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How To Tackle Fake Online Reviews For Ecommerce Stores

How To Tackle Fake Online Reviews For Ecommerce Stores

by | Aug 16, 2021 | News

Fake online reviews cost $152 billion a year. There is a sub culture of review scammers who make money by working with brands who want to take risks and capitalise on a review attack or review spike. These networks can influence markets overnight and its scary how this works.

Here’s how e-commerce sites can stop them.

Online reviews will influence $3.8 trillion of global e-commerce spend in 2021. This is, in theory, a good thing. In their most ideal state, online reviews serve a valuable economic function for all parties in a transaction. These nuggets of wisdom and caution help to bridge information asymmetries between buyers and sellers providing information that may not be otherwise disclosed.

Ive worked with many ecommerce stores on review management work with me here.

However, as with many areas of the internet, while there are well-intentioned valid users, there are also malicious users and bots. In fact, this issue is significantly affecting ecommerce authenticity and even revenue.

  • While there are well-intentioned valid users creating online reviews, there are also malicious users and bots.
  • Translating this into economic impact, the direct influence of fake online reviews on global online spending is $152 billion.
  • There are tools available to help mitigate these risks – not just on review sites but in the customer acquisition funnel and beyond.

Read how e-commerce sites can stop fake reviews, and how they can benefit from online reviews.

five star review for ecommerce products

You’ll learn how to stop fake reviews on your e-commerce site. I’ll tell you why fake reviews are a problem, and how to stop them using AI-based tools. After reading this post, you will know how to spot fake reviews and how e-commerce sites can stop them.

Amazon has a big problem with fake reviews. The company is looking to implement machine learning in order to find and remove fake reviews. Sadly Amazon does not have a great seller support ecosystem and they believe that the customer is always right.

Overnight in Australia and United States a review attack as they are known can crash a top sellers listing in 12 hours or less. The seller has very little recourse to stop this and retain their high listing or positive seller status. Amazon sucks.

There are apps for Shopify and Software for Review management.

The booming market for fake online reviews

Why are fake online reviews so resilient?

A significant reason is because the return on investment of soliciting fake reviews make them highly profitable. Lets look at Yelp reviews, when a business listing gets an extra gold star that listing lets say its a car part dealer the listing will increase revenue on average by approx 5-9%. That figure is just one of teh increased signals a review increase can help a business.

Now in reverse that could also start to cripple a business if it happens too often. One example of someone gaming the system was a company who we can not name paying fake reviewers in excess of $250,000 that in turn resulted in this business generating just shy of $5 million in sales.

The deployment of fake reviews causes a substantial short-term rocket in organic search positions and sales ranks that can stay increased in listing visibility for weeks, even after deletion or detection. And by using fake reviews, bad actors are able to “bootstrap” their reputations with fake information.

In general, the eventual culling of fake reviews occurs after around 100 days, giving fraudsters enough time to turn a profit. Like other online markets, such as ad fraud, the economic benefits outweigh the risks and costs of being caught. This incentivizes bad actors and the ongoing growth of this underground economy.

The trading of fake online reviews has become standardized with groups,

commission structures, and loyalty schemes. Payments change hands from around 25 cents to $100 per review. Marketplaces include online private groups that increasingly solicit buyers to purchase their product and leave a five-star review in exchange for a full refund, and in some cases a $5-10 commission. Some 23 fake-review related groups operate per day.

Just one automated operation can generate an unlimited number of fake reviews across the e-commerce landscape – and it doesn’t even require programming skills.

scrooge mcduck money man

The $152 billion problem of fake reviews

Using official figures and self-reporting by the world’s leading e-commerce sites (including Trip Advisor, Yelp, TrustPilot and Amazon) on average we find that 4% of all online reviews are fake.

Translating this into economic impact, the direct influence of fake online reviews on global online spending is $152 billion.

This problem can be further broken down into the impact of fake reviews on review-influenced e-commerce in some of the biggest e-commerce countries. Fake online reviews influence $791 billion of e-commerce spending annually in the US, $6.4 billion in Japan, $5 billion in the UK, $2.3 billion in Canada and $900 million in Australia.

What can e-commerce businesses do?

1. Identify and filter invalid reviews

Since reviews are often placed by bots rather than valid users, it is important to identify these invalid users and mitigate risk accordingly. The key is to get ahead and stop the reviews from happening in the first place.

Knowing where the risks come from and acting fast are key. The most basic fake review bot attack could be created and executed within a few hours.

Businesses can retaliate by ensuring that fake users on review sites aren’t making their way to a company’s site and by deploying customer acquisition security technology to ensure marketing efforts are going towards potential customers rather than malicious bots.

2. Protect global economic growth and small businesses

The direct costs of fake online reviews refer to the immediate losses imposed on society by the crime or attack. However, the US government has suggested that to best understand the cost of harm, estimates should consider both the financial and non-monetary effects.

By gaining a better understanding of how fake online reviews affect different industries and markets, the risk they pose to a specific business can be more accurately gauged and will reveal how that has a domino effect on other businesses and revenues. Education can be the first step toward better protecting an online reputation.

3. Get ahead of enforcement costs

The high price of court cases brought about – both by public bodies and competitors fighting each other’s alleged treatment of fake reviews – is a major indirect cost that could be added to the $152 billion direct loss. The costs of enforcement, lawyer’s fees, court time, executive and employee headspace, and litigating over fake reviews can stretch into millions of dollars.

When businesses protect their reputations by blocking online reviews through a few simple development steps, these costs can be minimized. The problem will only multiply if left to fester, as new technology brings new bots into the area. But if companies actively filter out these kinds of reviews they can ensure enforcement costs are as low as possible.

4. Prioritize action against fake reviews

Negative reviews can cause a negative economic impact on businesses, and when they are created by bots and invalid users they can be even more frustrating.In one case in Australia a plastic surgeon claimed that his business dropped by 23% in the week after a fake review was posted.

In a court case in 2018 (United States District Court Eastern District of California) California based Super Mario Plumbing said their business dropped 25% and were forced to reduce the work of two employees as a result of a competitor’s fake review. Elsewhere, an Ottawa shop selling dumplings cited the time and money they spent: “It took 10 days for 13 years’ worth of work to break down [the issue]”, says Kamilla Riabko of Ottawa Perogies.

By protecting online reputations and by blocking and filtering online reviews businesses protect their revenues. It’s understandable that unsatisfied customers might leave some constructive criticism here and there, but if bots are taking over your review platforms, then minimizing fake reviews should be a priority.

5. Maintain trust

The presence of fake reviews causes a loss of confidence, with 85% of consumers believing the reviews they read were “sometimes or often fake”. Elsewhere, Bazaarvoice found 28% of respondents said a fake review would cause them to distrust other reviews, and 26% said it would lead them to distrust the brand.

Eliminating fake reviews when possible doesn’t just help with revenue and authenticity, but it also helps maintain trust among your existing and future customers. When consumers realize that a brand cares about promoting and championing the truth, they tend to want to continue to buy the service.

Online reviews are one of the largest markets hit by bad actors and among the costliest in economies where e-commerce has been further expanding during the COVID-19 pandemic. Image: Statista

It’s time to turn off fake online reviews

The ease and access to fake reviews is only increasing whether by humans or botnets, click farms or groups. This makes online reviews one of the largest markets hit by bad actors and among the costliest in economies where e-commerce has been further expanding during the COVID-19 pandemic and continues to grow.

One tactic I have been enlisting across several client sites where we are getting attacked by fake reviews  (competitors) we have been disabling reviews on the Facebook pages. This has slowed down the fake reviews but not solved the problem.

It has become a clear economic necessity to act against fake online reviews and further diminish the reach of bad actors undermining online buying decisions.

Taking necessary steps to minimise these risks positions brands as trustworthy and authentic and helps to expand businesses among authentic users.

Invalid traffic exists everywhere – but there are tools available to help mitigate these risks – not just on review sites but in the customer acquisition funnel and beyond. Businesses should act now.

As a ecommerce store owner myself I find it incredibly annoying  having to mitigate invalid reviews, many platforms do not have very good removal features and have a strong line when removing reviews. This is such a headache for me and I felt that it might help many of you that do have your own ecommerce stores that get fake reviews. I hope it helps.

Breaking Down Keyword Difficulty

Breaking Down Keyword Difficulty

Keyword Difficulty Can I really rank on page 1? In all cases you need to assess the keyword popularity and the competition separately you can not associate example “vegan supplements” in the same way that you would research words like “vegan pizza napkins” the two...

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Onpage Blog Interlinking Tactics

Onpage Blog Interlinking Tactics

ON PAGE TRICKHere are some tactics for using your blog pages to your advantage by linking from those posts to your revenue-generating products and services pages. This tactic takes small more agile pages that can target lots of longer keywords and phrases and directs...

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Google Search Console Query Deep Diving

Google Search Console Query Deep Diving

Here is a little tip that I do to help get stuck websites momentum. You can find a similar report to what I am referencing if you visit your Google Search Console. It is called Google Search Console query profiling. This is a Do It Yourself tip. In my circle and in...

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How To Understand What SEO Is Business Owners Guide

How To Understand What SEO Is Business Owners Guide

by | Aug 15, 2021 | How To, News

In this guide, you will learn the SEO basics and get a basic understanding of what SEO is, how it works, what it involves, and why it is important.

If you are new to SEO and want to grasp the basics and fundamental SEO concepts, then this is the guide for you.

The guide to SEO basics is made of questions that every beginner SEO has, to-the-point answers, I have found this useful for educating business owners as well as junior marketers.

I discuss the fundamental concepts of SEO, what each section within the very broad topic of search engine optimisation..

Intro to SEO basics

Everything starts witha keyword search in popular websites like Google, YouTube Ebay, Facebook and so on. The key thing SEO does is help your website, video or other web pages show up higher in those search results. This is a complex process that constantly evolves as those platforms change their ranking factors.

SEO is never one and done. The core can be done so the foundations are set but the actual signals that help increase visibility need constant work. SEO tactics are what is used to help move web pages up and down search results.

My aim is to make this as easy to understand as possible for you. If you want to understand what your SEO agency is doing or need to make a selection of a new provider this guide will empower you.

Learning business operations is tricky

What is SEO and how it works?

SEO refers to the process of optimizing your website so that it will rank higher in the search engine results pages when someone searches for specific keywords. This gives your content exposure so people remain aware of your brand.

SEO has an enormous impact on your website traffic. If you want to receive lots of free traffic, you’re going to need to invest some time and effort into SEO. In turn, you’ll be able to attract more customers who are already searching for brands like yours and looking for offers like the ones you are offering.

There are hundreds of elements and factors influencing SEO, so it is not possible to cover all of them even in such a long SEO guide like the one you are reading now.

Why is SEO important?

SEO is important because it brings to your website visitors who are genuinely interested in what you are offering. These are the visitors who are exactly looking for information about the topic of your web page. 

PRO INSIGHT: Did you know that Google receives about 65 000 searches every second? It means that all your current and potential customers are on Google. And you should be there too. 

Every day more and more transactions and purchases are made on the Internet. This is especially true in 2021 and in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. More and more businesses are now going online and it’s mainly Google where customers come to look for what they need. 

SEO is important! Businesses of all sizes spending billions of dollers every year on making sure their websites show up higher in Google search, their videos get seen in YouTube and their products get seen in places like Amazon and eBay.

What is a search engine?

A search engine is a program (an online tool) that provides the results based on the query (keyword) a user submits. When a user types in a query, a search engine searches for relevant information in its database and displays it in the form of a SERP (search engine results page).

Search engines discover, analyze, understand, and organize the content on the web. Their main purpose is to provide the most relevant and the best results to their users.

PRO TIP: The main goal of search engines is to satisfy users’ needs and make them happy. To win in search engines, your goal as an SEO should be exactly the same.

The most popular search engine is – not surprisingly – Google with more than 75% of the market share. Other notable search engines are Bing (by Microsoft), Baidu (popular in China), or Yandex (popular in Russia). Note that YouTube (owned by Google) is also a search engine and it’s the second-largest search engine in the world.

