Why It’s Important To Keep SEO Momentum Going

It’s a great accomplishment when you reach the first page of Google. You probably have an influx of clients and a boost in revenue. All those blogs, white papers, website links, and digital marketing efforts are finally paying off. You’re successful enough that you don’t have time, or perhaps the will, to market yourself. After all you’re a success so that means you can take your foot off the pedal, right?
WRONG!
You may be tempted to put SEO on the backburner or cut costs, you think your competition is going to do the same? Not likely. Keeping the momentum going is more important than ever, especially if you’ve worked so hard to climb the Google rankings. Here are some good reasons why it’s important to keep SEO momentum going:

Reason 1

It’s Tougher To Start Again

You remember when you first started riding a bike? You were wobbly and shaky until you started to pick up momentum and then suddenly it was easier to balance and steer. SEO is kind of like that.

It’s a lot harder to start over again than to coast. Maybe you don’t need to try so hard to rank on certain keywords but it you stop altogether than it’s like falling off the bike. You’re back at square one.

Google keeps constant tabs on you when you’re constantly updating your website, blogging often, and creating great content. But when you stop SEO, Google stops coming around to your site often and even if you start all those SEO tasks again Google is slow to visit you because it’s not used to your updates.

Reason 2

Your website’s traffic will decline

AS we mentioned, SEO takes time to build up and requires a great content strategy and execution to maintain a great raking on Google.

While stopping all search engine optimization efforts won’t make your phones stop ringing – at least at first, it is inevitable your rankings will decline. Google will see your sight as less valuable and you won’t be as searchable and your conversions will decrease.

Though the decision is momentous and seemingly temporary, the impact it has on your rankings is longer-term than desired. It takes time to build your rank on search pages and it must be an ongoing practice to keep your content and backlinks fresh, and maintain a competitive edge within the marketplace.

You must keep your site from becoming stale in order to maintain a credible business in the eyes of search engines.

Reason 3

You Lose Valuable Insights About Your Customers

If you stop SEO then you lose valuable insight on what your customers are doing and how they behave on line.

Their interests, behavior patterns, and how they use your site are derived from analytical reports developed by your SEO team. If you don’t have that information, it because very difficult to make future predictions about your business.

Here’s how you can use this information to support your overall business goals:

Find patterns in users’ engagement to create content they truly care about identify opportunities for improving your website’s structure based on bounce rate, conversion paths, and more Identify business gaps and validate the need for new service or product offerings Define new campaigns and offerings based on interests

Google Changes It’s Criteria, so Should You

There are almost 4 billion search requests each day made on the biggest search engine – the only one that really matters because let’s be honest, nobody cares about Yahoo or Bing anymore. Because Google processes so many requests a great user experience is mandatory and so they constantly evolve to make their user experience better.

As they change their search criteria, what you used to do – keyword stuffing, tons of useless backlinks for example – no longer work. You have to remember Google’s job isn’t to get you to rank higher on its search engine but, it’s customers are all those people using it to search for information.

Those are the people Google caters to and wants to keep happy. You have to ensure your SEO goals align with Google’s –keeping your customers (And Google’s) happy.

The Competition Won’t Stop

Perhaps with your first place Google ranking you’re in a position to turn business away, but maybe your competitors are willing to hire more people or come up with alternate solutions to maintain their momentum.

We had previously discussed how Google rewards high-quality, fresh content – and if you stop nurturing your content creation, it’s only a matter of time before your competitors begin capturing traffic and potential customers that were once yours.

Conclusion

If you need some help determining the best SEO strategy for your business, talk to AJ Frey aka The Best SEO in Canada. We’ll guide you through the difficultly &; help you define the best course of action going forward and create a plan that is sustainable and effective.

Call Now 250-801-6588 or Contact US

The post Why It’s Important To Keep SEO Momentum Going appeared first on Rad Websites.

And millions of people around the world hire experts like AJ Frey for their SEO audits. Still not convinced? Let me ask you? Do you think it is a coincidence that you are here? No, it’s not! You are here because our SEO experts have spent hours auditing our website to ensure that we make it on Google’s page one–which is where you found us. 

And that’s just one reason people prefer hiring experts for their SEO audits. We’re the good guys. We believe in sharing information so we’re going to share some more reasons with you. Are you ready? Here then are 5 reasons people prefer hiring experts for their SEO audits. But for the newbie who is just starting out in SEO and has no idea what we are talking about, let’s first define an SEO audit.

What Is an SEO Site Audit?

Well, we are going to presume that you already know that SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. According to Yakkety Yak (a Chicago-based marketing agency) “an SEO site audit is an analysis of the factors that impact your website ranking in organic search. 

This often includes technical back-end factors as well as on-page, content-focused elements that make a website both easier for search engine robots to crawl and easier for people to navigate”. The objective being to understand the ranking of your site and to discover how to increase traffic to your site.

Why is this Important? 

A 2020 study (Search Engine Journal) found that the clickthrough rate for websites in the first position on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) is 25%. For websites in the second position, this number drops drastically to 15%, and 2.5% for websites in the 10th position. And this is all on the first page!!! 

Can you imagine what happens when you get to Google’s page 2? This means if your website is not on page 1, the odds are pretty slim for consumers to find you. Why spend money to build a website if not to generate revenue. However, if no one is visiting your site, then it means no leads and ultimately no revenue. 

So now you see the purpose of SEO, you can also understand why it’s important to do an SEO audit of your website to ensure it is properly optimized for the search engines. 

Why can’t I do it for free?

Good question. Let’s look at free: 

We all know that time is money, therefore it is unreasonable to expect an SEO Expert to spend the time to do an audit for free, right? So what’s left? DIY or have a team member who’s not an expert do it. Anyone else who promises free has an ulterior motive, whereby you are going to end up being penny wise and pound foolish. 

