Tag Archive for: google

Top 7 Google Ranking Factors

/in , /by

It’s hard to know which Google ranking factors really matter and which ones are just fluff. Especially since there are over 200 of them. Here’s how to clear that up. 

Understanding the most important factors will help you optimize your website to rank higher in Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs). We’ve compiled a definitive list of Google ranking factors that can make or break your search optimization strategy. This guide will walk you through each factor and help you determine what you should focus on for maximum impact!

Backlinks

Google has said that they are planning to move away from backlinks in the future, but for now they still remain the most important ranking factor for your pages. Except now you have to be very straightforward with your SEO strategies — your links have to come from a variety of high authority websites that are similar to yours. Furthermore, there are Google sources who say that freshness and traffic may also be important backlink metrics.

The goal is still the same: get people visiting your website through search engines like Google and Bing. But now you need to focus more on getting links from sites where people are likely to click on them because they’re interested in what you’re selling or offering up as content.

Relevance

How do you know what your potential customers are looking for?

Google has systems in place to help it understand what searchers want. You, too, need to understand this if you want to rank. For example, most of the top results for “air fryer” are blog posts with top picks. This indicates that searchers are in research mode, not buying mode. As a result, it probably makes the most sense to target this keyword with a blog post over an e-commerce category page.

Freshness

Freshness is a query-dependent ranking factor. It’s stronger for queries that call for fresh results, so if your keywords are on the right side of this equation, you should be good to go.

However, if you’re looking to rank highly for queries that don’t demand freshness, like “how to solve a rubik’s cube” or “how to make origami animals in 5 minutes,” then updating your page often or publishing new articles isn’t going to help you.

If freshness is a big deal for your keyword, then update your page often or publish new articles so that Google can see that you’re staying current with demand.

Google My Business

Creating a Google My Business listing is the single most important thing you can do for your local SEO. It helps establish your company as an entity, which in itself is a great asset to your SEO. Even more, it will skyrocket your local search performance.

Once you create a listing, it becomes eligible for the local business panel as well as Google maps, opening your business to nearby searchers. For example, if someone is shopping and stopping for a coffee, your Google My Business listing will help show you in the search results of a nearby option.

In addition to being eligible for the local business panel and Google maps, creating your Google My Business listing will help make sure that you’re showing up in search results across other platforms like Yelp or Bing Places. The more ways people can find out about you, the better!

Mobile Friendliness

Mobile-friendliness is a ranking factor on mobile since 2015. When Google moved to mobile-first indexing in 2019, it became a ranking factor on desktop too. If you don’t have a responsive design, your site may be losing out on traffic and conversions. You can check this by using the Mobile Usability report in Google Search Console to see if you have any issues.

Page Speed

Page speed is another ranking factor that has been available since 2010 and became available on mobile in 2018. Google has used various methods to measure page speed over the years but as of recent it only uses Core Web Vitals (CWV).

Core Web Vitals (CWV) are three metrics that Google uses to measure a page’s loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) are the three metrics that make up CWV.

Here’s a quick way to get a sense of your site’s CWV performance:

  1. Ask Google to crawl your website 
  2. To request a crawl of individual URLs, use the URL Inspection tool.

Keep in mind that there’s a quota for submitting individual URLs and requesting a re-crawl multiple times for the same URL won’t get it crawled any faster.

Intrusive Dialogs

Google and other search engines love to index content, but they don’t like it when your website is hard to use.

Dialog boxes and interstitials are a great way to direct users’ attention to something that is important, but if you make them too intrusive, users will be annoyed and frustrated. You want your visitors to feel like they have control over their experience on your website—and if they’re constantly being interrupted by pop-ups or other obstructions, it’s harder for them to do that.

Overlay ads are another good example of this kind of thing—they’re not necessarily bad in themselves, but if they interrupt the user experience too much then people will stop visiting your site as often.

More From Onimod Global

Looking for an agency to help your small business with your search engine optimization? Reach out to us here!

Onimod Global is a digital marketing agency that helps startups and small businesses grow. More importantly, we are a Google Partner, meaning we can help with all of your Google Marketing needs.