What is a keyword?

A keyword (also known as a keyword or key phrase) is a word or a combination of words that define and describe a given topic. They usually refer to online content, such as articles or blog posts.

SEO Basics: keyword

In SEO, keywords are the terms and phrases that users enter into search engines to find the information they are looking for. Keywords understood as words typed into a search box in a search engine are also called queries or search queries.

Not all keywords are created equal, though.

keyword research dog food

What is a long-tail keyword?

A long-tail keyword is longer and more specific than a regular keyword. When users type in a long tail keyword they know exactly what they are looking for. Long-tail keywords are usually made of several words.

Long-tail keywords are usually much less competitive and are searched for much less frequently.  However, there are many more long-tail keywords than regular keywords.

PRO INSIGHT: Did you know that about 18% of all the searches made on Google each day are completely new and have never been done before?

Examples of regular keywords:

  • SEO
  • SEO audit
  • SEO guide

Examples of long-tail keywords:

  • How long does it take to audit a website
  • WordPress plugin to speed up a website
  • Different types of search engine optimization

PRO TIP: Long-tail keywords are usually way easier to win. It is good to focus on optimizing your content for long-tail keywords especially if you have a brand new site that has not built its authority yet.

The definition of keywords would not be complete without digging a bit deeper into what’s behind a keyword. Yup, that’s search intent.

What is keyword research?

Keyword research is the process used by SEO professionals to find and analyze keywords (or search terms) that users type into search engines to find specific information, products, or services.

The easiest way to find keywords for SEO is to use one of many available SEO keyword tools. There are many both free and paid keyword tools you can use.

PRO TIP: With keyword research, you can learn what keywords are most often searched for, how competitive they are, and how difficult it is to rank for a given keyword.

The most popular keyword tool is Google Keyword Planner which gives you keyword data straight from Google.

Keywords are more and more often analyzed in terms of search intent instead of just the meaning of a given word. 

That’s why keyword research should also include the analysis of what type of content already ranks for a given keyword and what types of results Google displays. 

What is search intent?

Search intent (also referred to as keyword intent or user intent) is the reason why a user types in a specific query into a search engine. Search intent describes the goal a user wants to achieve with the help of a search engine.

There are three main types of search intent:

Keyword Intent

  • Informational intent is when a user is simply looking for information and wants to learn something. For example, a query like “how to learn SEO”.
  • Navigational intent is about a user wanting to visit a specific website. Instead of typing the website’s address, they type its name into a search box. For example, “seosly seo guide”.
  • Transactional intent is when a user is ready to make a purchase and is already in the buying mode. For example, “buy technical seo audit”.

PRO TIP: Search intent is becoming increasingly important for SEO. You should never optimize a web page for any keyword without at first analyzing the search intent behind it. 

PRO TIP 2: The easiest way to check the search intent of a query is to simply analyze the results returned for it. If there are only informational guides there, then you can be pretty sure this is an informational query. 

What is the difference between SEO and SEM?

SEM stands for search engine marketing which refers to using paid strategies to gain visibility in search engines. This means paying for ads that appear directly in SERPs (search engine results pages) and look similar to organic search results.

The biggest difference between SEM and SEO is that with SEM your website stops being displayed in search results the moment you stop paying. Organic listings, on the other hand, are free and don’t disappear the moment you stop doing SEO. 

SEO basics: SEM

In some highly competitive businesses, SEM makes more sense while in others it’s only SEO or the combination of the two.

PRO INSIGHT: SEM brings almost immediate results while SEO takes a lot of time and patience. Technically both are paid (unless you do SEO on your own) but it’s SEO that brings long-term results which can last for months or even years with little or no extra work.

What is organic traffic?

Organic traffic is the visits to your website that come from organic listings in SERPs (search engine results pages). The opposite of organic traffic is paid traffic which relates to visits that are generated through paid ads. Paid visits stop the moment you stop paying, which is not the case with organic visits.

Organic traffic

PRO INSIGHT: Getting quality SEO created organic traffic to your website is the primary goal of SEO and the most reliable metric of your SEO success. Organic visitors are usually the most targeted and the most valuable visitors you can get to your website.

Google Analytics Traffic Sources

What are SERPs?

SERPs stand for search engine results pages which are the web pages displayed to users when they type in a search query (a keyword) into a search engine, such as Google or Bing.

SERPs contain 10 organic results on the first page, sponsored results (ads) usually on top, featured snippets (usually above organic results), and other elements like maps, images, videos, and others, depending on the query type.

PRO INSIGHT: The purpose of SEO is to get your website as high as possible on the first page of results for a given keyword. Only the first three results of the first page receive any meaningful organic traffic. 

In the past, some 15 or more years ago, SERPs were made of 10 blue links. You probably noticed that this is not the case anymore. Try typing “Google in 1998” to see what SERPs looked like back then.

SEO basics

What is universal search?

Universal Search (also referred to as Enhanced Search or Blended Search) is the integration of different types of results within a SERP (search engine results page). Universal Search means that there are different types of media in a SERP instead of just 10 blue links. Universal search has been around since 2007.

Universal search results include assets like images, videos, local businesses, rich snippets, featured snippets, maps, shopping results, and more. These elements can be displayed among, below, above, or alongside regular organic listings in search engines like Google or Bing.

What exactly is displayed depends on the type of query, user location, or even their previous searches. Any clever SEO must account for universal search when doing SEO for themselves or their clients.

What is a featured snippet?

A featured snippet is a different form of presentation of a search result. Instead of being a link to the site, a featured snippet usually displays one or two sentences from a website in an attempt to directly answer a user’s query. A featured snippet can also be a list or a table. 

What is a rich result?

Rich results (also called rich snippets) are regular search results with some additional information and data displayed. Rich results are displayed thanks to the presence of structured data in the HTML code of a web page. 

Rich results provide additional information to the user and help search engines better understand the topic of a web page. Examples of rich snippets include recipes, reviews, or any other visually enhanced type of search result.

PRO TIP: Even though they don’t directly influence rankings, rich results make a web page look more attractive in SERPs. This may lead to a higher CTR which may influence the rankings of a web page. 

What is CTR?

CTR stands for a click-through rate which is the ratio of users who click on a specific link to users who view a given link. CTR is often used in paid ads (Google Ads) to measure the success of an ad campaign. 

In SEO, CTR tells you what percentage of users who viewed your web page in search results actually clicked on it. 

SEO Basics: CTR

What are ranking factors?

Ranking factors are the criteria that search engines use to assess and rank websites in search results. There are hundreds of both less and more important ranking factors (or ranking signals) influencing the website’s visibility in search.

Examples of ranking signals include a website’s backlink profile, technical optimization, speed, user behavior, content, internal linking, or security to name just a few.

Search engines rarely provide specific information on what is a ranking factor and what isn’t. However, they give a ton of useful guidelines on how to make your website the best of its kind making it friendly both for users and search engines.

PRO TIP: The 3 most important Google ranking factors are content, backlinks, and internal linking.  

What is a backlink?

A backlink (also referred to as an incoming link, inbound link, or inlink) is a link from one website to another. Any external link pointing to your website is a backlink.

Google, Bing, and other search engines use backlinks as a ranking factor. They all admit it’s a ranking factor. In this respect, backlinks are treated as “votes of confidence” by search engines.

Since backlinks play a very important role in most search engine algorithms, they are very often overused or created purely with the purpose to mislead search engines.

crazy-backlink-explainer-diagram

What is a nofollow link?

Nofollow links are the links that you don’t want Google to associate with your website when determining your ranking.  You add a no-follow tag to a backlink to tell Google that it shouldn’t pass any “link juice” to your website.

Nofollow links help you ensure that your website is only connected to well-reputed and authoritative sources. Unlike do-follow, no-follow is not a default attribute, and you have to add the tag to each link you don’t want to be associated with your website.

What is a dofollow link?

A Dofollow link is any backlink that Google considers when ranking your website. By default, all backlinks are dofollow. They have to be switched to nofollow if you don’t want Google to associate your website with those links.

Do-follow links enable Google to determine which websites are linking back to you and calculate your ranking “worthiness.” You don’t have to add the do-follow attribute to make it a do-follow link as it’s the default configuration.

Is Google the only search engine that counts?

There are search engines other than Google but Google is the search engine that counts the most. Google has over 75 % of the search market while its biggest competitor Bing has only about 10% of the market share.

There are, of course, other search engines like Baidu (the Chinese search engine), Yandex (the Russian search engine), or DuckDuckGo but it’s Google that we all care about the most.

SEO Basics: other search engines

PRO INSIGHT: The reason behind this is simple. Google simply provides the best and most relevant results. That’s why every SEO should know a bit about Google and what Google cares about the most. 

What is Googlebot?

Googlebot is the name given to the algorithms and code (i.e., the “crawler”) that go through every website and tell Google what it’s about. Googlebot is responsible for discovering and indexing all the web pages on the internet so that Google knows about almost every piece of content (on all the webpages) that’s currently available online.

It allows Google to display the most relevant and up-to-date results when someone types in a term (or phrase) for Google to search. A website should be easy for the Googlebot to crawl through. Otherwise, Google won’t know about all the web pages you have on that website. As per Google, there are two main types of Googlebot crawlers:

  • A Googlebot that stimulates and looks at the web from a desktop user’s perspective.
  • A Googlebot Smartphone that sees the web through a mobile user’s lens.

What are Google algorithms?

Google algorithms are very complex tools whose task is to retrieve data from the index and present it in the form of the best and the most relevant search results possible. Of course, Google uses combinations of different algorithms that take into account different types of signals to rank web pages.

Some of the most popular Google algorithms (or components of the Google search algorithm) are called RankBrain, BERT, or Caffeine.

I strongly recommend you read the article on how search works straight from Google to better understand how Google works.

What is Google algorithm update?

A Google algorithm update means a change (big or small) to the way Google algorithms assess, value, and rank websites.

Google algorithms are updated multiple times a day! It is not possible to track all of those changes and adjust your website to each one of them.

A few times a year Google releases a broad core update which is a major algorithm update that usually impacts the rankings of many websites. 

In the past, Google algorithms updates received special names like Panda or Penguin. Now they are simply called core updates like January 2020 Core Update. Moz has an interesting historical list of Google algorithms updates.

Wikipedia Google is uncontrollable

What are Google Webmaster Guidelines?

Google Webmaster Guidelines are a set of rules and guidelines provided by Google with regards to optimizing a website for search and doing it the white hat SEO way. 

PRO INSIGHT: I see it time and time again. If a website complies with Google webmaster guidelines, then it usually has no trouble ranking. 

Google webmaster guidelines should be your SEO bible. I’m not kidding. Make sure to read Google webmaster guidelines if you still haven’t done it.

What is Google penalty?

A Google penalty is a situation where a website drops out of the search engine index or its rankings for given keywords drop dramatically. A Google penalty is almost always the result of breaking Google webmaster guidelines. There are two main types of penalties you can get: manual and algorithmic.

PRO TIP: Google is giving a manual action only if it cannot punish a website algorithmically. A manual action happens when a website owner manages to mislead Google algorithms so that they are not able to automatically detect this manipulation and need the help of a human. 

Google is getting smarter and smarter at recognizing different mischievous SEO techniques. That’s why more and more penalties are now handled algorithmically. 

Your job as an SEO is to play by the rules so that your website or your client’s website never gets penalized. If the website does get a manual action, your task as an SEO is to clean it up as quickly as possible and remove spammy toxic backlinks that may cause Google to penalise your website.

It sounds really far fetched but Google has spent millions on their IP and protecting it by making people who try to game the system having a penalty system. 

What are Google Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines?

Google Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines (also called Google Search Quality Raters Guidelines) is a publicly available document that is given to raters, people employed by companies working for Google. The raters’ task is to rate websites based on those criteria. 

SEO Basics: Google search quality raters guidelines

The raters do not influence the rankings of a website. Their ratings are used to improve Google algorithms so that they can return better results in the future. 

The guidelines outline all the necessary elements that should be taken into account when evaluating a website. One of the very important elements discussed within guidelines is E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness).  

