Why?

Marketing is an essential part of creating a successful business. It helps you establish your brand in the marketplace, engage with consumers, create brand loyalty, differentiates your business, along with providing many other benefits.

Digital marketing involves marketing your business via digital technologies including social media, websites, emails, online advertisements, search engines, and mobile phones. These are quite different to traditional marketing and do require the use of some advanced technologies.

To help you understand the importance of digital marketing, this guide will explain what it entails and how it can help your business.

What Is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is the promotion of products or services using digital technology. It is mostly focussed on Internet-based technologies because they are so widespread, but also includes marketing to mobile phones and other electronic devices.

A successful digital marketing campaign supports an organisation’s business goals. It often will work in conjunction with traditional marketing techniques, helping the business develop its brand, identify leads, become an authority within the market and much more. 

Digital marketing is particularly important for businesses because it allows them to connect with consumers where they spend they a lot of their time — online. Some of the techniques that are often used as a part of a successful digital marketing campaign include:

Search engine optimisation (SEO)

Search engine optimisation is the process of increasing the level of high-quality traffic to web properties by improving their search engine rankings. It requires the use of several different techniques including link building and on-page optimisation.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

SEM takes advantage of programs like Google Adsense and Bing Ads to place advertisements on search engine results pages. These advertisements are typically placed above organic search engine rankings and can be very effective at attracting traffic to a website.  

Content marketing

Content marketing involves the creation of highly-valuable content that is distributed across several digital channels. This can include white papers, blog posts, articles, social media posts, and videos. It is a very useful and recommended way to drive brand awareness and establish an organisation as an authority within its chosen industry.

Influencer marketing

This is one of the most recent forms of digital marketing. It involves hiring prominent figures on social media to endorse your organisation’s products or services. Their endorsement influences their followers, improving brand awareness and image through social media, encouraging more consumers to try your product or service.

Social media marketing

This form of digital marketing uses social media platforms and websites to promote your products or services. It is a very cost-effective and easy-to-use form of marketing which can help you market to specific demographics.

Data-driven marketing

Data-driven marketing involves the analysis of big data to form predictions about future behaviours. This information helps marketers improve their digital marketing efforts. The data that is used includes consumer interactions and engagements, behaviour of competitors, and analysis of marketing trends.

Ecommerce marketing

The goal of e-commerce marketing is to drive awareness of businesses that sells products or services electronically. It incorporates a wide variety of other marketing techniques including social media marketing and content marketing.

Display advertising

This is a form of online advertising that uses banner ads that are placed on websites and social media platforms. These ads can include images, videos, HTML 5 animations, and any other kind of rich media.

Email direct marketing

Email direct marketing uses email-based campaigns that are sent to a targeted list of recipients. These emails can include text, HTML, images, videos, and other types of rich media. It is a very useful form of digital marketing that typically achieves high levels of user engagement. 

Web conferencing

This is an umbrella term for several types of online collaborative services including webcasts, webinars, and web meetings. These services can be used to promote products or services, provide training sessions, answer customer questions, and to provide support.

Mobile phone marketing (SMS and MMS)

This form of marketing aims to reach consumers on their smartphones, tablets, an and other mobile devices. It uses a range of technologies including SMS and MMS, mobile apps, websites, email, and social media.

Affiliate marketing 

Affiliate marketing is a form of performance-based marketing where an organisation rewards affiliates for each visitor or customer they bring in via their own marketing efforts. Essentially, the affiliates will be launching their own marketing campaign in an effort to sell your product or service in return for a commission.

The Importance of Digital Marketing

Marketing – Better consumer engagement through content

Digital marketing creates many exciting new media opportunities for organisations to interact with consumers. Most of these opportunities differ greatly to the one-way forms of communication offered by traditional marketing techniques like tv ads and print media advertisements.

For example — a television or radio advertisement only allows an organisation to speak “at” a consumer. Digital marketing techniques, on the other hand, allow for a free-flowing exchange between organisations and consumers. 

This interaction is a mutual dialogue that provides additional benefits to both parties. It is highly engaging for consumers and increases their appreciation for your brand in a way that traditional marketing techniques cannot.

It reaches consumers where they are spending their time

Consumers are increasingly turning away from traditional forms of media like television, print media, and radio. They are spending more time on the Internet and using their electronic phones as their primary source of entertainment.

According to research firm Zenith, consumers are now spending an average of 170.6 minutes online each day. They spend much of this time watching videos, playing computer games, reading news, participating in social media, or studying.

This statistic clearly highlights the importance of having a strong presence on digital platforms – which is only made possible by having digital marketing strategy. If you fail to market your organisation online, consumers simply won’t know you exist.

People use the Internet to make purchasing decisions

Most people now rely upon Internet research to make their purchasing decisions. The following statistics clearly highlight this fact:

• 50% of consumers will search for a business using their smartphone before they visit the business in person
• 78% of consumers have spent more time researching a brand or product online than they have researching in a store
• 86% of consumers read reviews for local businesses (including 95% of people aged 18-34)
• 57% of shoppers say they look online for helpful recommendations or suggestions for gifts
• Consumers read an average of 10 online reviews before feeling able to trust a local business
• 91% of 18-34 year old consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations

If your organisation does not have a digital marketing strategy, it may not be discovered as consumers perform their online research or it may be found to be lacking in some way. This will reduce your chances of attracting new customers. 

Consumers usually opt for companies with the assets that digital marketing provides including a professional website, active social media profiles, excellent online reviews, and strong SEO.

A targeted approach to marketing

If your organisation decides to run a television advertisement, you have a ‘general’ sense of who is going to see it. If it is aired during a sportscast, you could safely assume the viewers will be sports lovers, for example. 

However, you don’t know with any great certainty how old the viewers are, what their hobbies are, what they purchased last week, what information they are interested in, and so on. Many of the people who view your advertisement will be the wrong target demographic for the product or service you are providing.

Digital marketing allows you to create highly-targeted media content that is only displayed to people who precisely fit the demographic you are interested in. If you are interested in selling a product to cat lovers, you can use online ads that only appear when someone types in a search term relating to cats. You could also place advertisements on websites or social media pages dedicated to all things involving cats and so on. 

This kind of recommended and highly-targeted approach can help you get much more ‘bang for your buck’ in terms of your marketing budget.

Dramatically improves brand awareness 

Brand promotion is a critical part of marketing any organisation. In simple terms, you need to get your brand in front of as many eyeballs as possible. Digital marketing makes this task much easier by:

• Helping your brand appear prominently in search engine results
• Increasing the number of mentions your brand has on social media
• Using influencers to promote your brand on various digital channels
• Turning your brand into an authority for certain kinds of online content 
• Helping you grow a newsletter list of loyal consumers who love your brand
• Harnessing digital technology like apps, emails, and smart phone messages to expose more consumers to your brand 

Once your brand becomes well-known and well-regarded, it becomes much easier to attract and convert consumers.

An incredible return on investment

Digital marketing has a much better return on investment than traditional forms of marketing. This is largely because digital marketing techniques: 

• Provide customer engagement
• Are highly targeted
• Have a bigger audience range
• Are much less expensive than traditional media

More accessible to customers

When an organisation obtains a strong online presence through digital marketing, it becomes much more accessible to consumers. It becomes easy for a consumer to interact the organisation via social media, email, blog comments, SMS messages, and so on. 

Having a high level of accessibility leads to several important benefits including better brand recognition, consumer trust, market authority, and user engagement. Consumers will consider your organisation to be much more professional and trustworthy because it easy to reach online.  

Customers will come to you

One of the greatest advantages of digital marketing techniques is that they can help you create a long-lasting online presence that continues to attract customers over time. You won’t have to constantly purchase television or radio advertisement slots to draw more customers in. They will visit your website, read your online content and engage with your brand in various ways into the future.

Obtaining competitive advantage

In today’s highly competitive marketplace, it is crucial to identify ways to differentiate your organisation and obtain a competitive advantage. Digital marketing is one of the easiest ways of doing so.

A strong digital marketing campaign improves brand awareness, consumer engagement, and consumer trust. Your organisation will have a powerful online presence that sets it apart from competitors and gives your organisation an advantage.

Allows for non-linear marketing approaches

One of the key advantages of digital marketing is that it makes non-linear marketing approaches possible. A non-linear approach uses multiple channels simultaneously to engage with users in a variety of ways.  

You organisation can launch a digital marketing campaign that simultaneously uses blog posts, YouTube videos, Tweets, Instagram stories, Webinars, web forums and many other platforms. Users can then choose how they engage with the organisation. 

Consumers will see your brand wherever they go online and will have many opportunities to share their experiences, opinions, and thoughts with your organisation. This is a far more effective approach than traditional advertising which typically uses one-way forms of communication.

It becomes easier to reach a global audience

Traditional marketing like television advertisements or print media are restricted to the limited geographical regions. You will only reach the locations where the television station broadcasts or where the newspaper is published. 

When you use digital marketing to create websites, blogs, videos, social media profiles, and other forms of online content, it immediately has a global reach. This is particularly useful for organisations that are looking to take orders from around the globe.

Low cost marketing opportunities

Many organisations find it difficult to successfully market their brand because of the costs that are involved.  After all, running an effective print, television or radio marketing campaign is not cheap. 

Digital marketing provides a fantastic opportunity for those organisations because it uses many techniques which are either affordable or completely free. For example, it doesn’t cost anything to establish a social media account and start posting. A domain can be registered for a few dollars and your content can be published online for free. You will have many opportunities to promote your organisation without paying a cent.

Your competitors are online

You can virtually guarantee that your competitors are already taking advantage of digital marketing. When a consumer searches for a product or service that you provide, your competitors will probably feature prominently. If they have a good digital marketing strategy, they will probably dominate the search engine results and have a strong presence on online review websites. 

The good news is – you can look at what approaches your competitors have already used to see what works and what doesn’t. Do your competitors have social media profiles? If so, do those profiles attract user engagement in the form of comments and likes? Do they use highly professional videos, a podcast or blogs? A digital marketing strategy will help you identify how they are succeeding online and develop ways to take them on.