Note that a free SEO audit will generate incomplete and misleading information, which if acted upon could harm the quality, visibility and profitability of your website. If using a third-party, he/she could provide sales-oriented recommendations to steer you towards engaging with the third-party providing the audit. I.e. “Hire us” and we will fix the problem for you. This we call the foot-in-the-door tactic.   

What you will not get for free is valuable insights, historical contexts (past and present performance) and meaningful recommendations for what to do next. The danger of missing these three necessary ingredients is that you can end up making harmful decisions due to a lack of information, the wrong information, or information designed to lead you in a predetermined direction. 

Not only will you now have to deal with the financial fallout of an uninformed decision, but you will also have to bear the additional cost of fixing it–penny wise and pound foolish.

Why it is Worth Paying for an SEO Audit

A free SEO audit, as a giveaway, only provides limited useful information in its purpose, scope and strategic value. A paid SEO audit delves deep into your marketing data to analyse the meaning and implications of the site’s SEO performance.

Not only that, but it also presents a “comprehensive picture of how SEO affects overall marketing and business goals, so the audit delivers many times the value of your investment in revenue-driving conclusions”.

Having established that you are now left with a paid SEO audit, let’s now look at the 5 reasons people prefer hiring experts for their SEO audits. Also, let’s give a look how SEO Expert AJ Frey, the best SEO in Canada, can audit your site and ensure your audiences discover you on Google’s first page. 

You’re hiring a team of experts

Usually, SEO experts do not work in a vacuum. So what most people don’t know is that when you hire an SEO expert, you are actually getting a team of experts working together to do a comprehensive audit on your website. 

You’re getting value for your money

When you hire an SEO expert, you’re actually getting value for your money because he/she is going to evaluate your website based on your unique needs, foci and desired conversions. There is no one-size fits all in SEO, therefore, you cannot use a template to do an SEo audit. Even if you start with a template, it must be customized to meet the needs of that particular website. 

You’re getting thoughtful, Informed Insights

You could decide to purchase the SEO tool–which is good, and even the SEO experts use them sometimes. The only problem is, you may not be able to read and understand the outcome. What does “manual actions” and “tracking/analytics” really mean, for example? An SEO expert will give you thoughtful, informed insights based on the outcome after he/she has audited your website. 

You can expect to receive quantitative and qualitative information because well-trained experts like AJ Frey are looking through every single anomaly revealed through their SEO audit of your website. 

Issues like duplicate contents, excessive redirects, low word count, unlinked pages, etc. are recorded and categorized into subheadings. The SEO audit report will not read like a fill-in-the-blank generic report used by everybody. No, every section of the report will contain thoughtful insights about your website–information that has been obtained from the data collected.  

You’re Getting Honest and Forthright Recommendations

After a thorough evaluation, you can expect an SEO expert to provide a prescriptive list of categorize recommendations fit to your budget. And one that is easily implemented by you and your team. 

Many third-party auditors will give you a description of what’s “wrong” with your website–Usually in the form of a pdf file, and that’s where they stop. However, they will not prescribe the “medicine” needed for your “broken” site. 

With an SEO expert, an SEO audit report is not just a pdf file (though you will get that too), but also includes meaningful recommendations that go beyond “check your sitemap” and “improve content”. 

The SEO expert will have a conference call or face-to-face meeting with you to discuss the findings of the SEO audit. After giving you honest and forthright recommendations, he/she will answer all the  questions you may have concerning the audit and your website. You can expect to get honest feedback.

By the time you finish, there will be no doubt as to what your next move will be. This is another reason people prefer hiring experts for their SEO audits. If you do not have an SEO team, we will gladly assist. We have the best SEO packages in Canada, so you don’t have to worry about your bottomline. 

You will avoid Issues with Google

And the fifth reason people prefer hiring experts for their SEO audits is to avoid any issue with Google. If you know anything about SEO you know that Google has a Best Practice manual of the things one can and cannot do in order to rank on their pages. 

You’re an upstanding citizen, but unknown to you, when you decided to place your favourite keyword 20 times in your underperforming page Google sees that as a “black-hat” technique and penalises you. 

Google no longer accepts keyword stuffing (that’s what they call using a keyword too many times in one article) and so Google’s crawlers notice this on your web pages. What will happen is, you will see your page rank go down instead of rising, which means fewer people will find your page, and subsequently fewer leads and conversions.

As you can see, it’s bad enough If you make a mistake with your SEO campaign–if that’s all you had to worry about: wasted resources. However, your real problem starts when you get entangled with Google. If you’re not experienced with SEO-and most DIY web owners aren’t–you could accidentally conduct black-hat SEO techniques without fully understanding the consequences of your actions.

SEO Experts know all the rules. That’s why they are experts. A part of their job is to understand the ins and outs of the industry, to ensure they never run into legal issues. If they were to conduct “black hat” SEO, they could find themselves in trouble with Google, and you could take legal actions against them. 

Final thoughts

When It comes to SEO Audit, you could download a free SEO tool and DIY. However, if you did, and if you’re not an SEO expert, you coud not only hurt your bottomline: you could get into trouble with Google and your website could get penalised for inadvertently practicing black hat techniques.

Or, you could hire an SEO expert who will not only conduct a thorough audit of your site, but will also present the results in a timely, well-thought out manner, whether face-to-face or virtually. He/She will go through the results with you in a thoughtful way. 

Once through, you will receive a honest and forthright recommendations. So you can make informed decisions. The value you get from hiring experts for your SEO audit will be proportionally more than what it costs, if managed correctly and nurture your business to scale.

If you do not have an SEO team, we can provide SEO services to you, at a fraction of the cost seen on the Internet. Or, if you want to learn more about how search engine optimization can help your business grow, give us a call, or send us an email. AJ Frey is ready to help you!  

