Tag Archive for: SEO tips

Optimize Your SEO With User-Generated Content

/in , /by

User-generated content, or UGC, has been very successful in terms of being effective in creating a highly successful, long-term SEO and conversion strategy. UGC can improve KPIs for your search marketing:

  • Increase your page rankings
  • Increase Google Ads click-through rates up to 20%
  • Increase organic traffic up to 400%
  • Increase conversion rate up to 75%

UGC should be part of your 2021 SEO strategy, and Onimod Global experts are here to help you discover why.

Why is the impact so great?

Any content coming from consumers talking about or reviewing a product is immediately seen as more trustworthy. For example, 88 percent of consumers trust online reviews written by other consumers as much as they trust suggestions from their personal network. Content from a consumer ultimately is more relatable, therefore signalling a psychological response called “social proof” which makes people assume that others’ actions reflect correct behavior for a situation. For example, if we see someone go through something negative such as slipping on a patch of ice on a sidewalk, we will likely learn not to follow those same actions.

We are also influenced very much by the opinion of others. So if you didn’t see it directly, but you hear from a friend at school that the sidewalk is slippery, you are likely to avoid the sidewalk and the icy patch. We are simply more open to accepting the opinion of our peers.

Switching this from ice patches back to marketing, from a customer point of view, social proof helps to increase conversion rates by building trust. A brand telling you that their products work, they’re a great price, they are quality material is great, but the opinion of someone else outside of the organization carries a different weight and is more believable.

Check out this graph from Search Engine Journal comparing conversion rates with and without UGC:

It is evident that there is a strong correlation between the use of UGC and converting users into paying customers.

How UGC helps with SEO

Step 1 for a lot of buying processes begins with Google, and the Seach Engine Journal found that organic page visits greatly increased over the span of nine months by simply adding customer reviews to website pages.

  1. UGC provides new and relevant content to your site. There is without a doubt a high need of relevant authentic content that your customer base can relate to.  The practice of displaying UGC on the website demonstrates that brands aren’t just talking at customers, rather they show that customers have a way to dialogue with the brand.
  2. UGC helps naturally rank your pages for long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are specific search phrases that are much easier to rank highly for due to the low search competition. For example, if you’re a skin care brand trying to rank for “skin cleanser”, you’re facing a large amount of competition. Instead, “skin cleanser for dry mature skin” potentially may have much less competition and be searched by users with a specific intent to find and buy this product. UGC will include this type of verbiage and therefore allow you to gain insight on what exactly is the pain-points for consumers.
  3. Ideal for manual and automatic optimizations. Automatic search updates with crawlers scope out things like customer reviews and automatically push your page higher in search results. In addition to the automatic updates, Google and other search engine companies employ search quality raters to manually evaluate websites. Things that they look for are rating for key credits like mastery of the topic, authority of the author, and truthfulness in content, which can easily be obtained from your customers’ content.

More from Onimod Global

Onimod Global is looking forward to the future and helping your business reach your full digital potential with SEO and user-generated content. Interested in growing your digital presence for your company? Reach out to us here!

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.

The Top 5 Google Ranking Factors – SEO Guide

/in , , /by

With so many different ranking factors for Google, over 200 in total, it’s important to identify which are the most important that are essential to your success. Overall, there are several ranking factors that do little to nothing in terms of SEO, so we’ve created a definitive list of Google ranking factors that can make or break your search optimization strategy.

Mobile Optimization

Google announced that starting from September 2020 all websites without exception will be judged on their mobile version, not the desktop version. So essentially if you want your website to have any chance of ranking, it definitely needs to be optimized for mobile landing pages. It also provides your customer with a better user experience, so it’s a win win for everyone involved.

Structured Data

This is where you implement tags that are crucial to Google understanding everything about the content you are posting. Structured data can be used to tag authors, ratings, product features, locations, and so much more. This is a not-so well known SEO tool that can do wonders for you in terms of ranking — creating links between entities, pin your location, and enhance your search snippets with rich elements.