PRO TIP: You should understand the Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines as a place where Google algorithms want to go, not how they work, and how they assess websites. 

What is E-A-T?

E-A-T stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness and is a concept originating from Google’s Search Quality Raters’ Guidelines. 

PRO INSIGHT: Every type of SEO analysis you do should assess the website in terms of E-A-T.

SEO basics: E-A-T

Your task as an SEO is to make sure that a website has a decent amount of E-A-T. If it does not, then you need to provide recommendations on how to improve it. 

E-A-T is becoming more and more important, especially for YMYL (Your Money Your Life) websites. In some niches like medicine or law, it is now practically impossible to rank without a decent amount of E-A-T. 

What is PageRank?

PageRank (PR) is an algorithm for calculating and evaluating the web page based on the quantity and quality of links pointing to it. PageRank was developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google. 

Since its creation in 1998, PageRank has changed and evolved but it still operates on the same core principles. The PageRank score is not public and is now only used internally by Google. 

PRO FACT: In the past, the PageRank score was public in the form of Google’s Toolbar PageRank which was regularly updated. However, the PR score was overused and manipulated by black hat SEOs, so Google removed it entirely in 2016 (and stopped updating it in 2013). 

What is RankBrain?

RankBrain is a machine learning-based system within Google’s core algorithm. The purpose of RankBrain is to identify and determine the most relevant results to user queries.  It also helps Google better understand user queries and their intent. 

PRO TIP: According to Google, RankBrain is one of the most important ranking factors alongside PageRank and content.  

What is Bert?

BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers and is a Google neural network-based machine learning technique used for natural language processing and pre-training. 

PRO TIP: With BERT, Google is able to understand and process complex queries often in the form of complicated questions with a lot of context. 

BERT is part of the Google search algorithm and is now used in almost all English queries. 

What is Google Autocomplete?

Google Autocomplete is a feature available in Google Search designed to help users complete their searches faster. Once a user starts typing, Autocomplete starts to automatically predict the queries based on what is being typed. 

Google Autocomplete

Autocomplete allows for completing your search without the need to type all the letters and words of your query. This is a huge time saver, especially for mobile users. 

PRO TIP: Google highlights that Autocomplete is about predicting what a user is going to type, not suggesting the query. 

What are Google search operators?

Google Search Operators (also called search commands or search parameters) are special commands and characters that you can type straight into Google to filter, refine, or narrow down the results. With search operators, it is way easier to find specific information or search a specific website.

What is Google Search Console?

Google Search Console or simply GSC (formerly knows as Google Webmaster Tools) is a free Google tool that allows website owners to monitor the process of indexing and crawling their website.

GSC also provides a wealth of data about the rankings of a website, number of clicks, CTR, and more. It also helps website owners better understand how their website is performing, what issues it is facing, and how to troubleshoot potential problems.

Google Search Console

What is technical SEO?

Technical SEO  focuses on technical aspects of a site when it comes to improving its visibility in search engines.

Technical SEO includes, among others, optimizations, such as accessibility to internet robots, or how robots understand a website’s content. Site performance and its speed are also part of technical SEO. And so is the security (using HTTPS).

When doing Audits and Technical SEO for a website, you should know and understand terms, such as an internet crawler (robot), crawling, indexing, rendering, structured data, breadcrumb navigation, or internal linking. You also need to understand what a robots.txt file and an XML map are and how to fix possible issues with them.

Why is technical SEO important?

Technical SEO is important because it’s the opening door for a website’s visibility in search. The purpose of technical SEO is to help search engine robots access, crawl, index, and understand your website.

If a robot can efficiently crawl and index your website, then your website stands a chance of better rankings and improved visibility.

It doesn’t matter how awesome your content is if search engine robots cannot access and understand your website. Don’t neglect technical SEO!

What is a technical SEO audit?

A website audit focuses mainly on technical errors and optimizations to be made within a website. A technical audit usually analyzes things, such as a website’s indexability, speed, performance, XML sitemaps, and robots.txt.

PRO TIP: The first and the most important step in any technical SEO audit is to make sure that the website is indexable.

Technical SEO audits should highlight quick fixes and quick wins, such as noindexing thousands of thin content web pages or implementing correct redirects from outdated and irrelevant web pages.

What is crawling, rendering, indexing, and ranking?

Crawling, rendering, indexing and ranking are four different processes that shouldn’t be confused with one another.

  • Crawling is the process in which a search engine bot discovers and analyzes new or updated content on the internet. A web page, an image file, and a video are all a type of content. Search engine bots discover content via links.
  • Rendering is the process in which a search engine bot retrieves a web page, runs its code, and evaluates its content to understand its structure and layout.
  • Indexing means storing the content discovered during the process of crawling and rendering. The information and data gathered during the crawling process are stored in the index.
  • Ranking is the process of determining where a specific piece of content (usually a web page) should appear within a SERP (search engine results page). Good rankings are the main purpose of SEO.

PRO TIP: Crawling is not equal to indexing and indexing is not equal to ranking. Google has a nice guide explaining how the process of crawling, rendering, and indexing works.

What is crawl budget?

Crawl budget is the number of pages that Google indexes (or goes through) every time it crawls your website. Once your website exhausts that budget, the crawler moves on to a different website, but that doesn’t mean it would go through the “known” old webpage and miss any new ones you’ve set up.

The budget is set and updated automatically by Google. It’s based upon your website size (number of web pages), update frequency, website speed, and internal linking, so it usually takes into account any new pages you have set up and updates your crawl budget accordingly.

Crawl budget doesn’t impact most websites’ SEO or ranking (simply because crawlers are efficient and the budget is almost always adequate). But big websites with several thousand pages and where new pages are added very frequently should optimize for crawl budget.

What is a search engine robot?

A search engine robot (also referred to as a bot, crawler, or spider) is a tool that search engines, such as Google or Bing use to gather information about websites and add it to its database.

Search engine robots are similar to web browsers in how they operate except that they don’t need human interaction.

Bots access web pages mostly through links placed on other websites or XML sitemaps. The most popular search engine robots are, of course, Google crawlers. 

What is an XML sitemap?

An XML sitemap is a text file that tells search engine robots which pages should be indexed. An XML sitemap can also provide links to other types of content like videos or images.

An XML sitemap informs Google (or other search engines) about the most important web pages of the website. The purpose of a sitemap is to help search engines discover the web pages of the website.

PRO INSIGHT:  An XML sitemap is especially important for huge websites that have deep information architecture.  Small websites (up to a few hundreds of web pages) can do without an XML sitemap. However, it’s still a good practice to have one!

What is robots.txt?

A robots.txt file tells search engine bots which pages or files should or should not be crawled. Note that the purpose of a robots.txt is to protect your website from overloading it with requests. It’s not a way to keep a web page out of the Google index.

PRO TIP: A very common SEO mistake is to use robots.txt to block URLs from indexing. To block a URL from indexing, you should add a meta robots “noindex” tag to it. 

What are canonical URLs?

A canonical URL (also referred to as a canonical tag or a canonical link) is the URL of a web page that is the main or the “preferred” version of a given piece of content.

It helps prevent the problem of duplicate content when there are many similar web pages on a website.

What is canonicalization?

In SEO, canonicalization is the process in which, out of a number of similar URLs, one URL is chosen as the main one and the representation of other URLs. 

One way to help search engines choose one URL over another is to use a canonical link element. This is, however, only a hit and Google may still choose another URL as canonical if it thinks it is more relevant. 

PRO TIP:  To check what URL Google chose as canonical, you can use the URL inspect tool in Google Search Console. 

Customer targeting with paid ads

What are meta tags?

Meta tags (also referred to as metadata) provide information about a web page to search engines. Meta tags are practically invisible to users from the level of a web page because they are actually small snippets of code.

The most important meta tags are meta title, meta description, meta robots, meta viewport, and meta charset.

PRO TIP: In the case of many websites, the optimization of meta tags is a quick win when it comes to SEO.

PRO TIP 2: Meta tags should contain important and relevant keywords.

Search engines use the information contained in meta tags to display a web page in SERPs.

8-date-ideas-serp

Meta tags also help search engines better understand what a web page is about. High-quality and clickable content of meta tags may help improve the CTR of a web page. 

What is the title tag?

A title tag is an HTML element that tells the users and the crawlers what the title of your page is. It’s what is displayed as the main clickable heading when you search for something in Google.

Title tags are important for both SEO and click-through, but they are more important for your users than crawlers because when they put a link in the top spot, they take the whole content of the page into account. In contrast, online users will probably make up their minds about clicking after reading the title.

What is the ALT text?

ALT text (alternative text) is the HTML attribute used to describe the appearance and content of the image used on a website. 

PRO TIP:  Remember that ALT text is not the place to stuff your keywords but to describe the image. 

ALT text is important both for users of screen readers and search engine robots because it conveys the meaning of the image. 

What are headings?

Headings help both users and search engine robots better understand the content of a web page. There are five types of headings (from H1 to H5) with the H1 tag being the most important one.

PRO TIP:  Headings are also very useful for users of screen readers. 

Headings define different parts of a web page and how they relate to one another. They should contain the keywords you are optimizing a given web page for.  

You can treat headings as chapters in a book where the web page is that book. 

What is anchor text?

Anchor text is the content (usually just a few words) that is hyperlinked to another webpage. Anchor text should ideally be relevant to the page’s topic or the content it’s linking out to. It’s clickable and usually stands out from the rest of the content because it’s a different color and underlined, though you may choose to blend it in the content.

There are different types of anchor text, including exact, partial matches, and generic (like click here). Relevant anchor text helps both users and crawlers understand how the current content is connected to the webpage it’s linking out to.

SEO Backlinks

What is structured data?

Structured data in the context of SEO simply refers to providing information about a web page or a piece of content on it in a specific format, which is, in this case, Schema.org.

Structured data do not directly improve rankings but some of them can influence how a web page looks in search results. 

seo guide structured data rich results

PRO TIP:  Thanks to structured data, a web page becomes eligible for rich results, which can improve the attractiveness of its snippet in SERPs and make it more clickable. 

In this way, structured data help search engines better understand what a web page is about and what other topics or entitles it relates to. 

What is breadcrumb navigation?

Breadcrumb navigation (also known simply as breadcrumbs) is a secondary type of navigation that helps users better understand their location within a website’s structure.

PRO TIP:  Breadcrumbs are an important element of the correct internal linking structure. 

It’s usually located on top of a web page and contains links to higher-level pages like category or homepage.

What is mobile-first indexing?

Mobile-first indexing means that Google takes into account the mobile version of a site when it comes to crawling, rendering, indexing, and ranking. 

In the past, users mostly viewed websites from their desktop computers, so Google primarily used the desktop version to index and rank a site. Now the majority of Internet users use mobile devices, so the mobile version has become the new “default”.

PRO TIP: You should think of mobile-first indexing as “mobile-only” indexing. 

In Google Search Console, you can check if your website has been switched to mobile.  Just go to Coverage and check if Primary crawler says Mobile or Desktop. 

What types of SEO are there?

There are lots of different types, categories, and subcategories of SEO. I really mean a lot! Let’s take a look at the most popular and the most important ones.

  • SEO is often divided into on-site SEO and off-site SEO. 
    • On-site SEO refers to the optimizations of the elements of the website, such as meta tags, content, speed, URLs, internal links, and more.
    • Off-site SEO refers to optimizations made outside the website, such as link building.
    • There is also on-page SEO and off-page SEO which work analogically but relate to one specific web page instead of the whole site.
  • SEO practices are often divided into back hat SEO and white hat SEO depending on whether you comply with Google webmaster guidelines or prefer manipulative techniques.
  • Another common division of SEO is into technical SEO (focused on technical optimizations), mobile SEO (focused on optimizing a website for mobile), and local SEO (focused on local visibility).

In most cases, SEO simply refers to optimizing a website for search. But not always!

  • That’s why we also have YouTube SEO, Instagram SEO, or App Store Optimization (ASO) which focus on increasing the visibility of a YouTube channel, an Instagram account, or a mobile app.

