Search Engine Optimization Archives - Page 14 of 14

September 29, 2020 by David Henderson

Online marketing is an essential part of growing a successful brand in today’s world. There are thousands or millions of potential customers waiting for you online. However, many websites and business owners only have modest budgets at best. Therefore, it is helpful to know some effective promotional strategies that can be implemented without spending a lot of money.

1. Do Some Keyword-Based SEO

Search engine optimization is the process of improving your online content to ensure that it ranks highly on search engine results pages. Advanced SEO requires knowledge, experience and the right tools. However, you can get started with some basic keyword research. For example, Google offers the Keyword Planner, which can help you find some valuable keywords for your website.

Look for keywords that are highly relevant to your site but not overly competitive. You are going to have a hard time ranking highly for “athletic shoes,” but you may have some success with “running shoe store in Kitchener,” for example. Add these keywords naturally into your website content.

2. Create a Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing is a technique that involves publishing informative blogs or articles that your audience is likely to search for. Returning to the athletic shoe example, you could publish some guides on how to find the right fitting shoe for different foot shapes and sizes. Another option may be a list of common foot injuries from running and how to resolve them.

With the right content management system for small business websites, you can easily create and share web content. This technique is completely free but can be time-consuming to do yourself.

3. Create a Google Business Listing

Google offers numerous tools to help businesses easily reach their customers. If your business relies on a local audience, a Google Business Profile listing may be one of the most valuable options for you. When you search for a business, you may have noticed that some have a box on the right side of the results. This includes key information about the company. You can control this with your Google business listing.

Sign up for Google Business Profile. From here, you can edit the information in your business listing, including address, open hours, website, phone number and more. This is something that every company should do. However, it is typically most impactful for local brands. It is a must-have local SEO tool.

4. Establish an Email Marketing Campaign

You can create an email marketing newsletter. Collect emails from current and potential customers and send them periodic messages that include information on sales promotions, new products, and special events.

The key to effective email marketing is providing value to your recipients. In other words, your emails should be about topics that attract your readers. It can be helpful to segment your email list based on interests.

Gather emails by offering something free in exchange for contact info. For example, you could provide some useful content or a webinar that requires registration using an email address. Alternatively, offer free tickets to an event in exchange for subscribing to your newsletter.

Get Professional Help

The above strategies are either cheap or free if you do them yourself. However, they can be time-consuming. If you are struggling to keep up with the marketing workload or want to achieve better results, consider hiring professional help. It is often a smart investment to hire a marketing agency and dedicate your time to running your business.

Unwired Web Solutions can help. Our team has empowered brands in Ontario and the rest of Canada to reach their growth goals. We offer options for SEO, web design, content marketing, and other services. Contact us today to learn more about these services and how we can help.

June 24, 2020 by David Henderson

Google takes hundreds of elements into account when it ranks your website. Although keywords are one big factor, elements of user experience, aka UX, is also considered. UX is about the user and concerns how easy your website is to use and navigate.

When visitors come to your site, can they understand your site and find what they want? UX also takes into account your site’s credibility and accessibility. When your site is designed to meet expectations for users, search engines use that information for search rankings. More importantly, users come back to your site.

Here are five tips for improving user experience.

1. How easy is it to read your website?

When users come to your website, the information needs to be organized in a way to let them easily find information. Use bulleted lists. Keep paragraphs short. Put in headings for easy skimming. The sad reality is that most people don’t read blocks of text; they’ll just scan the headers.

Use a conventional flow for your site:

Logo in the left-hand corner
Call-to-action at the top
Search feature at the top of the page
Contact information, social media icons and sign-up forms in the footer

Make sure your text stands out against the background. It’s okay to get creative, but keep UX in mind.

2. Is your content fresh and relevant?

Users who come to your site want updated information. Fresh content helps your site be found by search engines. Content that is up-to-date and interesting adds to your credibility. Create blog posts that offer new information about your industry and business to give customers insight. Meet consumers at any place along the sales journey, whether they’re just gathering information or ready to purchase.

3. Can users connect with you on social media?

Modern shoppers want to know about your business before walking into your store. Give customers a way to connect with you through social media. Your promotions and campaigns online can help you grow your customer base when you provide value. Giving ways for customers to easily find you on social media increases the user experience.