So there you have it. The 5 Reasons People Prefer Hiring Experts for Their SEO Audits. What are your thoughts? Let us know in the Comments box below.

The post 5 Reasons People Prefer Hiring Experts For Their SEO Audits appeared first on Rad Websites.

In the past, webmasters employed bad SEO practices such as keyword and banner stuffing, link building and cloaking in order to rank on Google’s first page.

However, Google’s latest algorithms make those practices almost impossible. Nevertheless, there are always unscrupulous webmasters who try to get around Google’s best practices.

Whether you are new to website development or a seasoned veteran at building websites, here is a simple guide to Good SEO Practices vs. Bad SEO Practices, so you can beware when making SEO decisions while building or maintaining your websites.

Good SEO Practices

Good SEO practices consist of what is called “white hat” techniques. These include:

● Security Certificate:

Up to recently, most people did not know what the ‘https’ at the beginning  of a domain stood for. However, they understood that if a site had this “lock”, it meant the site could be trusted.

Today, Google has added security certificates as a requirement in their list of best practices for SEO. So websites with the https automatically rank higher in their search results.

HTTPS stands for hypertext transfer Protocol Secure, and enables websites to be more secure by encrypting the information sent between the visitor to the site and the server. It has been a Google ranking factor since 2014.

You can tell if your site is already using HTTPS by checking the loading bar in your browser. If there’s a lock icon before the URL, then it means your site is secure. If there is no lock, then you need to ‘buy’ one by installing an SSL certificate.

Due to Google’s standards, most web hosts offer these in their packages. If yours does not, you can depend on AJ Frey, owner of Best SEO in Canada, to pickup one for you.

This is a one-time installment, and once done, you can expect security on all your pages, including those you may add in the future.

● Placement of your target keyword / phrase:

Google’s best practices suggest that your target keyword / phrase should be in at least these three places. These are your title tag, heading and URL. Let’s take a closer look at each:

a) Title tag

According to Google, title tags should be written that accurately describe the page’s content. If you’re targeting a specific keyword or phrase, then this should do precisely that. However, search engine optimization isn’t just about improving rankings, but also enticing clicks. This is why your title tags must also be compelling.

N/B: Readability always comes first. Your title tag must make sense to the searcher. For example, if your target keyword/phrase is “saskatoon berry pie cheap,” then that doesn’t make sense as a title tag. Rearrange the words so it makes sense, even if you have to add stop words—Google is smart enough to understand what you mean. At Best SEO in Canada, AJ Frey knows just how to do this for you.

Finally, keep your title tags under 60 characters and use only “title case” for titles.

b) Heading (H1)

In addition to your title tag, your target keyword / phrase should also be in your heading. N/B: Every page should have a visible H1 heading on the page, and it should include your target keyword/phrase where it makes sense.

c) URL

The third place according to Google, where you target keyword / phrase should be is in your URL. According to Mozilla, “URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator.

A URL is nothing more than the address of a given unique resource on the Web. In theory, each valid URL points to a unique resource. Such resources can be an HTML page, a CSS document, an image, etc.”

Your URL should be short and descriptive, according to Google, as long URLs may intimidate web searchers. As such, it is not always best SEO practice to use the exact target query as your URL.

N/B: Earlier we noted that it was okay to add stop words to your title tags. However, it is good SEO practice to remove stop words from your URL. What are stop words? Words such as The, Is/Are, At and On. There are others, and different search engines have different criteria for stop words.

Finally, your keywords/phrases in URLs should be relevant to your page’s content.

● Match search intent:

Another good SEO practice is to match search intent. This means to align your title and the description of your page with search intent. Nobody wants to see product pages in the search results for “how to make blueberry grunt.” Clearly, these people are in learning mode, not buying mode.

Google understands this, which is why all of the top results will be blog posts—not pages selling blueberries, lemon and sugar.

The opposite is true for a query like “where can I buy blueberries.”

People aren’t looking for a blueberry grunt recipe; they’re looking to buy some blueberries. This is why most of the top 10 results are going to get ecommerce category pages, not blog posts.

Matching search intent goes beyond creating a certain type of content. It’s also about creating the content from a particular angle and in a specific format. Which brings us to the next good SEO practice.

● Write thorough and relevant content on a regular basis:

How do you rank for more queries? By making your content more thorough and relevant. But how do you do that? Here are a few tips:

1. Complete sentences with good spelling and grammar. There are a few reputable software programmes that offer spelling and grammar corrections, so there is no excuse for poor grammar and typographical errors on your website. This would not be a good SEO practice.
2. Make sure that your content is unique and original. There is nothing wrong with publishing content that is written by others, however, it must be unique and original.
3. Well-labelled images: If you use images in your content, ensure that each is properly labelled. If in case the images cannot load, at least the searcher can know what the image is about by reading the label.
4. Make sure that your content is relevant. Quality over quantity. While the length of your content may be important in certain contexts, at the end of the day, it must be relevant to your searchers’ queries. Btw, this not only applies to blog posts, but also to other types of content on your website.

N/B: Publishing new content on a regular basis is a good SEO practice, but it is also important to keep a balance between content produced by the website and content offered to the website by an author, in exchange for a link in the author bio. In this case, it is better not to publish, than to break this rule.

●  Relevant internal links:

Internal links are those from one page on your website to another. Adding internal links from other relevant pages is a very good SEO practice. This is one of the foundations of Google’s ranking algorithm and remains important even today.

Internal links also help Google understand what a page is about. Look for suitable places to add internal links on pages that fit the bill.

Unfortunately, Google discontinued public PageRank scores in 2016, so there’s no way to check them anymore. But in general, the more links a page has—from both external and internal sources—the higher its PageRank.

Which brings us to last, but not least:

● Get more backlinks:

Backlinks are another foundation of Google’s algorithm and remain one of the most important page ranking factors.