We release the latest digital marketing news and essential marketing tips every Tuesday and Thursday! To catch up on the top digital marketing news and trends, click here. To get started, contact us today.

Long-Tail Keywords: What are they?

/in , , , , /by

Are you tired of trying to rank for the two or three-tail high-competition keywords as your competitors? Long-tail keywords could be the answer. What are long-tail keywords and how do they work in search marketing? Let’s find out!

Targeted keywords filled with intent can help you reach your target audience. If they’re clicking to your site from the search engines, chances are they’re finding you through longtail keywords. Let us break down how to use long-tail keywords for your business’ benefit.

What are Long-Tail Keywords?

Long-tail keywords are specific search queries that tend to have relatively low search volumes. They make up a large percentage of overall searches when added together. The term long-tail was coined to describe the phenomenon of niche products becoming a top seller.

The term “long tail” refers to the tail at the end of a curve when looking at keyword searches on Google. Long-tail keywords are specific but least-searched. A head keyword is typically a broad term when it comes to searching for a product/brand.

Here are a few examples of long-tail keywords vs. head keywords:

Head Keyword:

Nike

Long Tail Keywords:

Nike Air Max Ones

Nike sustainability policy

Vintage Nike shoes

Nike Men’s Yoga Shorts

While exact length doesn’t matter, long-tail keywords are typically at least three words in length due to their specificity.

Why Are Long-Tail Keywords Important?

Head terms are competitive, especially the popular ones. This in turn, makes it difficult for them to rank well with SEO. By using long-tail keywords you’re able to differentiate your business and services while having fewer to compete with to rank on the first page of Google.

Long-tail keywords can help you get more out of your advertising return on investment. High-volume keywords have a high cost per click, but they don’t convert well. Low-volume keywords are highly targeted and therefore have a higher conversion rate.

Using Long-Tail Keywords Effectively

Finding a good long-tail keyword is only part of the heavy task at hand. Once you’ve found your desired keywords, you need to use them strategically on your page. Here are a few on-page SEO tips that apply specifically to long-tail keywords:

  1. Using keywords naturally
  2. Placing keywords strategically
  3. Consider your user’s search intent

Final thoughts

The foundation of any successful SEO campaign is keyword research. In addition to long-tail keyword strategies and other digital marketing updates, we will continue to share case studies and the latest SEO updates to help you drive your business. Our goal is to ensure we help improve your marketing and drive success.

At Onimod Global, we have endless experience and expertise when it comes to all things SEO, general social media advertising, and digital marketing. Got questions about keywords or want to learn more about our services? Contact us here today.

4 Ways to Boost Your WordPress SEO

/in , , , , /by

Yes WordPress is SEO-friendly, but simply launching a WordPress website isn’t enough to rank at the top of the search engines.

WordPress has been around since 2003, and has certainly come a long way to help define itself as a powerful marketing tool. Over a third of all websites are using WordPress, simply for its publishing platform and well-designed SEO.

However, if you want your site to rank higher than your competitors’ sites, you still need to do some work yourself. Here’s a couple ways Onimod Global can help you improve your WordPress site’s SEO.

Carry Out Keyword Research

Without keyword research, you are not going to know which search terms you should be optimizing your site’s content for. Keyword research should come at the start of any SEO project and be used to plan your site content and on-page optimization.

You can use our Keyword Overview tool to identify the keywords you should be using and optimizing for. Whether you are starting to optimize your site from scratch or are creating new content, knowing the keywords you are trying to rank the page for is essential.

Craft Unique Optimized Title Tags & Meta Descriptions

Your page’s title tag tells users and search engines what your page is about and is commonly regarded as being an important ranking factor. It is what feeds the clickable page title you see on Google search results.

Yoast automatically sets your page’s title tag using your page heading. What’s nice about Yoast is that you also have the ability to overwrite this and improve it in order to work in variations of keywords that you might not include in your page’s heading. Here are a couple things you can do to optimize your title tags and Meta descriptions:

  • You can either use snippet variables, add custom text as your title tag, or use a mix of both.
  • Meta descriptions indirectly impact your site’s organic performance due to Click-through- rate. It is worth spending time to write enticing descriptions. 

