a mix of head terms and long-tail terms because it'll give you a keyword strategy that's well balanced with long-term goals and short-term wins. That's because head terms are generally searched more frequently, making them often (not always, but often) much more competitive and harder to rank for than long-tail terms. Think about it: Without even looking up search volume or difficulty, which of the following terms do you think would be harder to rank for?


  1. how to write a great blog post
  2. blogging
​​
If you answered #2, you're absolutely right. But don't get discouraged. While head terms generally boast the most search volume (meaning greater potential to send you traffic), frankly, the traffic you'll get from the term "how to write a great blog post" is usually more desirable.

Why?

Because someone who is looking for something that specific is probably a much more qualified searcher for your product or service (presuming you're in the blogging space) than someone looking for something really generic. And because long-tail keywords tend to be more specific, it's usually easier to tell what people who search for those keywords are really looking for. Someone searching for the head term "blogging," on the other hand, could be searching it for a whole host of reasons unrelated to your business.

So check your keyword lists to make sure you have a healthy mix of head terms and long-tail keywords. You definitely want some quick wins that long-tail keywords will afford you, but you should also try to chip away at more difficult head terms over the long haul.

Step 3: See how competitors are ranking for these keywords.

Just because your competitor is doing something doesn’t mean you need to. The same goes for keywords. Just because a keyword is important to your competitor, doesn’t mean it's important to you. However, understanding what keywords your competitors are trying to rank for is a great way to help you give your list of keywords another evaluation.

If your competitor is ranking for certain keywords that are on your list, too, it definitely makes sense to work on improving your ranking for those. However, don’t ignore the ones your competitors don’t seem to care about. This could be a great opportunity for you to own market share on important terms, too.

Understanding the balance of terms that might be a little more difficult due to competition, versus those terms that are a little more realistic, will help you maintain a similar balance that the mix of long-tail and head terms allows. Remember, the goal is to end up with a list of keywords that provide some quick wins but also helps you make progress toward bigger, more challenging SEO goals.

How do you figure out what keywords your competitors are ranking for, you ask? Aside from manually searching for keywords in an incognito browser and seeing what positions your competitors are in, Ahrefs allows you to run a number of free reports that show you the top keywords for the domain you enter. This is a quick way to get a sense of the types of terms your competitors are ranking for.

Step 4: Use Google's Keyword Planner to cut down your keyword list.


Now that you've got the right mix of keywords, it's time to narrow down your lists with some more quantitative data. You have a lot of tools at your disposal to do this, but let me share my favorite methodology.

I like to use a mix of the Google's Keyword Planner (you'll need to set up an Ads account for this, but you can turn your example ad off before you pay any money), and Google Trends.

In Keyword Planner, you can get search volume and traffic estimates for keywords you're considering. Then, take the information you learn from Keyword Planner and use Google Trends to fill in some blanks.

Use the Keyword Planner to flag any terms on your list that have way too little (or way too much) search volume, and don't help you maintain a healthy mix like we talked about above. But before you delete anything, check out their trend history and projections in Google Trends. You can see whether, say, some low-volume terms might actually be something you should invest in now -- and reap the benefits for later.

Or perhaps you're just looking at a list of terms that is way too unwieldy, and you have to narrow it down somehow ... Google Trends can help you determine which terms are trending upward, and are thus worth more of your focus.

Best Keywords for SEOUnderstand that there's no "best" keywords, just those that are highly searched by your audience. With this in mind, it's up to you to craft a strategy that will help you rank pages and drive traffic. 

The best keywords for your SEO strategy will take into account relevance, authority, and volume. You want to find highly searched keywords that you can reasonably compete for based on: 


  1. The level of competition you're up against. 
  2. Your ability to produce content that exceeds in quality what's currently ranking.
​​
And ... You're done! Congratulations! You've now got a list of keywords that'll help you focus on the right topics for your business, and get you some short-term and long-term gains. 