Google confirms this on their “how search works” page, where they state: “If other prominent websites on the subject link to the page, that’s a good sign that the information is of high quality”.

Finally, you should aim to build backlinks from authoritative and relevant pages and websites.

Bad SEO Practices

On the other hand, persons who wish to take the shortcut to ranking high on Google’s pages employ bad SEO practices referred to as “Black Hat” techniques. These include:

● Duplicate content:

Duplicate content is a very common practice, as some webmasters will publish content that has already been published elsewhere. In and of itself, that is not a bad thing; there are many sites with information you may think is useful for your visitors.

If your intent is not to try to rank for a certain keyword or “stealing” someone else’s work, then you should “no index and no follow” those pages so that you are not penalised by Google for bad SEO practice. Non-unique content is not good for SEO. Think about it: If search engines already have the same content in their index, why would they index your web page since it has nothing new to offer?

● Invisible text and keyword stuffing:

It is not as common today, but there was a time when “black hat” strategists used to include many keywords at the bottom of a webpage, but make them the same colour as the background so they weren’t very noticeable to the human eye.

Google has been known to penalise such practices. The same goes for “stuffing” keywords where they are irrelevant. Have you landed on a page with a keyword search and that page was filled with the keyword, and barely anything else?

That is an extreme example of what we’re stating. This is a very bad SEO practice. Not only will it discourage visitors to your site who are looking to read relevant information on their search term, but it is also a red flag for search engines such as Google that you are trying to manipulate their algorithms.

N/B: It is enough to mention your keywords in the title, description, opening paragraph and a few other places in the body of the text.

● Cloaking and redirecting:

“Cloaking”, a very common practice of old, is when webmasters hide the real destination of a link, while “redirecting” is sending multiple “keyword-rich” domains to a single website.

Now, there may be times when redirecting is necessary for your business. However, there is a thin line between redirecting to a subdomain or domain and buying several domains just for the purpose of redirecting their traffic to a single website.

Showing different versions of a page to web crawlers and visitors to a website was a common practice in the past, but due to Google’s best practices thankfully this has been discontinued.

However, in case you just arrived on the planet and do not know Google’s best practices, please be advised that using such “black hat” techniques now is considered a very bad SEO practice.

● Poor linking practices:

Going out and purchasing a Fiverr package promising you 5,000 links in 24 hours is not the right way to build links. You need to get links from relevant content and sites in your niche that have their own traffic.

There are many other bad SEO practices one can employ including guest posting for links and accepting low quality guest posts. However, we will continue that discussion in a later article.

Conclusion

Google’s best practices reward good SEO practices such as Security Certificates, applying keywords to title tags, headings and URLs, having unique and relevant content, using appropriate internal and backlinks, while penalise bad SEO practices, which we call “black hat” techniques such as keyword stuffing, excessive link building and cloaking.

If you wish to have a successful website that ranks high on Google’s pages, then it behooves you to master good SEO practices.

AJ Frey can help you to develop and maintain a successful website that sees you ranking on Google’s first page with no fear of penalty due to bad SEO practices.

He offers a comprehensive range of SEO services dedicated to driving traffic that meets your lead, acquisition, or sales objectives.  You should start seeing results–qualified leads, sales and traffic–in approximately 3 months.

That’s it. A list of Good SEO practices vs. Bad SEO practices, which we hope will help you to stay in Google’s good books, and any other search engine you wish to rank on. We know there are others. Why not share them in the comments section below? Ready to let an SEO expert help you maintain good SEO practices on your website? Give us a call or send us an email.

The post Good SEO Practices Vs. Bad SEO Practices: A Simple Guide appeared first on Rad Websites.

The leading issue in trying to answer that question is that there are plenty of things that factor in – including but not limited to, the type of business, industry, marketing strategies, and web design. Simply put, figuring out how long it takes for SEO to work is relative to how it is done in the first place. 

We’ve dealt with several businesses in the past who already had impractical expectations before coming in; they ask head-on if we can help them produce results in a couple of months because that is the ideal time frame they hear from their peers.

How Long Does SEO Take to Work?

The Truth About SEO

Sadly, for them and any future client, we tell them that SEO doesn’t walk on a straight line. In other words, there’s no uniform system or set of rules that govern how strategies should work and what methods should be avoided. 

Key in the term “SEO tips” in Google, and you are bombarded with thousands of opinions from everyone claiming to be experts. While there is nothing wrong with the overabundance of information, we take issue on those who cash in on misinformation, particularly about SEO campaigns that produce results in no time. 

You’re here because you want to know the truth. Don’t get me wrong – We’re not dissuading you from investing in SEO. You’re here for a reality check, and that is what we’re giving you.

Don’t worry if you are confused or scared. Everyone feels the same way when they ponder how long it’ll take for SEO to work. But before we delve on to the factors that affect the timeline and results, let’s make sure you know the basics of SEO. 

What is SEO?

SEO deals with the optimization of the pages of a website in a way that achieves favorable rank in the search engine results pages (SERPS). It stands out from all other strategies with the same objective because it involves the use of free or “organic” methods. 

SERPs contain links to pages, listings, videos, and other stuff that are relevant to a specific keyword phrase or search term. The results are ranked using an algorithm designed based on the search intent of the user. 

SEO has the most impact on a website’s ranking, but it is a broad concept that is better understood by two attributes – on-page SEO and off-page SEO. 

On-Page SEO

The only way to understand on-page SEO is by learning how a search engine like Google operates. It was mentioned earlier that search engines embrace an algorithm to examine content and rank pages through them. Google gathers content by using spiders or crawlers.

Search engines use a database (indexes) to save pertinent website info, including URLs. So, when someone searches “signs of a roof replacement,” Google displays results based on its indexes. 

On-page SEO deals with optimizing a page on a website. The search engines take multiple factors into account when ranking pages. These factors include keyword use and stemming, internal links and anchor texts, mobile responsiveness, and distribution of page authority, to name a few. 