Use Internal Linking

You need to use internal linking within your content to help establish topical relevance between different pages on your site, to pass authority earned from external links, and to help users efficiently navigate.

Adding in internal links to other pages in WordPress is really simple. All you need to do is highlight the text which you want to link (this will be your link’s anchor text) and click the ‘link’ button on the toolbar, which will then allow you to either paste a URL or search for pages within your site.

Mark Up Your Pages with Schema

Schema markup can help to enhance your SEO efforts by adding context to your content and data. It helps Google to understand your content, present it in different and useful ways, which enhances a searcher’s experience.

By adding context to your pages, you are making it more likely that you not only rank higher but also get clicks when your page receives impressions. Since Yoast 11.0, a full structured data graph is built for every post or page on your site, but there are instances where you will want to mark up specific blocks within WordPress.  

Last Thoughts

WordPress is one of the most SEO-friendly CMS’ out there, and that is one of the reasons why it is so popular. It is user-friendly and easy to implement a whole host of SEO tactics using just a small number of fantastic plugins. By following the steps above, you are putting yourself in a great position to outrank your competitors.

Onimod Global is your Chicago-based, in-house marketing team, your partner experts for specific marketing verticals or some nice balance in between. We excel in customer service and will teach you the most relevant and up-to-date digital marketing skills. From social media to SEO and paid search, you will have the tools to ensure your business succeeds online.  

Have questions about creating your online presence and need help strategizing? Contact us here today.

Content Marketing & SEO

/in , , , /by

SEO and content marketing are made for each other. A lot of people are confused about SEO and content marketing. Neither works well on its own, but, together they are a powerhouse for internet marketing. Let’s take a quick look at the importance of each and then how they work together.

SEO and content marketing go hand in hand. Without each other you would not be able to fuel your potential online success. As a quick recap, it’s important to know the terms before we dive into SEO and Content Marketing.

SEO Basics

SEO (search engine optimization) is a way to improve the position of a page in search engine results by tweaking on-page and off-page factors.

Search engine traffic can be maximized by:

  • Optimizing pages until they appear on the 1st page of search results
  • Claiming special features like the local search map results or search snippets
  • Getting links into other high-traffic content

Content Marketing Basics

Content marketing is a way to use content to create interest or trust. Advantages of content marketing include:

  • May provide a lot of long-term value: The content created for these campaigns can be so effective that it can get shared for years in emails, lists of top guides, and social media channels. This kind of exposure isn’t vulnerable to sudden search engine updates.
  • Supports your brand: One of the benefits of content marketing is that providing solid information is always good for your reputation. Communicating helps customers know where you stand. The communicating you do during content marketing has a lasting impact on your brand.

Whereas content marketing is focused on using valuable and relevant content to drive customer and client action that in turn, becomes profitable. The most important thing to remember about the two is that SEO is strategized around content marketing. Every website needs words, substance, keywords and images in order to be successful.

Here’s a look at Content Marketing & SEO and what you need to know.

Keywords

The key to SEO is researching and finding relevant keywords and making use of them in your content so they rank higher in the search engine results pages, also known as, SERPs. You should avoid filling a page with keywords and over optimizing. In order for SEO and content to work, you need to find a balance between the two.

Keyword strategies are imperative for effective search engine marketing (SEM). Embedding target keywords is essential to rank well and boost traffic. Follow a strategy and avoid stuffing them in the content. Repeating keywords has a negative impact on SEO. Follow a reasonable approach and use the main keywords in the title and body section.

Quality Content

SEO and content marketing require consistency. Fresh, unique and creative content gets indexed quickly and ranks higher than low-value and repetitive content. Your content should be able to lure in your clients as well as solve a particular issue. One can write influential content by using important keywords and targeting visitors. 

This is the most important factor, where Google determines the relevance of a page and ranks a piece of content. By understanding the purpose of the page you’ll be able to better understand what criteria goes into evaluating that page for quality. 

User Experience

SEO is significantly more than just blogs, keywords and backlinks. It is equal parts, enhancing metadata and using the appropriate tags. It is also part of creating an experience for the user that is enjoyable. Optimizing URLs and making the slug everything after the (.com) concise, drives the search engine to find the relevant subpages and categorize the different parts of your site. This is crucial to the success of any SEO campaign. Technical optimization plays a key role and makes a web page appealing to the search engine and ensures that the site has no broken links and no error codes. Otherwise, it will be poorly ranked by the search engine. 

