Category: SEO

As a result of the current pandemic, most B2B marketers have had to adjust their content marketing strategies. They have optimized their strategies for better audience targeting, personalized messaging, and powerful distribution of content.

But why?

Because they want to attract, acquire, and retain customers while boosting their B2B content marketing ROI (Return on Investment).

The question is: 

Did marketers achieve success after optimizing their strategies?

In a study conducted in 2020, 31% of B2B marketers said they were significantly successful with content marketing. The majority, 54%, considered themselves moderately successful.

Image via Content Marketing Institute

What is preventing marketers from generating better results?

In the study mentioned above, marketers stated that content creation and distribution challenges, strategy issues, and challenges with measuring ROI have been the major drawbacks.

If you don’t know which factors to track and measure, you will not be able to identify areas that need optimization to improve results.

That’s why the first step towards boosting your B2B content marketing ROI involves tracking the performance of your current strategies and content.

Let’s take a look at a few ways to optimize your B2B content marketing ROI.

1. Analyze the Performance of Your Existing Content

You should make it a habit to monitor how your content is performing after publishing. You can use analytics tools to figure out whether or not your content delivers the expected results.

Which metrics should you track to figure this out?

You can track:

• The amount of traffic driven by your content
• Time users spend on your page
• Bounce rate of your website
• Engagement rate
• Lead attribution
• Navigational behavior of users

You should use these insights to gauge how your B2B content marketing efforts affect your target audience. Do they like and interact with your content? Does a certain content format attract them better than others?

Analyzing this can help you create content that has greater potential to drive engagement and conversions.

But what if you have just started your B2B business?

Then, you may not have enough content and user data to analyze what works best for your audience. You need to first focus on publishing high-quality content and promoting it through multiple channels.

Once you’ve got enough data, you can analyze the impact of your marketing strategy and improve it.

2. Document Your B2B Content Marketing Strategy

One of the top challenges marketers face is failing to create content that generates leads, attracts more traffic, and resonates with their audiences.

Image via SEMrush

How can you overcome these challenges?

The easiest way to overcome them is to document your content marketing strategy and process to boost efficiency. You should create a plan that offers you a 360-degree view of your B2B marketing tasks, activities, and deliverables.

You can use a chatbot to get good traffic on your blog posts. Chatbots are great options for your content marketing strategy because they can connect 24*7 with your customers and provide quick replies, thus gathering leads and generating sales.

It should include details about:

• The goals and metrics you will use to track the performance of your content.
• Your audience, what they need, and how you can solve their problems.
• The channels your audience uses and how they search for information.
• The type of content to create, formats to use, topics to cover, and keywords to include.
• The tools you will use during each stage of your B2B content marketing process.

You should then create a content calendar that outlines when and how to create, publish, promote, and track the performance of each post.

But why is it important to document your plan?

Documenting your plan can help you visualize your strategy. You can get a complete picture of where it’s headed and which areas need improvement. It also allows you to map out deadlines, keep your tasks organized, and identify opportunities for meaningful collaborations.

3. Don’t Skimp on Research

Successful B2B content marketing requires that you understand who your target audience is and what they need. You can’t just rely on guesswork or write on topics that you find interesting. 

You need to research your competitors and target audience.

Conducting audience research enables you to understand who your audience is, their needs, problems, and what motivates them to buy. 

It helps you identify phrases that your audience uses to look for information, brands, and products and understand their search intent. You can then include these phrases in your content to attract and nurture leads.

Conducting competitor research, on the other hand, can give you insights into the strategies other marketers are leveraging. You can find ways to run your marketing campaigns differently.

While conducting competitor research, you should check:

• Their domain authority
• Their backlink sources
• Their posting frequency on various channels
• Promotional strategies
• Keywords they rank for

With this information, you can discover areas to focus on and new ways to boost your ROI.

4. Optimize Your Content for Better Performance

As a B2B marketer, your goal is to create content that offers value while keeping your audience engaged. You need to ensure that it helps you attract qualified leads, drive conversions, and boost your campaign ROI.

But how can you get there?

The answer lies in leveraging the right content tactics to boost your marketing ROI.

These include:

• Repurposing content: Find ways to use each piece of content in various ways.

For example, you can republish an article as a podcast episode or video. You can also compile multiple blog posts that talk about a broader topic into a resourceful ebook.

• Updating old content: You should update old posts by adding the latest strategies, statistics, and examples to it. This will help you keep all your posts fresh and relevant.
• Promoting content: Promote your newly-published and updated posts on channels that your audience visits frequently to increase its reach.

For example, you can share links on social media, cold pitch to your blog subscribers or republish your posts on article syndication websites.

• Personalizing messaging: You should personalize your brand’s messaging and offer custom solutions to different audience segments.

Here example, you can send personalized email copy and offers to prospects, depending on what stage of the buying funnel they are at.

• Leveraging influencers: You can find influencers in your niche who can promote your brand. You can turn them into your brand ambassadors or have them review your products and ask them for referrals for your products and services.

Using these tactics can help boost your content marketing ROI over time.

You can use them to improve your search rankings and become a go-to resource for people who are looking for similar information. Great content can translate into increased traffic, reduced bounce rates, higher engagement, more conversions, and better marketing ROI.

Ready to Boost Your B2B Content Marketing ROI?

These are just some of the ways you can use to boost your B2B content marketing ROI.

You need to create valuable content, use it strategically to attract potential buyers, monitor how your audience responds to it, and offer them more value.

Do you have any questions about the strategies mentioned above? Share them in the comments below. I’ll be happy to help!

With rapid-paced advancements in algorithms, AI, and data collection,search engines are getting smarter. 

It has always been the objective of Google and other search engines to serve the most relevant information to those searching, and with improved search engine intelligence, internet search results are becoming more tailored to the individual making the query.

How does your business remain competitive?

One word, and one acronym: Semantic SEO.

How do you accomplish that? Don’t write for SEO.