Off-Page SEO

This is often called “link building,” for a good reason. Off-page SEO describes the process of creating a reputable inbound link profile for a website by using:

• high-authority
• relevant
• trustworthy links from other websites.

The reason why it is called “off-page” is that the work done is outside of the website. An excellent example is when you ask an authority site in the roofing industry to link to your blog post about the signs that a roof needs replacement.

When Will You See Results from Your Campaign?

Irrespective of the chosen SEO strategy, it takes time to see the results after the implementation. If you’re desperate to know how long you should wait, then the most sensible projection is four to seven months.

This is the period when you begin to see results. In other words, we’re not saying you achieve utter success in less than a year. 

The reason why we’d always come up with this modest projection is that there is a bevy of factors that affect the development of your campaign. We discuss these factors below:

Age

Being a newbie is the biggest challenge for every website trying to climb up to the search engine results pages. It’s like when you’re vying a job straight out of college, and everyone looks at you as an inexperienced prospect with a lot of risks and a few upsides.

For the most part, it takes Google a couple of months to index a newly published site. In other words, age plays a crucial factor in figuring out how long you have to wait for your website to appear on the first page of SERPs.

There are ways to help speed up your progress, i.e., obtaining links from authority sites (off-page SEO). Doing so means convincing high-ranking and relevant sites to link to you. If you’re successful in getting these links to your pages, you’re telling Google to index your site quicker. 

History

Age and history are two different things SEO’s perspective. The former refers to the time that your site has been published on the web. While the latter talks about your site’s interaction history with the search engines.

Google hands out a score on every page of a website based on factors such as trustworthiness and reputability. This score or rating exemplifies your site’s propensity to climb in the search engine rankings. Hence, the higher score your page gets, the more likely faster the climb to the first page of Google will be.

Penalties

We said earlier that there is no set of strict guidelines or rules in SEO. But don’t think Google and other search engines won’t penalize black hat strategies.

Google hates websites that break its rules, although there’s no existing document that details these rules. Any decent individual with minimal background in SEO knows what it means to break the rules.

For example, procuring backlinks from shady and spammy sources, posting duplicate content, and keyword stuffing.

If you’ve engaged in any of those black hat techniques before, it means your site has a tainted reputation online. Google and other search engines won’t forget previous penalties when they rank pages. But like everything in life, there’s always a second chance to redeem yourself. 

Final Words

SEO is a lot more complicated than most people think, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Instead of probing into how long does SEO take to work, the best approach is to set realistic goals. And then establish an effective plan based on them. Instead of focusing on the time frame, you should weigh on the factors that affect your campaign. 

The post How Long Does SEO Take to Work? appeared first on Rad Websites.

Although this page isn’t designed as an aggressive marketing ploy, it helps in motivating a prospective consumer to buy a product or avail of service by answering his/her query. So, if the FAQ page is about delivering information in a “question and answer” format, why is there a need to customize it?

For starters, an SEO-friendly-FAQ page cuts the workload of your customer service/support team. They don’t have to answer as many questions as they should since the page provides everything. It saves your people some valuable time.

A well thought out Q&A page builds trust since it addresses the consumers’ need for information. A visitor to your website sees you as an authority when he/she is impressed, or at least satisfied with the information that your SEO-Friendly FAQ page provided.

You may not notice it, but an SEO-friendly FAQ page significantly improves user experience.

Put yourself in the shoes of a potential customer who needs his/her questions answered. You want your questions to be answered in the FAQ page instead of having to call or chat with customer support and wait for hours to get a response.

Creating an SEO-friendly-FAQ Page

Your FAQ page plays a critical role in drawing traffic to your site. There’s no way to get a higher ranking in Google when you’re not driving enough traffic to your pages.

More notably, the page provides visitors with a comprehensive understanding of your brand, product, or service that no other section of the website can. Simply put, it improves your conversion rates.

Below are the ways to come up with an SEO-friendly-FAQ page:

1 – Come up with a list of RELEVANT frequently asked questions

You just don’t make up all sorts of questions for the sake of having an FAQ page. The key is figuring out the right questions that will enlighten a potential customer about your brand.

You know those questions are effective when they generate demand. Creating this list takes a lot of effort, patience, and common sense.

If your company employs customer service representatives, then that’s a great place to get suggestions. Those guys are the recipients of hundreds of questions from customers, which means they are a valuable source of information once you start creating the SEO-friendly-FAQ page.

Do some digging on your competitor’s FAQ page. This helps you understand if they’re doing things right. You don’t necessarily have to copy their Q&As, but you at least an insight on how you can improve your own.

2 – Add structured data to the page

Incorporating structured data to the FAQs will improve your page’s reputation with regards to the search engine results pages. Structured data is a staple in obtaining a better click-through-rate.

If your competitors aren’t using structured data in their FAQs, you have your best chance of getting ahead of them. Just so you acknowledge the value of this strategy, Google now has integrated support for FAQ structured data both in Google Assistant and Search.

If you implement the structured data system, it transforms your content into an SEO-friendly material since the questions and answers appear on Google Assistant and Search.

3 – Don’t settle for text alone

We know that an FAQ page is about posting the right questions and their corresponding answers. But one issue that you need to face is its bland aesthetics.

You don’t want the page to contain anything but text. Preferably, use images, illustrations, graphics, or even videos to your answers to improve the aesthetic value of the page.

The information delivered through the combination of text and graphics is conveyed more effectively compared to text alone.

4 – Mind the navigation

An ideally written SEO-friendly FAQ page is useless when visitors to your website can’t even find it.

Apart from the information and inclusion of images and graphics, you should build a straightforward navigational structure. Since you expect a ton of text, breaking it down to categories and subcategories makes sense.

