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Understanding Long-Tail Keywords: An Important Part Of Local SEO

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Whether you’re an old pro at SEO strategies or you’re just diving into the waters of optimizing your business site for the internet, you may have heard of “long-tail” keywords. These particular keywords represent a new strategy within SEO that takes a supply-and-demand stance on keywords, SEO, and internet consumerism. Those who promote long-tail keywords assume that there is a customer for every niche — and that all they need is an easy way to find you. Check out the following facts to develop an understanding of search engine optimization Kitchener techniques for the local area and beyond.

How Do Keywords Affect SEO?

Beginners to website optimization and digital marketing should understand that websites are considered well-optimized for search engines when searchers can easily find what they are looking for by searching for terms that match a site’s keywords. There is no perfect SEO strategy, but there are many good ones, and there are a lot of mistakes that business owners make even when they’ve nailed their first batch of keywords.

For example, owners of a great website will research SEO keywords regularly. People evolve, the internet constantly changes, and what search engines look for in keywords alters on a rapid basis. When you target keywords that are too popular, many websites are using these and vying for the searcher’s attention. This ultimately means that your site may not be listed in the results despite having perfectly optimized keywords. Read on to learn more about short-tail and long-tail keywords and why long-tail keywords may be the key to cracking the SEO code for your site.

What Are Short-Tail Keywords?

Short-tail keywords, or searches composed of only one or two words, have been the norm for a while when it comes to SEO keyword research. As stated above, the problem many people run into when they only use short-tail keywords is that these search terms can be too competitive. If you are running a small brick-and-mortar bakery, for example, you’ll want your searchers to find you locally. If they type in “cupcakes” in a big city, they may receive geographical results from all over the town and opt to take their family to the search result that pops up first.

What Are Long-Tail Keywords?

If the family in our example wants to find a specific type of cupcake, they may choose to use a long-tail keyword, which is simply a keyword phrase designed to yield more specific results. For example, if they wanted to find “gluten-free and dairy-free cupcakes in Kitchener”, this long-tail keyword may net them one to five results. One of those results may be your site.

What you should take away from these examples is that long-tail keywords, though they are more specific, are far less competitive because of how customized they can be. When you optimize your website with short-tail keywords, your site may pop up in many searches, but whoever is searching may or may not be looking for whatever you or your company provides. They also may never come across your site due to the overpopulation of the internet in general. Long-tail keywords can narrow your audience base and target specific people who are searching for specific things.

How We Can Help

By understanding search engine optimization Kitchener techniques, you can boost your SEO tactics. Before you do anything else, try out a long-tail keyword or two to see if this tactic attracts customers in your area who are already looking for you. For more information about keywords and marketing strategies, get in touch with Unwired Web Solutions today.

Why Image Optimization is Important for SEO

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A good image can speak a thousand words. But on a website or blog, if that image is not optimized properly, no one will hear those words. Adding images to a website is not anything new, but what most people don’t realize is that certain SEO tips can be done for images to help your site rank in Google. 

Image optimization has many advantages other than just ranking higher on a google image search. It can also allow for faster page loads, better user experience, and additional ranking opportunities. 

Given Google’s broadening of artificial intelligence, some people are wondering if image optimization is still necessary. According to top SEO company guidelines, the simple answer is yes. Google is still not able to read all types of images even though AI has significantly improved in recent years. 

As many problems can originate from simply opting to upload raw images to your site, it is well worth your time and energy to put in a little bit of work. By adding in a few more steps when you upload an image to your site, you may find better SEO conversion rates. 

The Importance of Alt Tags

Image optimization starts with alt tags. Understanding alt tags and their purpose is crucial to creating ultimate descriptions. Overall, creating alt tags doesn’t have to be difficult, and it is best not to overthink them. You simply need to describe an image. Think about words that could be used to describe the image if someone wasn’t able to see it. You will want to stick to around 10 words to describe the photo without repeating or stuffing the same word numerous times. 

Descriptive Image Names

Google published a guide of best image practices and one of the easiest takeaways that it recommends is to make sure you are using descriptive image names. When you upload an image straight from a camera, it normally has a generic name including some letters and numbers. As an example, using “cat-playing-ball-yarn.jpg” is better than “IMG00458.jpg.” 

Reduce Image File Size

There is nothing more upsetting than building a beautiful website only to realize that it loads so slowly most people will leave before the images upload. The main camera on an iPhone X produces image files that are much larger in pixel dimensions than the image that will display on your website. This difference in pixel size can significantly add to an increased page file size. Check what file size your page requires and resize all images to their maximum display dimensions. 

Implement Lazy Loading

Page speed is important in the world of SEO, and images are usually the assets that cause slower site speeds, especially when there are a lot of images on one page. While they are extremely important in providing a great user experience, images can be set up to deter a browser from loading an image until it is needed. 

Lazy loading simply means that images are not loaded until the user scrolls down the page and lands on the photo. So, if the user never scrolls down to the second half of a page, those assets will never be loaded. This can bring noticeable performance improvements and result in Google taking notice. 

With Google rolling out their Page Experience Update this year, it is more important than ever to get your site in top form. This update will take several ranking factors into account, including page speed. 