Header tags and title tags benefit the user by strategizing the content in a way that is useful and simple for readers to understand. A good title tag ensures a great user experience because the visitor can recognize the information from the page before they actually click on it. 

Final Thoughts

The biggest takeaway from this article is when Content Marketing & SEO work together in harmony you’ll see online success. Your Content marketing will only be as successful if it is properly paired with the appropriate SEO. 

At Onimod Global, we have endless experience and expertise when it comes to all things SEO, expanding your social presence and digital marketing. Got questions about how to develop a digital marketing strategy for 2022 or want to learn more about us? Contact us here today.

SEO Performance & Moving Your Website Host

/in , , , , /by

Here’s a little known secret: many people are afraid to switch their web hosts. But eventually your once state-of-the-art website will begin to lag in performance and speed. However, it is important to be aware of the value of updating your web host and the difference it makes for your site. Read on to find out why. 

When you’re in the process of optimizing your web pages your goal is to have your content rank high on a search engine, like Google. Ideally, you want your content at the top of a search engine’s results for keywords relevant to your product or services.

Changing the location of your website hosting can impact its performance in search results. It may sound a little scary at first when your website hosts are slow but don’t panic – the rankings will come back!

Here’s what you should know about changing your website host location.

Google Slowing Down Your Website

The first thing you will notice when you move your host location is that your website is slow, perhaps extremely slow. Rest assured, this isn’t something that will stay that way for long. Google makes your website slow when they notice a change in host. They do this so Google won’t cause any problems in the future.

Whether you’re moving to a hosting provider in the same location, or a new location, Google will be cautious with how much it crawls the site. Over time, once Google’s systems can tell that going faster doesn’t cause any issues, they’ll speed up again. This is independent of the kind of hosting change you make. It doesn’t make a difference if you’re moving to a different provider down the road, or moving to another country.

Impact on Website Loading Times

There are a couple of different scenarios that are at play if you’re thinking about moving your website. If you’re thinking about moving your website hosting to a new location, this can have an impact on how fast your website will load for your users. If a majority of users live far away from where the website is hosted, it could lead to a slower user experience. 

In turn, that could affect the speed and page experience ranking factors. Depending on how strongly this is visible, that can play a role in speed and the page experience ranking factor for a website.

Hosting Your Website in Multiple Locations

To avoid the likelihood of your website loading time being affected, you could host your website on servers in multiple locations. Content delivery networks, also known as (CDNs) often do this, and depending on the hosting platform you’re using your site may be on multiple servers already.

If you’re using a hosting platform the chances of them already doing this for you is high. With SEO, the server’s location is unfortunately not used for geo-targeting. If you want your website to target users in a specific location, you would need to use either the country-code top level domain, or the appropriate setting in Google Search Console.

A country-code top-level domain is an Internet top-level domain generally used or reserved for a country, sovereign state, or dependent territory identified with a country code. The appropriate setting in the Google Search Console can be found in the international targeting report in your settings. 

  • Use the International Targeting report to monitor your hreflang errors, or to choose a country that should be prioritized for your search results. This report has the following sections:
  • The Language section: Monitor the usage and errors of hreflang tags on your site. 
  • The Country section: Set a site-wide country target for your entire site, if desired.

Final Thoughts

Overall, changing the location of your website host will temporarily impact crawling on your website, and has the potential to impact loading time. It’s important to remember that this type of change will not impact SEO when it comes to geo-targeting.

At Onimod Global, our goal is to ensure we help improve your marketing and drive success. Our mission is to ensure we help improve your marketing and drive success. We have endless experience and expertise when it comes to all things SEO, general social media advertising, and digital marketing.

We have a preferred hosting vendor that boosts SEO performance. If you’d like to learn more about our hosting vendor and our services contact us today! 

Google Revamps Search Ads 360

/in /by

Google has revamped Search Ads 360, a search management platform, the company announced on February 8th. This update and refresh of this platform includes support for some newer Google Ads features such as Discovery campaigns and Performance Max, search engine support for other brands, a new interface for the platform as well as workflow improvements. The refreshed UI will start rolling out over the next few months. Google plans to share the timeline of migration as the year goes on.