Confused? 

What is Semantic SEO?

Search engines have evolved to recognize when you’re writing specifically for SEO, and

Google and other search giants are now ranking content in order of the value it provides, relying on context rather than scanning for specific keywords or phrases.

Search engines have reached the point where they recognize nuance. For example, if you are writing an in-depth piece on how to successfully live stream a video, search engines will recognize, through the context of the content, that when you mention ‘stream’ you are talking about videos and not a body of water.

Because search engines are now measuring the quality of a piece of content, this often means pages that have been written for only the purpose of search engine visibility are seeing a decline in rankings in favor of content that provides the most important information.

This profound understanding of context means that marketers and copywriters need to write in-depth, comprehensive content that offer extremely high value to the reader.

What Qualifies as In-Depth Content?

In-depth content is typically longer than your average blog post, covers a wide range of details on a specific topic, and cites relevant and reputable sources. While there is no universal word count requirement for a piece of content to be considered in-depth, consider that in order to cover a topic in detail is likely to be over several hundred words, if not more.  

How Do You Know Where to Begin?

If you’re struggling with writing for semantic SEO or what exactly your content should cover, there are a myriad of tools to help you. One of the easiest and most effective ways to discover what information potential audiences are looking for is to look at Google’s “People also ask” section on search results pages.This list of suggestions related search topics that users may find of interest. 

Another option for writing comprehensive content is to consider frequently asked questions. Chances are that if previous customers have asked a question about your product or service, that a future customer will have a similar inquiry. 

Tips for Writing for Semantic SEO

Write Authentically

As mentioned earlier, writing for semantic SEO doesn’t revolve around specific keywords and phrases. Instead of focusing on the saturation of keyphrases, write organically about your topic. You’ll likely use terms surrounding the topic that will signify context to Google.

Be One Step Ahead of Your Audience

The goal of semantic SEO is to leave no question unanswered, providing the most comprehensive information possible.

When writing your content, your aim should be to be inside the reader’s head as much as possible. Anticipate questions. Elaborate on topics, subtopics, subtopics of subtopics, and so on. Pay attention to the flow of information.

If you make mention of something, go into detail with your explanation. Write content that doesn’t raise questions that can’t be answered within your text. If a reader has to click away and perform another search engine query, you’ve lost your lead.

For example, let’s say you are a painting contractor in New Hampshire with the goal of ranking your website for ‘home painting in Concord.” You would create in-depth content about interior painting and related topics, such as types of paint, options for texture, the painting process, and any other questions that your audience might have on your interior painting services.

By creating an ‘encyclopedia’ on the topic, Google will view your content as authoritative, and respond by rewarding you with higher rankings.

Other Tips for Writing High-Ranking Web Content

Even if you write the most comprehensive, strategic, informational, and high quality content, if your content isn’t structured optimally, search engines will still rank other sites higher than your own. It is important to follow several rules of thumb when it comes to structuring content for SEO.

Formatting

Creating content that is formatted for a seamless user experience is crucial to your website rankings (not to mention, it’s just good customer service). Avoid large walls of text. Use headings, subheadings, and bulleted lists where possible. Search engines prefer serving easily navigable, organized content to users above content that is poorly formatted.

Mobile optimization

Over half of internet searches are conducted from mobile devices. With the rise in popularity, search engines are now prioritizing mobile-optimized. Mobile-friendliness includes writing in short, concise sentences and easy-to-read formatting as well as the design and technical elements of your website. Check the status of your website’s mobile-friendliness with Google’s mobile-optimization checking tool. 

SEO is in a Constant State of Change

As technology advances, search engines update their algorithms to provide internet users a smarter, more efficient, better experience. Semantic SEO is the direction search engine optimization is going; if your business intends to compete, It is essential to adapt and react to this evolution.

With the events and losses of 2020, it’s time for every business to rethink their marketing strategy. 

Are you looking to get ahead of the game? Maximize the power of social media this 2021!

Preparing your social media strategy as early as now puts you at an advantage to do better than your competitors.  

According to Buffer’s statistics, 73% of digital marketers believe that social media has been a game changer in their marketing strategies. 

Read more to learn how you can build an effective social media marketing strategy for 2021 in just 5 easy steps!

5-Step Guide On Building A Social Media Marketing Strategy For 2021

In the coming year, digital marketers are projecting a change in trends for social media, such as conversational marketing, use of automation, and video content marketing.  

Knowing these projections will make building the right strategy for your 2021 social media campaign easier! 

Looking for a quick guide? Here’s what you need to do: 

Research your niche and your competition

Research always comes first before launching a big project.

You can start by gathering information about your target audience and the conversations around your niche.

It is vital to keep in mind that social media users on different platforms don’t behave the same way.  

Based on Pew Research Center’s findings, Facebook and YouTube lead social media usage in the USA. 

By performing cross-channel research, you can derive a formula to find the right type of content appropriate for your target audience.

Social media platforms use hashtags to make it easier to locate specific trends. This can be a useful tool to help you identify your ideal target audience. 

It’s also good to consider checking on your competitions within the social media networks.  

By studying your competitor’s techniques, you’ll learn from their mistakes and adapt what works for them. 

Plan your content

Quality content is crucial for the success of your strategy. 

From the data you’ve gathered, you’re well on your way to developing a solid social media plan. 

The goal is to create content that would spark conversation across different social media communities. 

For example, in the healthcare industry, effective healthcare content marketing prioritizes the blend between factual yet entertaining content. 

Sharing vital information on social media can be done in a compelling manner by producing content in the form of video blogs or infographics. 

When planning your content, remember to prioritize quality over quantity. 

A few high-quality posts than a bulk of low-quality posts will always win better in engagements. 

Designing and scheduling using social media tools

Visualized content, such as infographics, has also become a powerful material in social media. 

According to Facebook’s latest research, posts with images are 75% more effective than those with just a plain text. 

Luckily, with online graphic designing programs like Canva, you can now create aesthetically pleasing content in no time! 