Getting to know your target audience

It’s very easy to use social media, blog comment sections, online surveys, email, web forums, and other platforms to have a two-way dialogue that helps you learn more about your audience.

The information that you receive will help you understand your audience’s demographics, goals, and purchasing preferences. You will learn the answer to important questions like:

• What do my customers like/dislike about my products?
• How can I improve my customer service?
• What pain points does my audience often experience?
• Why does my audience prefer to use my competitors product?

Levels the playing field for small businesses

Small business have a tough time competing against large corporations with massive advertising budgets. Digital media marketing makes competing with big players easier because it lets you target specific niches that are relevant to your organisation’s interests.

Access to data-driven advertising

Data-driven advertising uses the data collected from consumers online to generate extremely effective and highly-targeted advertising campaigns. The data is collected with the user’s permission from emails, websites, social media interactions and other digital interactions. This type of advertising has been shown to have a very effective conversion rate and offers an excellent return on investment.

Easy to scale and adapt

Business conditions change very quickly in our fast-moving global marketplace. You may find that your organisation needs to constantly refine its marketing efforts. Digital marketing makes this simple, because most techniques can be altered on the fly. 

It only takes a few clicks to change your online advertising budget or SEO budget. You can send a new email newsletter campaign to your subscribers within a few minutes. Having access to marketing techniques with a high level of scalability and adaptability means you can react quickly to changing circumstances.

Accessing hard-to-reach consumers

Younger consumers are considered hard to reach because they don’t watch television, read newspapers, or listen to the radio as often as older demographics. However, they spend more time on their mobile phone and the Internet. Having a digital marketing campaign is important for reaching these younger consumers.

Thanks for reading. For more information on Digital Marketing, contact Disseminate Digital today on (+44) 843 8963063.

The post Why Digital Marketing Is Important in 2020? appeared first on Disseminate Digital.

Local SEO Marketing

If you want to consistently attract new local customers to your business, using local SEO marketing is essential.  It is a branch of search engine optimisation designed to help businesses and organisations appear more prominently in local web search results. 

Image Courtesy: shanebarker.com

Let’s say you have a Chinese restaurant in London.  Local SEO marketing will help you appear in a prominent position when users perform searches like Chinese restaurants in London.  It also helps your business rank well when people located in London perform searches on their mobile device for terms likeChinese restaurants near meor Best Chinese food nearby.

In this guide, I’ll explain exactly this is is so important. I’ll also share some simple changes you can make to boost your local SEO.

Why does local search engine optimisation matter?

There are several reasons why local search engine optimisation matters:

It helps consumers find your business

The way that consumers find businesses has changed dramatically thanks to the advent of the Internet.  Instead of flicking through the Yellow Pages, most consumers will perform a Google Search, use Google Maps, or perform a Voice Search on their mobile device.  

According to Google, 46% of all searches performed are local searches and 86% of the people who use Google Maps do so to find the location of businesses. About 76% of all local searches end in a phone call to a business and 50% of people who conducted a search on their smart phone visited the store within a day. 

In addition to looking up the address of your business or organisation, consumers often use the Internet to check trading hours, prices and the availability of products or services.  If your web properties are not optimised for local search, your enterprise could be missing out on thousands of customers.  

Lower competition in local areas

Targeting your SEO efforts on a specific region means you will be facing much less competition.  When you target local searches, you won’t be taking on Chinese restaurants from around the world by trying to rank for “Chinese restaurant”.  Instead, you will only be trying to beat businesses in the local area.  It is much easier to achieve high rankings for valuable local keywords and attract more customers.

Can outrank national brands

It’s common for national brands to spend millions of pounds on their website, SEO, and marketing campaigns.  It is extremely difficult for your business to outrank national for broad search terms. By focussing your efforts on local search, you can ignore the big brands and dominate the results for the local searches that deliver great results.

Local reputation

Having a strong online presence boosts your local reputation.  More consumers will be aware of the name of your enterprise, what it does, and where it is located.  This can have a snowball effect, helping you become well-known in the local area.

First steps for improving local SEO

Before we jump into the more technical aspects of this type of marketing, here are a few simple techniques you can implement which can have a significant impact on your local SEO.

Set up a Google My Business page

Google My Business gives businesses the opportunity to create an online business profile with all of the details of their enterprise.  This profile is then used by Google in Google search engine results and Google maps.

Setting up a business profile only takes a few minutes and provides a significant local SEO boost.  Google My Business profiles let you add all kinds of information about your business including its address, phone number, and operating hours.  Images and reviews can be added to your profile by Google users, which is an easy way to create some social proof.

Get some local citations

A local citation is any online mention of the name, address, and phone number (NAP) of your business.  They are useful for informing consumers about your business and also have an impact on search engine rankings.  You can place local citations on the following locations:

• Major business data platforms
  Create your own citations on business data platforms like like Google My Business, Bing Places, Yell, thomsonlocal, Scoot, FreeIndex, BT Tradespace, Hotfrog.  Placing citations on your Facebook and Yelp profiles can also be useful.  
• Local platforms
  Try to get citations placed on local platforms like chamber of commerce websites, local business groups, social clubs, newspapers, and local charity websites.
• Other websites
  Look for opportunities to place your local citation on other local blogs and websites, government sites, apps, news sites, and maps.

In addition to using your business’ NAP, feel free to add other other information to your citations including:

• Geo-coordinates
• Reviews
• Driving directions
• Business description
• Business category
• Business tagline
• Email addresses
• Types of payment that are accepted etc.

Companies like Whitespark and BrightLocal specialise in obtaining local citations. They are a great option for businesses that don’t have time available for local SEO marketing. 

Local reviews

Local reviews are a powerful ranking signal used by search engines to determine where to position your business in local searches.  If your Chinese restaurant has dozens of five star reviews, Google is much more likely to place it in a prominent position when someone searches for “Best Chinese food in London”.  There are many opportunities for obtaining reviews including Google My Business, Yelp, Trust Pilot and TripAdvisor.

Locally trusted links

Obtaining incoming links from other local businesses with high authority can really supercharge your local SEO efforts.  Attempt to get links to your website from local business owners, charity organisations, social media groups, and local media organisations (more on this below).  

Building local links will improve your domain authority and relevance. This can eventually help your website appear in the first three local map listings on Google results pages, which is a significant competitive advantage.

Have a location page on your website

Add a page to your website that has your business’ NAP details along with a Google Map that displays the locations of your stores.  This will help users locate your business and this information will make it easier for search engines understand where your locations are.

On Page factors

The are many optimisations you can perform to your web properties to ensure that search engines can easily find, process, and categorise your website. These optimisations ensures that search engine realises your web properties relate to a product or service provided to people in a specific location.

General Keyword Research

Keyword research tools likeUbersuggest, Moz, and SEM Rushcan be extremely useful for on-page search engine optimisation.  They are a great way to find additional keywords, assess keyword ranking difficulty, monitor competitors, and see how well your website is currently ranking.  

Keyword research can guide your efforts in terms of choosing which local keywords to target.  The only downside of using these tools is that they often don’t have much data available for “hyperlocal” keywords, which are low-volume geographical searches. In many cases, you simply need to target hyperlocal keywords then assess how well they are performing via website analytics. 

It’s important to note that traditional keyword research can only do so much when it comes to local search.  You will need to think about what kinds of searches a real person might use on their computer or mobile device.  For example, a person looking for information about a Chinese restaurant nearby might use:

• “Chinese near me”
• “Manchester Chinese food”
• “Good Chinese food in town”
• “Chinese food nearby”
• “Chinese Manchester phone number”
• “Chinese buffet local”
• “Chinese restaurant walking distance”

A tool like Page Optimiser Pro by Kyle Roof can be useful for finding good local keywords as it can detect the local signals that Google is seeing in competitor’s websites.

Latent Semantic Index Keywords

Latent Semantic Index (LSI) keywords are the keywords that are used by search engines to determine how relevant a website is to a specific query.  They are a range of keywords that related to your main keyword and in some cases may be synonyms of your main keyword.

Let’s say you have a business that sells cars.  You decide optimise your social media profiles, business profiles, website and blog for the word “Cars”.  Makes sense right?

The problem is – Google doesn’t know if you mean “Cars” the band, “Cars” the movieor the kind of “Cars” that you drive. It also doesn’t know if your website is about renting cars, buying cars, or a social club for car owners. 

The search engine needs LSI keywords to help it understand the context of “Cars”.  In this example, words like “Buy”, “Sell”, “Dealer”, “Repair”, and “Vehicle” will tell the search engine that your website is about buying and selling actual cars (automobiles).  If you used words like “Movie”, “Animation”, and “Cartoon” it would rank your website for search queries relating to Cars the movie.

To optimise for local search, you will need to incorporate LSI keywords for the locations where your business or organisation operates.  Keyword phrases like “Car Sales London” would provide Google with the information is needs to understand what your web properties should be ranking for.

Setting up local location pages

Creating unique location pages which focus on the the specific areas you service can provide a significant local SEO boost.  However, it’s important that any local location pages you create are unique and contain high quality content. It is a good idea to install the Yoast and Yoast Local plugins, as they have lots of features to help you.

Avoiding keyword cannibalisation 

Before you rush out to create dozens of pages for the geographical locations that you service, be wary of keyword cannibalisation.  Keyword cannibalisation occurs when you have more than one page on your website competing for the same keywords.  

Let’s say your business services the North West of England.  You would need to target the towns and cities in Cheshire, Cumbria, Greater Manchester, Lancashire and Merseyside.  If you write 10 pages of content that mentions all of those locations on every page, you are at risk of those pages competing to rank for the same keywords. A better approach would be having dedicated pages for each location.

Internal Linking

Internal linking is crucial for local SEO.  It connects your content and gives search engines an idea of how the site is structured.  Linking will also spread the authority of one page (obtained from incoming external links) to other internal pages. To learn more about internal linking, read Yoast’s fantastic internal linking guide. 