Google My Business Listing

Creating the listing, optimizing, and then maintaining your Google My Business listing is hands down the 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.

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.

Avoid Content Saturation

In the past, you could overload your content with keyword rich information. Now things have changed, and for the better including everyone involved. Your SEO content has to contain an appropriate amount of relevant keywords, entities, and images for the length of the copy. The content should not be completely filled, like in the beginning days of SEO, it should rather be a natural-sounding copy written in an informative style.

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 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.

Google Search Results: Page Experience Update Coming 2021

/in , /by

Roughly a full year after the first announcement, Google confirms a new page experience update is coming to Google search results May 2021. This gives us all another 6 months to ensure pages are optimized to full user experience potential.

But what exactly does the new page experience update entail and how can you start prepping early? Onimod Global experts are here to dish all there is to know and prepare for.

What exactly is page experience?

Google will evaluate a set of signals that are meant to understand how a user will perceive the experience of a specific web page. These signals will cover topics such as how quickly a page loads, mobile-friendliness, runs on HTTPS, has invasive interstitials and whether content jumps around as the page loads.

A great resource for more information on this topic is Search Engine Land’s Guide to Core Web Vitals for a deeper dive into what you need to know about these vital user experience metrics.

Google page experience update: What you need to know

With user experience gaining ever-increasing importance for brands and consumers, it’s only natural that the world’s dominating search engine takes into consideration this element. Another area Google wants to experiment with is testing a “visual indicator that highlights pages in search results that have great page experience,” and how they will perform, according to Google.

“We believe that providing information about the quality of a web page’s experience can be helpful to users in choosing the search result that they want to visit,” Google wrote. “On results, the snippet or image preview helps provide topical context for users to know what information a page can provide. Visual indicators on the results are another way to do the same, and we are working on one that identifies pages that have met all of the page experience criteria.”

– Google Webmaster Blog

Google plans to measure a website’s performance based on user experience by using Core Web Values. The metrics’ role is to identify how a user would rate their experience on a given page. Some of the factors that will be looked at include loading speed, mobile-friendliness, if the page is HTTPS-based, use of advertising, content structure, and more.

How You Can Prepare

It’s likely that even with the 6 month buffer period to prepare, several companies will fall far behind in SEO and quickly.  In fact, research from August revealed that no more than 15% of websites could pass the assessment of Core Web Vitals due to poor optimization.

According to Search Engine Land, The Core Web Vitals report in Google Search Console is a great place to get started with understanding your initial benchmark and get a good sense of how your site is performing in these page experience areas.

Contact Onimod Global

Still need help to prepare for this new page experience update and to be part of the top 15% of websites that will pass Google’s user experience assessment? Reach out to us here!

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.

Top 5 Most Important Google Algorithm Updates

/in /by

Almost every day, Google introduces changes to its ranking algorithm. They even claim to update their search algorithm several thousand times per year. Some are tiny tweaks, usually too small to notice. But, every once in a while, Google introduces a change so fundamental, that it completely alters the way we do SEO forever.

#1. Panda

Hazards: Duplicate, plagiarized or thin content; user-generated spam; keyword stuffing.

How does it work? Panda assigns a “quality score” to webpages; this score is then used as a ranking factor. Initially, Panda was a filter rather than part of Google’s ranking algorithm. In January 2016, it was officially incorporated into the core algorithm. Panda rollouts have become more frequent, so both penalties and recoveries now happen faster.

#2. Penguin

Hazards: Spammy or irrelevant links; links with over-optimized anchor text

How it works: Google Penguin’s objective is to down-rank sites whose backlinks look unnatural. This update put an end to low-effort link building, like buying links from link farms and PBNs.