The time of posting also plays a crucial factor in your engagements. 

According to Sprout Social, there are ideal days and time windows to get the best engagement, depending on the social media channels and your business type.

Scheduling tools like Hootsuite, Buffer, and Eclincher are popular applications that make social media management more efficient. 

When used to their full potential, these online tools and software will save your marketing team a lot of time and effort.

Engage consistently and effectively

With a well-researched content planned and scheduled, you’re one step closer to a successful social media campaign. 

However, it’s not enough to keep posting new content. It’s also essential to engage with your followers and actively spark conversations. 

When connecting with your audience, it’s necessary to be both proactive and reactive.

If your accounts are getting a lot of mentions online, be reactive by making sure all these mentions are being responded to. 

On the other hand, you should also grab the opportunity to join the conversation whenever someone mentions your brand indirectly. 

Engaging even without getting tagged lets people know you’re being proactive online. 

Answering your customers’ inquiries is also vital in maintaining a healthy and effective engagement. 

According to Sprout Social, consumers are becoming more critical of a brand’s customer service responsibilities online. 

49% of the respondents stated that they’d start unfollowing brands who show poor customer service on their social media. 

When responding to your followers, don’t forget to show your human side with your response and make them feel at ease. 

It may be best to dedicate a person in your team to be in charge of customer support through social media, so your brand can stay on top of every concern. 

Monitor your performance

2021 is no different when it comes to prioritizing your social media metrics. 

There are always going to be trend-changes in social media that can make your plan ineffective. 

Some of the parameters you should always look into are sales conversion, engagement rate, and audience growth.

Find out what works and make necessary adjustments to get back on track. 

Keeping an eye on your audience’s behavior across different channels should also be considered. 

You can always pair up consistent social listening with performance monitoring to take control of your marketing strategy. 

Plan Ahead To Succeed In 2021!

The 2020 pandemic has caused many changes in the world of digital marketing, and it’s projected to carry over next year. 

Moving into 2021, adapting your strategy to the changing trends will ensure the success of your social media marketing efforts. 

Starting with comprehensive research on your target audience and specific social media platforms is always a good first step to take in any social media planning.  

Once you’ve laid down your plan, take advantage of the various online tools to design and schedule your posts.

Don’t forget to regularly engage with your audience about trends, stimulating their interest, and responding to queries. 

At the end of the day, it’s important to keep a close eye on your performance to analyze whether or not your strategy is working. 

With these core steps in mind, your social media strategy will surely weather any challenges the incoming year has. 

When it comes to website traffic, no one can rely entirely on referral or paid traffic. Generating organic traffic is the most sustainable way that works in the long run.

That is why, in this post, the focus will be entirely on ways to generate organic web traffic. This is not one of those long lists of tips and tricks, but a solid 5-step approach that can almost guarantee results.

Are you ready to learn more?

Here are five tried-and-tested tactics to generate website traffic organically. These tactics will not just work one time but will show results over the long term. Let’s get started.

1. Create Targeted and Useful Content

The most important advice anyone can give you for increasing organic website traffic is to write for your target audience.

Before you create content, you should have a good understanding of who your target audience is, what they like to read about, etc. You need to do thorough audience research to understand who you’re writing for and then create content that your audience will love.

Your content should be current, relevant, actionable, and accurate. There is no substitute for good content if you want to drive organic traffic to your blog.

2. Optimize Your Website Content for Keywords

This is a tactic that everyone knows about, but few do it right.

Optimizing for keywords does not mean keyword stuffing. It means that you need to maintain a good keyword density to rank high on the search engine results pages (SERP), but not so much that it is flagged as spam.

So, what should you do?

Here are a few tips to get you started:

• Use a keyword research tool to find and select keywords that you want to target.
• Also, do some competitor research to see which keywords and topics they are targeting.
• Create a separate list of keywords for your landing pages and your blog.
• Make a content calendar with publishing dates, topics, and keywords targeted by each piece of content.
• Maintain 1-1.5% keyword density for blog posts and slightly higher for landing pages.
• Start posting SEO-friendly content and track the results.

An additional tip is to use more long-tail keywords that have decent volume and are more targeted. This will help you generate more relevant organic web traffic.

SEO and content marketing go hand-in-hand and these keyword optimization tips are useful for both. Use these tips to make your website more SEO-friendly to generate more organic traffic.

3. Choose Trending Topics in Your Niche

Just like keyword research, topic research should also be an integral part of your SEO strategy to increase web traffic organically.

There are two important aspects to this. First, you should find the most popular and trending topics in your niche that people will love to read about. Second, your content titles should be able to grab the audience’s attention and get them to click on your search result link.

You can find hot topics using any good SEO tool and by checking on what your competitors are doing. To choose an appropriate title, search for that topic on Google, and check the first few results.

This will give you an idea about what kind of topics rank and what the user intent behind those searches is. It will make it easier for you to create content that is in-line with audience expectations.

4. Create Evergreen Content

Evergreen content is something that stays relevant over the years and continues to drive organic traffic on its own.

This could be something like an exhaustive resource on a topic covering everything a beginner would like to learn. It could also be a checklist, cheat-sheet, or any other type of actionable content that tells people how to do a certain thing.

Take this exhaustive glossary of terms and definitions created by the Search Engine Journal. This is the type of content that will never become outdated and will continue generating traffic.

Image Source: Search Engine Journal

Think about such topics from your industry and create an exhaustive resource like this that will not only rank but will also continue generating traffic for years. Also, don’t forget to optimize your content for SEO.

Some common types of evergreen content include lists, how-to guides, case studies, lists, encyclopedia-type entries, checklists, etc.

Pro Tip: Keep adding more information to your evergreen content from time to time, to make it more exhaustive. This will help you promote content through multiple channels and drive consistent traffic. Above all you don’t have to just depend on organic search traffic.