Local outreach

Working with local organisations can provide a huge boost to your local SEO. Look for local websites with good domain authority and busy social media groups which discuss events in your local area. Start by targeting the following:

Charities and sporting clubs

Search for local charities and sporting clubs that feature links to the websites of sponsors. A small donation might provide you with a highly valuable link that boosts your local SEO efforts.

Newspapers

Has your business done anything newsworthy lately?  Perhaps your donation to a local charity is worth reporting about? If you can get a local newspaper to report on your business and include a link to your website or social media profiles, it can provide another SEO boost.

Good quality local directories

Add your business’ NAP and website address to any local business directories and community websites.

Relevant local sites

Look for opportunities to place links to your website on relevant local sites. Ideally all sites should have topical trust flow, which is “a measure of the topical relevancy of the inbound links that are pointing to the site where your link is coming from”.  

In simpler terms, this means the sites that link to your website should have incoming links that are also relevant.  Search engines will see those sites as being more trustworthy and relevant if they have appropriate incoming links — which increases the benefit of their links to your website. 

Social Media

Social media can be very useful for improving your local brand, increasing traffic, and building a great online reputation.  It may not directly boost your local SEO, but the it can lead to actions which benefit local SEO.

Monitoring your progress

It’s important to track the success of your local SEO efforts so you can tell which methods are working and where improvements need to be made.  Here are a few ways to do so:

Using SEO tools to track ranks

There are several SEO tracking tools ideal for monitoring local SEO performance. The best options include SEM Rush, WebCEO, SEO Smart Suite, Internet Business Promoter and Advanced Web Ranking.

Search console

Both Google and Bing have useful webmaster tools which can help you improve your local SEO optimisation efforts.  Use these tools to identify popular keyword combinations and to test new keyword combinations.

Google Analytics

Google analytics is a brilliant tool for tracking the progress of your campaigns.  It can help you track incoming traffic levels, incoming keywords, popular pages, and demographic data.  Google analytics is also handy for identifying areas that could be developed.

Thanks for reading our guide.  For more information on Local SEO tactics, subscribe to the site.

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A Guide to Local SEO

To say that local SEO is “important” is a massive understatement.  According to web analytics firm Hubspot, 46% of all searches performed on Google are local searches. They also found that 89% of people will search for a local business on their smartphone at least once a week.

If a business does not have a local SEO strategy, it can miss out on a significant amount of web traffic and lose customers to its competitors.  To help you understand local SEO and take advantage of it, this article will:

• Explain what local SEO is
• Help you understand why local SEO is so important
• Identify some of the techniques that are used in local SEO

This information will give you a solid grasp of the most important local SEO concepts and help you improve how well your website performs in local searches.

What is Local SEO?

Local SEO is the optimisation of a web property to improve its performance in localised searches.  It is similar to organic SEO, but with a geographical component attached to it. Local SEO is particularly important for businesses that deliver products or services in a specific area.

Let’s say you have a Chinese restaurant located in Essex.  There’s not much point trying to rank for “Chinese restaurant” because the people performing that search could be anywhere in the world.  You really want people in Essex to find your website, so they can visit the establishment and enjoy a meal.  You business needs to rank for phrases that are used by people in the local area, like “Chinese restaurant in Essex”.

Local SEO is essential if you want your business to reach users of mobile devices because of the way those devices handle searches.  If a mobile user is walking around Essex and decide they feel like Chinese food, they might search for: “Chinese restaurants near me”, “Chinese nearby”, or “Chinese food local”.

The mobile device will then pass the location details of the searcher to the search engine to help it formulate the results.  If your website has not been optimised to rank well for searches like “Chinese restaurant Essex”, it may appear far down the search engine results pages (SERPs) or not appear at all.

Local SEO will also affect how your website appears in the maps that search engines like Google when displaying local searches.  If your website is not optimised, it will not appear in a prominent position, leading to lost sales.

Local SEO will optimise many on-page and off-page components to improve a website’s local search ranking, including:

• Link signals – Incoming links from other websites with relevant keywords, authority of linking websites etc.
• Business signals – This includes factors like your proximity to the searcher, location keywords in business name, category names etc.
• On-page signals – Presence of business Name, Address, Phone Number (NAP), location keywords in titles, the domain authority of your website.
• Citation signals – Online references to your business’s name, address and phone number.
• Review signals – The quality, quantity, and frequency of the reviews that your business has received.
• Behavioural signals – How people use your website and interact with your business, including mobile click to call, check-in, bounce rate, and click-through rate.
• Social signals –How well received your website and business is on social media.

Why is local SEO so important?

Here are a few reasons why local SEO is critical for businesses that have physical locations:

People who use local search actually visit stores and buy things

According to a report published by Google, 50% of people who performed a local search on their phone went to the physical store the next day.  The figure was slightly lower for laptop and desktop computer users, with 34% of people visiting a physical store the next day.  An impressive 18% of local mobile searches resulted in a salewithin 1 day of the search being performed.

These statistic indicate that people using local search are interested in making a purchase in the near future.  This makes them a qualified prospect as they have shown strong interest in the products or services that your business provides.  The value of these leads makes investing in local SEO much more important than other forms of advertising with lower conversion rates.

Proximity is now a significant ranking factor

The majority of Internet searches are now performed using mobile devices.  Because of this trend, search engines have made various adjustments to the way their results are formulated and displayed.

One major change is that proximity is now a major ranking factor in web searches.  This means that it is important for your business to clearly indicate where it is located and which areas it services — which are both integral parts of Local SEO.

People will perform a local search to find your location

According to a Search Engine Land survey, 71% of people will search for the location of a business online before visiting it for the first time.  If a business is not optimised for local search, it may be difficult for these people to find it and a competitor may obtain their business.

Consumers consult reviews before purchasing

A survey performed by BrightLocal found that 88% of consumers will consult online reviews before they purchase local services.  If your business has poor reviews, some consumers will choose to avoid it.  Local SEO helps because it incorporates some online reputation management techniques.  It will help you attract more reviews and improve the quality of the ratings that you receive from customers.  It’s important to note that search engines also use online reviews as a ranking factor that determines your position in SERPs.

If your business does not rank well on local search it is ignored

BrightLocal also discovered that 98% of searchers choose a business that is on page one of the search results.  If your website has not been sufficiently optimised to reach page one, your business could be missing out on thousands of valuable leads.

Local SEO helps you rank in the “pack”

When Google displays local search results, they usually include a map.  This map will show red dots for all of the businesses, organisations, and locations that match the search.  The top three results in the SERPS flora local searches will have larger symbols on the map.  They will also their own listing boxes directly beneath the map, which really makes them stand out:

These business in the “pack” have their ratings, opening hours, business type (if applicable), and an image from their location all displayed.  The prominence that is granted by appearing in this area is important, and the only way your business can get there is by improving its Local SEO.

Who benefits from local SEO?

The types of businesses that will mainly benefit from Local SEO are those which:

• Have a limited service area
• Have a physical location where customers must visit

This includes lawyers, plumbers, electricians, carpenters, builders, doctors, medical practices, restaurants, clothing stores, books stores and so on.

If your store does not have a physical presence, it will obtain less benefit from local SEO.  This includes certain types of eCommerce stores and private online sellers.

Local SEO techniques

On-page website optimisation

Your website will need to be optimised for local SEO.  This involves several steps including:

Adding NAP to your contact page

The name, address, and phone numbers (NAP) of all of physical locations should be added to the website’s contact page. This helps search engines understand where you are located.  You can also add NAP details to the footer of your website, which is useful for website visitors.

Make phone numbers clickable

Several Local SEO techniques are focussed on improving the optimisation of websites for mobile devices. One of the steps that should taken is making the phone numbers on your website clickable for mobile users.  This allows them to tap the screen to make the call instead of manually copying the number into the phone section of their mobile device.

Adding Schema markup

Schemawas developed to give search engines more context about the contents of a webpage. Essentially, it tells the search engine what bits of content really mean.  Schema markup tells It can be used to let the search engine know that:

• A number is actually a phone number
• Certain currency symbols refer to the currencies you accept
• Two listed times refer to your opening and closing times
• A text string refers to the awards you have received

Search engines will use this additional information to correctly populate their local search results.  They help Google successfully answer user user queries like “What is the closing time of Tong’s Chinese?”.  Here are the Schema properties that are applicable to Local Businesses.

Add a map to your website

This is another optimisation that is mostly for mobile users.  Having a Google map on your website with your location highlighted makes it easy for mobile users to find you.

Add testimonials to your website

Search engines like Google consider testimonials to be “trust signals”.  Display your testimonials in a prominent position on your website to receive an SEO boost.

Create great content (that is relevant to your local area)

Content marketing is an extremely effective technique for improving local SEO.  It involves generating high-quality content that provides some kind of value to consumer (informative, interesting, inspiring or funny). The content you create can be distributed and promoted in many ways including via newsletters, blogs, social media, and third party websites.

When it comes to local SEO, you can create content that is targeted at local events and place it on a blog.  This content could include local news, business updates, press releases, informative articles (on many topics), and community events.  You could even sponsor an event or sporting team and write about it on the blog.

Search engines are very receptive to regularly updated sites that publish original content of high value. If the content contains references to your local area, it will provide a significant boost to your local SEO.

Grab your online profiles

It’s important to have presence across any prominent review sites. That’s because many popular review sites will be listed on the front page of the SERPs, just below the top 3 local search results. Register your business with Yelp, Harden’s, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Google My Business, and any other prominent sites in your local area.

Creating profiles on social media websites can also be useful for improving local SEO.  Some of the best websites to use include Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.  Ensure that your NAP is correct on all of the profiles that you create and add some photos to showcase your business.

Improve your reviews

Search engines rely heavily on review websites to determine how good a business is.  If a search engine sees that review platforms like Yelp.co.uk and Google My Business are packed with 5-star reviews, it assumes that your business is well-liked (which is a ranking factor).