By implementing new steps when uploading images to a site, you will notice an increase in Google rankings. However, don’t forget about your pages and blog posts that you have already set up. Now is the time to go through past postings and update images with alt tags, size requirements and image names. An SEO company can help with an audit that will go through any images that need to be updated. It may seem like a tedious job, but your rankings and subsequent visits will be worth it.  

Contact the experts at Unwired Web Solutions today to get your site up to date and ensure your images are working in your favour.

Why You Should Be Doing A Quarterly Content Marketing Audit

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When looking at how to improve SEO, doing a quarterly content marketing audit is essential. While this may be a new term from some people, it has been an important part of online marketing since day one. To get the most out of your website, experts recommend doing a quarterly audit of your content. If you are looking for content marketing services in Canada, the professionals at Unwired Web Solutions have the tools to make sure your content is helping your SEO. 

The performance of any content website follows an 80/20 rule which means that 80% of traffic is a result of just 20% of content. This means that only a few articles are the ones pulling traffic and creating conversions. The trick is making sure your 20% is performing well and keeping up to date information. 

Why You Should Do an Audit

A well-performed content marketing audit can provide deep insights into your marketing strategy in terms of the blog articles and content that are performing the best. Most people tend to write content and never go back to it once it is published. However, over time it may become outdated or completely irrelevant. 

This is why it is a good exercise to keep revisiting your content quarterly to keep check on its usefulness and make sure all the information is up to date.  

By performing a well-executed content audit, you will find out which pages or blog posts are your top performers. You will also find which topics your audience most engages with, and it can give you a chance to find any posts that have exceeded their expiry date. Your audit will provide insights that will enable you to increase the focus on future efforts to increase sales, provide lead generation, and give you details about your marketing progress. 

Before starting your quarterly audit, it is necessary to define your objectives. A content audit is not an easy task and can strike fear into the most experienced marketers. By clarifying your business needs you can objectively look at your content and see if it covers what you want to achieve. 

By defining your business goals, you will be able to select performance parameters and list the best content classified into 4 categories. These categories include:

  1. Engagement metrics
  2. User behaviour metrics
  3. SEO metrics
  4. Sales metrics

Create Content Inventory

Before deciding on how to audit your content, it is important to decide what type of content you need to review. Internal content such as blogs, news, product reviews, landing pages, or external content can all be part of your audit. 

Once you have decided where you will put your focus, you can start your inventory. Collecting the URLS’s of all the webpages you want to analyse is called a link analysis. This will provide a list of all pages that need to be checked for your audit. 

As you analyse each page, recording your data in a spreadsheet will provide a quick and easy way to reference each one later in time. This will also allow you to get the full picture and draw inferences about your site by looking at your metrics as a whole. 

Assessing Your Content

By evaluating each piece of content, you will be able to place them in one of three categories. 

  • Keep: This category will contain pieces that perform well and will be kept as part of your future content marketing strategy. 
  • Update: This content needs to be updated to make it more efficient or relevant to future searches. 
  • Delete: This is content that is beyond improvement and updating it will take too much effort. This can contain content that was set up for seasonal marketing that has since lost its purpose. 

While performing your content marketing audit it is necessary to keep your long-term marketing strategy in mind. By finding your successes and failures you will be able to understand what changes need to be made to reach your target audience and get better conversion rates. 

In today’s fast-growing world, performing an audit regularly is necessary to stay relevant and improve your online engagement. A frequency of 3 to 4 times is recommended, though you can adjust this to suit your company. Performing a content marketing audit is no easy feat, and many people need content marketing services to help them perform the task. If you want to make sure your site is up to date and at peak performance, contact our experts at Unwired Web Solutions today. We will be happy to assist you with your audit to make sure you are getting the SEO exposure your business deserves. 

SEO Expert Tip Focus On User Experience

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The internet is a crowded environment. It takes planning and effort to make sure that your website gets noticed. For the past three decades, search engines have been cataloging content on the web, and content providers have been looking for ways to ensure their sites land on the first page of the search results. Search engine optimization is a set of processes that seek to improve site visibility and rankings for search results that are relevant.

These days, Google algorithms direct traffic on busy internet highways. Keeping up with the ever-changing methods the company uses to determine what gets seen in search results is not easy. Unfortunately, any changes they make ultimately alter optimization strategies. This leads many businesses to hire an SEO company to do the work for them. While it is important to get people to visit your site, there is more to a good SEO strategy than simply getting views. 

Prioritize Your Users’ Experience

In 2021, optimizing your content so that it turns up in relevant search results is going to take more than just getting people to your website. Getting visitors to stay on your site is imperative to good rankings. The quicker they leave, the lower your position falls. There are multiple ways you can create content that is engaging enough to make people want to stick around. Your optimization strategy should utilize more than one method, but each should seek to place the primary focus on user experience. Possible strategies include:

  • Write content that is centred on medium-tail keywords, and make sure that that page is high quality. Make it meaningful and relevant and get rid of the fluff.
  • More people are inclined to watch a video than read a post, so take advantage of opportunities to create engaging video content.
  • Optimize your content to show up as a featured snippet by incorporating keywords, lists, images and graphs into your content.
  • Write long-form content that has some staying power, rather than providing information that is likely to change in a few months’ time.
  • Make sure that your site is mobile-friendly. So many people use their devices these days that a mobile site is considered the primary site, rather than the desktop version.