5. Leverage Structured Data and Rich Snippets

Getting more organic traffic is as much about higher SERP rankings as it is about getting people to choose your link over other search results. While the tips for generating more traffic mentioned above focused on the ranking part, this one tackles the latter.

What exactly is structured data and how can it help you get more organic traffic?

Structured data is basically a coded form of data that helps search engines understand your content better. Not just that, search engines also use it to display your search results in a better way using Rich Snippets.

Search results with rich snippets appear differently than other results and users are more likely to click on them.

Here’s an example of search results with (the first one) and without (the second one) structured data.

Image Source: Google Search

The one with structured data has a picture, rating, and other details that regular search results don’t have. Search results that appear in the form of rich snippets have a higher likelihood of getting clicks.

So, use structured data to get featured on the SERPs as rich snippets and generate more organic website traffic.

Ready to Increase Your Website Traffic Organically?

These are the most effective ways to generate organic traffic for your website and improve your search rankings. Use all five of these to see tangible results in terms of a steady increase in your website traffic.

Also, conduct a website audit periodically to understand which pages are generating more organic traffic for your blog or website. You can use these insights to create more such content for your target audience.

Overall, remember that the key to generating organic traffic is good content. All the best!

Are you a newbie or an expert in digital marketing?

Are you using the right professional SEO audit tools to optimize your content on the website?

Don’t worry, here I am going to give you the few tools that improve your skills in digital marketing.

Each and every digital marketer should know how to perform a professional SEO site audit, but doing so entirely “by hand” is a time-consuming and difficult task.

Instead of spending much time on manually handling the SEO, a digital marketer should focus on the most reliable SEO audit tools. These tools will help the digi people to address critical website issues, that creates or brings a negative impact on the site performance.

As a digital marketer, if you want to know more trends, pitfalls and how to establish your business, there are certifications like digital marketing course, SEO marketing, etc.

To help you, I have presented the best SEO audit tools that help to make your website more search engine friendly and achieve success.

Yeah, now let’s walk through each and every SEO audit tool in -depth.

Top 7 SEO auditing and monitoring tools in 2020

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free service provided by Google that enables advertisers, web developers or site administrators to easily track their appearance in Google Search results.

Google Search Console provides tools and reports that help users identify some of the most common technical SEO issues. You can use the platform to check that Google’s web browsers are able to access all pages on your site, ensure that new pages are indexed as planned, and receive updates when Google detects indexing or spam problems on your website.

Aside from the professional SEO features, the console enables businesses to browse the complete backlink profile of their website and track all their keyword ranking positions on the SERPs.

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is among the leading companies in the field of technical SEO auditing, with a consumer base that includes Google, Apple, Amazon and Disney. The company’s SEO Spider tool is a web crawler that quickly analyses web pages of any size and provides technical SEO personalized recommendations.

Use an SEO spider to recognise broken links on your website, find sections with poorly customizable or missing metadata, generate accurate XML sitemaps that speed up indexing, diagnose and fix broken redirect chains, find duplicate pages, and more.

Semrush Site Audit

SEMrush is one of the most reliable and popular all-in-one search marketing software platforms in the world. The system enables its professional Seo audit capabilities through a single site audit tool that diagnoses over 130 technical and on-page SEO issues.

SEMrush covers the full range of technical SEO performance concerns in the execution of a website audit. The major difference between SEMrush and these other tools lies in their dashboard and reporting capabilities. SEMrush offers thematic reports, custom reports that users can access that are specific to one aspect of technical SEO.

Custom reports for crawlability, site performance and international SEO are available – just to name a few. The tool also highlights the major technical issues affecting performance, making it easy for digital marketers to prioritise their workflow optimisation.

Ahrefs SEO audit

Ahrefs competes for high positions among the best and most reliable all-in-one SEO resources. To its credit, Ahrefs offers one of the most detailed and user-friendly technical SEO audit resources you can find on this list.

Ahrefs would provide you with all the computing tools you need to conduct your audits and other services. The Ahrefs site audit software automatically identifies over 100 technical and on-page SEO issues that could have a negative effect on your SERP rankings.

The best thing is that such issues are organized by category and analysed into full-colour chart reports that you can print and either share with your team or present to your customers. The types used here include output, HTML tags, social tags, content quality, incoming and outgoing links, broken images or scripts.

Hubspot Website Grader

HubSpot launched a Web Grader tool that helped companies explore search engine optimization opportunities. Since a lot has changed since then, the company has developed a new and updated version of the tool for 2020.

It is a free online SEO audit tool that generates personalized reports based on the performance, mobile-ready, SEO and security, etc.

To get the grade of your website, go to the Grader website, enter your URL and email, and then get your ranking. In a matter of seconds, you can see a ranking between 1 and 100 as well as a comprehensive chart. 

When you have received your study, you can see actionable insights into how you can boost the efficiency of your website to drive more traffic.

BuzzStream

BuzzStream could be the cheapest way to handle your outreach to people who can provide inbound links to your website. 

While backlinks to your website are vital to Google ranking well, the outreach you do when building a connexion may feel a lot like a cold call. BuzzStream makes it easy to find the right people, come up with interesting email addresses, and watch who’s going to approve them.

BuzzStream lets you recognise outreach candidates based on their profession and how they are active across different social networks — so you know who would be most open to your backlink request and raise your Google ranking.

Moz’s Pro tools

The Moz Pro subscription is used as an all-in-one tool to increase the search ranking of your company. Moz’s range of research tools provides subscribers with the information they need to identify SEO opportunities, monitor progress, report and maximise their overall efforts.

For example, the Crawl Test tool uses Moz’ own web crawler, RogerBot, to examine up to 3,000 links on a given URL. When completed, users will receive an email report describing the data for each page linked to the site.

Conclusion

All the above-mentioned SEO audit and monitoring tools help digital marketers to improve their website performances to a great extent. Each and every tool has its own importance in terms of efficiency. Try them one after the other, based on your requirements. Even if you found any other helpful tools just comment on them.