#3. Hummingbird

Hazards: Keyword stuffing; low quality content

How it works: The Hummingbird algorithm helps Google to better interpret search queries and provide results that actually what the search was intended for (as opposed to the individual terms within the query). While keywords still remain very important, the Hummingbird algorithm makes it possible for a page to rank for a query even if it doesn’t contain the exact words the searcher entered. According to Search Engine Land, his is achieved through the natural language processing that relies on latent semantic indexing, co-occurring terms and synonyms.

#4. Pigeon

Hazards: Poor on- and off-page SEO

How it works: Pigeon affects those searches in which the user’s location plays an important part. The update created closer ties between the local algorithm and the core algorithm: traditional SEO factors are now used to rank local results.

#5 Mobile

Hazards: Lack of a mobile version of the page; poor mobile usability.

How it works: This, and subsequent mobile search updates (2018, 2020) have shifted the focus from a desktop to a mobile version of your website. Today, Google ranks all websites based on how fast and user-friendly their mobile versions are. This automatically puts you at a huge advantage compared to competitors. The faster the content is mobile optimized, the higher Google will prioritize your ad.

Contact Onimod Global

For more on the latest digital marketing news and information, follow Onimod Global! Our experts 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 find out more about who we are and what we do, click here.

6 SEO Techniques to Enhance Your Search Traffic for 2021

/in /by

As marketers, we’re always looking for new ways to improve and enhance our strategies, especially when it comes to SEO.  

Here are 6 link building SEO techniques that will not only increase the amount of traffic you drive to your website, but the quality as well. 

1. Create and maintain a strong blog strategy. 

It’s not enough to have created a blog calendar if you’re not sticking with it. It’s essential to consistently post blogs that are valuable and relevant among your audience members. Your goal is to get people to want to link back to your blog content. This is one of the best ways to organically generate inbound links. Ultimately improving your search rankings and generating more traffic back to your website. 

2. Utilize infographics. 

People love consuming and sharing visual content. An easy way to get topics for infographics is from your already created blog posts. There are also plenty of online tools that can make graphic creation easy, such as Canva. The goal is to create infographics with valuable information and data that people will share and link back to you as the original source. 

3. Link back to other blogs on your blog. 

A blog is ultimately a social tool. The more you link to others, especially when you do it in a consistent, opportunity-driven way, the greater the likelihood of one of the other bloggers will return the favor. 

4. Write guest blog posts.

Similar to linking to other blogs, you can shop your best performing blogs around to others it would be a good fit for. If you find a taker, it’s just another opportunity for another inbound link back to your site. 

5. Curate and publish helpful resource lists. 

Resource lists are great link bait and increase your chances of getting a featured snippet on Google. Creating a comprehensive resource list makes it easy for other sites to link back to in their own content. Both which are great for your rankings and traffic. 

6. Consistent brand monitoring. 

Consistently perform searches for your name to see if there are any mentions floating around that you’re unaware of. If you find some in a place you want to be, contact the owner of the site to see if you can turn that into an inbound link. And if you find one that might be negative and unwarranted, get that removed, so it doesn’t harm your reputation or SEO. 

Final Thoughts 

At Onimod Global we understand how vital SEO can be. Search engine optimization is our core attribute and a pillar of our strategy. We develop  organic search engine optimization campaigns that deliver increases in organic traffic through an increase in natural rankings on major search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. We are a trusted Google Partner and continually excel with their products. If you need assistance with SEO, or in any area of digital marketing, contact us today. 

How to Optimize Your Website Structure for SEO

/in , /by

Not all website structures are favored equally by search engine algorithms. A site that is a disorganized jumble mess of pages is unlikely to rank well against a structure that is rigorous and streamlined. To make your site structure SEO-friendly, it has to appeal to users while guiding them to relevant content across your website. 

Learn more about website structure, why it matters and steps to take to optimize yours for SEO. 

What is Site Structure? 

Site structure refers to the way a site’s content is grouped, interconnected and presented to its visitors. Website structure starts with a foundation, its home page, then splits off into other sections, such as the about page, contact page or blog page.