We also know that reviews are important for many consumers.  About 63% of consumers will check a businesses reviews on Google before visiting itand 84% of users trust online reviews as much as their friends. If you have no presence on review sites or very poor ratings, consumers will avoid your business.

Many approaches can be taken to improve reviews including:

• Asking for reviews from happy customers
• Making it easy for customers to review your business after visiting or making a purchase by providing links to review sites
• Creating a sharable link for customers to write Google reviews
• Participating on review sites, replying to bad reviews and attempting to rectify the issues they had

Gain more citations

Citations are references to your businesses name, address, phone number and website address (NAP+W). The more third parties mentioning your NAP+W, the more search engines will believe you are a prominent local business that deserves a high listing in their SERPs.

When obtaining citations, do your best to ensure they are identical, so search engines recognise that it is the same address.  If abbreviations are used in a citation, make sure they are acceptable.

You can obtain citations from a number of sources including:

• Industry blogs and directories
• Local community websites
• Local business directories
• Local business websites

Optimise for phrases used in local search

Consumers use different kinds of phrases when searching locally.  Their searches will often:

• Use location based terms like “close by” or “near me” to find businesses in the local area
• Use short phrases because typing on a mobile device is time consuming
• Use questions

That means you can expect searches like “What time does Acme open?”,“Best Acme near me”, “Acme phone number”, “How far is the nearest Acme?”, “Where is the best coffee in Essex?”. You can optimise your website for these kinds of phrases. One useful approach is to create a frequently asked questions page, which contains answers to these common questions.  Google loves this kind of content as it gives them answers to common user questions regarding your business.

Thanks for reading my Local SEO Guide.  For more information on Local SEO, contact us today or drop a moment below.

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Boosting Your Marketing Boost Your SEO Efforts?

Most people know that social media allows businesses to form online relationships with customers, prospects, and other businesses.  But that is just the start — social media marketing (SMM) can be used to help your business promote its brand, provide customer support, share product information, and much more.

One of the most effective ways to use social media is to integrate it with your search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts.  Combining the two approaches can be very fruitful, driving traffic to your website, making your content marketing efforts more effective, and encouraging user engagement.  In this article, I’ll explain how social media marketing works before detailing the ways that SMM can work in conjunction with SEO.

What is social media marketing?

“Social media” describes any website or application that allows users to create and share content and participate in social networking.  This ranges from simple communication platforms like Twitter through to complex web applications like Facebook.

“Social media marketing” refers to techniques that use social media platforms to gain web traffic, increase brand awareness, or promote products.  Social media marketing campaigns usually involve:

• Creating a presence on major social media platforms like Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn, Youtube, and Twitter
• Creating high value content and advertorials which can be shared on these platforms
• Interacting with other social media users in a variety of forms — providing customer support, running competitions, sharing popular memes and so on.

Social media is a highly effective tool as your marketing campaigns are often shared directly between users who are known to each other.  This gives the campaign much more resonance.  SMM is also useful for forming an immediate connection between a business and its customers, which is very useful for customer-driven enterprises.

How can social media marketing help your SEO?

Content marketing is one of the most effective marketing strategies available for businesses.  It involves consistently publishing high-quality blog posts, white papers, infographics, images, and other forms of content.  It can help your business by:

• Attracting incoming links to the high-quality content on you are promoting
• Increasing the visibility of your brand
• Establishing your business as an authority within the sector
• Creating brand loyalty and trust with prospects and customers
• Opening new lines of communication
• Triggering the reciprocity principle (readers feel thankful for your free content and feel the need to repay you)
• Generating more traffic to your website which creates additional leads

Social media can supercharge your content marketing efforts by providing you with many ways to promote the fantastic content that you are creating. You can share links to articles on Twitter and Facebook, post original content directly to LinkedIn, share infographics on Pinterest and so on.

Once you have shared your content, social media users who find it valuable will share it with their friends or re-post it on their social media feeds.  This can result in a single article or video reaching many thousands of views via social media.

As your content continues to spread across social media, you will gain incoming links to your website from various social media websites — delivering a minor boost to SEO performance.

Social media can be used to build links

When a user performs a search in Google, the search engine returns sites ranked according to their relevancy and authority. Relevancy is determined by how thoroughly the page discusses the search term and topics relating to it. Authority is determined by how trustworthy a particular site is.

Google will use the number of incoming links from other websites to determine trustworthiness. Essentially, the more links a website has from other reputable websites, the more authority it will have and the higher it will rank.  This is why link building is such an important strategy in the world of SEO.

Although the incoming links from social media websites are generally considered to be low quality, there are two other important ways that social media can help with link building:

• Building a wider audience – As your social media channels become more popular, your content will gain greater exposure. This can help you gain links organically from other influential websites as they see your content and decide to share it.
• Building relationships with brand fans, influencers, and partners
  Social media makes it easy to form connections with other people online. This includes brand fans (people who love your business), influencers (prominent social media users, and partners (other brands to collaborate with).  You can start a dialogue with these parties, helping them learn more about your content and business model.  This dialogue may increase the number of links to your website.

Optimising content for searches

Search engines like Google tend to rank news stories near the top of their search engine results pages (SERPs) for some keywords.  These stories are usually sourced from news websites and blogs.  Google also looks favourably on large social media websites like Facebook and Twitter, ranking the latest posts from those platforms high in the SERPs.

You can take advantage of this fact by ensuring your content is posted across a variety of social media platforms.  It can result in a prominent, but temporary, position in the SERPs. This serves two purposes — to get the search engine to notice your new content as soon as possible, and to help users find your new content.

Engaging with the locals

Ranking well in local search is extremely important for businesses that are located in a specific geographic location and need the attention of local consumers.  Social media can help by providing a way to engage with the local community.

Business owners can discuss their business on local Facebook groups, provide support to local residents on Twitter, donate to local charities on social media, and so on. These acts will send local-specific authority signals to search engines, improving your website’s SEO.

Take advantage of social media searches

Many Internet users no longer turn to search engines when they want to find information on a business — they turn to Facebook or Twitter.  Social media search engines have seen numerous improvements over the years and can be as useful as a traditional search engine.

When you create a profile on one of these platforms with all of the information about your business, you are listing your website on their “social media” search engine.  The very act of creating a social media profile isa form of SEO.  As you promote your social media profile, your position within Facebook or Twitter’s internal SERPs will improve — attracting more traffic.

Obtaining traffic from hashtags

A hashtag is a user-generated tag that can be placed on content created by social media users. It allows users to designate their content as being related to a certain topic.  For example, a Tweet that is about U.S. politics might feature the hashtag #politics.  Other users can then click on that hashtag and see other Tweets that are also about politics.

Hashtags allow users to group together Tweets from different users on Twitter.  They can also be used as a form of metadata on content.  For example, Instagram users can add a hashtag to their images to tell people what they are.  So if someone posts a picture of a Pug, they could tag it with #pug. Other users could search for the hashtag #pug and see more pictures of pugs.

Not surprisingly, the concept of hashtags has spread to search engines with many users now adding hashtags to their queries.  By participating in social media and using hashtags, you can ensure that your website and social media profiles will rank for any hashtags relating to your brand.

Ranking with social media profiles

If someone performs a search for your brand, search engines will usually list any social media profiles that you own.  This can help you dominate branded search terms by having multiple listings on the first page.  It also gives users the option of how they interact with you — some users may prefer to contact you via Facebook’s chat feature, while others will use the phone number on your website.

Social media improves brand awareness which helps SEO

As your business builds a larger presence on social media, its brand awareness improves. Participation in social media can also improve the reputationof your brand as you engage in positive ways with other users.

This can lead to consumers performing more brand-related searches in Google.  They will search for your business name, the names of your products, or your content.  This will eventually lead to an improvement for rankings for non-branded keywords in search engines like Google.

The power of social media

As you can see, social media can have a positive impact on your SEO and content marketing efforts.  Social media provides the perfect platform for promoting content, building relationships, showcasing your brand, sharing ideas, providing support, fostering audiences, and much more. These activities can all result in the improved search engine optimisation for your website.

Thanks for reading How Can Social Media Marketing Boost Your SEO Efforts?  For more information on search engine optimisation or social media marketing, contact us today!

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Our Guide to Organic Marketing

The concept of organic marketing is quite simple.  It refers to any technique that gets consumers to come to a website or social media profile naturally — as opposed to “artificially” attracting them with advertising or paid links.

Organic marketing is very effective at achieving long-lasting improvements in the performance of both websites and social media assets.  Although paid marketing campaigns can boost viewership in the short-term, organic marketing is about playing the long game — organically growing the popularity of web properties over the course of many months or years.

To helpyou learn more about organic marketing, this post will define the concept and share the ways that organic marketing is used in SEO and social media marketing.

Defining organic marketing :

There are several characteristics that define organic marketing:

User-centric techniques

The most successful organic marketing techniques involve the creation of valuable content to attract social media followers and incoming website links.  They focus on creating an authoritative and valuable web resource for users — which naturally attracts links and grows in popularity.

A focus on building relationships naturally

Organic marketing uses techniques that build relationships (links, social media followers) in a natural way.  Unlike paid marketing, it never involves the use of paid links, advertisements, or paid social media followers.

Legitimate techniques

Organic marketing will always use techniques that are compliant with the rules laid out by search engines and social media platforms.  This helps to ensure that your web properties are not penalised for using spammy techniques that only deliver a short-term benefit.  Organic marketing techniques will usually avoid automated tools as they are more likely to violate the rules set by search engines.

A focus on the long-term

Many organic marketing techniques are relatively ineffective in the short term.  They must be applied consistently and for the long-term to obtain the best results possible.  This is different to paid marketing, where an advertisement can generate a quick influx of visitors to a website or social media profile.  However, once organic marketing techniques have begun to work, they will establish a web property as being authoritative, which is very useful if you intend to build a long-lasting brand.