Every business wants to grow. 

Every brand owner wants to increase sales and make more money. The steady flow of traffic to your website is the only way to be successful in today’s technical and online environment.

Little that they know, the major source of traffic comes from Google, which makes it crucial to rank on the top pages. But this is significant to gain a good amount of traffic, visibility and brand credibility.

If your site shows up on the first page of Google it suggests that Google is trusting you and your services and is approving your offerings products or services to its millions of users. 

But the things become very hard for you when you begin losing the position once again here and when your website experiences a significant drop in organic search rankings As a result you will lose traffic, business sometimes loses credibility, technical glitches also may lead to black-listing and even drop in revenue.

Here are a couple of reasons your SEO ranking might have  dropped significantly: 

1. A New Google Update 

Google is always looking for ways to improve strategies and results by making algorithm changes.

The algorithm is a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations, especially by a computer.

The algorithms of Google change so frequently, leaving many companies to wonder what they should do now to fix the issue. If not managed well, this at times also result in lower site rankings, significant edits in the website and sometimes even lead to restructuring

Of course, you could miss out on several points to determine the actual reason since understanding how Google algorithms actually work requires expertise. To avoid being crippled by Google’s updates, use effective cross-channel marketing and traffic strategy that includes social media and other marketing channels. Keep your website clean and optimized schedule regular checks if need be. 

2. On site-related issues 

Like many others, you may have forgotten to fix the dead links and redirect before getting your site live. Always checking the dead or inaccessible pages of the site is important for any good SEO. 

It is very easy to fix this issue if you have basic information on Google Console since the dashboard will show if any such issues exist on your current site. 

Having a developer handy who understands the basic google set-up should be of great help.

3. Checking the Lost Links 

Another reason your site ranking might have dropped is that you have lost links.

It’s normal if you have lost a couple of inbound links. But if you see that you have lost a lot of links, this might be the reason for the drop in rankings. 

It generally happens when google finds out that the links are unnatural and Google hates unnatural links more than anything else. Keep in mind that Google can penalize you for a long time or sometimes permanently if this continues.

On the other hand, if inbound links to your site are broken or lost, you have to find out exactly where those links are coming from and why they are broken. So that you can either remove, replace, or retain them. But please make sure that your SEO and SEM team is checking it and understanding the root problem.

Sometimes the links break or change because of the new Google update. In that case, you can request the site owner to restore them or fix the related cause to retain

4. You Have Got Any New Links Too Quickly 

This is also one of the most common Black Hat SEO techniques. Many professionals offer this as quick results which are visible in the short term but bounce back with negative reviews and repercussions later. Therefore leaving the site owner confused and this also calls for a lot of rework in some cases.

Despite the fact that Google considers the regular link loss as a negative activity on your site, It’s also bad if your site is gaining a large number of links quickly. The process should ideally be regularized and 

Google considers this as a suspicious activity. In professional language, it is known as the link spam that may trigger Google to punish your site for the presence of unnatural connections. 

Link spamming can lead you to get your site penalized. Take the time to develop a high quality link building strategy to avoid getting penalized by Google and grow your organic search traffic. Always choose quality over quantity.

5. Maybe You Have Received Site Penalties 

In most of the cases, people are unaware of the manual and algorithm penalties from Google. 

You can check if your website was penalized by an automatic penalty is to login to Google analytics and review your Google organic traffic. If you find a drastic drop in your traffic during the dates that Google released an algorithm change, then there is a possibility that you were hit and that’s the reason that your traffic dropped.

You are much advised to have a look under the “Manual Actions” section to check if any suggestions are there from Google to sort out any such issues.

6. Check What Your Target Audience is looking 

Gone are the days  when SEO and SEM were restricted to a couple of methods. Earlier SEO worked fine because the digitization of businesses was still in its nascent stage. With technology and small phones reaching the entire customer base across segments, the SEO game is evolving. However, today the manner in which it works has totally changed. It is also because the digital behaviors and consumer insights have evolved. They expect simplification, ease of access and user driven interface. 

In the previous times putting the keywords directly from the URL to the content, headers and title was sufficient to get your site in good ranking. 

But nowadays that’s not enough to gain a good amount of traffic. You need content marketing to build your brand. You have to get into details, analyze the visitor behaviors and must find out  what your audience needs. Try to see and understand from the point of view of your audience. What phrases your audience is using to find the content and write your content accordingly.

7. Page Speed

Page speed matters a lot. How fast your page will load directly affects your ranking. The internet speed has evolved from 2G to 5G and so are the expectations of world wide web visitors.

If your page loads slowly your bounce rate will increase because no one likes to wait. There are so many more websites where they can find their answers and they will just leave your website and it is also important for the user experience.

To find out your website speed go to google page speed insights and work on your page speed. 

Here’s a 10 Point checklist for SEO and SEM experts who want to keep up their work:

• Always keep your content optimized because the content is part of your website.
• Maintain the content freshness and avoid plagiarism or duplicate content. Quality content is the priority for good SEO.
• You should know about your target audience, the things they like, their pain points and the questions they can ask from Google. By knowing what questions they ask and what types of queries they might ask google also helps you in keyword research.
• Keep your On-page optimization always in check by reviewing your title tags, meta description, optimize your images and videos, alt attributes and proper use of heading tags.
• Focus on interlinking your content with each other properly. Interlinking gives Google an idea of your website and also improves user experience. Give more link value to your important pages and posts than less valuable pages. This will set up a hierarchy on your site. By using the right interlinking strategy you can boost your SEO.
• Claim Google my business listing for your company. It is essential for Local SEO as it allows your business listing to appear in the local search results for queries specific to your product or services.
• Setup Google webmaster and analytics for your site to analyse the data for your SEO. Without setting these accounts you can’t analyse your SEO data.
• Make your site mobile user friendly. If you will notice around you the major number of people are using browsers on their mobile devices. Which makes it crucial for your site to be mobile friendly and also for better user experience.
• Use Accelerated Mobile (AMP). It is an open source project that enables webpages to load almost instantly for mobile users.
• Make sure that your SEO strategy follows Google Webmaster Guidelines. Using black hat SEO techniques can increase your site ranking rapidly but it can also get your site penalized for a long time or sometimes permanently. 
• Your site should have an XML sitemap because they make it easier for Google to crawl your website pages.
• Add testimonials and privacy statements on your site to build trust.