What is Search Ads 360?

Defined directly by Google, “Search Ads 360 is a search management platform that helps agencies and marketers efficiently manage some of the largest search marketing campaigns in the world, across multiple engines and media channels.” The pros of this platform has been streamlined workflow and reporting features that enable buyers to run their campaigns more efficiently, and automated bidding is included as well to improve campaign performance. Built-in integration with the Google Marketing Platform allows buyers to manage and track digital campaigns across a single platform, enabling rich, cross-channel buying, reporting and attribution.

What’s new in Search Ads 360?

Supports new Google features. The new version of Search Ads 360 was redesigned and relaunched using the same technology that powers Google Ads, the newer platform between the two. Having this common technology as the foundation enables support for most new Google Ads features, such as Performance Max and Discovery campaigns.

Support for other search engines. One of the main selling points for the updated 360 platform is the ability to manage your ads across different channels, including other search engines. Search Ads 360 allows Google to add support for more features from other search engines.

For example, the updated platform now supports additional Microsoft Advertising features, which includes responsive search ads, call extensions, and additional Microsoft audience types like customer match. Support for Yahoo! Japan’s Dynamic Ads for Search and sitelink extension scheduling are also now available.

Google will continue to add more features and channel support in the coming quarters.

New advanced features for enterprises. In addition to support for existing features, Google is also rolling out completely new features for Search Ads 360.

“For instance, the new Search Ads 360 takes enterprise workflows to the next level by giving you new ways to centralize and scale your day-to-day tasks and key activities — like campaign management, automated rules and labels — and you’ll now be able to make these changes across multiple advertisers at the same time,” Google said in the announcement.

The company is also making upgrades to existing features: The “Performance Center,” which will become available later this year, is touted as an improved budget management planner with support for enterprise planning capabilities, like improved forecasting across search engines.

And, the existing inventory management and ad builder tools will be unified into one feature, which will be called “Templates.” Templates is also expected to become available later this year.

Refreshed UI. Google also updated the interface of Search Ads 360, borrowing elements from the Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising UIs. This may make navigation more efficient since advertisers may already be familiar with it.

More from Onimod Global

More information on the update can be found in Google’s update. In addition to Google news and other digital marketing updates, we will continue to share case studies and the latest SEO updates to help you drive your business. Our goal is to ensure we help improve your marketing and drive success.

At Onimod Global, we have endless experience and expertise when it comes to all things SEO, general social media advertising, and digital marketing. Got questions about Facebook advertising or want to learn more about us? Contact us here today.

Google Introduces New Search Console URL Inspection API

/in /by

Yesterday Google introduced the new search console URL inspection API. This will give programmatic access to URL-level data for properties you manage in Search Console.

According to Google’s news release on the topic, “the Search Console APIs are a way to access data outside of Search Console, through external applications and products. Developers and SEO tools already use the APIs to build custom solutions to view, add, or remove properties and sitemaps, and to run advanced queries on Search performance data.”

Google will be providing a new tool with the new URL Inspection API for developers. The tool will assist in debugging and optimizing their pages. You can request the data Search Console has about the indexed version of your URL. The API is going to then return the indexed information currently available in the URL Inspection tool.

 

How to use the new URL Inspection API

In order to learn how to use the new API, Google also has provided the developer documentation for the API which you can find here. The request parameters are a combination of the URL you are wanting to inspect from yours or your client’s site, and the URL of the property as defined in Search Console.

The response includes analysis results containing information from Search Console, including AMP, index status, rich search results and the mobile-friendliness of the URL.

The Google release also explains how “once you make the API call, you will get a response with all relevant results. If the request fails you would receive an error message instead. If a specific analysis result is missing from the response, it means the analysis was not available for the URL inspected. Here’s an example of the response you’ll get from the API.”

 

Final Thoughts

The entire release of the new URL Inspection API can be found on Google’s blog. In addition to Google news and other digital marketing updates, we will continue to share case studies and the latest SEO updates to help you drive your business. Our goal is to ensure we help improve your marketing and drive success.