4. Do you interact with your customers?

When customers post reviews, negative or positive, do you answer? You need to post responses to users who interact with your business on social media and through Google Business Profile reviews. Not only does this keep current customers, but potential customers are watching your brand. They’ll get to know you through your engagement on your social media. Demonstrate your commitment to customer service and support.

5. Is your website optimized for performance?

Content is king, but the technical side of your website is just as important to UX as what you post. If you want users to click on something, make it obvious. Optimize your site to make pages load quickly and get rid of features that cause slow load-times. Make sure your website looks great on different screen sizes. Add metadata that helps search engines find your pages. Although your users may not recognize these things, ignoring the technical aspects of SEO decreases UX.

Analyze How People Are Using Your Site

Use analytical data to see how you are doing. Test different versions of your pages to see which performs better. Have a plan for using your website. Set goals and constantly work to achieve those goals.

Building a website isn’t as easy as putting words up and waiting for people to come. You have to be proactive and work hard to grow a customer base that responds to your brand. Talk to an SEO company about making your website SEO friendly and customer-oriented. User experience boosts your online presence by increasing customer engagement, which in turn helps your search engine rankings.

June 17, 2020 by David Henderson

Search engine optimization is one of the most important aspects of any marketing mix. By improving your website ranking in search results, you can also improve the efficacy of your other channels. In other words, when your business is easier to find, you earn more sales.

However, search engines are constantly changing. They update their algorithms regularly and introduce new features. These updates enhance the way that people search, but they also make optimization a moving target for businesses. Therefore, it is important to stay up to date with the latest trends. Furthermore, businesses must stay active with SEO in order to bring as many relevant visitors to their sites as possible.

Voice Search

It may be hard to believe that voice search first became part of the Google mix back in 2012. At the time, it seemed to many like a fad feature that would be fun to play with but that would never have a major impact on search. Of course, in 2020, we know that voice search is here to stay.

The growing popularity of home speakers and smartphone assistants has helped to make voice search not only a permanent fixture but also an important focal point of SEO. Today, tens of millions of searches are initiated by voice every month. To capture a slice of these, you need highly optimized content that plays well with Google’s voice search results.

Implementing structured data targeted at voice search and leveraging Speakable markup can increase your website’s visibility. Understanding Google Actions is also helpful for making the most of voice search.

Google Actions/Entities

Google is increasingly putting development time into more defined and structured data. Whereas search algorithms were once enough to provide valuable search results, today users expect more. Furthermore, there is so much data on the internet that Google expects businesses and developers to “play nice” with its functionality in order to rank well.

Actions on Google and entities are examples of this. The first is voice search actions that can be integrated into software to allow Google Assistant to control it. Entities are a well-defined thing or concept in Google’s search results. Websites and apps with data that are structured to work with these types of results tend to perform better.

Topics & Semantics Over Keywords

In years past, SEO involved a lot of gaming search engine results pages. People would pack their content with keywords to help it rank better. Today, Google and other search engines have gotten smarter. They are structuring their algorithms to more closely match what people want to see.

Perhaps the most significant example of this is the heightened focus on topics and semantics. Increasingly, Google can understand the meaning of users’ searches. The engine isn’t just matching keywords from search terms to words on web pages. Instead, it figures out what the user actually wants and finds content that is highly relevant to that topic.

For businesses, this means one thing: High-value, relevant content is king. To rank well on searches, there are fewer games to be played. Instead, the content needs to raise and answer questions that users are actually searching for. Webpages still need to be optimized so that Google can understand them. However, there is no replacing high-quality content.

Get Help Harnessing the Latest Trends

If your business needs help with SEO in 2020 and beyond, Unwired Web Solutions is here for you. We are a digital marketing agency that helps brands like yours compete online. Our services include web design, content management, social media, and search engine optimization. Contact us today to learn more about our services and how we can help your business succeed.

June 10, 2020 by David Henderson

Once upon a time, anyone could put up a website, add a few keywords, and wait for customers. Although this worked for many businesses, customers often got sent to sites that weren’t exactly what they wanted. Search engines responded to make the user experience better. Today, search engine optimization includes hundreds of elements that relate to the quality of the website to deliver the best results to the user. Understanding the basics of SEO can help you partner with a great agency to get marketing success in search.

Learn What Your Customers Are Searching For

Optimizing your website for search means figuring out how your customers find you. There are dozens of sites that can help you find the right keywords for your industry and business, but you can also use common sense. A little thought can turn up hundreds of keywords to create content that is relevant and informative for your customers.