Conclusion

Although sometimes it becomes really hard to understand the reasons why your rankings on Google are dropping significantly. But if you actually work on the above-mentioned points and work consistently about your content marketing and SEO audits, you will understand the reasons behind your dropping site ranks. 

Are you tired of trailing behind on the search engine results pages (SERPS)?

I get you. Nobody likes losing out to competitors. But what should bother you most is when you invest effort and money in SEO but don’t get the desired results.

If that sounds familiar, you’re reading the right article.

Your SEO efforts may be failing if you are investing in outdated SEO techniques, like targeting short, popular keywords.

You need to revamp your SEO strategy and start focusing on long-tail keywords.

Sound weird?

Actually, it’s a sound strategy, backed by research and successful use cases.

In this post, I’ll explain how you can take advantage of long-tail keywords to top the SERPs.

But first, let’s talk about what long-tail keywords are and why they matter.

What Are Long-Tail Keywords and Why Do They Matter?

Long-tail keywords contain three or more words. They are very precise but unpopular search terms. By “unpopular,” I mean they generate fewer searches than corresponding shorter keywords. Then, why do I recommend using them?

That’s because long-tail keywords convert exceptionally well. They closely resemble the actual search queries that people type in search engines. Since they match user intent so precisely, they get more clicks and your website gets more targeted traffic.

Need evidence?

One of my blog posts about Instagram Spaces is getting a lot of traction on Google. I compiled the keywords it’s ranking for, and here is what I found:

Note that “how to space out Instagram captions” (a long-tail keyword) beats its shorter counterpart (“Instagram spaces”) in most aspects. It’s generating more clicks, click-throughs (CTR) and gets me to position two on the SERPs.

Though it’s lagging in impressions, that doesn’t impact my website traffic as much as the other parameters.

If you’re still not convinced about the efficacy of long-tail keywords, take a look at their main advantages below.

1. Long-Tail Keywords Have Low Competition

There is fierce competition to rank for short keywords. But their targeting is not as precise as long-tail keywords.

Fewer marketers target long-tail keywords, though the trend is changing after Google’s Panda update. Lower competition means more opportunities to rank as well as more cost savings (more on that later).

Image via Instapages

To verify the low-competition claim, I did some keyword research of my own.

I compared the keyword difficulty (KD) of three semantically-similar keywords (LSI): “lose weight,” “how to lose weight,” and “how to lose weight fast.” Take a look at the results:

Image via SEMrush

The longest keyword had the lowest difficulty score (KD%). That means you can reach the top of the SERPs faster if you build your content around longer keywords. That’s good news as moving up one spot on SERPs can improve your CTR by nearly 30.8%, according to Backlinko.

2. Long-Tail Keywords Help Drive Qualified Traffic

I already mentioned how content that is optimized for long-tail keywords satisfies user intent.

What exactly is “user intent” or “search intent”? It is what triggers users to turn to devices (the web, in this case) in search of information. User intent can be transactional (buying-type), informational (educational-type), or navigational (locational-type).

If you understand a searcher’s intent, you can present them with content they are looking for, which can push them down the sales funnel.

Long-tail keywords help you align content with user intent.

When a searcher types a query like “affordable camping gear in Texas,” (a long-tail keyword), you know they are ripe to convert. You can serve them listicles of top suppliers or tools to search for vendors, or to your own product pages (if that’s relevant).

For doing this, you can create SEO pages with exact-match keyword anatomy. You can include the long-tail keywords in the page copy, meta-tags, and images so that Google crawlers don’t miss your page. You can create an SEO friendly landing page using the best landing page software.

If your content is insightful and high-quality, there’s a good chance that the searcher will engage with it. Being broad terms, shorter keywords don’t have scope for such precise matching. That’s why long-tail keywords are more effective in driving targeted traffic organically.

3. Long-Tail Keywords Are Cheaper

Now, we come to the best part about long-tail keywords.

What’s that?

Long-tail keywords have lower cost-per-click (CPC) compared to their shorter peers.

Image via Instapages

CPC is the actual amount you pay when you invest in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. If you build your Google ads around long-tail keywords, you incur lower advertising costs since these keywords have a low CPC. As a result, you can draw more mileage from your advertising spend.

Refer to this image from the “lose-weight” example we saw earlier.

Each click on Google ads that target “how to lose weight” will incur you a cost of $1.21. The cost goes up as the target keyword gets shorter.

In short, long-tail keywords can help you excel at organic as well as paid searches.

How Can You Use Long-Tail Keywords to Drive Website Traffic

As you can make out, long-tail keywords can help you win the coveted top position on Google. No matter how often Google algorithms are updated, targeting long-tail keywords remains the preferred strategy of experienced content marketers.

Yes, long-tail keywords are the secret weapon to win more website visitors. But that doesn’t mean that you should stuff them in your landing pages and other pages. After Google’s RankBrain algorithm, such marketing ploys can get you a red flag.

Here are five ways you can use long-tail keywords naturally in your website content.

1. Write Keyword-Rich Headlines

Your page headlines grab the attention of Google crawlers first. So, front-load your long-tail keywords in your page titles.

If you’re wondering how to write catchy headlines, use Google’s Keywords Planner, Just insert your target keyword and hit the “Get Ideas” button.

Image via Google Keyword Planner

Google will list variations of your target keyword.

Next, identify the search intent of the keyword variation you select. Simply, copy-paste the keyword into Google’s search bar and click on “Enter.” Analyze the kind of pages ranking on the SERP. You will learn what kind of content Google indexes for the keyword.