Organic marketing in SEO

In an SEO context, organic marketing means only using natural (unpaid) techniques to achieve better placement within search engine results pages (SERPs).  There are many techniques used in organic SEO marketing including:

Keyword analysis and keyword placement

Understanding which keywords consumers use to look for certain types of content is critical for the success of any organic SEO campaign.  Keyword analysis is used to find the keywords that might attract the largest audience.  These keywords are then placed throughout a website’s content to improve the likelihood that search engines will rank the website for those terms.  They are also used during the link building process and as a part of any content marketing efforts.

Website code optimisation

There are dozens of minor changes that can be made to a website to improve its organic search engine rankings.  On their own, many of these changes are inconsequential, but when used together, they can result in much better rankings within search engines.  Website code optimisation includes tasks like using semantic HTML, placing keywords within headings, using page titles, and having the appropriate menu structure.  It also includes making the website fast and responsive.

Content marketing

Content market is one of the central pillars of organic marketing for SEO.  It involves the creation, distribution and promotion of high-quality content across multiple platforms.  The content is produced with the goal of educating, informing or entertaining the target audience.

Content marketing can be performed using articles, blog posts, white papers, social media posts, videos, podcasts, infographics, and many other types of content.  The content that is created as a part of a content marketing campaign must be “valuable” in the eyes of the  target audience.  Content is shared across both a client’s website and third party websites like YouTube and Facebook.

A well-produced content marketing campaign can deliver many incredible benefits including:

• Increase a website or social media account’s readership
• Encourage users to link to a website (which improves SEO)
• Improve a business’ authority within an industry
• Help a business to develop a large subscriber list

Organic link building

Organic link building involves the acquisition of external links in a natural way — without the use of automated link building tools.  Some of the techniques used for organic link building include:

• Content marketing (as mentioned earlier)
• Social bookmarking
• Engaging with influencers
• Publishing press releases
• Guest blogging
• Encouraging users to link to your website
• Submitting your website to directories
• Social media promotion
• Webmaster outreach

Improved user experience

Good organic marketing always places a strong focus on the user experience.  This requires a focus on usability and information architecture. Users should find the website easy to understand and simple to use.  The intention of the website should always be clear and it should be free of intrusive content like pop up advertisements.

Creation of local landing pages

Local landing pages are dedicated to a specific geographical region.  They are a useful way to pull in customers looking for a product or service that is local to them.  Local landing pages also help organic SEO by letting search engines know which locations a business serves.

Blogging

Although blogging might be considered a form of content marketing, it deserves its own heading because of its importance.  Blogging is a fundamental part of organic marketing.  It is a fantastic way to share content, perform organic link building and develop industry authority.

Having a blog lets you delve into narrow topics with a high level of detail.  In return for this kind of high-value specialised content, you will obtain links and social media shares from your audience — resulting in brand awareness and better SEO performance.

Posting to social media

Search engines like Google use “social media signals” to determine how popular a webpage is. Essentially, the more likes and shares a piece of content generates on social media, the higher the perceived value of that content in the eyes of a search engines.

To take advantage of social media using an organic marketing approach, you will use techniques that naturally accumulate social media followers and shares.  This includes engaging directly with other users, posting regularly, sharing great content, republishing other people’s content, and so on.

Meta data, sitemaps, and structured data

Meta tags helps search engines understand what your website is about.  Sitemaps can also be used to help search engines find new pages and understand the information architecture of a website.  Structured datais particularly useful for giving search engines more context about the data on a web page.

Customer research

Because organic marketing has a user-orientated approach to improving a web property, it greatly benefits from learning more about a customer.  Organic marketing specialists will often perform extensive customer research to understand what kinds of content their audience wants to see, how they expect it to be delivered, how they expect a website to look and so on.

Organic marketing in social media

Organic marketing in a social media context is about focussing on naturally accumulating followers, likes, and re-posts of content.  This process avoids the use of automated tools and succeeds by simply participating as a normal user.  It includes techniques like:

User engagement

Engaging with other social media users is the quickest way to naturally obtain more followers, likes, and content shares.  It involves simple tasks like answering questions, sharing and promoting other people’s content, asking for advice, having discussions, and so on. Essentially, user engagement is about interacting with other users in a natural way to gain more visibility and brand awareness.

Content promotion

Social media content promotion is an important aspect of content marketing.  It involves sharing original content on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest.   This approach is useful for gaining exposure and establishing a brand as an authority within the industry.  Other people’s high-quality content can also be promoted, as it will make a social media account more valuable to users, increasing the number of followers an account has.

Providing support over social media

If you are a business, offering support over social media is a cost-effective way to provide assistance. If it is done using publicly viewable messages on platforms like Twitter or Facebook, your assistance may be noticed by other users and will deliver a  significant reputation boost.  This kind of interaction can drive organic growth in your social media presence.

Promoting social media channels on other platforms

A simple yet effective organic marketing approach to promoting social media profiles is to share it across many platforms.  Social media profiles can be promoted within websites, newsletters, emails, business cards, and other promotional materials.

Optimise your social media profiles

All social media profiles should contain any relevant information about you or your business. This includes the industry you are in, the location of the  business, a brand photo, keyword rich descriptions and so on.

Post exclusive content to social media

One of the best ways to encourage people to follow a social media profile is to post exclusive content for subscribers.  This can include special offers or competitions, which are only available to the people who follow a profile or share content.

Final thoughts

Organic marketing is an essential part of promoting any long-term online venture.  It will help you establish a foundation upon which you can build a highly successful brand.  While it does take time for organic marketing techniques to deliver good results, the effort is easily worthwhile if you are interested in long-term success.

The post What Is Organic Marketing In SEO and Social Media? appeared first on Disseminate Digital.

AI – SEO And Social Media

After the 2015 announcement of Google’s machine learning algorithm “RankBrain”, Artificial Intelligence (AI) became one of the most heavily discussed topics amongst SEO and marketing professionals.

Most experts in the field believe AI will have a significant impact on how SEO professionals optimise online content in the future.  AI will also give SEOs access to advanced analytics tools and change how social media can be used in a marketing context.

To help you learn more about the potential impact of AI, this post will share the most important ways that AI will change SEO and social media.

What is AI?

Artificial intelligence is a field of study that attempts to simulate human intelligence using machines (usually computers).  This is in contrast to natural intelligence, which human beings and animals naturally display.

AI uses computers that are programmed to engage with their environment, interpret incoming information, solve problems, and respond in a similar way to a human being.  Some of the common functionality of AI programs include:

• Natural language processing
• Knowledge representation
• Reasoning
• Perception
• The ability to plan and learn new things
• Understanding relevance and context
• Social intelligence and general intelligence

AI allows companies like Google to develop programs that interact with the Internet as a human being would.  This allows them to interpret the contents of a web page like a person does, instead of using algorithms that can only analyse the basic components of a page.

Many marketing companies already use AI online to target their ads, identify customer segments, streamline marketing campaigns, and determine the relevancy of a user’s browsing history to certain products.  However, AI is still in its early stages when it comes to SEO.  Although Google introduced RankBrain in 2015, AI technologies are just beginning to make their mark.

How does AI work for SEO and Social Media?

Traditionally, search engines would send “bots” to a website to retrieve page data.  It would then feed this data into multiple algorithms which determine what the pages are about, how good the content is, and how relevant it is to a particular keyword.

Algorithms would also be used to determine the authority of a website, based on its age, incoming links and a variety of other factors.  The search engine’s algorithms eventually determine where the page should rank for particular keywords.

AI will be able to process web sites in much more complicated ways.  It will be able to look at the information on a web page and assess:

• The readability of the content
• The immediate relevancy of content to a search term or particular user
• What other topics the content might be associated with
• The overall tone of the content
• What the content says about relationships between websites or social media users
• How linguistically advanced the content is
• How easy it is for a human to navigate or scan the available content
• What each image on the page means

In short, AI can help a search engine understand a web page and the connections between websites as a human would.  This additional insight will help the search engine determine an accurate ranking for web pages.  It will also be used to power the SEO software that professionals rely upon.

In terms of social media, it is expected that AI will make it easier to understand the complex relationships between human beings.  This will providing SEO and marketing professionals with much more insight into the world of social media.

How will AI change SEO and Social Media?

The most significant changes that will be caused by AI in the next few of years include:

Search engines will be able to fully understand visual content

Billions of images are uploaded to the Internet each day.  Unfortunately, search engines haven’t been very good at understanding what these images actually mean.  AI is set to change that, as it will give search engines the ability to fully process and comprehend the contents of images, infographics, and videos.

Being able to understand visual content will give search engines more context about the contents of a web page.  This additional information will help search engines understand if a web page serves the needs of a visitor.

Visual content will also be categorised and ranked more accurately in SERPs.  This will most likely lead to websites with higher quality visual content outranking those without it.

Preparing for this change is relatively simple — incorporate more high quality infographics, images, and videos into your websites.  Although AI will be better at processing and understanding images, you should still incorporate alt tags, title tags and other useful meta data.

Search engines will be better at interpreting queries

Keywords will continue to play an important role in SEO.  However, AI may change how search engines interpret the keywords that are used in a query.  Instead of simply searching for the highest authority site that features a specific keyword, the search engine will have a better understanding of each website’s relevance to a keyword for a specific searcher.

Websites that are relevant, helpful, and designed with usability in mind will do well when AI is used in this way.  The more a website writes for the user (instead writing for a search engine bot), the better their results will be.

Voice search will be far more prominent

One of the most powerful capabilities of AI is native language processing.  This allows AI software to comprehend spoken questions from human beings.  This technology is already used to power applications like Google Voice Search, Amazon Alexaand Apple’s “Siri”.

As AI becomes more common, you can expect to see more people searching using a verbal query.  This will have a number of flow on effects including:

• Conversational queries – The kinds of keywords used to perform search engine queries will change to become more conversational. Instead of using “best restaurant Chinese London” spoken queries are more likely to be “What is the best Chinese restaurant in London?”
• Local search even more important – Local search will become more important because people using mobile phones to perform voice searches tend to use phrases like “What is the best pizza place near me?” Their phone sends geographical information through to the search engine to complete the query.
• Search engines will look for simple answers – Because users are interacting with a device verbally, they will be expecting a short-form verbal answer to many types of queries. Websites that feature these kinds of answers will gain an advantage in voice search.
• Mobile searches to increase – Mobile search volume has dramatically increased in the past decade, with mobile searches soon representing 50% of all search volume. This trend is expected to continue thanks to powerful AI-supported voice search.