The structure avoids confusion and customers find the right questions in seconds instead of minutes. You want the experience of reading through the page to be instantaneous.

5 – Don’t forget about analytics

The purpose of checking analytics is to see if the pages on your website are getting traffic, and if they are ranking for the relevant keywords. Without it, you can’t know for sure if visitors are taking their time to read your FAQ page or if they are merely skimming through it.

Furthermore, analytics tells you the path that the visitors to your website are taking. Web analytics essentially give you the data and numbers that you can use to determine if what you’re doing actually works.

There is a handful of advanced web analytics out there, so it shouldn’t be challenging to get things started. Remember that analytics provide actionable insights, so you must embrace it.

Conclusion

Some say that FAQ pages are nothing but a waste of time. Why optimize it when you already have a well laid-out website with a superb navigational structure to guide your visitors to the information they need? The truth is an FAQ page plays an indispensable role and is never an afterthought.

The content inside it provides direct answers to highly specific questions. You don’t leave it at the corner and forget about it. If that is what you are doing right now, then you might as well delete the page.

The SEO value of an FAQ page is underrated, but it brings traffic and improves conversions. It’s just a matter of you acknowledging its worth.

The post Tips on How to Create an SEO Friendly FAQ Page appeared first on Rad Websites.

“Don’t worry about your word count; Worry about making your words count.”

You’ve more than likely heard the term SEO, and, like most people, can recite “search engine optimization”, but that’s where your knowledge ends, right? You’re still confused as to how to optimize the search engine, and which search engine are you optimising for that matter? Let’s find out below about Best Word Count for SEO.

These questions will naturally answer themselves during the course of this article as we try to fathom what is the best word count for SEO in Canada. But first, you need an actual definition for SEO. 

SEO and Word Count

According to New York Times bestselling author Neil Patel in his article SEO Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide For 2021, “SEO stands for search engine optimization. Which is the art of ranking high on a search engine in the unpaid section, also known as the organic listings”.

In other words, SEO is the process of getting your web page/ article / blog, etc, at the top of the search results of a search engine like Google, without purchasing Advertisements.

So for example, you entered your long tail keyword ‘What is the Best Word Count for SEO in Canada’ in the Google search engine and the results show THIS article on page one of the search results.

You would therefore conclude that this page has been successfully optimized for Google. Btw, a long-tail keyword is a keyphrase such as the title of this article, which is more specific than a short tail keyword, which is one or two words such as “SEO word count”. More on this later. 

SEO experts, and there are many, including Patel, will tell you that in order to rank on Google’s first page in the search results, you have to follow an SEO strategy involving backlinking, providing relevant content and writing long texts where you made sure to include the most important keywords at the right places. 

Where did this idea come from? 

Actually, indirectly  from Google–10 years ago! If you’re surprised that SEO has been around for so long and you are only now learning about it, be prepared to be shocked: SEO is actually over 20 years old.

To be more specific, the actual term ‘Search Engine Optimization’ was first used in 1997, though the practice of optimising web pages started from as early as the mid 90s. Back then, Yahoo was the Google of today. Interestingly, Google started in 1998 and has since become the go-to search engine not the least due to its simplicity and ease of use.

As such, website owners now optimize their sites to rank on Google’s search engine. 

While Google never discloses the algorithms used to rank pages, they have from time to time given clues and suggestions to enable website developers to produce high quality content to the end user.

The Evolution of Word Count for SEO

So ten years ago, in order for Google to retrieve the end users’ keywords, they relied on what is believed to be TF-IDF or term frequency inverse document frequency, along with the title tags and words in the heading.

It is believed that in order for Google to retrieve these keywords, they would somehow use this technique to find and extract the most relevant words in a series for the web page to rank them high.

Consequently, in order for Google to understand what your webpage was about, you would have to write long texts making sure to include the most important keywords, strategically place these keywords in the text, and have the right number of keywords in the texts.

Remember, Google never reveals their algorithms, so this was the outset for the emergence of SEO experts–men and women who would study Google to figure out their algorithms based on what they said, and mostly what was not said, and also experimenting on the websites’ optimization to see how they ranked. 

Due to the inevitable manipulation of the system by web developers to rank high on the search engine (keyword stuffing and cloaking are two common violations of Google’s algorithms), Google has had to over the years change its algorithms as these “experts” discovered their secrets.

Today, it employs related keyword techniques that are themed to interpret the intent of the content on a webpage. Enter BERT. 

What is BERT? 

According to Google Search, “BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), which is another attempt by Google to improve their natural language processing in order to better understand the search queries of their end users”.

Introduced in 2018, the BERT models can “consider the full context of a word by looking at the words that come before and after it—particularly useful for understanding the intent behind search queries”.

In other words, BERT is basically a machine-learning algorithm that, based on large amounts of text, is trained to read text in order to find the best matching answer. Can you say almost human? Indeed, BERT is Artificial Intelligence (AI). And this is the direction that Google has taken in the past few years. 

However, Google did not get here overnight. According to Google’s CEO Sundar Pichal in a 2017 keynote speech at its annual I/O event “the company was shifting from a “mobile-first world to an AI-first world.

BERT, SEO and Word Count

Then a series of announcements followed involving AI in various ways: from the development of specialised chips for optimising machine learning, to the use of deep learning in new applications including cancer research, to putting Google’s AI-driven assistant on as many devices as possible.

Pichai claimed the company was transitioning from “searching and organizing the world’s information to AI and machine learning.” The end result: BERT.

The idea of BERT is best explained by their research director, Peter Norvig, “With information retrieval, anything over 80% recall and precision is pretty good—not every suggestion has to be perfect, since the user can ignore the bad suggestions. With assistance, there is a much higher barrier.

You wouldn’t use a service that booked the wrong reservation 20% of the time, or even 2% of the time. So an assistant needs to be much more accurate, and thus more intelligent, more aware of the situation. That’s what we call ‘AI-first.’”