Image via Google

In this example, I can see that service pages are topping the charts for the keyword “affordable search engine optimization.” So, I can either create a new, optimized service page or keyword-enrich my existing service page.

Whatever format you select, ensure that the keyword should fit naturally in your headlines and sub-headings. You can try LSI keywords in the Related Search section or auto-fill suggestions.

2. Write Long-Form Content

When we compare long-form and short-form content from an SEO perspective, longer content wins, hands down.

Why, you ask?

Because longer content offers more opportunities to add long-tail keywords. Your page’s keyword density increases. Plus, they allow you to deep dive into the topic and deliver value to consumers. All these factors add up to make your page attractive to search engines and visitors.

Since our key concern today is attracting website traffic, you need not worry about losing social audiences who don’t have the patience to read lengthy content. You can also use tools like LinkedIn automation tools, Facebook tools, etc to get best results for your social audiences.

3. Optimize File Names

Lastly, don’t forget to add long-tail keywords to your page URLs. Enrich your image URLs as well. The Backlinko research I cited earlier shows that if your page URL perfectly matches your target keywords, the organic CTR soars.

Image via Backlinko

Even Google recommends this. Their Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide says that  site URLs should resonate with the page content, which is molded around keywords.

Image via Google

Are You Ready to Be a Long-Tail Pro?

Long-tail keywords are effective but underrated. However, seasoned marketers vouch for their effectiveness, especially for driving organic traffic. Today, I’ve explained how they can help you excel at PPC marketing as well.

Do you have any questions about SEO for website optimization? Leave them in the comments below. I’m always happy to answer.

If it often feels like search engine optimization success is a lot like trying to hit a constantly moving target… that’s because it largely is. Google is the biggest search engine on Earth and they’re constantly making adjustments to their site’s algorithm that throw rankings into a constant state of flux.

But rather than looking for that one “silver bullet” technique you can use to get to the top of the SERPS, it’s best to just forget all that entirely. Instead, focus on those small-yet-essential SEO moves that, when taken together, add up to something more powerful than anyone could ever be on its own.

Case in point: what follows is a list of some of the most important SEO tips for you to utilize in 2020 and beyond. All of them bring something unique to the table and all are certainly worth a closer look.

Understand What Matters… and What Doesn’t

One of the most important things to understand about the current state of SEO is that things are essentially in a constant state of flux. This is largely happening by design, as Google is always trying to close loopholes and stop people from taking advantage of the system they’ve worked so hard to build in the first place.

Therefore, it’s almost more important to know what doesn’t matter in terms of modern-day search engine optimization best practices than it is to learn what does. Running afoul of Google won’t just get you penalized – it could potentially get you delisted altogether if your violations are egregious enough.

Case in point: keywords. Gone are the days when all you really had to do to rank highly was cram your page with as many “relevant” keywords as possible. Google in particular has been very clear over the years that to rank highly, your content needs to provide something of genuine value to those who will be consuming it. Not just Google’s search engine “spiders” – but real, living human beings.

Now, that’s not to say that keywords aren’t important – because they are. In addition to including relevant keywords in the title tag and meta description of your content (so that people can quickly confirm they’ve landed on the type of page that they were searching for), you should still include them in the body as naturally and as organically as possible.

But don’t start with the keywords and try to work your way backwards to the content. Instead, head to a site like Respona to see what real people are searching for and what topics they’re interested in. Then, craft content around those ideas and add something tangible to the discussion that they may not otherwise have had access to. If you build your content around these hot-button topics, you won’t have to worry about finding ways to jam in as many keywords as possible after the fact. Your high quality, relevant and valuable content will have already essentially taken care of that by design.

Infographics: More Powerful Than Ever

Everyone knows that it’s a good idea to create social media graphics because this type of content is naturally more popular (read: shareable) on sites like Facebook and Twitter than something that lacks relevant visuals. Infographics, on the other hand, are your opportunity to take these effects one step further by helping to build brand awareness and increase your SEO prowess at the exact same time.

Infographics are essentially your opportunity to have your cake and eat it, too, as they still allow you to tell a full “story” with your content but you get to express as much of that narrative in a visual way as you can. However, there are still a few rules that you should keep in mind the next time you sit down with a tool like Visme (which I founded) to create that next compelling Infographic.

Experts agree that:

• The most shared Infographics tend to have an average word count of about 396 words. So don’t assume you can get away with only visuals, but also don’t assume that there’s no such thing as “too long” for the accompanying text.
• The average size of the most popular Infographics are around 3683 pixels by 804 pixels. In other words, don’t make people scroll too much and make sure that your content can be adequately consumed on devices with smaller screens like smartphones and tablets.
• Roughly 73% of all Infographics use some type of identifiable color scheme – meaning that you need to use every tool in your arsenal to really create the impression you’re after. An Infographic is more than just a black screen with pictures and white text on it. You need to think about the color choices you’re making for each element and how they all tie back into the main theme that you’re going for, narratively speaking.

Even More SEO Best Practices

Finally, there are a number of major elements you’ll want to account for to help your site rank as highly as possible – all of which have less to do with the content itself and are more about the way that content operates on the web.

These types of tips are especially true if you’re focused on WordPress SEO in particular, as that particular service essentially gives you complete control over the architecture of your site from top to bottom.

For the absolute best results, remember to:

• Use SEO-friendly URLs. As a rule of thumb, try to make your URL something that is easy for an actual human to remember. Sure, a Google spider may be able to make sense of “www.mywebsite.com/998eeuroiiua7”, but an actual person is never going to be able to remember that and it certainly won’t help your organic traffic.
• Use the most mobile-friendly website design that you can. If your site doesn’t look perfect on a smartphone or tablet, you need to make some significant changes. Google has been incredibly clear that mobile-friendliness is a major part of their current algorithm, which means that you need to care about it, too.
• Improve page load speeds as much as possible. The vast majority of all people who come to your site will slam that “Back” button and never return if your page takes longer than three seconds to load. With a bounce rate that high (and a time on page rate that low), Google will immediately take notice – and your rankings will suffer as a result.
• Use the right tools. WordPress, in particular, has all sorts of social media plugins that you can use for social media promotion, and tools like Yoast SEO are great for adding keywords, titles, meta descriptions and more.