AI means more ways to use “big data”

Big data is the term used to describe very large data sets that can be analysed to reveal trends, patterns, and associations, particularly relating to human interactions.  AI make working with big data much easier and helps search engines to gain more insight into online relationships.

Google’s RankBrain is already working with big data to identify the types websites that users find the most engaging.  It uses a variety of metrics to find the websites that users enjoy including content quality, bounce rate, and information architecture.

RankBrain also compares millions of sites against one another to find the web sites that offer the highest quality user experience.  Because it uses AI, it can determine the purpose, industry, and niche of a website, which helps it make comparisons between similar websites.

AI will find digital influencers

The ability of AI to process big data becomes very relevant when talking about social media.  AI bots will be able to use big data to learn how humans interact with one another within social networks.

AI will be able to scan networks to identify social media influencers — people with a huge amount of social media sway.  This will be very useful for SEOs and marketing experts who want to identify the newest influencers in a specific niche.

Determining upcoming social media trends

AI will be able to rapidly scan social media signals to identify any particular keyword that is rapidly increasing in popularity.  This will give marketers and SEO specialists incredible insight into the news stories, products, or people that are “hot” right now.

Helping you learn how users respond to content

There are already several tools which can analyse how users respond to content on a website or social media channels.  The rise of AI will mean these tools will become much more advanced.  They will be able to provide feedback on your content marketing efforts more quickly by helping you analyse how content is used by humans across the Internet.

Making social media more about real time interaction

AI bots will be able to scan the Internet to find opportunities to engage with users.  For example, an AI bot could look for social media media posts that are asking questions relating to a specific business, service, or product.  The bot could either begin interacting with the user who posed the question (acting as a Chatbot), or forward their details to a related business.

This will completely revolutionise the way that Internet users interact with businesses.  In a few short years, AI bots will become so sophisticated that they will be able to handle most support requests via social media on behalf of businesses.

Apps such as Mobile Monkey are already utilising AI chatbot technology for intelligent communication with users through Facebook Messenger.

Process automation

Some SEO tools are already powered using AI software.  Most notably, SEMrush and Hootsuite have components which use AI for keyword research and A/B testing.    As AI becomes more advanced, the capabilities of these tools will increase dramatically — something many SEO professionals are looking forward to.

AI will help you know when to post content

There is nothing more disappointing than posting a great piece of content only to see it fail to get traction on social media.  AI might be able to help marketers and SEO professionals avoid this problem in the future by discovering the best time and location to post specific kinds of content. AI will also give content generators more insight into what makes a piece of content go viral.

Thanks for reading How Is AI Changing SEO And Social Media.  For more articles on AI and its affect on SEO, subscribe to the site of follow me on social media.

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Writing Effective Blog Posts and Articles

The old SEO adage that “Content Is King” remains true today.  If you want your website to rank well and attract a large audience, you mustpublish great content.  If you want to establish your brand as an authority in your chosen industry, you must publish great content.  

In addition to producing original content, you must take steps to ensure that it is effective at reaching the goals you have set for it.  To help you get started, this guide will share several essential steps to making effective blog posts and articles.  We’ll also explain how the “Skyscraper Technique”can be used to promote your highest-quality content.

What is an “effective” content?

An effective piece of content is one that achieves specific goals like:

• Increasing brand awareness
• Attracting visitors to your website
• Increasing the number social media followers your business has
• Establishing your business or brand as an authority in your chosen industry
• Informing or entertaining readers to generate goodwill
• Improving the search engine optimisation of your website
• Generating leads

The type of content presents a business or business in a positive light while providing value to the people who read it.

Writing effective content

Use the following steps to create content that gets the job done.

Step 1: Know your audience

Before writing another blog post or article, spend more time getting to know your audience.  Are they young or old?  Highly educated or poorly educated?  Will they be able to understand technical concepts or will they need you to explain everything?  Are they interested in certain topics?

By learning more about the people actually reading your content, you can tailor it to suit their preferences — which makes it much more effective.  They will be able to understand what you are saying and your content will hold information that they find valuable.  Some aspects to consider when writing for a specific audience include:

• The terminology you use
• The complexity of your language
• How much you need to explain new concepts that are introduced
• How you present information to the audience (blog posts, white papers, articles, tweets, infographics, images)
• The topics that your audience would enjoy learning more about

Step 2: Choose an exciting topic for your readers

So, now that you have thought about what your audience actually wants, pick a suitable topic. Any topic that your audience finds engaging, interesting or entertaining will work well.  You should also focus on topics that you:

• Enjoy writing about
• Don’t mind researching
• Are familiar with
• Know have enough depth for a long-form piece
• Know will convert into sales (optional)

Step 3: Write a compelling headline

it can sometimes be difficult to grab the attention of people who are browsing content online.  That’s why it is critical that you develop an exciting headline that sparks the interest of potential readers.  Some useful techniques for choosing a headline include:

• Make the value proposition obvious, telling the reader who they will get
• Use strong languagelike “epic”, “exposed”, “fail”, and “love/hate” to trigger emotion
• Use alliteration (“Fun Facts About Fruit”)
• Use numbers (“10 Best Internet Research Tips For 2019”)
• Keep your title length below 15 words
• Identify and Solve a Problem
• Use any keywords that you are interested in ranking for

Step 4: Create a hook to grab the reader’s attention

Once a reader has decided that your headline is worth clicking on, you have another 3 or 4 seconds to convince them to keep reading.  This can be achieved by giving the reader a compelling hook that grabs their attention.  Some useful techniques for creating a hook include:

• Ask a question of the reader then tell them you have the answer
• Begin with important facts (like a shocking statistic)
• Use the active tense
• Avoid jargon and confusing words
• Start with a quote
• Be descriptive but keep sentences short

Step 5: Decide what you want the reader to take away from the article

Before really getting stuck into the article, think of a single key message or idea that you would like to convey to the reader.  Keep this concept in mind as you write the article, bringing your points back to this core message.

Step 6: Make sure your content is informative and provides value

Good content will always attempt to share useful knowledge with the reader.  Make a habit of including any relevant statistics, facts, figures and instructions in your articles.  If you make a point that could be disputed, use data to back it up.  By the time the reader has finished reading your content, they should always be better informed about the topic.

Step 7: Check that your content is conversion-ready

If your content is produced with the intention of driving sales, ensure that the reader has many opportunities to make a purchase as they read your content.  Use clear call-to-action throughout the article and provide all of the information you might need to convince the reader to go ahead with the purchase.

Step 8: Use a unique voice

If you want your content to stand apart, write it in a unique voice.  Use a tone that matches your personality, the audience, and the brand persona.  Is it a fun lifestyle brand?  Make your content funny and clever.  Is it a security company?  Focus on being professional and informative.

Step 9: Write for the web (format your content)

The way that humans consume online content is very different to how they might read a book or pamphlet. They are more likely to scan pages quickly, looking for information that is of some value.  Accommodate this kind of behaviour by formatting your content appropriately and using:

• Short paragraphs and short sentences
• Headings and subheadings
• Bullet points
• Easy-to-read fonts and colours
• Links
• Images and infographics

Step 10: Optimise for SEO

If you are creating content for search engine optimisation purposes, make sure you have included all of the keywords that you are interested in ranking for.  If you haven’t performed any keyword research, simply focus on the keywords that you think people interested in the article will use when searching for content.  Use a mix of short and long tail keywords in the article’s title, headings, URL, and links.

Step 11: Proofread and publish

Once you have finished creating your article, proofread it multiple times.  If it is a particularly important piece, you can also ask for a colleague or friend to read it and provide you with feedback.

Step 12: Promote!

Your job isn’t over once you have pressed the publish button.  Great content should be promoted with great marketing.  Use social media, email newsletter, advertising, and other marketing techniques to promote your content.  If you are stuck for ideas, look at this excellent list of content promotion techniques posted by Neil Patel.

Step 13: Track the success of your content

Finally, track the success of each blog post or article you publish.  This will tell which types of content are most popular with your readers and effective at reaching your content marketing goals. You can use tools like Google Analytics and Social Mention to track how many times your content is read or shared.

Promoting content with the skyscraper technique

Content creation rarely works unless it is performed in conjunction with link building and other forms of marketing. One of the best strategies for marketing high-quality content is the skyscraper technique, which was developed by Backlinko. It can generate the high-quality links that your high-quality content deserves.

The concept is fairly simple as it only involves three steps:

Step 1: Find link-worthy content

Step 2: Make content that is even better

Step 3: Reach out to the right people to promote your content

The first step involves locating a “proven linkable asset”.  This is another way of describing a high-value piece of content that people are happy to link to.  This kind of content is extremelyinformative, useful, or entertaining. Proven linkable assets can quickly accumulate links from other websites and social media profiles.

The next step is create your own version of the article and make it better — “much” better.  There are a few ways to do so:

• Make it longer
  If the original post was 3,000 words on the 20 Best Weight Loss Supplements, your post should be 5,000 words on the 30 Best Weight Loss Supplements.
• Make it more up-to-date
  If the proven linkable asset was created a few years ago, it may be out-of-date. Add recent facts and figures to your version, and correct any concepts in the original article that are no longer valid.
• Better designed
  Content that is visually attractive can attract a bigger audience. You can add visually striking infographics and images to your article to make it better than the article you are attempting to beat.
• More thoroughly researched
  You can go into more detail than the original article and link to the sources of information that you used.

Finally, we have reached step 3 — reaching out to the right people.  In this step, you will reach out to website owners who have linked to the proven linkable asset or other content that is similar in nature. We are looking for websites that are in your niche, interested in the topic, and happy to link to high-quality articles.

To find the websites that are linking to similar content, you can use a tool like ahrefs.com, Majestic SEO or Link Explorer.  Search for the domains that are pointing to the proven linkable asset (or articles that are similar to it).