But what does this have to do with the best word count for SEO in Canada? 

A lot, actually. In fact, SEO experts are at the best position one could be in terms of optimising web pages for search engines now more than ever–due to AI-first technology.

While it will be more difficult to manipulate the search engine with keyword stuffing, exaggerated length of texts and word counts, it will be easier to rank higher in the search engine when SEO experts help their clients to produce content that is relevant to the search of the end user. 

Which brings us to the age-old question, “What is the best word count for SEO in Canada” when producing relevant content? After all, clients want to know how many words to write to have the best chance of appearing on Google’s first page.

Surely there has got to be some guideline somewhere? And, indeed, there are. But before we delve into this, let’s hear from Google’s Search Advocate, John Mueller, on the subject of word count in 2021. 

This topic came up on Twitter in response to a user who asked whether or not it would be beneficial to de-index shorter articles. This is what John Mueller had to say, “I agree with you & Mihai :).

Word count is not indicative of quality. Some pages have a lot of words that say nothing. Some pages have very few words that are very important & relevant to queries. You know your content best (hopefully) and can decide whether it needs the details.” 

Key takeaway:

1) “Word count is not indicative of quality”

2) Quality is what Google is looking for

3) By the same token, pages with few words may be highly relevant to a user’s query

4) Ultimately it’s up to the site owner to use their best judgement.

In other words, Google will not necessarily rank pages based on word count alone. When it sees the quality content, it will rank shorter content just as well as longer content.

And in case you’re wondering why Google; aren’t there other search engines? Yes, there are. But as of 2021, Google is still the number one search engine and the go-to site for all things Internet. 

What do the SEO experts have to say about this? 

Notwithstanding what Mueller has said, four major players in the SEO industry have found clear correlations between word count and Google rankings:

1. Hubspot: 

In a recent study the marketing automation platform, Hubspot, gathered data from the 50 most read blog posts in 2019. They found that the articles were, on average, 2,300 words long.

2. Yoast: 

Yoast is a search engine optimization plugin in WordPress–but it is so much more than that, and personally one of my favourites. If your website is hosted by WordPress, chances are you are using Yoast. According to Yoast, the ideal blog post length is 300 to 1,000 words.

That is a huge gap. However, Yoast takes into account the fact that some topics do not require any research, but may just be an answer to a question. Yoast concluded that 1000 word count is the ideal number for higher rankings.

3. Semrush: 

According to a 2018 SEMrush study, the ideal length for better ranking is 1137 words.

4. Backlinko: 

According to backlinko in the 11.8 million Google search results they analysed, overall, the average word count of a Google first page result is 1,447 words. 

From the above one can infer that a webpage with an average word count of 1,471 (the avg of the four numbers) ranks higher than other pages.

So, is 1471 the best word count for SEO in Canada? Not necessarily.

Correlation & Causation

One of the challenges SEO experts usually have is understanding the difference between correlation and causation.

If you looked at the top 4 or 5 ranking pages for your keyword search and saw that they all had approximately 1471 words, it is understandable that you would think that is what is required to rank well for that keyword. However, this could be a correlation, not a causation. 

Another study (2015) by HubSpot suggested that longer posts may be “link-worthy” and more shareable. In turn, it could be the link profile of the page that causes it to rank well. It could also be that longer posts allow for more thorough answers required for some search queries, which then triggers Google’s AI technique to rank it higher. 

What is important to note is, correlation does not equal causation.

Google’s own SEO starter guide states, “Content should be factually accurate, clearly written, and comprehensive.”

Comprehensive is not a synonym for long. Comprehensive means “complete and including everything that is necessary.”

If you’ve been following this article you should have concluded by now that there is no definitive answer to the question, what is the best word count for SEO in Canada.

However it is not our desire to leave our readers more confused than when they started, so let’s see if we can help you to actually arrive at a “magic number as to the best word count for SEO in Canada by looking at some other factors. 

The first factor we will look at is Relevance:

Arguably the most important factor to rank content is its relevance. We cannot over emphasise the point that content should be relevant to the search of the users.

Ahrefs advice on content length: “Don’t shoot for a particular word count- just make sure you cover a topic in full. Whether that takes 500 words or 10,000, the key is that you are creating the best resource available for your target keyword.” (Search Engine Journal)

Ultimately you are writing for the users’ keywords. When a topic asks for more information then you should write as Google suggests–comprehensively.  

The second factor is the length of the keyword:

According to some SEO experts, your word count should be dependent on your keyword length. So for short-tail keywords (one or two words), you should shoot for approximately 4,500 words or more; mid-tail keywords between 2,000 and 4,500 words and long-tail keywords such as the title of this article, between 1,000-2,000 words. 

Long-tail keywords are considered to be the best in Digital Marketing SEO. They are a great opportunity for small blogs to rank higher and do well. The ideal blog length for long-tail keywords is 1,000-3,000 words. Although the market is competitive, it is less competitive due to its specificity. This article is 2490 words long. You be the judge as to who’s right. 

A word of caution concerning keywords:

Short-tail keywords are very competitive. You will notice in the search results, millions of answers–that’s due to the non-specificity of the query. This makes it hard for Google to show specific results and you will be “punished” for this.

The results: a low ranking of your webpage –especially if you’re a small site with low domain authority. So, this is a very important factor. You should select your keywords properly.

Another factor we’ll look at is: User Intent

The most important aspect when deciding on how long content should be is user intent. I.e. What does a user want when he/she lands on your page. If you understand what a user is looking for on your page, it will help you to write comprehensively enough to meet that need.

Having said that,

Content should be as long as it is needed to help convey the message of the page and allow users to complete their desired actions on that page.

Conclusion

You’ve seen that many studies by SEO experts have shown varying lengths for the best word count for SEO.