Perhaps it seems intuitive that user experience is important to finding and keeping customers. It has always been the key to any successful business. The internet and search engines have altered marketing strategies, but, in the end, SEO rankings are circling back around to placing importance on user experience to determine which sites rank high and which sink into the depths of search results.

Familiarize Yourself With Google’s RankBrain

So, what’s driving the shift in SEO strategies? Simply said, it’s Google. The company utilizes a number of elements in its ranking algorithm, and RankBrain is one of them. Google now uses the “learning” capabilities of artificial intelligence to determine what ultimately shows up on search results pages.

This AI is capable of ascertaining probable user intent based on the way people interact with the results that turn up for a given search query. If a user clicks on a link for your site, and then immediately leaves, it tells the AI that your site wasn’t what that person was looking for when they entered the search terms. When they spend more time on your page, RankBrain takes it to mean that you are providing them the information they are seeking, which, in turn, boosts your ranking, drives more traffic to your page and increases your lead generation and sales.

Give Your Business a Boost

Keeping up with the ever-shifting landscape of SEO is a full-time endeavor. Unwired Web Solutions makes it our business to stay on top of the newest trends in marketing. Our SEO services provide you with the most up-to-date approaches to optimizing your site, driving more organic traffic to your online properties. Take the next step in growing your business by contacting us today!

Top 5 SEO Trends For 2021

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With a new year comes all new trends in the world of search engine optimization (SEO). But for many business owners, SEO can be a confusing world filled with concepts that they may not be familiar with. However, by simply getting to know the top 5 trends for the new year, you can stay ahead of your competitors. For those looking for professional, reliable services for search engine optimization in Kitchener, Unwired Web Solutions has got you covered. Our team of leading experts can help improve your search results and expand your customer base.  

A great search engine optimization strategy should be relevant and stay on top of trends. By taking a look at what is ahead for SEO professionals in 2021, you can get a good idea of what your business may be lacking. We have asked our top SEO experts what the top 5 trends will be for the new year. 

1. Focus on The User

While this is not a new concept, it is important to refocus and fine-tune your approach as searcher behaviour and intent changes all the time. Getting into the head of your customers and understanding the nature of why people search the way they do can greatly benefit your business. 

Part of this means that SEO pros will start to transition away from traditional practices that will hold less value as the algorithms get stronger. Writing meta descriptions for every single page will become a thing of the past while more focus will be put on better understanding of what is happening within the search engine results page and searcher intent.

By paying closer attention to search results, SEO pros can get a leg up in creating content in the way that searchers desire to consume it. It is now more important than ever to focus on learning what a user is looking for and learning how to fill their needs. 

2. Mobile-Friendly Sites

Mobile-friendly sites are becoming more important than ever since Google rolled out mobile-first indexing in 2019. This means that the search engine looks primarily at the mobile version of a website, considering this the “primary” version instead of the desktop version. Moving forward, it is estimated that nearly 73% of internet users will access the internet solely via mobile devices by 2025. By checking how effective your mobile site is and monitoring your mobile usability, you will have better chances of staying on top of Google’s search results.  

3. Utilize Video

For those who have been avoiding video, you better get over being camera shy. Online video seems to be the way forward. YouTube now has over 1 billion users and it is growing daily. According to Cisco, video is projected to surpass all other content forms in terms of consumption, so if you want to get your information heard, you better fire up the camera! 

But video alone will not get you ranking on Google. Your videos must be optimized with a video channel name and description. Keep in mind that your description should not be crammed with keywords but provide a user-friendly overview of what your channel is all about. 

4. Optimize for Voice Search

Voice search technology has come a long way thanks to innovations such as Google Assistant, Apple Siri, and Amazon Alexa. By 2022 it is estimated that 55% of all households will own a smart speaker. 

Voice search is now something that needs to be considered for keyword creation. When people do a voice search, they tend to use longer more natural-sounding phrasing. For example, when using voice search a person may say “What are the new fashion trends for 2021?” by they may type the words, “new fashion trends 2021.” Keeping the way people will be searching in future in mind when creating keywords will help immensely with SEO. 

5. Refer to the EAT Principal

More than ever, quality content is critical for ranking success. But what is “quality” in Google’s eyes? The easiest way to make sure your website stacks up is to refer to the EAT principal: expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Google looks at these factors to decide if a webpage has useful, quality content. 

The best way to ensure your site has quality content is to make sure you are publishing topics that your client values. Be sure to back up any claims you make with statistics and facts. Linking to reputable sites such as .edu and .gov and having credible sites linking back to yours are also ways to fulfill the EAT criteria. 

By following these top 5 steps you may be able to improve your SEO and attract more customers to your site. Having a knowledgeable team in charge of SEO can ensure these new trends are applied to your site and stay on top of search results to stay relevant in your field. If you are looking for search engine optimization in Kitchener, contact Unwired Web Solutions and talk to one of our experts today.