Export this list of links to a spreadsheet.  Clean it up by removing websites that contain user submitted content links article directories and forums.  We are only interested in websites where the owner has manually added the link because there believe it is a high-quality asset.

Next, manually contact the websites in the spreadsheet.  Inform them that you have created an authoritative piece of content on a topic they are interested in.  Tell them that it is more up-to-date or comprehensive than the other site that they were already linking to.  Most webmasters will be more than happy to change their link to point to your content. The quality of the links that are generated using this technique is typically very high.

Thanks for reading How To Write Effective Blog Posts/Articles.  For more useful hints and tips subscribe to the site or follow me on social media.

The post How To Write Effective Blog Posts/Articles appeared first on Disseminate Digital.

Voice Search – Our Guide

The popularity of voice search is expected to dramatically increase in the coming years.  SEO analysts expect that 20% of all search queries will be performed using voice search by 2020— a significant increase over today’s levels.

Industry analysts like Gartner suggest that websites that are optimised for voice search will benefit substantially from this change.  They estimate that early adopters supporting visual and voice search will increase digital commerce revenue by as much as 30%.

But how do you adjust your SEO practices to prepare for voice search?  In this article, we’ll explain why voice SEO is becoming so popular and how you can update your SEO strategy to accommodate this change.

What is driving the move towards voice search?

Consumers are becoming accustomed to using voice commands to interact with their electronic devices. This has largely been driven by virtual assistant technologies like Amazon Alexaand Apple’s virtual assistant “Siri”.

These technologies allow users to ask questions and give commands using their voice.  The device then retrieves information, performs an Internet search, or fulfils a specific command.  Most users find this type of technology very useful, particularly when they are on the move and unable to type search queries.

Google jumped on the voice search bandwagon in 2014, when they released Google Voice Search.  This technology was integrated across numerous Google platforms including Google Android, Google Searchand Google Chrome.  Users were able to perform voice searches using their desktop computer, smartphone or tablet with Google Voice Search.  Google also released theirGoogle Homeelectronic assistant in 2016, which includes voice search capabilities.

The types of functionality provided by voice search and virtual assistants has continued to  grow over the years.  It is now possible to perform searches, book concerts, buy products, book flights and perform many other useful tasks using voice commands.

By 2017, 35.6 million Americanswere using their voice-activated assistant device to perform searches at least once a month.  This generated an estimated $1.8 billion in eCommerce sales, which is expected to grow to $40 billion by 2022.

The advantages of voice search are numerous:

• Voice search allows users to perform searches while mobile
  Users can perform a search while walking on the street, exercising, driving a car, or from the couch. They don’t have to look at a screen, they simply command the device to find the information they need and receive an immediate verbal response to their query.

• It’s easy to instantly get specific information
  The voice search technology provided by companies like Google, Bing, Apple, and Amazon is very sophisticated. It can pinpoint specific information much faster than a user can when performing a normal search.

• Users can perform searches
  For most people, it is much quick to speak an SEO search query than it is to type one — particularly on a mobile device. The ease-of-use of voice search has helped it quickly increase in popularity.

• Easy to incorporate voice search into a daily routine
  Many users are now in the habit of waking up and asking their virtual assistant or voice search-enabled device for the day’s weather. The convenience of voice search quickly makes it a part of a person’s life.  This will ensure the wide adoption of voice search is maintained.

• The answer is immediately read back to the user
  Most virtual assistant devices will immediately return the results of a query using audio. This means the user doesn’t need to scan multiple search results to find the information they need.

What does voice search mean for SEO

Voice search will have a dramatic impact on SEO.  Here are a few ways that voice SEO will change how people search online:

People will use longer conversational phrases

When humans ask questions of each other, they are typically asked in in a conversational style.  For example, a person will ask “How do I make the best Italian style pizza dough?”.  This is very different to the way most people person type a search phrase in Google to obtain the results they desire.

Searches will be conducted from more locations

Voice search allows users to conduct searches while at home, in their car, while exercising, while in a restaurant and from many other locations.  This will have an effect on the types of questions they ask.  Instead of “pizza store Wembley”, they might perform a voice search for “What is the best pizza near me?”.  The device will provide geo-data to help the search engine find the right shop.

The types of results that are returned will change

The way that search engines respond to a voice search is very different. They will attempt to provide the information in a verbal manner in addition to providing results on a screen. That means the search engine is looking for results that provide a clear answer.  This means your website’s content should give direct answers to direct questions.

Preparing your website for voice search

Work on local SEO

The majority of searches performed using voice search on mobile phones are local searches.  That is — users on a mobile device are trying to find information relating to their specific geographical location.  These kinds of searches are often performed by people looking for a local business that offers a particular kind of product or service.

It will be crucial for your business to rank well for local search terms if it wants to be included in the results for a geo-specific voice searches.

Some of the steps you can take to improve local SEO include:

• Keep your Google My Business page up to date with the correct contact details and operating hours.Check that this information is consistent across all websites.
• Use structured markup data on your website
• Concentrate on earning positive reviews and rankings
• Create content that is useful for your local community
• Participate in social media including any local Facebook Groups
• Create neighbourhood specific landing pages on your website
• Obtain links on community websites and on the websites of other local businesses

Target question phrases using natural language

Currently, Google does not include the search terms that people use when making voice searches in Search Console.  This means that SEO analysts cannot know with any certainty which terms voice searchers are using.

However, it is fairly easy to predict the kinds of phrases that a person on voice search will use. In most cases, they will use questions and not statements, because that is how most people communicate when talking to a person (including virtual people like Siri).  That means they will use “When is the best time of year to visit London?” instead of “Tourist season London”, or “How hot is it in London today?” instead of “London temperature”.

Concentrate on phrases that use natural conversational language like “Where is the best…”, “Where is the closest.. “, “How do I start a…“, “Who was the first…” and so on. These kinds of sentences will often be used by consumers using voice search.

You can optimise your website for voice search by adding these kinds of phrases to page titles, headings, alt-tags, meta data, and content. The challenge will be finding phrases that work well for both search engine bots and humans using voice search.

Target long tail keywords

Most of the queries performed by voice search users will be long form questions, so it only makes sense to target long tail keywords.  Don’t be afraid of going for very long tail keywords that have 6 or 7 words, particularly those that are in question form.

Add short, concise answers to your content

Search engines looking for the answer to a user’s query will be interested in a shorter answers. That’s because in most cases, the answer is being read back to the user.  They don’t want to sit through a 100 word answer.  Aim to answer simple queries in 30 words or less.

Create content for featured snippets

Featured snippets are used by Google to provide quick answers to a user’s question.  They are displayed above other search results in a separate box.  To get your content listed in a featured snippet:

• Create contentanswer specific questions
• Provide high-quality answers
• Use questions that users often ask
• Use question-and-answer pages.

Add some frequently asked questions (FAQ) pages to your sit

FAQ pages are now back in vogue because they perfectly match the requires of voice search.  Search engines will find it very easy to index the content on a FAQ page and transform those short answers into voice search query answers for users.

Keep your language simple

Search engines will prefer voice SEO responses that can be listened to and understood immediately. For this reason, you should use very simple language and use short sentences.

Perform other standard SEO optimisation

A number of other standard SEO optimisations will remain effective for voice search, including:

• Increasing domain authority
• Improving page speed
• Having a lot of content on your pages (1500+ words per page)
• Use video content

Thanks for reading Voice Search And SEO!  Hopefully, this article has given you some useful tips for preparing your website for voice search.  For more useful SEO articles subscribe to the site or follow me on social media.

The post How to Prepare for Voice Search appeared first on Disseminate Digital.

Keyword Research/Niche research

Keyword Research is an important part of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Internet Marketing (IM). It is useful for improving the performance of your website, discovering more information about your customers, planning marketing campaigns and much more.

Keyword research can give you incredible insight into what consumers are looking for — helping you create highly targeted websites, content, advertisements, and Internet marketing campaigns.

If you are interested in learning more about keyword research and niche research, you have reached the right place.  This guide will explain the importance of keyword research before giving an overview of the keyword research process.  It will help you gain a thorough understanding of how keyword research can improve the success of your website and marketing efforts.

The importance of keyword research and niche research

Keyword research is the foundation of SEO and online marketing.  It is considered essential because it helps you understand which search terms consumers are using when they search for products, services, or information online.  Having this knowledge available will help you target your SEO and marketing efforts very precisely.

In addition to determining which keywords are the most popular, keyword research can tell you how much volume and competition there is for specific keyword.  This information can help you identify keywords that have a decent amount of traffic without an excessive amount of competition.

Mastering the art of keyword research can help your business in a number of ways:

• Better SEO performance

Keyword research will help you find the ideal keywords to use for a website’s URL, headings, menu, meta data, and other content.This ensures that your website is relevant to the search term consumers use in search engines and can increase how well you rank for specific terms.

• Content marketing

Performing keyword research can help you identify the kinds of content that consumers are interested in. It can also help you identify which keywords to place inside your content to optimise it for SEO.

• You will know your customer better

Having customer knowledge helps you meet their needs, wants, and expectations. Keyword research gives you the precise language your customers are using when performing search queries, which can help you determine exactly what they are looking for.

• Advertising

Understanding the fundamentals of keyword research will help you find the best keywords for your online advertising campaigns.

• Internet Marketing

Other forms of Internet Marketing including newsletter marketing, social media marketing, and affiliate marketing will also benefit from keyword research.

How to perform keyword research — the right way

So, how do you find the right keywords for your business to use?  Traditionally, most people would simply think of a few random keywords that users are likely to type when looking for products or services that their business offers.  For example, it’s reasonable for a sport’s shop to believe that people looking for soccer balls would search for “soccer balls”.

Next, they would type “soccer ball” into Google’s Keyword Planner and look at the related keywords that Google has found.  This might include phrases like “soccer balls for sale” “adidas soccer ball” and so on. They would then pick the phrases that seem relevant and use them to make content or optimise their website.