Assign keywords to specific pages. While you can certainly use two to three keywords on each page, you want to make sure that the search engines know the focus of every page on your site.

Design Pages With Search in Mind

Keywords may be the basis for SEO, but without a good website structure, even the best keywords won’t accomplish much. Technical SEO is the behind-the-scenes optimization that provides good user experience and assists search engines in ranking your pages. Search engines aren’t interested in promoting your business as much as satisfying users. After all, Google’s stated mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

To satisfy this objective, here are some elements of on-page optimization:

Short URLs that are descriptive for the page
Metadata, such as title tags and descriptors that show up in search
Logical structure to each page, using descriptive headers and formatting
Optimization of pictures to help search engines understand what the image is

On-page optimization is complex. Fine-tuning your efforts can help you be more successful. Bottom line, you want to make sure that your site is easy for humans and search engines alike to navigate.

Optimize for Both the Humans and Search Engines Using Your Pages

When developing web pages, remember that humans may be who you want to read your site, but search engine bots are what is ranking your pages. Artificial intelligence has come a long way and now can better mirror human behaviour, but there are still differences you need to account for. The algorithms used by search engines for page rankings are extremely complex. That doesn’t mean you can’t understand the basics:

Make sure your website loads fast: You have about three to four seconds to grab the attention of human visitors on your site. Pages need to load quickly.
Prioritize mobile-friendly pages: More people are using their mobile devices for search. Search engines look for mobile-friendly pages.
Ensure security: Install an SSL certificate, which establishes security. If you’re accepting form submissions or selling items, this protects customer data.
Maintain a sitemap: Consumers may not use sitemaps, but search engines do. A sitemap shows the way your site is linked together. It helps search engines index your site faster.
Create internal links: Point visitors and search engines to important pages through links to other pages on your site.
Create backlinks: Build the authority of your site by getting other pages to link to yours.

Successful SEO Takes Time

SEO is like cooking in a crock-pot. You can’t just put the ingredients together and expect dinner in 30 minutes. With SEO, it’s a long-term plan. There are tools that can help you analyze your SEO strategy to know whether it’s working. Ranking for keywords can be competitive, but it’s one of the most effective methods for bringing relevant customers to your site.

May 29, 2020 by David Henderson

We are proud to unveil the new look for Unwired Web Solutions’ website. After many years of using our previous website design, we knew it was time for a facelift. In fact, we knew much earlier. However, like a hairstylist who never has time to have her own hair cut, we put off updating our site so that we could focus on our customers’ success. Eventually, we decided it was time to move forward with our much-overdue redesign.

Like most brands, Unwired Web Solutions leverages its website as a marketing and informational tool. It is how many of our future customers learn more about our services. Below are three of the key reasons why we decided that updating our website would not only support our brand but would help us serve our customers better.

Staying Current Is Essential

Search engine optimization is an important part of modern digital marketing. It is an effective way to bring high-value visitors to your website. However, Google and other search engine companies are constantly changing their algorithms. This can significantly impact how much organic traffic your website receives.

At Unwired Web Solutions, we knew that our site was due for an update to improve its SEO performance. We spend so much time ensuring that our clients’ websites are up to date with the latest best practices in search marketing, we had fallen a little behind on our own. Fortunately, this update will help to spread the word to an even wider audience of businesses.

A Refresh Reflects Who We Are Now

Beyond content, updating the website helps us to keep our online brand in line with our business. When someone visits the Unwired Web Solutions website, we want that visitor to know exactly who we are. This facelift refreshes the look of our site to make it better reflect our brand.

A website is a lot more than just a marketing channel. It is the centerpiece of a business’s brand online. Therefore, we knew that our website needed a new coat of paint to better align with the company we have become since launching the previous version of our site. It is natural for brands to evolve over time. We encourage all businesses to make sure their websites evolve too.

Is It Time for Your Website Update?

Do some of the above reasons for our update sound familiar? Perhaps your team has been telling yourselves that your site is “good enough” for a little too long. Every business faces the question of whether it is time for a refresh. Fortunately, once you have decided it is time to pull the trigger, the rest can be easy.

Contact Unwired Web Solutions to learn about our website design services. Our team will work with you to review your current website and identify what you love and what you want to change. We’ll then get to work on a thorough redesign that helps to give your brand a refreshed look online. Get started today.