Be sure to re-evaluate these keywords every few months -- once a quarter is a good benchmark, but some businesses like to do it even more often than that. As you gain even more authority in the SERPs, you'll find that you can add more and more keywords to your lists to tackle as you work on maintaining your current presence, and then growing in new areas on top of that.

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Best Keyword Research Tools to Find the Right Keywords for SEO

9/24/2021

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Let's get right down to it: The key to successful SEO is concentrating on long-tail keywords.

Although these keywords get less traffic than more generic terms, they're associated with more qualified traffic and users that are typically further down their path of intent.

The good news is that choosing the right long-tail keywords for your website pages is actually a fairly simple process -- one that's made all the more simple and quick when you use the right tools to perform your keyword research.

In this post, we'll cover the nine best tools out there for performing keyword research for your website content. Before we get started though, let's briefly go over two important things to consider as you do your research: relevance and (if applicable) location.

Keyword Relevance

Relevance is the most important factor to consider when choosing the right keywords for SEO. Why? Because the more specific you are, the better.

For instance, if you own a company that installs swimming pools, it's likely that you'd attract more qualified prospects by targeting a keyword such as "fiberglass in-ground pool installation," rather than "swimming pools." That's because there's a good chance that someone searching for "fiberglass in-ground pool installation" is looking for information on installation or someone to perform the installation ... and that could be you!

Sure, optimizing for "swimming pools" has its place. But there's no doubt that this keyword will attract a much more generic audience that may not be looking for what you have to offer. Go for the relevant, long-tail keywords instead.

Location-Based Keywords

Another major factor to consider when optimizing for the right keywords is location-based searches. When looking for contractors and services in their specific area, search engine users will usually include their location in the search. So, "fiberglass in-ground pool installation" becomes "fiberglass in-ground pool installation in Cleveland, OH."

If you operate in one geo-location, you may want to consider adding location-based keywords to all of your pages, since traffic from other locations isn't going to be very much help to you. If your business operates in several geo-locations, it is also a wise choice to create a separate web page dedicated to each location so you can make sure your brand is present when people are searching for individual locations.

Now, how do you choose the right keywords for your business? We certainly don't recommend guessing, for obvious reasons. Instead, there are many ways to research and find long-tail keywords that are right for your business.
Here are nine awesome free and paid keyword research tools you can use to quickly and easily identify strong long-tail keywords for your SEO campaign.

Free Keyword Research Tools

  1. Google Keyword Planner
  2. Google Trends

Free Keyword Research Tools

1. Google Keyword Planner

Google has a few tools that make it easy to conduct keyword research, and their free AdWords tool called Keyword Planner is a great place to start -- especially if you use AdWords for some of your campaigns. (Note: You'll need to set up an AdWords account to use Keyword Planner, but that doesn't mean you have to create an ad.)

When you input one keyword, multiple keywords, or even your website address into Keyword Planner, Google will spit out a list of related keywords along with simple metrics to gauge how fierce the competition is around each one and how many searches it gets on both a global and local search level.

It'll also show you historical statistics and information on how a list of keywords might perform -- and it'll create a new keyword list by multiplying several lists of keywords together. Since it's a free AdWords tool, it can also help you choose competitive bids and budgets to use with your AdWords campaigns.

Unfortunately, when Google transitioned from Keyword Tool to Keyword Planner, they stripped out a lot of the more interesting functionality -- but you can make up for it somewhat if you take the information you learn from Keyword Planner and use Google Trends to fill in some blanks.

Which brings me to the next tool ...

2. Google Trends
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Google Trends is another free tool from Google. It lets you enter multiple keywords and filter by location, search history, and category. Once you enter that information in, it'll give you results that show how much web interest there is around a particular keyword, what caused the interest (e.g., press coverage), and where the traffic is coming from -- along with similar keywords.

The best part about Google Trends is that it doesn't just give you static keyword volume numbers like most keyword research tools. Instead, it generates colorful, interactive graphs that you can play with, download, and even embed on your website. It'll also give you more dynamic insight into a keyword with information like relative popularity of a search term over time.