This approach is now considered outdated and inefficient.  A better way to perform keyword research is to focus on“niche topics” at the the very start of the research process.  A niche topic is a question, ideas, or events that relates to a specific niche.  This can help you find “new” keyword ideas instead of words that are just “related” to the keyword.

For example, if you were selling soccer balls, its niche topics would include things that relate to soccer, like the “World Cup”, “Lionel Messi”, “Best soccer goals”, or “Live football scores”.

These soccer-related keywords are very far from “soccer ball”, but they form the basis of potentially-valuable niches that you can use to find underused keywords.  While every other shop is competing to rank for “Soccer balls”, you can use related soccer niches to reach soccer lovers from a different angle.

Finding niche topics

In the example we just gave, we more-or-less guessed basic niche topics relating to soccer.  Let’s try that again, but this time, we’ll think about the kinds of topics that someone interested in buying a soccer ball might like to read.  We can safely assume they are playing soccer, so they might be interested in information like:

• “How to kick a soccer ball further”
• “How to kick a soccer ball accurately”
• “Soccer ball drills”
• “Fitness for soccer players”
• “Best soccer tips”

These are potentially valuable niche topics that can be used to bring traffic to your website, improve your SEO, and bolster your marketing campaigns.  The best niche topics are often searched for but have very few websites providing that kind of content.  This allows you to reach an audience that wants to buy soccer balls without ever competing for the term “soccer balls”.  If you are struggling to find niche topics, here are a few tips:

Consider the buyer

What kind of person buys a soccer ball? They are very likely either be a soccer player or a parent of a soccer player.  Now, have a think about their goals and ambitions.  They probably want to get better at soccer, get fitter, and learn more about the sport.  What challenges will they have?  They might struggle to kick the ball very far or pass accurately.    Think about what they want to achieve and you will discover dozens of niche topics.

Use social media and websites for ideas

If you are still struggling to find appropriate niche topics, consider visiting social media websites like Pinterest and Facebook to see what soccer fans are currently discussing.

Web discussion forums are also an excellent place to see what soccer lovers are talking about.  You will find hundreds of questions, debates, and discussions that soccer fans are having with one another.  You can find web forums by searching for your primary niche and the words “forums” or “board”.

Searching for “soccer forums” results in dozens of web forums including BigSoccer.com.  This website includes a subform where players are discussing how to get better at soccer. Just looking at some of the titles will immediately give you ideas for potential niche topics:

“Improving shooting technique”

“Turf cleats are they worth it?”

“Hip flexor injury”

“How to beat goalie one on one”

Another fantastic option for learning more about a niche is Reddit.  It is one of the world’s most popular websites, with thousands of soccer players using it to discuss their favourite sport.  For our example, I will visit reddit and search for soccer to find the soccer-related subreddits.  Some of the subreddits that appeared include r/Soccer, r/SoccerNerd, and r/SoccerNoobs. You use the titles of posts for idea or click on a link to see what players are talking about in the comments.

Finding keywords for our niche topics

The next step is find some keywords for our selected niche topics.  The types of keywords that you find for each niche topic should be divided into one of three categories:

Head keywords

These are single word phrases that relate to the niche like “Soccer” or “Football”.  They extremely difficult to rank for as they are highly competitive. It is very unlikely that your sports store is going to beat BBC Sportor The Guardian’s sport sectionfor keywords like “Soccer” and they are high authority sites.

These keywords get a huge a huge amount of traffic every day.  However, these broad kinds of keywords don’tconvert very well because most people who want to buy a specific item will not be searching for broad terms like “Soccer”.

Body keywords

Body keywords are typically 2-3 word phrases that are still quite broad.  For soccer, a body keyword might be “soccer ball” or “soccer skills”. These kinds of phrases have slightly less traffic and less competition than a head keyword.  However, they will convert better than a head keyword, with terms like “soccer ball” converting very well amongst people interested in buying a soccer ball.

Long tail keyword

Long tail keywords are very specific phrases with 4 or more words.  The kinds of people using these phrases are usually interested in a specific product, service, or source of information.  A long trail keyword might be “Adidas competition soccer ball” or “Buy Nike soccer ball”.  These kinds of keywords have much less search volume individually, but can provide a great deal of traffic if you rank for many of them.  Most of the Internet searchers performed are long tail searches. Long tail keywords convert very well because the searcher is looking for a specific item or piece of information.

The best approach for most businesses is to target body and long tail keywords.  it will be easier to rank for these keyword categories and they convert very well.

When choosing a keyword to target, the key is to aim for the sweet spot between competition, conversion potential, and search volume.  You will be looking for the low competition, high search volume keywords that consumers often use when they are interested in making a purchase.

Now that you understand the concept of niche topics and keyword research, you can begin to use Google Keyword Planneror a tool like Uber Suggestto identify useful body and long tail keywords.

Thanks for reading Keyword Research/Niche Research.  Hopefully, you now have a better understanding of the importance of keyword research and how you can use niche topics to take your keyword research to the next level.

The post Keyword Research – Finding your Niche appeared first on Disseminate Digital.

Considering UX In Design/SEO

Search engine algorithms have become very sophisticated in recent years, largely thanks to the integration of machine learning.  Machine learning helps the algorithm evaluate a website more like a human does — looking at the overall page layout, identifying visual content, assessing the readability of a page, and so on.  It can also be used to analyse various behavioural metrics which determine how much a user enjoys a website.

The integration of machine learning is a significant step forward in the world of SEO, as search engines will be able to more easily evaluate the user experience (UX) of a website. There is some indication that search engines are already using UX as a ranking factor, with websites that offer a poor user experience finding it more difficult to rank well.

What is UX?

User Experience (UX) refers to the experience that an individual has when using a website. This includes how they perceive and respond to the website’s appearance, organisation, usability, and efficiency.

UX is completely subjective, as one person can have a vastly different website experience compared to another person.  It can also change over time, as a person becomes more familiar with a website and learns how to use it.

The primary goal of a UX designeris learn how people use and respond to a website, then make adjustments to improve the overall user experience.  They will often audit websites to identify common UX mistakes and conduct in-person tests to determine which parts of a website users enjoy or dislike.

UX designers pay particularly close attention to:

• The website’s overall structure
• Location of important functionality (search boxes, menus)
• The quality of the menus (how easy they are to find, understand, and use)
• How content is structured
• The flow of the website
• How users interact with the website
• How colours and fonts are used, and much more.

What does the focus on UX mean for design and SEO?

So, how does an SEO specialist or designer prepare for the increasing importance of user experience?

SEO specialists will need to learn UX principles

Google has always been focussed on delivering the best possible experience for users.  This is the main driver of their new focus on UX and desire to use it as a search engine ranking factor.  SEO specialists will have to follow Google’s lead and spend time learning UX design principles.  This may be a significant change for many SEO specialists who are more used to dealing with keywords more than the preferences of human users.

Designers will need a stronger UX focus

Although many designers already have some UX training and an intuition for making websites that people enjoy using — they may have to take it up a level.  This is particularly true when they are planning menu systems and other important elements of the user interface.

UX specialists must also change their approach

Making UX an important ranking factor for SEO will also change the way that UX designers work. Traditionally, UX designers followed a linear approach, based off a user reaching the home page of a website.  The UX designer would make changes based on how the user interacted with the home page and navigated through the site from this starting point.

Unfortunately, this is not how most users reach a website via a search engine.  For most websites, about 50% of visitors will enter the website via an internal page.  They won’t see the home page unless they manually navigate to it.  This means that these internal pages must be designed to be as satisfying for the user as the home page is — which will require a re-focus for many UX experts.

What can you focus on now?

While it is unknown which UX concepts Google might use as ranking factors, there are some areas which are guaranteed to have an impact.  SEO specialists can focus on these areas today.

Headings

Most SEO specialists know how to use semantic HTML and keyword research to create informative headings for search engines.  The good news is that creating semantic HTML remains a very effective UX strategy.

Make sure all pages use a single H1 element, then H2, H3, H4, and so on for subsequent headings (with appropriate visual formatting).  Place the H1 heading at the top of the page, with relevant keywords at the beginning. By creating a logical hierarchy of headings, you can help both your human users and search engines algorithms.

Website speed

Most SEO specialists are aware that Google uses site speed as a significant ranking factor.  It is very likely that site speed will become an even larger factor in future years as it also affects UX.

Site structure and navigation

This is one area where many modern websites continue to fail.  They often use confusing or frustrating site structures and navigation systems that annoy their end users.  Previously, this might have resulted in poor conversions and customer complaints.  Now, it may also result in poor search engine rankings.

One of the most common mistakes made by designers is hiding the main navigation system and replacing it with the word an icon or the word ‘Menu’.  This is often done to make the website look cleaner.  Unfortunately, hiding important navigational items from the user just makes the website frustrating to use.

Avoid hiding your navigational elements unless you absolutely must.  You should also using fancy pop-ups, providing far too many menu options, or having a complex menu structure.  Simplify as much as possible and make the site structure logical for the average human user.

The mobile experience

Since Google released its first mobile friendly update in 2015, SEO specialists and designers have been scrambling to make their websites work well on mobile devices.  Mobile friendliness is now one of the major ranking factors for websites and can dramatically affect how well a site performs.

This trend will only increase as UX becomes a more powerful ranking factor.  You must ensure that all websites have an easy-to-use interface that is a pleasure to use.  Everything from above-the-fold content to navigation systems and button sizes must be considered when designing for mobile in the future as it affects the user experience.

The focus on UX will good for everyone

The plus side of the increasing focus on UX is that SEO specialists, designers, and UX specialists will develop a multifaceted approach when planning websites.  They will all have a strong focus on the user experience and creating a website that is more enjoyable to use.

Long gone are the days where SEO specialists would stuff keywords into a page or designers would use an abstract design that is very difficult to use.  They will have to think about the user throughout the design and optimisation process.  This will lead to a more collaborative approach and better outcomes for everyone.

The post The Importance Of UX In Design/SEO appeared first on Disseminate Digital.