What is link building?

Link building is the process of acquiring links to a website from other high-quality and thematically-related websites. 

Acquiring does not mean buying but rather earning those links by creating such high-quality content that others genuinely want to link to it. 

PRO INSIGHT: Examples of high-quality shareable content are stats reports, in-depth guides, or research results, to name just a few. 

Whether you like it or not, content marketing is an integral part of SEO. 

What is a link audit?

A link audit is a process of analyzing all the incoming links to a website in an attempt to assess if they may be hurting the website and negatively impacting its rankings. 

Doing a link audit and submitting a disavow file to Google Search Console may prevent a website from being punished for link manipulations. 

What is off-site SEO?

Off-site SEO  refers to optimizations made outside the website with the purpose of increasing a website’s rankings and visibility in search engines. Off-site SEO aims at collecting external signals, such as backlinks.

There is also off-page SEO which aims at collecting external signals to a specific web page instead of on the whole website.

PRO TIP: A good SEO strategy relies on both on-site and off-site SEO.

Off-site SEO is most often associated with link building which is its main part. But there are other off-page SEO techniques as well.

Off-site SEO includes any promotional activities that take place off your website. It’s (high-quality) guest posting, getting mentions from other experts in the field, your activity on social media, or even being trusted and recognized by other authorities.

What is on-site SEO?

On-site SEO refers to the optimizations made on the website itself, such as meta tags, headings, ALT tags, content, speed, URLs, internal links, and more. It includes both the optimization of the website’s content and its HTML code.

PRO INSIGHT: Many on-site SEO optimizations fall within the scope of technical SEO which we will talk about in more detail below.

On-site SEO should focus on making the website accessible and easy to understand both for users and search engine robots.

Marketing & SEO roadmap we have a plan

What is an SEO audit?

An SEO site audit (or simply an SEO audit or website audit) is the process of analyzing and evaluating a website in terms of its search engine optimization and visibility in search engines.

Audit Website SEO data and technical health

PRO INSIGHT: The purpose of a website audit is to detect any issues that need fixing to improve a website’s ranking and visibility.

An SEO audit checks if a website complies with webmaster guidelines and other best SEO practices.

When used effectively, disavowing a link prevents a spammy site from bringing your website ranking down by backlinking to it. But it can also be a double-edged sword because disavowing a link also means that it stops passing any link juice to your website/webpage.

Disavowed links are not removed, and you would need to contact the webmaster of the site or original poster to get them removed.  

What is disavowing?

Disavow means telling Google (or another search engine) not to consider specific backlinks when ranking your website. You cut any positive or negative ties to a backlink when you disavow it, so even if it’s functional (still points to your website, and you might get traffic from it), it’s “dead” in terms of SEO. You disavow any backlinks that you think are doing your website more harm than good.

What is local SEO?

Local SEO is the process of optimizing a website for visibility in local search results. Local SEO, just like regular SEO, is about increasing organic (also called free or natural) traffic to a website.

However, the difference between SEO and local SEO is that the latter focuses on increasing the visibility of local and usually smaller businesses that have physical locations.

A geographic location is a vital component of local SEO.  An example of a local query might be “pizza near me” or “pizza in Trigg”.

All of the technical and mobile SEO techniques, of course, still apply to local SEO. However, there are a few local SEO-only tactics as well. The basic and the most important component of local SEO is to claim your firm’s Google My Business listing, which brings us to another question. 

local business success

What is WordPress SEO?

WordPress SEO simply refers to the search engine optimization of a WordPress-based website. The general SEO recommendations apply to any website regardless of its CMS.

However, the methods of implementation of some of these SEO optimizations differ depending on the CMS used. In the case of WordPress sites, the implementation of SEO optimizations is usually very quick and easy.

PRO INSIGHT: 30% of websites on the internet are powered by WordPress, so it’s certainly a good idea to know how to do SEO for WordPress sites.

The beauty of WordPress is that it lets you optimize many advanced and technical aspects of a site even if you are not a technical person. 

What tools should you start with?

There are so many SEO tools out there that choosing the right tools for a website may seem overwhelming. Fortunately, many of these tools are quite similar and it’s really about choosing the tools you like the most and learning how to use them.

Semrush

I know that there is an overlap between the tools I show you below but some tools belong to several categories (i.e. a given tool is free, essential, and comes from Google). 

Here are some tools you may want to start with:

What are the top techniques for SEO?

Based on my experience, the top techniques for SEO include:

  • Making sure the website is accessible to search engine bots and there are no obvious technical issues, such as a noindex tag. 
  • Optimizing meta tags and headers so that both users and search engine bots can understand the main topic and subtopics of a web page. 
  • Creating high-quality useful in-depth content that helps users solve their problems or answers their questions. In other words, content that meets users’ needs. 
  • Taking care of all Google page experience factors.
  • Earning (not building) high-quality backlinks that actually bring traffic to a web page. 
  • Building a website’s E-A-T. 
  • Following SEO and webmaster guidelines provided by Google. 

PRO TIP: I put accessibility to search engine robots at the beginning because this is the foundation without which a website does not stand a chance of high rankings no matter how great it is. 

When does SEO start working?

SEO takes time and requires a lot of patience. There are lots of variables influencing how quickly you can see the first effects of SEO. It depends on the size, type, or age of a website. It also depends on the niche and how competitive it is. 

  • In general, you can expect the first results after a few weeks. 
  • New sites usually need to wait a few months. 
  • The greatest effects (and the snowball effect) usually come from consistent white hat SEO actions taken for a couple of years.

PRO INSIGHT: My own experience shows that a brand-new website usually starts to gather momentum around 6-8 months. Results not typical as every website is judged on its own merits.

Unfortunately, many people want immediate results and are unwilling to wait for the big and real SEO effects to come. As a result, they either engage in black hat SEO techniques or choose an SEO “expert” who guarantees quick and awesome results. This is usually a shortcut to a website penalty instead of SEO success. Don’t take this road.

Remember that there are no guarantees in SEO. If an SEO specialist or an agency guarantees rankings, run away. 

Why does SEO take so long?

SEO takes so long because it is about establishing your position as an expert in your niche, building authority and trust, adding value, and meeting your visitors’ needs. Just like in any other field or industry, this is not a quick process.

If you are looking for instant results and bringing traffic to your website immediately, then PPC (pay per click) may be a better option for you. However, it’s SEO that brings long-term results and steady free organic traffic to a website. 

How can you tell if SEO is working?

You can say that SEO is working if your business is growing and new customers are coming. SEO success should never be measured purely by keyword rankings. This is a rabbit hole!

A website’s ranking for a particular keyword or keywords brings a lot of useful information but it should never be an SEO goal in itself. It is a common situation where a website has high rankings for hundreds of low-volume and low-demand keywords that bring no traffic or no new customers. 

But it is sometimes enough for a website to have high rankings for just a bunch of high-volume and high-demand keywords that bring lots of traffic that converts easily. 

How often does SEO need to be done?

SEO is not a one-time process that you follow and complete. This is an ongoing process that needs to be done on a regular basis and that requires constant monitoring and supervision.

However, contrary to PPC (pay per click), SEO doesn’t stop the moment you stop paying for it. An excellent website (in terms of content, E-A-T, and technical SEO) may do well for many months without much work on the SEO side except for some basic monitoring and regular creation of new content. 

However, I believe that any serious business that relies on organic traffic should have an SEO or an SEO agency taking constant care of the SEO side of things. 

Who is an SEO?

An SEO is a search engine optimiser, a person whose task is to audit and analyze websites in terms of their compliance with search engine standards and guidelines. An SEO is also often the person who implements on-page optimizations on a website or at least verifies their implementation.  

My work as a marketer heavily involves SEO is mainly made up of multi channel campaigns with a large component being SEO delivery. However, what you will exactly do for your SEO campaign depends on who you select as your SEO agency or freelancer. I am a huge SEO nerd, its a facinating never ending game of chess with the smartest super computer in the world being Google and I find the challenge so rewarding.

Should you hire someone to do SEO for you?

If you are serious about growing your online presence (and in most cases, you should be), then you should think about hiring someone to do SEO for your website.

Here is my bio and company values

A company owner usually has little or no extra time that they may spend learning and doing SEO on their own. Not to mention the fact that an experienced SEO specialist will have all the necessary knowledge to do SEO without experimenting with your business.  

Having experts do SEO for you can really give you a great competitive edge. The knowledge and experience of a good SEO specialist are almost always worth paying for. Even if it’s huge money.

Note that practically any company with a good online presence and high visibility in search engines has an SEO or an SEO team on board. You should too.

Want to hire me? Start Here

How can you find a trusted SEO company?

Finding a trusted SEO company isn’t very easy as there are still lots of black hat and unethical SEO firms that guarantee awesome results at very competitive prices. 

Below are the criteria that may really help you. A reliable and trusted SEO company:

  • will never promise you specific rankings for specific keywords.
  • is willing to share with you the results they achieved with other customers. 
  • has a lot of good testimonials.
  • has been on the market for a few years at least.
  • has a decent and SEO optimized website that looks professional.
  • always wants to start with doing an SEO audit of your website.
  • is quick to respond to any of your questions or doubts.
  • focuses on your income and traffic to your website, not keyword rankings.

How much does SEO cost per month?

The cost of SEO per month depends mostly on the experience of an SEO hired, the competitiveness of the industry, and the specific goals you want to achieve through SEO.

In places like Fiverr you can find lots of SEO “specialists” that will audit your website for 50$ and offer SEO services for $100 or $200 per month, but do you really want to do that?

A few years ago it was enough to pay a few hundred bucks to a random SEO agency that would rank your website with mostly black hat or dark grey hat techniques, such as building hundreds of spammy links to your site or stuffing keywords on your pages.

PRO INSIGHT: Any decent SEO expert will rarely charge below $2000 a month for complex SEO services. That’s because high-quality SEO requires hard work and is extremely valuable.

It has changed a lot since then. Now it’s all about authority, quality, expertise, and relevancy. That’s why you need to be ready to pay at least a few thousand dollars a month for a high-quality SEO service and at least a few thousand for an in-depth high-quality SEO audit. 

In many cases, it’s 5000$ and up. Some known SEO experts charge even $10000 per month for SEO. Provided that you find an excellent SEO firm or an SEO expert, it’s money well invested. 

What do SEO services usually include?

Contracted SEO services usually include some or all of the below:

  • An in-depth SEO audit at the start to diagnose the website
  • A technical SEO audit at the start and then at least 2-4 times a year
  • A content audit
  • A link audit
  • Competition analysis
  • Keyword research
  • Visibility analysis
  • Analysis and monitoring of data in Google Search Console and Google Analytics
  • On-site SEO optimization, such as optimization of title tags, meta descriptions, H1 tags, etc.
  • Off-site SEO, such as building your website’s reputation and trust online
  • Technical optimizations, such as creating or updating an XML sitemap and robots.txt
  • Speed analysis and optimization
  • Monthly reporting
  • Link building (or rather authority building)

This list, of course, isn’t final. The exact scope of an SEO service depends on the SEO company, the website, its industry, its competition, its business goals, and many other factors. 

 

In closing I hope this exlainer guide was helpful for knowing what SEO is and how it works. There are a lot of clouds of mystery over what it is how to deliver it and measure it. I cna tell you right now if your SEO provider cant tell you what they are doing or how they are doing it I would be moving away from them to someone who is transparentand at the end of the day it is your money. Thanks for reading I hope this helps.

Breaking Down Keyword Difficulty

Breaking Down Keyword Difficulty

Keyword Difficulty Can I really rank on page 1? In all cases you need to assess the keyword popularity and the competition separately you can not associate example “vegan supplements” in the same way that you would research words like “vegan pizza napkins” the two...

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Onpage Blog Interlinking Tactics

Onpage Blog Interlinking Tactics

ON PAGE TRICKHere are some tactics for using your blog pages to your advantage by linking from those posts to your revenue-generating products and services pages. This tactic takes small more agile pages that can target lots of longer keywords and phrases and directs...