Interestingly, its data doesn't include in repeated queries from a single user over a short period of time, which makes results cleaner. It also groups together searches that it infers to mean the same thing, like misspellings.

One way to use Google Trends? If you're trying to decide between two keyword variations for your latest blog post title. Simply perform a quick comparison search in Google Trends to see which one is getting searched more often.


Are you ready to launch your company's SEO strategy?

Call  (216) 339-6041 or contact us online today!
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7 Top Benefits of PPC Advertising

9/19/2021

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PPC advertising can help you increase your visibility online, bring new leads to your website, and boost conversions.  Learn more about the benefits of PPC advertising below.
The benefits of PPC advertising includes its ability to drive traffic, increase conversions, and grow your business.

What is PPC advertising?

PPC advertising is an online advertising model that allows you to place ads on search engine results pages (SERPs), social media sites, and other websites. With PPC, advertisers bid on keywords and pay only when a user clicks their ad. When users click your PPC ad, it brings them to a landing page on your website.

If you’ve ever looked something up on Google, you’ve almost certainly seen PPC in action. PPC search ads show up above and beside the regular listings, and they’re marked with a small icon that says “ad.” Here’s what they look like:

7 benefits of PPC advertisingHere are some of the key advantages of PPC advertising, and all of them are great for your business. 

  1. You set the maximum budget for your ads
  2. You only pay when someone clicks your ad
  3. You can compete even if your search engine rankings aren’t high
  4. You can easily test different ads
  5. You can gain more brand recognition
  6. You can launch a PPC advertising campaign in no time
  7. You can reach your ideal customers
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1. You set the maximum budget for your ads

With other types of advertisements, you are locked into a specific rate.

PPC enables you to work within your budget. That means whether you’re a multi-national conglomerate or a mom-and-pop in a small town, you can constantly change your ad budget within your limits.

2. You only pay when someone clicks your ad

With many types of advertising, you pay the same amount for your ad spot, no matter how many people see it or contact you because of it.

One of the major PPC benefits is that you pay per click. This means you only pay when someone interacts with your ad, providing a chance for conversion.

You won’t go over your budget, though, since you can set your maximum spend ahead of time.

3. You can compete even if your search engine rankings aren’t high

If your site doesn’t rank well in search engines, you can still promote your company through PPC.

With PPC, you can gain an edge on your competition even if you just launched your website. This is one of the most important PPC benefits for startups, as it lets them compete for new customers with companies that have been around for decades.
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4. You can easily test different adsEvery PPC provider tracks stats on your ads so you can refine your marketing strategies and see the benefits of PPC advertising in action.

All of them track the same basic stats, like clicks and how much you’re charged, and provider-specific information. Whether you’re on Google, Bing, or Facebook, you can always refine your PPC approach.

These stats also show you if you’re getting worthwhile returns from your investment. If you’re not, you can easily change something in a matter of minutes.

5. You can gain more brand recognitionAs your PPC ads show up more frequently, more people will see (and later recognize) your brand. That’s great for building your company’s reputation online, even if people don’t click on your ads at first.

6. You can launch a PPC advertising campaign in no timeDo you want to deploy PPC advertising before lunch? You can do it! 

You can set up PPC in a hurry when you have all of your other details laid out (like the ad text and landing page). You don’t need to sign a contract or lock into a five-year deal — you just set it up and go.

You’ll start seeing the benefits of PPC advertising soon after launching your campaign!

7. You can reach your ideal customersAnother one of the top PPC advertising benefits is that you can target your ads directly to the people most likely to become customers.

By conducting keyword research, you can determine which keywords potential customers are searching when looking for information about your industry, products, or services. Then, you can bid on these keywords and get your ad in front of those users.

You can also target your ads to users based on characteristics such as their demographics, interests, past online activity, and more. By using a tactic called remarketing, you can even serve ads to people who recently visited your website but didn't made a purchase.

Experience the advantages of PPC advertising with Swift Digital Marketing

Contact us online or at 216-339-6041 to start creating a PPC plan that’s tailored to your business's needs!
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