Ranking a new website for popular keywords can be difficult. So why are popular keywords so hard to rank for with a new website? It’s a good question, although the longer you work in search marketing, the more obvious the answer becomes.
The Main Reasons New Websites Have Difficulty Ranking for Popular, High-Volume Keywords:
Site Authority The amount of on-page optimization you do when targeting a specific keyword is only half the battle. The Google algorithm takes site or domain authority into account when assigning rankings. Your site’s authority depends on factors like age of domain (hence, new websites necessarily have less authority) as well as the number of inbound links your site has accrued and the authority, in turn, of the sites that link to you (aka PageRank).
The competition for “popular keywords” is that much stiffer By definition, more sites are competing to rank for more popular keywords, so your site authority is even more important if you want to rank on the first page or anywhere near it. Think about it: There are sites that have been around for a decade or more, working to rank for valuable popular keywords (like, say, “car insurance” or “local weather”). It’s unlikely that some newbie is going to be able to stroll in and take one of the top spots just because they want it.
The web is growing all the time, and the huge increase in the number of unique domains each year – in 2011, over 50 million new domains were created! – means that popular, high-volume search terms get exponentially more competitive over time. So yes, it’s true that it’s very difficult for new sites to rank for these keywords – unfortunately for you and your site, but perhaps fortunately for users. Search engine users want the best information first and fastest, so Google ranks sites that are already vetted through the “votes” of links. If you have a new website and you want to rank for a popular keyword, you’ll have to prove your site’s worth to Google first. Here are some tips for getting there:
Long-Tail Keywords First
Longer, more specific keywords – known as long-tail keywords – have lower search volume than head terms, but they’re much less competitive to rank for. For example, a new website has next to no chance of ranking for the head term “insurance,” but would have much better luck with a niche keyword like “business overhead expense disability insurance,” because fewer websites are competing to rank. Long-tail keywords also have the added benefit of revealing more intent, making it easier for you to create content that meets the user’s implied needs.
Real Content
SEO content is whatever it is on your site that might rank for a relevant keyword – whether it’s a blog post that answers a question (like this one), a video that shows viewers how to do something, or user-generated reviews of the products you sell. By “real content,” I mean content that is genuinely useful to people. Your content marketing strategy should follow naturally from the type of business you run, the types of keywords that your prospects use, and where your expertise lies.
Use Proper Link Building
Google is in full-on battle mode against SEO spammers, so be safe when building links (and I don’t mean giving your in-house SEOs condoms!). Don’t purchase links in bulk and don’t waste your time with low-quality websites that are irrelevant to your niche. Spammy link tactics are unlikely to work in the long term, but you do still need links to show Google your site is rank-worthy. So leverage that great content you’re creating and do smart link outreach to bring attention to your site.
Stay Committed
As mentioned above, part of what matters to Google is the age of your site. So there’s no fast track to great SEO rankings – to some extent it’s just a waiting game. But domain age alone isn’t worth very much – your site should be growing and improving all the time.
Use Pay Per Click
While you’re working to improve your site’s authority and organic rankings, consider leveraging paid search marketing, or PPC, to drive traffic. It’s generally faster and easier to place ads on the results pages for your target keywords than it is to rank for them organically, so you can use it as a stop-gap measure while your site is new and as a supplement to organic traffic later. Your PPC account will also provide invaluable data to help you better execute organic SEO.
Social media is an essential part of your overall online branding and marketing as it is a popular media to syndicate your message. Your message has the potential to be seen by many users if properly developed. Facebook alone has over one billion users and should always be considered when marketing your brand. Social media optimization can also create more traffic movement to your website and increase your organic rankings on search engines. With the right strategies, social media is an important factor to your overall marketing strategy. Listed below are key strategies and best practices to use.
Social Media Monitoring
In order to understand the needs of social media users and respond to them accordingly, it is advisable to monitor social media pages. You should find out what people are talking about, what they are interested in and what social media users do not like in order to tweak the content on your posts for better feedback. There are various monitoring tools available online that you can use to listen to social media. Listening is the key to learning and once you learn, it becomes extremely easy to action this knowledge to promote your brand.