Provided that you follow all of these top SEO tips for 2020, your ranking won’t be something you have to worry about for much longer. Your visibility will go sky-high and at that point, your website will be able to speak for itself – exactly the way it should be.

On-page SEO ranking factors can have a huge impact on your website’s search engine rankings. How you optimize your web pages affects your site’s ability to rank better in the search results. 

SEO experts suggest you should always focus on on-page SEO since it is an integral part of SEO as a whole. Moreover, the SEO landscape is evolving and so it is crucial that your knowledge of on-site optimization is up to date.

Here are 8 essential on-site SEO factors that affect your site’s ranking.

1. Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (EAT)

EAT is the foundation that raters from Google use to evaluate content creators, websites, and webpages as a whole. 

EAT was created to ensure that websites with low-quality content get less visibility in the search results. And websites with high-quality content are rewarded with higher rankings. 

EAT is vital especially if the content of your website covers YMYL or “Your Money Or Your Life” topics. 

Be sure to:

• Be legit. Have values. Do what real companies would do. Care about your customers. Hire experts if you can.

• Work so you can show Google about your brand’s expertise and value.

2. Content Audit

Most content creators focus on creating fresh content while neglecting to check their existing ones. 

According to a survey by SEMRUSH, the most effective methods used to improve content performance are:

• SEO or Search Engine Optimization (67%)

• Repurposing or updating existing content (51%)

• Making use of user-generated content (11%)

You should do content audits on a regular basis as this can give a boost to your SEO strategy.

Content audits help you:

• Assess your existing content if it is gaining ROI and achieving its goals.

• Identify the types of content that are currently working for your website.

• Determine if your content’s information needs an update or not.

3. A Properly Optimized Web Page

For a web page to be considered ideal, it should:

• Be relevant to a specific topic whether a single object or a product. The subject should be specified across the content. The subject should be included in the title tag, URL, and in the image alt text.

• Provide content that is unique for a given subject.

• Link back to the homepage. 

• Link back to the category page.

4. User engagement

Optimizing a web page is only half the battle. The other half is about ensuring your visitors stay on your website longer. They should be interacting with your pages and keep coming back for more.

To keep visitors who are already engaged to your site might be somewhat difficult to do but it is doable.

To increase user engagement, you should focus on:

• Content optimization

• Site speed

• Good website design

• User experience

• Responsiveness and 

• Mobile-friendliness

5. SEO Writing

SEO writing or “writing for SEO” is the process of creating articles with both search engines and users in mind. It is vital for your digital marketing strategy since amazing content is still king. 

To put it this way, SEO writing is the combination of your amazing content and a solid on-page SEO. 

A great way to connect with your potential customers is by finding all the questions they ask online. And then create content that has the answers to those questions.

Don’t create content for the sake of having one for your site. Keep in mind that you’re writing content for your target audience. Whatever content you create, it should be:

• High-quality

• Valuable and

• Relevant

6. Page Content That Brings Traffic

The quality of a page’s content is what makes it worthy of its position on the search results page. The content itself is what internet users come to see. This is crucial to search engines, especially Google.

Information is a bit like the world’s markets, it is also affected by demand and supply. To supply demand and being linkable are two attributes of good page content. Supplying the largest demand is what makes a page content to be the best. 

But, being the best doesn’t matter if the page content is not linkable. If people can’t link to that page, Google will unlikely rank it. 

If a page is not visible in the search results, then the content failed to drive traffic to the site. 

Content that is not linkable is the same as the content that doesn’t supply a demand. It is not good for internet users and in the eyes of search engines as well. 

7. Meta Tags

Meta tags are HMTL elements found on a webpage’s source code, they don’t appear on the page itself. Nonetheless, they help search engines understand what your page is all about. 

Meta tags are no longer a huge ranking factor as they were years ago. However, inserting your keywords in the meta tags is one of the best practices of on-page SEO. 

Title Tags

Title tags state precisely the title of your or document or webpage. They are featured in search results pages and in your browser’s window. Title tags should be catchy enough for internet users to click through.

Your webpage might show up in the search results when someone uses the search phrase or keywords relevant to your page. However, whether internet users click on your meta title or not depends on how catchy they are.

Remember, there’s no point in creating amazing content when no one clicks on your title tags.

Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions define what your page is all about. Google and other search engines need to understand what’s on your page so they can serve them to the exact audience. 

Meta descriptions should be written in a way that piques the interest of internet users and makes them want to click through. 

Header Tags

Compelling header tags or headlines and subheadings help your page perform well on search. 

Great headlines can mean the difference between an impression and a click-through. This is why it is important to write them strategically. 

Just like your meta title, your headline should spark the interest of internet users. This would make them click through and read your content in its entirety. 

8. Keyword Cannibalization

Keyword Cannibalization happens when your site has articles that rank for a similar search query on Google. Either the articles on separate web pages are optimized for the same search phrase (keywords) or because they cover similar topics.

This is bad for your site’s on-page SEO because the pages on your site are competing with the same keyword. As a result, Google won’t be able to distinguish which page should rank higher. There’s a higher chance Google will both rank those pages lower instead. 

This is called Keyword Cannibalization since your pages are ‘eating’ away each other’s chances to rank higher. 

Read more: How To Find Keywords For Travel And Tourism Websites 

Final Thoughts

On-page SEO is vital since it helps Google and other search engines understand what the content of your web page is about. This will ensure your pages are served to your target audience for relevant searches.

It is also important that you are always updated with the changes in SEO as search algorithms are becoming more sophisticated as years go by.