At Onimod Global, we have endless experience and expertise when it comes to all things SEO, general social media advertising, and digital marketing. Got questions about Facebook advertising or want to learn more about us? Contact us here today.

Continuous Scrolling Added To Google Mobile Search

/in /by

Back again with another Google SEO update, this time regarding continuous scrolling. Google announced they will be updating mobile search in the US with the ability to continuously scroll as more results automatically load.

Continuous scrolling to Google Mobile Search

In an announcement, Google says:

“At Google, we’re always exploring new ways to help people find what they’re looking for quickly and easily. Earlier this year, we launched a redesign of the Search results page on mobile for a more modern experience that’s easier to scan and navigate.

Today, we’re making browsing search results more seamless and intuitive with the introduction of continuous scrolling on mobile devices.”

For Google users this is a big time upgrade as it’s now possible to scroll through an almost endless list of results to find right content.

 

Previously on mobile devices, Google’s search engine results page for mobile mainly adhered closely to the ‘ten blue links’ format that was implemented in the beginning on desktop search. Rather than seeing a numbered page list at the bottom of results, users in general would only see a displayed ‘see more’ button. Clicking that button on a mobile device is equivalent to clicking on page two of desktop search results.

The ‘see more’ button isn’t completely disappearing, however Google says that searchers will be able to continuously scroll through “many more” results before finally triggering the ‘see more’ button.

What this means for business

As we all know, CTR rates are extremely low after first page results. This is particularly revealed in a 2020 study that finds the CTR of page two results is less than 1%. The reason behind users not clicking on the page two results is uncertain, but it could have something to do with the perceived quality of content that didn’t make it to page one. With continuous scrolling on mobile, there may be the potential that the bias behind page 1 results is removed.

Think of apps like TikTok, when you’re allowed to infinitely scroll and encouraged to do so. Maybe you’re scrolling for a few minutes, or maybe for several hours. With the same logic being applied to Google Search (okay maybe they won’t scroll through Google for hours), this has the ability to increase content discovery significantly.

Final thoughts

We’ll see as the months go on if this change helps increase traffic for low ranking pages, and provide updates along the way. We will continue to share case studies and the latest SEO updates to help you drive your business. Our goal is to ensure we help improve your marketing and drive success.

At Onimod Global, we have endless experience and expertise when it comes to all things SEO, general social media advertising, and digital marketing. Got questions about Facebook advertising or want to learn more about us? Contact us here today.

Google Now Shares What Factors Impact Specific Rankings

/in , /by

Google now shows why it ranked a specific search result. The new ‘About This Result’ feature shows searchers information about some of these most important factors used by Google Search to connect results to their queries. Read more

Google Launches New Integration with WooCommerce to Expand Ecommerce Offerings

/in /by

Google recently announced that they’re launching a new integration with WooCommerce that will allow their merchants to upload their product inventory across all of Google’s search and discovery surfaces. Last week, the extension went live for all 4.4 million of WooCommerce’s merchants.  

The Integration’s Features:

WooCommerce retailers can now sync their store with Google to list products for free, as well as run paid ads and track performance. When a store is synced with the Google Merchant Center, all information about the store and its products will be readily available to users when searching on a Google property. Information is also automatically updated when products are added or removed. 

Like regular search results, retailers can also pay for ads if they wish to be more visible in the listings. Retailers can also run free listing and paid campaigns simultaneously. 

The Benefits: 

The extension focuses on accomplishing three main objectives for retailers: 

  • Seamlessly connecting their store with Google Merchant Center 
  • Reaching online shoppers with free listings 
  • Boosting store traffic and sales with Smart Shopping Campaigns 

Final Thoughts 

As Google continues to work to get ahead of its search competitors, they have been making eCommerce a key focus. Given the integration’s reach and ubiquity, it’s likely to become a key destination for online shopping. This is why it’s essential for retailers to stay on top of these updates, ensuring they can maximize their exposure for those searching for their products. 

More from Onimod Global 

Onimod Global releases the latest digital marketing news and essential marketing tips every Tuesday and Thursday! To catch up on the top digital marketing news and trends, click here. To find out more about who we are and what we do, click here.