Why Does Site Structure Matter? 

Site structure is one of the most crucial components linked to SEO performance. A well-executed website structure sets you up for SEO success down the road. It also: 

  • Creates a better user experience. 
  • Helps with crawlability. 
  • Provides you with sitelinks. 

How to Optimize Your Website Structure for SEO

1. Plan your site hierarchy. 

The hierarchy of your site is the system that arranges your pages from top to bottom. A website’s structure is similar to a skyscraper. It would be difficult to revise the foundation once you’ve already constructed the middle floors. Which is why it’s best to establish the organization of your website from the beginning. Here are some tips to keep in mind when planning out your hierarchy: 

  • Make it logical. You don’t want to overcomplicate this process for both your sake, your users’ sake and for crawlability. Each main category should be unique and distinct. Subcategories should somehow be related to the main category under which it’s located. 
  • Keep the number of main categories between two and seven. There should only be a few main aspects of your website. If there’s more than seven, you may want to rethink the structure. 
  • Try to balance the number of subcategories within each category. You want to keep it approximately even. If one main category has a large number of subcategories, while others only have a few, the site can become unbalanced. 

2. Create a URL structure that follows the navigation hierarchy. 

URL structure also impacts rankings in Google. Your URLs should follow your website structure, as well as be simple and readable. So if your hierarchy looks like this: 

The URL structure for the Chinatown location should look like: www.kimsrestaurant.com/locations/chinatown 

More developed sites might contain a longer series of folders and subfolders, but the main idea is to create a concise URL with recognizable words.

3. Select the right navigational depth. 

The structure of your site determines how difficult it is to click to a different part of your site. You don’t want important pages of your site to be buried too deep. Shallow paths perform best from a usability and crawlability perspective. With that being said, you also don’t want to go with a completely flat structure. You want a site that proceeds deeper than a second tier of folders, but you want users to be able to get where they need within a few steps. 

4. Establish a header and footer. 

Headers and footers help enhance website structure by making navigation more seamless. Best practice is to display your main categories in your header, but you can also include dropdown features that show subcategories. When you do incorporate additional features, it’s important they have an easy-to-follow design. Basic text links and corresponding anchors are a reliable way to enrich your SEO strategy. Text links perform well because search engine bots can comprehend them. Although images have ALT text, text links continue to deliver better results when it comes to SEO. 

If you have a footer with menu links, be sure they’re duplicated exactly like the main menu links. Changing the order of links or adding additional category listings will complicate the user experience.

5. Include internal linking. 

Internal linking shows the relationship between pages and content on your website. Search engine crawlers move from one link to the next, on-site links give search engines a better picture of what your site has to offer. Placing links organically throughout blogs, product/service pages and other posts forms a grid for users to explore. If there’s a related page or helpful link on your blog, users can continue to traverse your site and come closer to converting or purchasing a product. Internal link structures also help crawlers understand the content you think is most important, which supports differences in ranking on search results pages for similar content. Try to link back to your most popular or important pages to instill more ranking value in them for powerful SEO optimization. 

Final Thoughts 

Site structure is something that can be easily overlooked if you’re not experienced in site building, but it’s crucial when it comes to SEO. At Onimod Global we specialize in both web site development and SEO. You can rely on us for new project development, website maintenance, and more. We build all of our sites with search engines rankings in mind. We analyze data from Traffic Sources and Visitor Flow to establish the routes people take to reach you, the devices they use to get there and what they do on your website. Utilizing this information allows us to build highly engaging, search friendly websites for your business.

Learn more about us and contact us today!

SEO Tips for Beginners

/in /by

It’s no secret that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can be extremely beneficial to a website’s and business’s overall success. But getting there can be complex, especially for beginners, and it can be easy to feel overwhelmed. A simple Google search for “SEO” returns almost 500 million results, which is more information than anyone could read in a lifetime. On top of that much of the information is now either out-of-date or not relevant. In reality, there are quite a few simple things you can start with to begin a highly effective SEO strategy. Here are 5 SEO tips for beginners. 