Make Your Social Media Posts Stand Out
In order to get more attention from social media users, you need to make sure each of your posts is a hit. You can get more attention and exposure on your social media posts using images, videos, gifs, and hashtags. Make sure the posts are short and concise to make sure everybody reads your posts and gets the message. You have probably come across the “too long, didn’t read” meme doing rounds on social media showing that internet users really don’t have the attention span for very long posts.
Build A Proper Detailed Profile
Social media profiles are a crucial part of branding your company. Most social media encourage creating a bio, putting up a profile picture and a cover or background picture. Ensure that the pictures you use to create your profile are a true and interested representation of your brand. Make sure you use your logo, and in your bio, include contact information as well. Using the company logo creates a lasting impression on the mind of your potential customer. Some social media users may not navigate to your website therefore including contact information in your social media bio makes it easy for them to contact you through email or a phone call.
Build Your Social Media Networks
Do not wait for the people to come to you; you need to connect with as many people as possible on social media. It is also important to make a strong connection. Only a fraction of social media users meet your demographic characteristics and these are the individuals you need to connect with. You can use the hashtags on social media pages to find individuals with shared interests and connect with them. You can also include a call to action buttons in your social media pages encouraging people to like and share your posts or visit our website to learn more.
Connect With Social Media Users
Building a network is one thing while connecting with users is another. People value brands that give their customers attention and value customer input. Therefore, you should not simply share posts on social media and wait for the traffic to start rolling in. You should respond to comments and feedback in the social media posts. Feel free to share positive feedback that you receive because testimonials from satisfied customers do have an impact in increasing the popularity of your brand. You should also thank individual customers who comment or give criticism through social media pages.
Choose The Right Social Network For Your Brand Image
Social networks have different characteristics, some are more business oriented (LinkedIn), some encourage craft (Pinterest, Instagram), some generate discussions (Twitter), while some are all about building a social life and social networks (Facebook). Therefore, your approach towards these different social networks should be customized. Make sure you choose the social network that best supports your brand image and use it accordingly. Facebook has a heterogeneous base and that is why it is considered the best social network for promoting any brand.
Create Valuable and Share-Worthy Content
You can only strengthen your brand reputation when you create quality useful content that your social media networks will be willing to share. You need to be sure of how your audience will respond to the content, and this takes us back to the first point of social media monitoring. You can use interesting content such as memes, tutorial videos, instructional pictures and short stories or descriptions to share more about your brand.
Use Existing Influences
If you are introducing a new brand into the market, it becomes extremely difficult to be noticed, as you would like, even when you have killer social media marketing strategies. It may take the input of influencers to get people talking about your product. You can contact social media influencers for reviews and mentions in order to get the attention you need. Choose niche specific influencers to ensure that your brand is being voiced to the right people.
Social Campaigns
You can also use social campaigns to promote your brand. Use valuable incentives that will encourage social media users to participate in the campaigns. You can create contests for the most number of likes, shares or the best picture showing the customer using your brand. The rewarded customers will automatically be converted into social media brand ambassadors for your products and services.
Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization makes up brand promotion across different platforms on the internet and not just social media. Search engines today incorporate social media signals into ranking websites in search results. Search engines will use Facebook likes and retweets to rank pages on internet searches. Social media profiles are also ranked among search results and your social media profile may appear on the same page as your website in a Google search. Therefore, you should ensure your social media pages are always up to date with a lot of buzz around them.
Social media platforms are also search engines in a way. People will use the search boxes on social media pages to find information about specific keywords. Therefore, you should ensure that you optimize the content on your social media pages with high conversion keywords.
Conclusion
People looking for your companies information look at your website as well as your information on Facebook, Twitter, and other social sites. Your company and its brand image on social media is every bit as important as your business website and is essential to the success of your business. Make sure your business is taking advantage of social media and if you are looking for to optimize your social media or need someone to manage social media Digital Marketology is always here to help. You can visit all our social media services by clicking here.
Content is one way to demonstrate your brand’s integrity and help your audience trust you. 28% of B2B marketers & 30% of B2C marketers say content marketing contributes to business goals
The old saying that content is king might be one of the most overused phrases ever to grace the world of digital marketing; however, it’s fair to say that it’s hung around so long because it’s actually true.Content marketing seems like it’s going to be easy. You just write a few blog posts or add more pages to your site, right? But when you sit down to really think about it, it’s a lot more complicated than you originally thought. First, you need a strong keyword research plan. Buyer Personas. Bags of creativity. A no-holds-barred approach to writer’s block. A top-notch grammar game. And ideas by the bucket load. Then there’s the competition. A recent study counted three times leap in the amount of content created by brands in just a 12-month period, with one single brand creating a massive 29,000 pieces of original content in one year.