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Google Search Console Query Deep Diving

Google Search Console Query Deep Diving

Here is a little tip that I do to help get stuck websites momentum. You can find a similar report to what I am referencing if you visit your Google Search Console. It is called Google Search Console query profiling. This is a Do It Yourself tip. In my circle and in...

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Types of SEO Keywords Explained

Types of SEO Keywords Explained

by | Aug 14, 2021 | News

Almost everyone nowadays is familiar with SEO work and its terms such as SERPs, Sales Funnels, content marketing, image optimisation and video production. However, not everyone is familiar with the different types of keywords associated with SEO.

I still see confusion around keyword selection, difficulty and intent. Its no ones fault because there is so much content around the topic.

There are three main types of keywords associated with SEO. Let’s take a look at the different SEO keywords and their meanings.

Keyword Type 1: Broad Match Keywords

When focusing on broad match keywords, it is possible for a business to reach a large audience. Broad match keywords, ultimately, are broad search terms and, as a result, are often used in search by a large number of people.

Advantages of Broad Match Keywords

The great thing about broad match keywords is that search engines also look for relevant variations and similar phrases to the search terms entered by the user. In addition, spelling and grammatical errors are included in broad match searches.

Disadvantages of Broad Match Keywords

There are a number of drawbacks with broad match keywords. Firstly, because of broad match terms targeting a wide range of people, not all traffic reaching your website would be potential consumers.

In addition, because broad match keywords aren’t always very specific, they can make the quality of your website much poorer and could potentially have a negative effect on a business’ SEO in terms of content quality.

Keyword Type 2: Exact Match Keywords

The opposite of broad term keywords, exact match keywords are much more specific and focus on the minor details of a search term. This makes it much more difficult for your website to match the search terms exactly but when your website does succeed in matching the keywords, the traffic directed to the site is likely to be much more focused and, as a result, will most probably lead to a high number of conversions.

Advantages of Exact Match Keywords

Exact match keywords probably lead to more sales because the search terms are more specific and therefore, consumers are much better matched than with broad term keywords.

Disadvantages of Exact Match Keywords

The main disadvantage is that less traffic will go to your website. Your website will, therefore, need to include a number of different exact match keywords. That said, although the traffic would be fairly low, most of the traffic would be completely relevant. This can help to raise sales.

Keyword Type 3: Phrase Keywords

Phrase match is some between exact match and broad term keywords. Phrase term keywords will, ultimately, give you less traffic than broad term keywords but that traffic is likely to be more relevant.

keyword data and insights

Here is a recap of a conversation I had with a client around targeting keywords that 99% of other SEO’s would not recommend. My aim is always to provide the best choice for my clients. Low volume but high intent thats the money right there. I avoid the fluff and focus on the money. 

Keyword research is a fundamental part of any SEO campaign. In this article I have outlined a list of different types of keywords and how you can use them in your content marketing strategy. I hope you found the article helpful. If you have any questions or concerns please contact me on the START button in the header.

Protect Your Identity With Anonymous Surfing

Protect Your Identity With Anonymous Surfing

by | Aug 4, 2021 | How To, News

There are a lot of people surfing the Internet everyday that are looking for new anonymous surfing tools that will allow them to protect their identity while the browse around.
There are some web-based applications available that will let you surf without disclosing your personal IP address, called web anonymizers, but there are some limitations that come with them.
One other options for anonymous surfing are the various commercial applications. These are programs that are installed directly onto your computer to protect you while you surf, chat, or email.
If you need a more powerful system that can protect you in a variety of circumstances, this may be the most ideal solution.
Web-based anonymizers are simple, but they won’t let you do any of your online banking or shopping.
The reason is that they don’t offer you any SSL or SSH encryption, which is necessary to perform transactions on most websites. Internet chatting won’t be covered, either.
That is simply beyond the functionality of these applications. If you are just a casual Internet user that doesn’t spend a lot of time online, a web-based program may be the best choice for you.
Using A VPN
It will disguise your personal IP address and let you surf anonymously without having to install a new program on your computer.
All you have to do to use these programs is visit the anonymizer’s website.
From that site all you have to do is type in the URL for your destination site and then let the site take over. It will redirect you to the site you wish to visit, but that site will only register your IP address.
If you wish to use a web anonymizer for more serious reasons, you can try some software on your computer. There are a number of programs that let you surf anonymously by encrypting your connection through an anonymous proxy.
These programs can be downloaded from the web and once you install it on your computer, you can start surfing anonymously. If you can’t seem to get one of these programs to run on your computer, then you’ll have to use one of the proxy servers.
Many of these sites are free but they are often a bit slow because of the number of users and advertisements helping to pay the bills for the site.
Web anonymizers are very convenient for the casual Internet user. If you’re using the Internet to just surf and don’t much more than email, chat, and shop online, then you can still surf safely using one of these programs.
However, if you have more serious things to do on the Internet, which mostly involves doing business, then you will probably want to seriously consider purchasing a commercial application.
This will also allow you to surf anonymously whenever you are online. Are there any doubts about web anonymizers and their ability to help you protect your identity? Not at all.
You can have this program installed on your computer and run everyday without putting much thought into it. It can provide you with maximum privacy whenever you are online. You can have the program configured to automatically change to different IP addresses each time you start your computer.
It can also monitor your activity through programs that run while you surf the Net. With these programs, you can finally surf anonymously and protect your identity with real time protection.
This is better than just using a web based program that might not be reliable. If you are looking for a sure way to surf anonymously and protect your identity online, you can’t beat the free web based proxy servers.
However, if you want the best and most reliable way to surf anonymously, then you can’t beat the commercial programs.


Should a Manufacturer Hire an Online Marketer?

Should a Manufacturer Hire an Online Marketer?

by | Jul 4, 2021 | News

I see this a lot working in ecommerce, the manufacturer is creating these amazing products but the retail stores and resellers are outranking them in search and making more money from customer acquisition than the manufacturer.

Don’t Fall for the Age-Old Misconception That Online Marketing professionals Are the Expensive Option.

Many manufacturers are stuck at a crossroad. Do you hire an in-house marketing person? Or contract an agency to develop and implement a strategy?

This addresses that question—Rand Fishkin’s recent article, “Why You Should Hire Agencies & Consultants (for everything you can)” is probably one of the most important articles manufacturing marketers can read. Rand makes the powerful case: do more with less and you’ll get even greater results.

Is your manufacturing leadership struggling with the question: do we have an internal marketing resource or contract outside resources? The answer will be different for each company. The answer will not be black and white, but various shades of grey.

Every brand as a basic hygiene factor should be doing some form of search engine optimisation and Paid Advertising. This should be a non negotiable.

This means you might have:

  • A dedicated agency handling a comprehensive role delivering leads to your sales team
  • A VP of Sales and Marketing that is supported by a B2B agency
  • A capable marketing team supported by freelance specialists and consultants

Which shade of grey is right for your manufacturing marketing need? That will be up to you, but the evidence outlined in Rand’s article is clear. You need the mix.

To make it even clearer heres an overview of where web traffic comes from. This reinforces to me how important being online really is.

Image source – SparkToro

There can be resistance from in-house marketers. “Trying new things is risky,” writes Fishkin. “And for internal managers, the benefits of consultants and agencies are overshadowed by threats, risks, and lost opportunities for your own career growth.”

Manufacturing owners and managers should also keep the bigger picture in mind. “Unfortunately,” writes Fishkin, “what’s better for the business isn’t always better for everyone in it.”

As the creator you the manufacturer can create the unique selling points. The retailers cant take that away from you when it is positioned from the manufacturer. Most retailers will just copy the descriptions, titles, images and even reviews from a manufacturer and have no real unique content to leverage.

As the source you can create unlimited content around the product. This is not limited to content, think more like images, video and user experiences.

Why is content successful? Three distinct reasons:

  • Resonating topic
  • Perfect timing
  • Targeting the right people

As a content marketing agency Webmecs has worked on various places on the “greyscale.” I’ve been solely responsible for marketing and lead generation for big name brands and working in the background either way I help bring my knowledge to your operations.

Topic: Finding an Important Subject That is Relevant to Your Customer

Great content is not about your company. It is about your customers. The topic of great content should be about the challenges your customers face.

Don’t get caught in the trap of writing content about your services. Capabilities, features, or even your process doesn’t matter to your customer.

Identifying and solving your customer’s challenges does matter. In most cases, it just comes down to the perspective you’re writing from.

For example, you’ve just finished the installation of a new multi-axis CNC station. Instead of focusing on features, share how it will shorten delivery timelines by reducing the number of setups. Showcase the increased accuracy of the finished part.

In short, make the topic relevant to your customer.

What are some topics that are relevant?

  • eBooks that introduce critical process knowledge to your customer (e.g. 10 Tips for Engineers to Select a Precision Machining Partner)
  • Case studies that dive into a specific challenge and how it was resolved
  • Common manufacturing process misconceptions or ways you’ve saved customers time or money

 

Timing: Delivering the Right Message at the Right Time

“The timing is bad,” is a common response in sales. Is your timing wrong or is it the wrong time for that message? So let’s pair the right message with the right time.

A dangerous assumption is that the sales process is linear. Prospective customers may not start at the top of your funnel. Creating content for different stages of the buyer’s journey is crucial.

Early Explorer (Awareness)

  • List-style tips articles (Top 3 Ways to Save and 1 That Will Cost Extra)
  • Infographics
  • Social media engagement
  • Videos and podcasts
  • eBooks

Metrics to Watch

  • Are prospects finding the content? (Organic search traffic)
  • How long are visitors engaged? (Time on page)
  • Are prospects taking action? (Email newsletter signup, content downloads, bounce rate)

Mid-Process (Evaluation)

  • Useful resources (how to or recommendations)
  • Case studies or work examples
  • Technical white papers
  • Webinars or events

Metrics to Watch

  • Are site visitors returning to the site? (New vs. returning visitors)
  • Does your content resonate? (Downloading long form content)
  • Have leads been generated? (Online form completions or meeting requests)

Final Decisions (Purchase)

  • Comparisons articles or infographics (You vs. competition)
  • Testimonials
  • Team profiles (Who will they be working with)

Metrics to Watch

  • Generated sales
  • Site traffic to case studies or team profiles
  • LinkedIn connection requests or page follows

There will be many paths prospect take to find you. Some will connect midway through their own process. Make sure you recognize what stage they’re in and which content is right for them.

Targeting: Aim Small. Miss Small.

The scene from The Patriot when Mel Gibson asks his sons, “remember what I taught you boys about shooting?”

“Aim small. Miss small,” they answer in unison. This makes sense in any business, don’t go too big too soon.

You should be focusing your content to a specific profile. Speak directly to your ideal buyer. Address their specific challenge.

Targeting your marketing tactics is likely part of your strategy, but what will really add fuel to the fire is when your content is equally focused on that buyer persona or Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).

Because you have different aspects to your business, you’ll likely have multiple ICPs. This is good. Having your profiles will allow you to generate content that speaks specifically to real people.

An extra bonus to documenting your ICPs is that when it comes time to promote, boost, or advertise on search or social channels, you will have all the needed details available.

Should manufacturers have an in-house team? Yes to a degree, it depends on what they want to accomplish with the marketing team. I would say yes to social media and have some form of organic visibility and paid advertising. This is as a minimum.

Should they have a marketing professional instead of an in-house team? Yes, In most cases yes I think they should have a specialist assist with online marketing. In todays world yes be everywhere and have as many entry points to your sales funnel as possible.

 

Really it depends on your objectives. It depends on the manufacturer, the team, and the objectives. I think manufacturers should be competing for visibility of their products in the market, unless they just want to make the product and have no interest in selling B2C. Then as long as the pipeline for B2B sales is full then marketing isnt as important.

There are some misconceptions. Collaborating with an agency does NOT mean you:

  • Surrender control of your marketing
  • Doubt your internal team’s effectiveness
  • Can reduce your sales efforts
  • Forge ahead without tools to measure performance

What are the benefits of working with an agency partner? Collaborating with an agency DOES mean you:

  • Instead of a single person, you get a TEAM of experts in a variety of subject areas
  • Project manager to keep tasks on schedule, answer your questions, and bring insights
  • Professional B2B content writers who know how to research and optimize
  • Tools to report critical marketing data and what it means for you

Manufacturers Can Create The USP

 

Is working with an agency that researches and writes content, crafts email newsletters, manages social media, and provides reporting financially viable for a small manufacturer?