Research and use relevant keywords

It makes sense that keywords are key when it comes to SEO success. Think about what your audience would be searching for on your website. What is their search intent? What are they really looking for? Understanding search intent is extremely beneficial when it comes to planning site content and your SEO approach. 

There are a number of tools and strategies to use to ensure we get a good selection of keywords together. Start by brainstorming potential keywords. Just simply write down everything that is relevant., such as services you offer, products you have, close locations, etc. You can also use a keyword research tool to help you identify new keywords. Google offers a tool that forms part of its Ads PPC service, but there are other providers that offer free and paid variations. Lastly, do your own keyword searches on search engines. When you do a search in a search bar, there will be a list of suggestions at the bottom of the page. You can add any relevant suggestions to your list. 

Optimize titles and meta descriptions

Now that you have your keyword list, you can use them to optimize your titles, descriptions and other forms of content. You want to get keywords into the title of pages, but in a natural way. Remember that these show up in search results, so aim to clearly indicate what the page is about and entice users to click on it. Try to include where, what and who if possible. 

Next we want to optimize the meta description. A page’s description doesn’t have as big of an impact on SEO, but it can still help. The meta description should explain the content on your page and further convince a user to click. 

Optimize for mobile

Almost 60% of searches are done from a mobile device. Google favors sites that are mobile friendly. Back in 2019, Google declared that “mobile-first indexing will be enabled by default for all new, previously unknown to Google Search, websites.” This means Google now crawls the mobile versions of sites first, before desktop various. And eventually, Google won’t index your site at all if it isn’t mobile friendly. So how do you go about optimizing your site for mobile? Here are some quick tips: 

  • Keep page load time down 
  • Make reading and navigation easy 
  • Make it responsive to smaller screen size, meaning there’s no pinching or zooming required

Create content, then optimize it

You don’t want to start your content by picking out your keywords and massaging content to match. Write content you’d like to read, things that are interesting, useful, fun and engaging; then optimize the content for SEO. Once you’ve fully written the content, go back and pick out places to insert keywords. Don’t forget to also optimize: 

  • Titles 
  • Descriptions 
  • Header tags 
  • Images 

Build relevant links

Link building carries a bad reputation due to marketers that use black hat strategies for SEO. But when done correctly, link building is extremely helpful when it comes to driving visibility, especially for competitive keywords. Developing this requires having the right kind of links pointing to your site. These links help Google and other search engines determine your relative importance and to order search results using these metrics. Google has commented on this point by saying, 

“Links help our crawlers find your site and can give your site greater visibility in our search results. When returning results for a search, Google uses sophisticated text-matching techniques to display pages that are both important and relevant to each search. Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B. Votes cast by pages that are themselves ‘important’ weigh more heavily and help to make other pages ‘important.’”

This can be the most difficult part of SEO, but there are some strategies to use to gain safe backlinks to help improve your visibility in search results. You can utilize highly credible directory sites, as well as a competitor link analysis to help identify new link opportunities. 

Final Thoughts

Having success with SEO isn’t something you can do overnight. It can take months and even years to create a site and content strategy that a search engine will favor. Often with SEO it is 20% of the effort that will get you 80% of the results and for most small businesses this is a great starting point that will help your site be more visible in organic search.

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.

 

Why Page Speed Matters and How You Can Improve It

/in , , /by

Page speed on your site is defined as the amount of time it takes for your browser to receive a web server’s first byte. One common misconception we see is page speed and site speed being used as interchangeable terms. Site speed is actually the average of sample several pages on a website.

 

Why Should You Care

The people expect nothing less than your best, and that means going that extra mile to make sure consumers get the helpful and friction-less experience that they want. At the end of the day, faster pages are much more efficient. If your pages are taking more than 3 seconds to load, over 25% of users will click out of your site. According to Google, for every one second delay in page load time, conversions can fall up to 20 percent. This means you are missing out on a large percentage of potential leads, sales, or any other conversion metric.