Despite the difficulties, brands are creating more content than ever before. But, why? Why is content marketing important? What does it add to a digital strategy? And more importantly, what does it bring to the bottom line?
Content is Used Everywhere and For Everything
There is no better long-term strategy than content marketing.” He gives a number of reasons for this view but what’s most compelling is his point that content is used everywhere and influences every other type of marketing strategy:
Your email content fuels opens and click-throughs
Your web content fuels rankings and encourages conversions
It’s essential for social media campaigns
Necessary for blog posts
And useful for creating trust, authority and establishing relationships with other brands and businesses
Content Gives Compounding Rates of Return
As your investment earns interest, your principal grows and you earn more interest with each subsequent round of compounding. Content works much the same way since it’s more or less “permanent.” If you publish twice a week, you’ll have 110 pieces the first year, so the first year you’ll produce 110 pieces and get 110 pieces’ worth of results. The second year, you’ll produce 110 pieces and see 220 pieces’ worth of results.” This compounding rate of return means your content is always available to you and can help to drive sales. If you create evergreen content in addition to news posts and trending topic-led pieces, you’ll also have a stockpile of information that you can turn to time and time again, whenever you need interesting, useful pieces for emails, slideshows, social posts, and other marketing activities.
Great Content Inspires Trust
In our annual local consumer review survey last year, we reported that 8 out of 10 consumers trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation for a business, product or service. In his article for the Content Marketing Institute, Sujan Patel mused that the reason there is a such an appetite for reviews is that as consumers, we need to be assured that we’re going to get what we pay for. User-generated content, like online reviews, fills this gap.
He said, “Content is one way to demonstrate your brand’s integrity and, in turn, help your audience trust you.” With this power, it’s easy to see how content marketing drives sales. Simply by reassuring consumers, a well-placed piece of content can set your brand apart in a crowded marketplace.
Building this into a content marketing strategy can be done in a number of ways.
Work with an influencer or blogger to endorse your product
Create authority branded content
Invite a respected person in your field or industry to contribute their own content to your blog or website
Secure a guest post or column of your own on a respected website, blog or magazine site
Ask happy customers to leave reviews on your Google My Business listing or other review sites like Yelp or Foursquare
Content Builds Links
If your marketing or sales activity relies on any form of organic search visibility, you need content to help with rankings for specific keywords and link acquisition. Backlinks are an essential component of any SEO campaign, with a few high quality, relevant links worth their weight in gold. In today’s fierce battle for page one rankings, great links can only be acquired with the help of stellar content. Whether you create a great infographic, a thought-provoking blog post or must-read ebook, it’s the quality of your content that will determine whether or not other sites want to link to you. Top sites and influencers won’t risk sending their hard-earned traffic your way via a link unless your content provides something that is a must see or a must read. Short of buying links, strong content is the only way to earn those likes and shares that will see your site moving up the rankings.
Content Value is Measurable
The importance of any marketing initiative, whether it’s content or advertisements, comes down to how accurately and how easily it can be measured. Director of Editorial Content and Curation at Content Marketing Institute, Jodie Harris cites a CMI Benchmark report which found that 28% of B2B marketers and 30% of B2C marketers now say their content marketing activity has reached a mature stage where its contributions to overall business goals can be measured. On the back of this, 52% of B2B and 51% of B2C marketers expect that blogging will be their most critical tactic for achieving success in the upcoming year.
Ready For Unique Content for your Business?
If you are looking to add rich content to your marketing strategy visit our Content Marketing Section at Digital Marketology so we can develop a personalized solution for you.
Most businesses have a basic understanding of SEO (search engine optimization) and why it’s important to the growth of their company. However, when it comes to developing and executing a proper SEO strategy they don’t know where to begin. Here are some tips for successful SEO strategies.
Develop A Mind Map
A mind map is a place to build your strategy from the ground up. A mind map is simply a branching series of categories, usually reaching out from the center, moving from more general to more specific categories, with ideas becoming more granular. It isn’t a visualization of your final strategy. A mind map exists not to help you present your plan, but to help you think about it.