Absolutely. Webmecs is a ecommerce specialist and has the background in the entire process from sourcing, logistics, shipping and sales to help craft the perfect plan.

I will work with you to find a plan that works with your budget.We will work together on your marketing plan. Very often, you’ll spend less contracting a team of experts than an entry-level salary.

Topic, Timing, and Targeting: Bringing It Together

The principle behind account based marketing (ABM) is to better understand your customer. Using the Three T’s allows you to create content that:

  • Has a topic that’s important to your future customer
  • Presents the right ideas at the right time
  • Delivers your expertise to exactly the right people

“The cost-benefit is clear,”

If your manufacturing company looked at the budget of bringing in an in-house person or team compared to the value and flexibility of working with a online marketing professional—the decision makes sense.”

If you think you’d like to talk to Webmecs to see if I can help you get more visibility for your work – just drop me a line. I will be happy to share how I  can help you accomplish more while you spend less.

What Do SEO campaigns Actually Do?

What Do SEO campaigns Actually Do?

by | May 17, 2021 | News

Breakdown of what SEO does for your business

I offer 3 SEO campaigns and a specific website Audit service to catch issues most agencies and marketers miss. Website Technical SEO Audit SEO services that I offer:
  1. Local SEO
  2. Ecommerce SEO
  3. Content Focused SEO
This keeps the choices for you simple and I know my delivery for each offering inside out.

What does an SEO specialist actually do?

SEO is a beautiful meta-layer that we add to things. It’s a bit like ketchup: it can upgrade a meal but doesn’t do much by itself. As SEOs, we give recommendations to engineering, design, and content. The number of things we can do ourselves, without support from other teams, is small: change meta-data, update location-targeting in Search Console, maybe set some canonical tags it the CMS allows it. Functionally, SEOs are consultants, whether they work in-house or as a freelancer or in an agency. At the same time, no other discipline except for Product Management is as horizontal as SEO. In fact, the list of responsibilities of Product Managers and SEOs is shockingly similar. According to Sherif Mansour, Product Manager responsibilities include:
  • Understanding and representing user needs.
  • Monitoring the market and developing competitive analyses.
  • Defining a vision for a product.
  • Aligning stakeholders around the vision for the product.
  • Prioritizing product features and capabilities.
  • Creating a shared brain across larger teams to empower independent decision making.
Martin Eriksson describes product management to live at the intersection of tech, business, and UX. Sounds like SEOs! In fact, SEOs are the product managers of the Marketing world! This brings me to SEO growth measurements and the new rules for organic growth.

The new rules of Organic Growth

Growth and SEO share many similarities, but more importantly, we can embrace Growth principles for better SEO. Growing a product with weak or no Product-Market/Fit is an uphill battle. The same is true for SEO: strong products gain more organic backlinks, develop stronger brands, and content becomes easier to rank. You’re more less likely tofall into the content commodity trap. As SEOs, we should do our best to inform the product based on market research, i.e., problems users try to solve on search engines. We should also aim to drive Brand traffic, referral traffic, and returning visitors up, next to non-brand traffic. All of these metrics are good outputs of brand mentions, links, and high-quality content. SEO has developed a level of ambiguity similar to Growth. Google’s use of machine learning for NLU and NLP and its understanding of user needs on a query-level mean we can’t apply the same assumption to all sites. The right mindset to thrive in this environment is a Growth mindset: testing, testing, testing, Systems thinking, and focusing on impact versus distraction. The Growth mindset is humble and impact-focused. “We don’t know if it works, so let’s test it and then make a statement about potential impact.” The idea of Zero-Based SEO is exactly that: forget your assumptions. Every tactic has to prove itself from scratch! The goal of Growth is to develop self-reinforcing systems: loops! In the same fashion, if SEO is an impactful channel for a company, the goal has to be to scale it up. Aggregators and Integrators have different levers: Aggregators scale on technical SEO, Integrators on content marketing (playbooks). Organic Growth is a set of methods, principles, and models that helps scale organic traffic generation in an ever changing environment.
GET QUOTE FOR SEO

Is “SEO” still an accurate description of what we do?

The tagline of my site is “web marketing mechanic”, and I often refer to what I do like a mix of web development, business operations, Paid advertising and SEO. All function aspects of a successful business when combined together. I’ve helped grown business by a mix of marketing and business operations before and I’ll no doubt do it again and again for my client portfolio. In today’s market paid advertising and SEO are required to compete online. They require integration into business marketing and can still produce big results. True revenue growth comes from marketing but must be integrated by a framework that allows each tactic to function as an acquisition lever for the growth of the business.

Is SEO still an accurate description?

I say “yes”. My goal is not to come up with another buzzword or coin a new term. It’s much more to show how the role of SEOs has changed over time. We must also consider that more people understand what SEO is and what SEOs do. Introducing a new term and new roles would set SEO back because it creates mental friction from having to understand goals and responsibilities. The SEO job market is hotter than it’s ever been. We shouldn’t cut that momentum off with a new term. Will my SEO campaigns help your business? I say yes for most industries. I will require a discovery call where I can assess your problems and expectations with working with me. I have a cap for how many businesses I work with and in some cases we may not be a good match. I always try to educate when I work with businesses so that they understand why I am doing something and what the output will be. If you have an expectation that you will get leads in the next 24-48hours I cant agree with you that I am a good fit. SEO takes time to kick in, when it has kicked in the results last for a long time. Paid advertising on the other hand can get leads and sales in 48hours of going live. What I ask for to make the campaign work is a clear briefing about the business, your goals, what you have tried before and what you are doing now. Establishing a baseline to work from helps me know where my time needs to be spent to get the best results. That said if you like what you are hearing reach out and make an enquiry. We might be a great fit for each other.
How To Get Cheaper Leads For Your Business

How To Get Cheaper Leads For Your Business

by | Mar 21, 2021 | News

I imagine every business owner wants the secret to cutting down the cost of getting leads and sales for their business. So I thought diving deeper in into the topic I think is the number one way to get half priced leads would be a good starting point.

Most businesses are caught in two states. These states are the way they approach their marketing for the business.

The first state is not really doing much with their marketing and really undervaluing themselves by not promoting their skills online.

The second state are those promoting themselves online who understand the value of marketing. These business owners will be using some form of pay per click advertising with Google, Facebook, TikTok or LinkedIn and the other channels.

Well what if both states could get better results than they have in a a month or two by doing one marketing type only. Thats the secret sauce right there for everyone. My go to for any business that wants to increase leads and sales at a reduced rate to any paid advertising channel is of course SEO.

The marketing channel that comes with the most stigma attached to it. This is because no one can control the goal posts that make up best standards. Google clouds the actual inner workings of this so much that no one person even at Google can know how the search engine evaluates things.

Freelance SEO services local and ecommerce.

The Positives: When you have targeted keywords all setup you start seeing growth in your online visibility. This helps with traffic to your website and in turn leads and sales. SEO does help reduce the amount you spend on your paid advertising.

The Negatives: It takes some time to kick in and for results to show. Typically results should start to show in 30-40 days.

As a business owner you probly have a thousand questions about SEO and how it impacts your business, how it works, what it is and how to see it. Thats the usual business owner frustration, they can not see the work being done.

is your website broken

It all starts with a keyword selection. You will need to have the best most relative keywords that people would use to find you and your services. Everything starts with a search by a user. Its that simple.

Next there should be some assessment of the website and if it matches those keywords that have been selected. This helps make sure whats in your head matches whats on the website. If the keywords and website say the same thing we are off to a good start.

Next is setting up tracking. As a business owner you must have a P&L statement of some sort to know how your finances are going. Well this is the same except you use Google Analytics to track how your website and its visitors behave.

This is a simple integration that allows the analytics dashboard to collect information and then showcase those data insights in an easy to read dashboard. You will pick up a lot of highly valuable insights just from setting this up. I have helped businesses scale to double and triple revenue by using the information shown in their Google Analytics dashboards.

Next, you will want to start working on your website content to make more use of those keywords from earlier. I can not say it enough, you must have good content on your website to grow your business with SEO. That is non-negotiable.

Warning time: Ive seen so many SEO gurus overhyping things that dont move the needle and make business owners spend thousands of dollers to get absolutely zero return on investment.

Be weary of people who cant answer your questions on the spot and have to go check with a specialist.

Be weary of people who cant explain the reports that they present to you.

The industry has a low barrier to entry and anyone who watches a couple of YouTube videos thinks they can sell this as a service. WRONG!!!

business consulting

The Typical SEO Guru

The value in SEO is simple. Create helpful web pages that answer peoples problems and offer solutions to these problems. It’s not hard to match these two, especially for a business owner.

Content plays a big part of it and then there are backlinks. This is a world onto itself. You can get lost trying to understand it. Ultimately it’s like your website is an electoral candidate and you are campaigning for likes, votes and support. Every backlink works as a vote of confidence that you are a real business that is not spammy, fake or deceiving people.

What about the backlinks?

You should be watching your backlinks (both quality and quantity) and getting more of them with every article or every piece of content you produce. For local businesses the focus is more on business directories and local news outlets and being found on them.

You want to make YOU appear to be an expert in your niche. You want people to want to link to YOUR site.

First, looking at my referring sites I have a wide range of them appearing with my keywords. Some are good, some bad. But in between there are a good 80 to 90 percent of my referring sites that are doing whatever they can to teenagers and mainly people who sharing my product or service.

Backlinks help power up pages and really douse them in fuel so that they light up and increase ranking. Backlinks are very powerful and will improve the position of a keyword in search.

An insane backlink diagram explainer

All the work you do above it helps you get more visibility in Google search engine. This in turn makes your website easier to find. When you know you have more traffic, leads and sales than before you started doing SEO work that’s when you know its working.

If you have an advertising campaign running it will pay to review how the conversions are performing. I always look at the conversions, quality score, cost of click, CPA and CTR of my campaigns to understand if its time to lower my ad budget because the SEO work is doing its job.

What should SEO do to help reduce pay per click spend? the SEO work should increase your target keywords that should also be the ones you have bid on in the Google Ads platform or Facebook Ads platform.

As your SEO visibility increases you will be able to reduce the budget you spend on these paid channels. The best way to know is to review the Google Analytics monthly.

Do you want that? Who knows? Maybe you have a store or a product that will sell itself and you don’t need ads anyway.

Here’s the thing. I’m no longer sitting there thinking of how to do it I am going in and taking action. Each day something small one by one the momentum builds and the website grows. Google loves this because it shows active websites, its users want to see updated information and this is one of the signals it uses to reward a website.

My mantra is do all the things. This means do everything and make sure you have something planned to be updated on the website each week/fortnight. The more you do the more you get back. Having an idle website is not what Google wants.

Building great websites

The key thing for me is looking at the competitors of a business and breaking them down into topics, into commercial intent and search intent. This is how I understand the website and its offerings.

Google will be doing the exact same thing!

I don’t think SEO is hard I think it is complex to understand what is required. There is so much misinformation out there, take it from someone who has been down every rabbit hole of SEO, someone who has worked on some of the biggest websites online like 2 million page websites and household brand name websites.

Routine and logic are the keys to success with SEO

Shane Pollard

Take these notes, this guide and make it part of your teams to do list to check off the actionable items. If its all too hard then hire me to do an audit of your website where Ill uncover the biggest issues and provide you steps on how to fix them.

For now maybe start with a look inwards at your business.

What are your objectives?

What goals do you want to hit with any online activity?

Who is your actual competitor?

How do people search for your products & services?

Then when you have a crystal clear understanding of your side of the business its time to seek out a marketing agency or freelancer that can help you. The best time to engage a marketing person to do this work is when you have the basics about your goals and business locked down.