 

What’s Slowing You Down

Every page is different and there can always be a variety of areas that need improvement, however there are a few common culprits:

  1. Heavy Page Image: Optimizing images will allow the pages on your website to receive bytes faster, and this makes your page more efficient with a faster load time.
  2. Large Files: We highly recommend a JavaScript compression or a minimization tool to help decrease your download size.
  3. Plug-Ins: Enabling caching with a plug-in allows pages on your site significantly faster. This saves you copies of pages with the same request, which allows your server load in a much more efficient manner.

 

How We Can Help

Are you on the hunt for someone to build you a brand new site completely optimized for the best SEO and page speed? We have you covered at Onimod Global! We would love to help you and your company succeed, request a quote or contact us here. We can’t wait to here from you!

 

 

How to Build Customer Loyalty That Drives Local Search Traffic

/in , , /by

When dreaming up ways to improve search engine results, few SEO specialists consider customer loyalty. However, customer loyalty plays a very crucial role in marketing for a company.

Lessons From Amazon

Amazon never set out to become a brand driven by customer satisfaction. Their primary concern has always been to fulfill orders as efficiently as possible, but along the way they were able to gain valuable insights of customers. All reviews on Amazon are 100% due to the efforts of verified customers. By allowing consumers to share their own experiences, Amazon was quickly able to build an incredibly trustworthy service.

High customer satisfaction translates directly to customer loyalty. Any time a customer is dissatisfied with an Amazon product, they receive a full refund, and typically also gain a complimentary service from the company to incentivize the customer to come back. Customers love to have a voice, and Amazon is more than happy to provide them with a way to be heard by other target customers. Companies with a customer focus certainly have a thing or two to learn from Amazon regarding their customer loyalty methods.

6 Additional Components

It is no simple task to replicate the efforts of Amazon. For this reason, the search engine optimization specialists from Onimod Global are here to offer several simple ways in which you can develop better customer loyalty within your own organization. The following 6 tips are based off of Wesley Young’s article that was recently published through Search Engine Land:

  1. Social Loyalty: Social media has grown to wield an impressive amount of influence over any given company. Recently, Facebook began appealing to users looking for recommendations regarding any number of products or services. This feature allows other users to weigh in on the topic and recommend businesses that they find relevant to their friend’s search. This word-of-mouth by proxy through Facebook is significant because it disrupts typical search engine procedures.
  2. Narrative Control: As mentioned with the example of Amazon, online reviews carry an incredible amount of power. Make sure that you are giving customers a way to express their loyalty via online platforms such as Facebook and Yelp. You can even use this information as a testimonial to the benefits that your company offers.
  3. Forever Loyal: Truly loyal customers will seek out a preferred business no matter what the odds. Young used the example of Chick-Fil-A to represent this ideal. He noted that no matter where he goes, he can find a line out the door of Chick-Fil-A, even when other area fast food restaurants have no wait at all.
  4. Loyalty Economics: It can be difficult to track down truly loyal customers. Typically, a company’s marketing efforts toward new clients are much more expensive than if the company were to simply continue marketing toward dissatisfied customers. For this reason, it may be worth considering ways in which you can better the experience of existing customers rather than solely focusing on new customer leads.
  5. Loyalty Database: Data is an invaluable resource for any business. Data regarding repeat customers is even more essential to promoting growth and prosperity. Once you are able to gain information about current loyal customers, you will be more easily able to locate new ones, which cuts out a lot of wasted ad dollar being used in search engine marketing.
  6. Determining Improvements: Even if a company’s customer satisfaction ratings are high, there is usually significant room for improvement. This issue points back to the loyalty database and what insights it can provide to your business. By going back over the numbers you can begin to paint a much clearer picture for both current and potential customers about your business and why it is the right choice for them to purchase goods and services from.