Mind maps are tools that help you envision your thinking process in a way that makes it easier for you to combine ideas by helping you see how they fit together as a whole. They help reduce the load that your strategy imposes on your working memory so that you can focus on thinking and brainstorming. You can use a tool like Mind Meister, or you can simply jot down your ideas as they come to you in the visual format.
The primary benefit of using a mind map is its ability to help you think in a nonlinear fashion. Using a mind map allows you to see everything at once, in a structure that resembles the networked way that your real brain works, so I highly suggest using one as you develop your SEO strategy.
A Visual Representation
Once your strategy becomes more concrete, you will need a more in-depth and professional document than your mind map. Keep in mind what a strategy is: a plan. That means you have goals, specific tasks attached to those goals, some tasks that have to come before others, recurring tasks that will need to be iterated and honed, and subtasks that will become more numerous and specific as time goes on. You need to be able to present all of this quickly and easily to your client and your teams, and you need to do so in a format that is simple enough for all parties to understand, as well as edit. You can use Google Sheets, Trello, Workzone, Basecamp, or whatever you prefer. The specific tool isn’t as important as your method for using it. It must be immediately clear to all parties about how to read the plan and make changes if needed. It must also be clear:
Which task is assigned to whom.
Which tasks follow the first.
Which tasks are recurring, planned, in progress, and finished.
An Understanding of the Company
Whether you’re an in-house or outsourced SEO, you need to have a solid understanding of the company in order to make any SEO strategy successful. You need to know what strengths you can leverage in order to get the most SEO value, what tactics will work best for the brand identity, and what is standing in your way. Here are some of the most important factors you should consider as you develop your strategy:
What is the product’s unique selling proposition? We may be referring to a line of products or a single product, but whatever the case may be, we need to know what makes our company different in order for any strategy to work. This will strongly impact the types of outreach that will make sense, the type of audiences we will want to cultivate, the type of keywords we will be tracking, and much more.
What is the company’s vision? We need to go deeper than knowing what industry we are in and that we want to be profitable if we want to generate the kind of waves that affect visibility in the search engines. Dig deep into that vision statement to look for ideas that will guide your strategic goals and metrics. If your vision statement isn’t doing that for you, you might want to consider developing a new vision statement for your own campaign, which serves the purpose.
Where is the company really hurting right now? This is one of those things that might seem like you can avoid early on, but will always creep in and decimate an SEO strategy (or department, or partnership) if it isn’t annihilated. Understand what the company really needs to see and really can’t accommodate before you commit to a strategy.
An Understanding of the Audience
You need to know who your audience is, and that means a great deal more than just what keywords they’re searching for. Here are a few things you need to determine, either by talking to your client, surveying your audience, browsing some relevant internet hangouts, or all of the above and more:
How accepting are they of marketing, upselling, and so on? If you’ve ever consumed anything in the self-help industry, you might have noticed how comfortable “gurus” in that industry are willing to upsell their audience, even spend a dedicated portion of a paid presentation for advertising their other products. Alternatively, if you’ve ever spent any time trying to link to anything of your own on Reddit, you know that they are hypersensitive to any kind of promotion at all. This is something you need to be highly aware of as you develop your strategy.
What is their level of knowledge? Are you talking to people who know everything about their subject matter and will laugh off anybody who tries to share introductory material? Are you talking to people who are completely oblivious to industry jargon?
How close are they to the industry? Is your audience consumers (B2C) or businesses (B2B)? Will these people be intimately familiar with your industry, or almost entirely outside of it? Are they interested in understanding more about the industry, or do they care solely about how your products can benefit them?
Precise Goals
For a goal to be useful, it needs to be precise, and for it to be precise, we should be focusing more on the working parts and how they fit together than on a particular dollar amount. We need to be deliberate when we choose our metrics and KPIs. Yes, we want revenue to go up faster than costs, and yes, it can be useful to set a financial goal. We certainly should be setting goals that have time limits. However, a strategy is about achieving goals that have a specific impact on the company, its direction and future, and the way that the business itself functions. That means our metrics should reflect what is happening with the working pieces themselves. This could mean links and authority, it could mean rankings, or it could mean organic search traffic.