I hope this helps clear up the importance of SEO in getting your cheaper business leads and how important it really is with Google making changes and the world in a COVID pandemic. Thanks for reading.

Scopeleads How Do You Get Clients Right Now

Scopeleads How Do You Get Clients Right Now

by | Aug 1, 2020 | News

How Do You Search For Prospective Clients Right Now?  

 

I used to spend countless hours analysing potential clients leads sifting through bad Yelp reviews, visiting Page 2 and beyond for clients needing help even visiting Adwords adverts to see if the landing pages were optimised for success and then correlating all that data and manually contacting the prospective clients and it took hours of scanning data copy and paste and then entering the info into my emailer what an absolute waste of time.

Until I was referred to a new software that made the ultimate claim of reducing my workload and helping to automate the process for me, Yes I know my spider senses were tingling as well there are so many shady marketers online and is this the next sales con or is this one of the most innovative softwares to hit the market. I gave it a second glance and I am familiar with its creator and lead both have good names in the industry and are down to earth guys who over deliver on software releases.

So doing my research I found the software to deliver exactly what it said it would and that was the early release since then I can vouch that the upgrades are kick ass and they keep coming I truely appreciate software developers that put in this much effort with after purchase success of their systems.

 

The software was sold as a system that gave you your time back and did all the hard work for you all you had to do was sell, sounds ideal for me and I gave it a chance I got in on the early release and picked up Scopleads Pro for a decent one time payment I believe that since public release the price is a one time fee for the basic 5 feature system that I still consider to be a steal for the functionality, and some of the add on features are available for a monthly fee. If I didnt get the Pro version I would be happy with the 5 features on the basic system they can keep your sales person busy for months.

Get More Leads
Catch-phrase “There’s no magic to closing lead after lead after lead… But there is a trick”

Step 1 Enter your Keyword or Location

Step 2 Choose the service you want to provide these leads – SEO, web design, Social media or adwords

Step 3 Click search and wait for the returned data

thats it that simple you click three buttons and get hundreds of leads ready for use within the system or you can export into a CSV.

 

BUT WAIT! Theres more

Now Scopeleads is not an autoresponder like Aweber or Mailchimp but it does pack some punch with its on mini Auto responder sequencer, with scheduling, merge fields and action based sequences you can really target prospective clients

with the automation feature used in the email to send an audit or their website yes Scopeleads has an auditor built in, you can present a fake or real video audit and all the standard merge field inputs.

Targeted Search Algorithms

Using location specific searches to pull data for local leads in the target area waiting for you to reach out and help them. These searches are performed using safe, secure and trusted algorithms to pull the most relevant leads in less time than it takes you to eat a breakfast bagel.

Unlimited Searches & Campaigns

No cap on searches you can target leads all day unhinged. No effect on Google and as long as you are sensible your email will be safe just use common sense when bulk mailing. You can use it to generate as many leads as you can handle, as many times as you like. Using a dedicated outsourced salesman? no problemo you can generate a huge list of leads and export the data to send to your sales person.

 

Detailed Digital Audits

Running a complete audit on the web presence of any lead is easy… and the perfect way to show authority.

In the click of a button ScopeLeads analyses crucial on-page SEO, social media and mobile issues to produce a detailed digital audit, then creates a public link to send out automatically via your email campaigns.

ScopeLeads even adds your contact details, and a custom logo to your audit to give it a professionally branded finish…

Personalised Email Marketing

This is where ScopeLeads gets really intelligent and makes your business easier than you can probably imagine right now…

Once you have your leads, and their contact details, and you know what each lead is lacking, (all supplied by ScopeLeads), the system gives you the option to send out personalised marketing emails with custom merge fields, to connect with your new prospects and warm them up for a consultation or strategy call.

Connect, Track, And Close With ScopeLeads CRM

Everything you do with your lead from the moment ScopeLeads brings it will be tracked for you by the built in CRM. See at a glance how many emails you’ve sent, how many emails are opened, and which links have been clicked. There’s no need for an expensive second service to tell you what’s working and what needs fixing… it’s all right there inside your dashboard.

Clean, Easy, Powerful Dashboard

Track opens, clicks, and spot check sales with powerful sales analytics inside your dashboard. See how individual campaigns are performing. Check on individual leads. Control everything, instantly, with absolute ease.

 

Easy Data Export

A quick click of a button on any search return and you can grab an export of a CSV file  very simple export and great for record keeping.

 

 

Location
Specific Results

ScopeLeads lets you set up campaigns and keep all your results in specific geographical areas. So if you want to keep your leads separate for country, state, and home town, (or any town for that matter) you can. Just enter your location of choice and you’re done.

 

 

Get Scopeleads

Click Here
Starting price is $67.00 USD for the basic system that comes with 5 features well worth it for that price.

The software works in your browser and you can target anywhere in the world as long as you have internet connected you can set your sights on any country city or town.

As soon as you sign up purchase and run through the tutorial you are ready to let loose, I suggest having your domain email details handy if you want to run the emailer function you can map your own domain to Scopeleads or use a Gmail address

In terms of limitations there is no real limitations with exception to your own email address safety with the sheer amount of leads that you can uncover it can be easy to jump into a client getting frenzy but remember to not send unusual amounts of emails at once to avoid email spam penalties if you normally send a thousand emails a day then great continue to do that, but if you send a normal email amount of 10 and then you start emailing 2,000 per day that will raise some questions be smart and use your email as you would normally  and you will be fine. The campaign searches are limitless you can scope all day.

One feature that can be talked about at great depth is the Mobile Lacking feature for selecting clients websites that are not mobile friendly a huge market since Google made the change to giver mobile friendly sites more love

the feature acts like Tinder if you do not know what Tinder is ask a single friend 🙂 the feature basically lists the websites from your search query and you can see how the website appears on mobile with the mobile viewer see below.

When you find websites that are not mobile friendly you have the option to swipe right to target them as potential clients or delete them by swiping left and moving to the next one, very clever and provides s giggle every time I use it.

Pro's

Scopeleads Positives and Wins

Pro’s

Features added on mass demand (at the time of writing email scheduling and

Speed, the speed of gathering leads blows anything Ive used out of the water

In literally 4 clicks you will have a list of leads to close

Time, saves me so much time with the automation of everything

versatility the range of client targets is limited to your own vision

The Tinder-esque mobile view feature hilarious

You get to test your email sales copy I now find this rewarding

Con's

Scopeleads Benefits and Drawbacks

Con’s

The sales conversion falls on your own sales copy or pitch

Cold emailing is no way to build stability in your business

Mobile lacking feature is not accurate even if the slide left and right feature makes me laugh

I came across a very similar software in late 2015 that did at a basic level the very same function of returning leads, that product was clunky and had a horrible UI I think from memory it was $17.00

The CRM was a little tricky to navigate *Update there is now a search function for searching leads much more enhanced

 

Get More Leads
I made a an overview of the software here have a look Subscribe and leave a comment if you enjoyed the video.

If you liked the video subscribe and look forward to more

Conclusion

I would consider Scopeleads as the best client prospecting software I have used saving my time prospecting by eliminating the need for me to sweat it out over bad reviews, page 2 and beyond and analysing the Adwords adverts I give it two 10’s for helping me get my time back, I was never intent on being an email marketing guy but after using Scopeleads Ive upped my game on composing and sending emails that generate interest and get replies that in itself has been like mastering another art form but is highly lucrative and very rewarding.

Who is this for?

I would say  it is better used for those doing digital marketing and more specifically for web designers, SEO’s, Adwords CRO consultants and social media management types either agencies or freelancers the benefit for freelancer’s is the targeting you can work anywhere with any target location a huge win for global servicing.

It doesn’t take long to gather a thousand leads, but making contact with these leads and initiating a connection to ultimately turn them into paying clients is where so many people fall down

but using Scopeleads you will stand a better chance by integrating the email sequencing and merge fields there leaves only room for you to work on the pitch it’s that simple remember to test headlines and sales pitch for best results.

Get Scopeleads!

Breaking Down Keyword Difficulty

Breaking Down Keyword Difficulty

Keyword Difficulty Can I really rank on page 1? In all cases you need to assess the keyword popularity and the competition separately you can not associate example “vegan supplements” in the same way that you would research words like “vegan pizza napkins” the two...

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Onpage Blog Interlinking Tactics

Onpage Blog Interlinking Tactics

ON PAGE TRICKHere are some tactics for using your blog pages to your advantage by linking from those posts to your revenue-generating products and services pages. This tactic takes small more agile pages that can target lots of longer keywords and phrases and directs...

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Google Search Console Query Deep Diving

Google Search Console Query Deep Diving

Here is a little tip that I do to help get stuck websites momentum. You can find a similar report to what I am referencing if you visit your Google Search Console. It is called Google Search Console query profiling. This is a Do It Yourself tip. In my circle and in...

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AMP: What You Should Know About Accelerated Mobile Pages

AMP: What You Should Know About Accelerated Mobile Pages

by | Jul 30, 2020 | News

Accelerated Mobile Pages What The Heck Are They?

Imagine your website page being displayed on a mobile device in its entire form. What AMP does is strip back some of the elements of your website page to show a clean, fast-loading lite version of your web page. Once you add AMP to your website, the display will show as the bare essentials on a mobile device.

AMP reduces load times and the functions that happen on the backend of a website. Lowering server requests by limiting tags, lazy loading and lazy rendering and Streamlining the CSS and JS components. In short, it’s an HTML page designed to be lightweight and re-designs your web pages to re-create really streamlined pages that are easy to use and don’t keep the browser waiting.

Accelerated Mobile Pages are also known as AMP

Before we get into this it might help if I give you a demo of what an AMP page looks like on your mobile device.

enter this into your browser on your mobile then type in a website to see what an AMP looks like. AMP Page demo.

AMP is built thanks to a deep collaboration with thousands of developers, publishers and websites, distribution platforms and tech companies. More than 1.5B AMP pages have been published to date and 100+ leading analytics, ad tech and CMS providers support the AMP format.

Accelerated Mobile Pages and Facebook Instant Articles

I know you have been hit with the “Mobile Optimise” for better rankings and online UX before and now there is AMP, but AMP is here for the long term with more and more users taking to mobile browsing every day the future is headed towards mobile search. The AMP project focus is aimed to make people’s experience on the mobile web not only faster but an overall smoother experience by removing the clutter from web pages to show the main focus content.

Facebook is well known for being a trendsetter but being edged out by Google on Instant articles it has joined the race launching Facebook Instant Article’s to improve its UX with its millions-strong mobile user audience hungry for information daily harnessing this new publishing solution makes sense for them to give their audience what they want.

Facebook Instant Articles is another way for publishers to create faster interactive articles for user satisfaction streamlining the most popular news on the web is a huge business and in the famous words of Ricky Bobby “if you’re not first you’re last!” Brands are scrambling to implement the new solution looking at getting the upper hand on the competition.

Higher Performance and Engagement When You Use AMP.

What AMP Will Provide For Your Website?

The AMP project is an open-source effort spearheaded by juggernauts Google & Twitter.

to speed up our mobile web experience. Even though many websites today are mobile-friendly, they still tend to be very sluggish, and clunky, and that’s where AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) comes in.

  • Provide A Better Browsing Experience
  • Provide a Clean Display
  • Loads Very Fast
  • Carousel Display in Search Results

In order to provide these improvements, on the mobile display, some features your website has will be stripped back to the bare basics. Your website will be shown as the lite version so not every function will activate.

Flexibility and Results

The ability for publishers & advertisers to have some input and control on how to present their content and what technology vendors to use can make a noticeable impact on the way media is shared across the web. The faster load times and cleaner displays mean better access and simplified consumption of information.

Improvements for advertisers is that web pages and ads published in the AMP open-source format load near instantly. These instant load times are giving users a smooth, more engaging experience on mobile and desktop. When the website is clunky and hard to read the user is more likely to leave that website.

The main benefits of having AMP on your site is that it benefits both users and your website because AMP provides a faster more streamlined experience to your content, which means it makes it easier to read your content.