The point is, everybody should agree on what metrics make sense and why. I strongly believe in the value of task-oriented goals over KPI goals. This is because, especially when it comes to inbound marketing and SEO, our impact on KPIs is indirect. For this reason, I believe in setting goals for projects, living up to those goals, then measuring the impact and adjusting the strategy in response. This is an approach that is more likely to lead to knowledge and actual optimization, as opposed to finding ways to manipulate the KPIs while losing sight of the long-term impact.
Conclusion
Nearly every SEO strategy can benefit from these five elements. Build them into your framework and make them a part of the way you do business. At Digital Marketology we are experts in Digital Marketing. To learn more about our SEO services visit Local SEO and Search Engine Optimization.
The Effectiveness of Google Ads. “Why use AdWords” and “Does Google AdWords Work?” are pretty common keyword phrase searched on Google, which suggests that there are a lot of marketers and business owners out there who have heard about Google AdWords but aren’t sure if and how it can work for them. We believe that AdWords – Google’s enormously successful pay-per-click (PPC) advertising system – can work for almost any type of business. Using AdWords (or any PPC platform) requires time and money, but thousands of businesses have found that it’s time and money well spent because AdWords delivers measurable ROI. We’ve devoted countless pages to how you should use AdWords. In this post, we’ll answer the question of why you should use it.
Before any of our SEO-loving readers get up in arms, let me preface this by saying that we’re not advocating that you do PPC to the exclusion of other marketing activities. As always, we recommend a healthy balance of marketing channels, including organic search, email marketing, events, social media and other lead sources. How you allocate your marketing budget will depend on which channels turn out to be most effective for your business. But if you’ve never used Google AdWords before, and you’re wondering whether or not it’s worthwhile, this post is for you. Here are 10 reasons to use AdWords.
AdWords Is Faster than SEO
For new businesses and websites, it can take months to see results from SEO. This perceived “penalty” used to be referred to as the Google sandbox effect – people assumed Google was intentionally filtering new websites out of the results. More likely the problem is that competition is fierce and it takes time for a website to “prove” itself and earn authority and links.
AdWords is a great workaround for new businesses because you don’t have to wait around so long to see results. While working on your site’s SEO, you can put resources into an AdWords campaign and start getting impressions and clicks immediately. Because it’s so speedy, it’s also a good way to test whether a given keyword or audience is worth pursuing via organic search – if it converts well in AdWords, you can deduce that it’s worth trying to rank for in SEO and build out your content in that area. (Just one of the ways that AdWords and SEO are two great tastes that taste great together.)
As an added bonus, you can often get started on AdWords very cheaply – Google often offers vouchers (basically free PPC budget) for new advertisers. Right now it’s running a special for AdWords Express: Sign up by December 16 and get a free month of advertising.
AdWords Is Scalable
One of the trickiest challenges for any marketer is finding lead sources that scale – meaning, it doesn’t require five times the effort to get five times the leads. Google AdWords is highly scalable, which is why some business spends millions of dollars a year on AdWords advertising. If you create an AdWords campaign that is converting at a profitable rate, there is no reason to arbitrarily cap spend on that campaign. You can increase your PPC budget and your leads and profits will increase accordingly. This makes AdWords highly effective for businesses that need a lot of leads but are short on time and heads.
AdWords Is Measurable
Compared to traditional marketing channels like TV and magazine advertising, online marketing is highly measurable, and AdWords PPC is one of the most measurable of online channels. It’s difficult to make exact measurements in SEO because you can’t always know what actions led to increased or decreased rankings. Then there’s the whole “not provided” fiasco. Social media can be equally difficult to measure. In comparison, AdWords is more transparent, providing tons of PPC metrics that allow you to see at a granular level what works and what doesn’t. You can pretty quickly determine if your campaigns are sucking or returning ROI.
AdWords Is Flexible
AdWords provides tons of options so you can customize your campaigns and ads to your particular needs, hyper-targeting the audiences you most want to reach. For example, with AdWords you can:
Specify keyword match types – You can, for example, only display your ad to people who search for an exact keyword you specify, like “vegas hotels” – filtering out traffic on general terms related to Las Vegas or hotels. (SEO, on the other hand, is aspirational; you can’t define what you rank for, you can only hope for the best.)
Use ad extensions to display product images, a phone number, a mega-pack of links to your site, your physical location – you can even initiate a chat or get an email address right from the SERP.
Narrow your audience by location, time of day, language, browser or device type and more. A good portion of your SEO traffic may be worthless to you (for example, if you only need US-based leads, and half of your web traffic comes from Australia), but in AdWords, you don’t have to display your ads around the world.
Access an enormous network of non-search users on properties like Gmail and YouTube and tons of partner sites.
Leverage the display network, which is great for building brand awareness and often converts at a lower cost than Google Search.
AdWords Is (Usually) Easier than SEO
Larry has argued in the past that SEO is much harder than PPC. His arguments were met with disagreement, but probably more because of how he said them than what he was saying. Here is WordStream, we’re seasoned practitioners of both SEO and PPC. And now that our PPC campaigns are built and in place, we find they require much less effort to maintain than our SEO efforts. Not only is our enormous beast of a website very difficult to keep up to date (which plagues me), but in order to increase organic traffic, it takes a team of 3-5 constantly churning out SEO content, working on optimization and building links. It’s fun, creative and rewarding when it works – but it’s also a relief to know that we can depend on PPC to deliver leads without all the hoops to jump through.
AdWords is also probably easier to learn because there’s less contradictory information out there. If you’re not inside the industry, it can be hard as a marketer to know which sources are honest and which are just selling proverbial snake oil. On the other hand, there isn’t a whole industry built around “gaming” AdWords. Check out our AdWords Learning Center for help getting started.
AdWords Is Taking Over the SERPs
AdWords is Google’s baby (it should be – it accounts for about 97% of their revenues), and over time the SERP has changed so that more and more above-the-fold real estate is given to ads rather than organic results. This can be frustrating both for SEO and users. But if you engage in PPC, it’s not all bad! It’s an opportunity for you to get your message high up on the SERP in a highly clickable way – it’s a myth that no one clicks on AdWords ads. For queries with high commercial intent (hint: those are the ones you’d want to be advertising on), sponsored ads take up to 2 out of 3 clicks on the first page.
AdWords Formats Can Be More Engaging than Organic Results
Google has rolled out lots of new ad formats in the past couple of years, such as product listing ads and in-video ads on YouTube. Google is motivated to do this because shinier, more engaging ads get more clicks and that means more revenue for Google. But higher clicks are good for the advertiser too, so take advantage of these new ad formats and extensions. Organic listings look pretty boring in comparison.
AdWords Traffic Might Convert Better than Organic Traffic
Hey, organic traffic is great, we don’t knock it! But there’s some evidence that paid search traffic converts better than organic traffic – with conversion rates up to two times higher. (Conversion rates vary by industry, and as always, this may not be true for your particular business, but you won’t know until you try.) This is probably due to the fact that paid search traffic is more targeted and qualified (due to those targeting options we talked about above), and that queries that result in ad clicks are much more likely to be commercial in nature, rather than informational.
AdWords Complements Your Other Marketing Channels
AdWords is complementary to your other marketing efforts. Remarketing is an especially powerful way to use AdWords to target people who have shown an interest in your business. With AdWords remarketing, you can track past visitors to your website with a cookie (these people may have found you through social media, your blog, a click on a product page from a forwarded email, etc.). Your display ads will then “follow” them around the Internet, so your brand stays top of mind. For example, the Land’s End and Priceline ads below are both retargeted – I visited those websites in the past 30 days. You can even show them the exact product that they searched for. Along with cart abandonment emails (same principle), retargeted ads have super-high ROI compared to other marketing channels.
Your Competitors Are Using AdWords
Finally, there’s peer pressure: The old “Everyone else is doing it, so why not you?” argument. It doesn’t work for jumping off a cliff, but it is persuasive when it comes to search engine marketing. A recent report showed that global paid search spending increased by 33% in the third quarter of 2012, year over year. According to a study by NetElixer, which looked at data from 38 large U.S. retailers and 120 million search ad impressions, “revenue driven by a paid search on Black Friday rose an impressive 31% year-over-year as advertisers invested 21% more in keyword advertising than they did in 2011.” Do a few searches on keywords you care about. Your competitors are likely there in the sponsored results at the top of the SERP. Can you afford not to be?