Even though Google hasn’t come out to say it helps search rankings for your website yet, we are confident that it will soon be a ranking factor as AMP only helps improve a user’s experience, and makes it easier to get access to content. Also if you haven’t noticed, AMP posts appear in the carousel first above the other stories.

Google was the early adopter and since many social media and news platforms have joined the accelerated mobile pages revolution — kind of in response to projects like the Facebook Instant Articles project from Facebook and Apple News and many more popping up daily. This is designed to be open-source, and there are all kinds of elements of openness to the project when you list it as open source.

Will Accelerated Mobile Pages Affect My Google Listings?

Currently Mobile search results the answer is YES, on desktop search listings the answer is NO. The aim of accelerated mobile pages is to provide a more lightweight mobile browsing experience and focusing on mobile search.  So let’s talk a little bit about how this might actually show up in search results. So first of all, what we know at the moment is it’s looking like it’s mobile-only. It’s right there in the name, Accelerated Mobile Pages and should not impact the desktop search listings or browsing experience. ,

One noticeable change I’ve noticed is news publisher’s and heavy content producer’s showing up in a carousel above the regular listings. It appears as if Google is giving them priority over other results. The carousel moves from right to left and vice versa with a swipe function either way moving through results. If you click on one of these it opens in an expanded view providing more detail and is very smooth in appearance.

Some Results Since AMP Rollout That We Have Seen:

  • Some PPC Ads Are Showing As AMP
  • AMP Is For Mobile Only Not Desktop
  • AMP Displays A Carousel For Top Results

The looming mobile-first index will have a benefit for AMP verified websites. Google announced that they are going to use a mobile-first index. This means that they are moving towards user first search terms. Mobile-friendly and optimised websites will be extremely important for the future of search. We noticed this as it happened and began rolling out Mobile SEO services helping clients prepare for this new way Google is moving towards.

It is actually taking place where some paid advertising would normally be positioned for some terms. Not all Adwords ads are showing as AMP but with the rollout, the kinks are still being smoothed over. The question could be asked will there be paid AMP search results? and what placement will they take and the benefits and so on for having these over generic paid ads?

Below is a brief demo of AMP in Google search.

What makes AMP so fast?

The removal of unnecessary items, not loading images until they are near view using a streamlined version of CSS and removing some HTML tags. The pure reader satisfaction focus is increased readability without pop-ups and opt ins, page loading times, and a more slimline design.

Look to the future with the potential for a built-in javascript library built into some of the more popular operating systems potentially removing the need for more load times to access this making sites even faster to load. There will be a time that your content may be stored on the browser so the need to “fetch” data is made redundant, This may be some time away but it is a direction that is possible with the advancement in browsing and web use we want it fast we want it now and being able to provide that is the goal for smart marketers.

How do I add AMP to my website?

If you have a website that uses WordPress as its CMS , the easiest way to get started is by simply installing one the following plugins both are very good to use.

This plugin allows posts on your site to become both AMP pages, and compatible with Facebook Instant articles.

Google is not the only company looking to add to Instant articles see below for Facebook Instant Article’s. This trend for faster and better will continue as our technology and consumer habits shift.

Facebook’s Instant Articles The Social AMP Alternative.

For Facebook Instant Articles, you will have to first sign up your page in order to have it enabled for your posts right here.

Marketing online is changing to ease of access the here and now, Amazon prime order now delivered in 8 hours or less. attract and retain consumer interest by providing amazing content that not only looks nice but loads fast for your mobile audience

Conclusion

Mobile technology and web browsers are only going to increase in advanced features, think virtual reality and augmented reality.  Adapting to consumer trends is smart and your business should consider moving towards mobile-first marketing.

Retain customers and attract new customers by being ready for these types of changes. Think Video Ezy and Blockbuster in the age of Netflix and Stan, they couldn’t adjust and now they are being left behind.

Do these three things to prepare your website:

  1. Prepare Your Website For AMP
  2. Use A AMP Plugin (WordPress)
  3. Validate Your AMP markup with this free tool.

Start by getting familiar with AMP and how it works across devices. This is a simple process and you should not have to change to much on your website. Take the first step forward and understand why you need to consider mobile viewing and why AMP will help you supercharge your website views.

Keep up to date with the AMP project right here to see what the coming months look like for the project.

Search Intent Micro Moment Marketing

Search Intent Micro Moment Marketing

by | Jul 30, 2020 | News

What Are Micro Moments?

Micro moments are those split second impulse decisions where someone for this example searches Best Hair Salon near me and the searches will present to the user the most relevant locations near their location, mobile search is the way of the future everyone has a mobile and mobile search has taken over. Be prepared and optimise for micro moments so you have the lead over your competitors when it comes to your buyers making choices that you can answer.

Micro–moments occur when people reflexively turn to a device more so  their smartphones to action a desire to learn something, do something, discover something, watch something, or purchase something. These intent-rich moments are when decisions are made and preferences shaped. Our mobile first world is changing we want faster we want now on demand results you either fit in and provide to your market or you simply fall behind, but saying that there is no race to dominate these near me micro moments not many marketing agencies have grasped the term yet and when they do its still an emerging trend so expect changes at your finger tips as this evolves.

When you fully understand the mechanics of near me micro moments you can connect the dots and see the semantic relationship between entities and then optimise for these moments providing a customer journey that provides exactly what the user wanted and rewards them for visiting your pages. Your website visitor wants to learn a new skill, buy a new product or decide if that robotic vacuum cleaner is really going to save time on housework, and they will do this by using the nearest device when the micro moment takes place they will want that query answered and you need to be the one that provides the answer or product & service that satisfies this micro moment demand.

Google shows us how they value these micro moments[/et_pb_text]

1. Optimise for mobile-centric searches

Consumer interest and demand is crucial in providing the service that answers their demand if you understand this you have an advantage over your competitor’s who may not yet understand their audience as well as you do, drill down and learn how your customer searches for you are they mobile orientated? great now identify what smartphone they use to interact with you and make sure you have optimised your site for the various screen sizes of smartphones so you are showing as mobile friendly at all times on all screens be prepared for mobile centric searches and queries stand out ahead of the pack and be found on all devices.

Your website analytics can help you unlock buyer search terms on your website and open opportunities that you have not considered as new streams of customer interest uncovering your buyer insights reveals powerful data that you can use to grow your business.

2. Understanding your customer FAQ’s Learn what it is they want

Your customers most common questions can hold the key to your success online you need to know your customer and you need to learn what they want and then provide that to them. Researching your competitor’s brand and how they interact with their own followers can add an alternative view on how you can interact and engage with your customers. What questions do they ask? Are they looking for a broad term or a specific term? is it a buyer search term or an intent term? key questions you need to answer.

Don’t stop at your competitor’s brand while you are in research mode look up your brand and see how your customers ask for your brand. Understanding keywords and search phrases can help your business identify new avenues and opportunities within your market.

Looking for a buyer targeted keyword research strategy? Apply here we can provide you with buyer intent keyword search terms for your market.

Understanding your customers can mean huge improvements in the way that they interact with your brand online failing to understand the people that are funding your business is critical in growth if you plan to scale your business. Create informational and educational content that helps satisfy search queries your audience has provide useful answers that attracts people to your website then learn how they interact with your content to adapt even further.

3. Survey your customers for new micro moment trends

You need customers for your business to survive and the most important thing you can do is listen to your customers drop a survey on them to find out what they like how they interact and use your website so you can use that data to adapt your services and website to cater for the way your audience uses your services. Identify emerging trends and push your service or product to cater to those new trends asking can uncover new useful micro moment trends that you can shape your business around.

4. Be the customer experience your brand journey

As your customers browse the web they shift from micro moment to micro moment at lightning speeds they need to land on your micro moment uninterrupted and have seamless transition in their arrival and exit so limit pop ups and cater for speed and UX have a customer journey that encompasses the micro moment start to finish not just the landing page you need to optimise the checkout page and the thank you pages that whole journey start to finish so that your user experience is contained unbroken and the transition is smooth.

Take time out to take your brand’s customer journey unfiltered pretend you are the customer and take the ride down your brand’s rabbit hole to feel what it’s like.

Example questions you need to ask about your brand micro moment customer journey:

Are those pop up’s annoying?

Does the slider move images to fast?

Can you easily navigate from page to page?

Are you category page tabs big enough?

Does the thank you page really thank your customer or is it a cold generic “Thank you!”?

Want to see how one of the world’s biggest brand’s uses these micro moments to capture the market share of their target audience?

Coke-a-cola released this video showing how they use these consumer moments to their advantage, watch listen and learn.

Answer your questions about what you really give your customer and you will be surprised at the results, Now ask your team members to all take that same unbiased journey and come back to you with notes of improvement and things that can be done better. What you get out of this companies pay big doller’s for consultant’s like me to come in and provide CRO advice on fixing the holes in their funnels here is your DIY tip to fixing your own funnels. Capitalising on these micro moments can have a tremendous effect on your business as this is relatively new trend that not many businesses understand yet or know how to optimise to capture the micro moment as it happens, yes it can be difficult to stay on top of every new trend as it happens but here on this post you have an advantage.

Once you have that data you just need to not only “fix” the problems but improve on them if you really want to impress, adding a band aid does not heal a wound you treat the wound so it fully heals. Having a broken consumer journey can lead to bad reviews online and offline and reputation management online doesn’t fix everything.

Your business should go over the collected data and identify how the business can be “useful” everyday so in these micro moments your business has value to contribute to those that search and land on your web pages. Your business managers and project managers should role play examples of these four main types of micro moments: I-want-to-know, I-want-to-go, I-want-to-do and I-want-to-buy moments where your business needs to provide answers to these search terms to qualify as “useful” nail that and you have the start for improving your customer journey. Every team member should have something to contribute to the improvement processes from map integration to keyword research and even analytics it all helps customise your brand’s understanding of your mobile first market audience experiences.

5. Speak to your customers unbiased views

Try this technique and see what the reactions are like and then decide if this method might be something you roll  out more mainstream for your operations team, select a random customer with a contact number and call them up speak to them about the service or product and how they felt about the purchase journey and if they would purchase with you again also ask “What can we do better?” you will get an honest outsiders perspective that can help you identify often problems that remain in your business blind spot. A recent random call I took made me aware of an automated follow up sequence that was outdated once identified I cancelled that out of date email sequence and refined that customer follow up process its the small things that can help make your customer journey more satisfying.

Just speaking to your audience can uncover the way that they use mobile search in real time as not every industry will utilise mobile search the same way so understanding your customer is paramount in catering for new customers. Once you understand your customer be it times of search and days they use search example A a coupon site may drop new deals on every Tuesday so it’s audience will search on Tuesdays for the new deals if you have that data you have critical information that can help grow your business.

As consumerism shifts to mobile, you must understand intent signals for micro moments across the journey. It helps to also look at what similar companies are doing and analyse how existing content is performing. (Ask your agency to help or, if you’re in an agency, offer this service to brands.)

Your business goal using micro moments is to build agile resourceful on the go effective engagement that satisfies your customer journey in the real time scenario and moving forward in the age of Mobile search you should consider using effective Mobile SEO processes to capture your market share of micro moments and always be working towards consumer changes of behaviour and analyse your shifting trends.

For more information on these suggestions visit Marketingland.

My Buddy Angel the talented micro moments marketer created this extremely relevant infographic on the topic of micro moments and the impact of near me searches.

Google Micro Moments Near Me Mobile
Courtesy of: Micro Moments Mobile Search Infographic.
Google is the largest search engine on the planet and they do search queries so well this video below really sums up how mobile search has changed and the micro moments that shape a users decision
based on intent check it out.

Micro Moments are intent rich decisions that shape a search query for a user, especially effective when combined with a paid advertising strategy. The ability to geo target people while for example they are on a bus on the way to work outside the city CBD is genius.
Is your business optimised for these new mobile search trends? Get onboard now before this becomes mainstream.
I would suggest for anyone who wanted to get ahead of this is to imagine yourself in yoru customers shoes. You could try different ways that the customer would search for your product or service and then focus on marketing that speaks to that type of search.
Search intent is not going away everything starts with a search.