With machine learning, such as Google’s BERT, search engines can now better understand your content without you having to type thousands of words. Notwithstanding the length, web owners are encouraged to provide good content for the end users, which may mean a short article, or a long epistle. 

Can more words allow you to expand on a topic and offer your reader a view of the bigger picture? Absolutely. Could a shorter read be just what they’re looking for during coffee break? Quite likely.

The real takeaway from here is that your web content should give contextual meaning and value to your user, which is a shared conclusion among all SEO experts. 

Because in the end, only Google knows the answer to how they process texts and whether the word count is something to strive for.

I advise people not to focus too heavily on SEO recommendations when crafting content. Focus first on what your content is meant to do and go from there.

Notwithstanding all of the above, 

The final answer to the question of what is the best word count for SEO in Canada is 2000 to 3000 words. 

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The post What is the Best Word Count for SEO in Canada? appeared first on Rad Websites.

If you’re like a lot of businesses out there, you’re probably not getting the traction to your website that you want. You have a great-looking website, you have a great product or service yet you aren’t getting enough sales. What went wrong?

Well the first thing you need to do perform an SEO audit to see where you stand and what improvements need to be made.

What Is An SEO Audit?

As a business owner, you should know what a SEO Audit is, and why it is crucial for your online presence. You need to identify issues that could and would prevent your website from being ranked on any search engines.

SEO Audits gives you a precise and detailed perception that gives you an overview of your site’s online presence. Ignoring these identifying issues, and your efforts will be in vain.

In other words,  your hard work will be paid off once you regularly audit your site. Also, this will make sure it’s properly crawled and indexed.

Pro tip: To make your content stand out, discerning content-related issues, indexing, proper use of backlink analysis, learning site architecture, and social media engagement are important factors to use in your internet marketing.

These components when understood and practiced will be important in helping you to identify strengths, weaknesses, and your website’s potential in gaining traction online.

Keep in mind that when you lose out all on the traffic, your possible sales will go down the drain. Quite the opposite when you regularly audit your website.

SEO Tool List

So how does SEO Audit procedure go? Here are tools you need to know:

1. Moz Site Audit Tool
2. Google Analytics
3. Google Search Console
4. Google Page Speed Insight

Starting The SEO Audit

The Crawl: This procedure is so important that you need to run it first before you do the other steps. Why is this important? Because this is where you identify your website’s problems, i.e., duplicate contents, low word count, unlinked pagination pages, excess redirects.

Moz Site Audit Tool

1. Go to the tool and open application.
2. On the top right of the screen, click new site audit.
3. Create new project.
4. Then enter your domain name followed by your project name.

With the exception of the limited checked pages, there is no need to edit any settings. However, if the need arises, remove URL parameters, bypass restrictions, or allow or disallow some URLs.

1. On Page SEO Score.
2. Organic Monthly Traffic.
3. Organic Keywords.
4. Backlinks.

As you scroll down the page, ‘Top SEO Issues’ will appear. Click on any of the URL for more information on your website’s issues. This way, you can review the pages; decide whether you need additional content. It’s crucial that you’ll have an insight on how Googlebot is crawling your site. You’ll know when your site is ranking well by manually searching your site.

Other Aspects To Check

When looking for relevant search results, how many of your pages pop up after? Do they come up first in the list when searching your site? Do you see your site in the list of end results when giving assessments?

Keep in mind though that despite your page’s not being at the top rank, it doesn’t mean that your page is uncrawlable, it only suggests that you need to realize the problem and what needs to be done.

You need to do this procedure in order to know if your page’s variation is in the right arrangement, in combination with duplicates. How do you do this? Go to Google and run a “site:domain.com.”

This will list indexed URLs for your domain. If you have mix site versions, then you potentially need to addressed to it. It’s important to run site search in order to have a preview of any used subdomains.

Checking your site’s indexed URLs is another procedure, it’s like running the same procedure as the above. You’ll be surprised to see a few pages Google has indexed after doing this.

Are these the results that you expect after a search? Then if not, there’s an issue that needs to be fixed. (The main culprit is usually the faceted navigation needs to be indexed). However, if it’s less than what you expected, your site then is being crawled or indexed.

How To Use Search Console

Seeing a drop in your site’s ranking or failing to rank high as it should be is anticipated once your site has violated Google’s Webmaster Quality Guidelines; this is where Manual Penalty comes in. If your brand does not rank then your site will be deindexed.

You can avoid this by checking in to see whether a manual action has been issued against your site by using the Search Console; look for:

1. “Security and Manual Actions” tab down the left-hand side of the menu;
2. Look for the manual actions link.
3. Click, then you will be directed to your status.

You can relax if you see the result with a green check. On the other hand, if an issue appears in a list, then you need a Manual Actions Report.

It has been an important factor for Mobile Ranking for a long time. Remember that User Experience is prevalent in SEO success so site speed is important.

In fact, data shows that if there’s a significant bouncing from a user, this increases a slower page load. The faster the page loads, the better result from SEO and UX perspectives. Use SEMrush Site Audit report to see load time statistics and list of highlighted errors.

SEO Audits and SSL Certificates

Implementing an SSL certificate is important if your site runs on HTTP. Once you run https://www.domain.com in your browser and see that your site remains on the HTTP protocol you can relax and head on to the next step. On the other hand, you need to address this issue if you are redirected to an HTTP version.

Make sure to keep up with the trend of having a mobile-friendly site. UX is a must if you expect to reach the top. You can check this on Search Console, look for Enhancements tab in the Mobile Usability section for any issues.

SEO Audits and Indexation Issues

How to analyze and resolve indexation issues? You will see valid pages or ones that have warning, plus, excluded pages as well as coverage errors, if you go to the index tab of the Coverage page in Google Search Console.

Prevention of site from being crawled and indexed is expected if there are underlying issues. Address this ASAP! Underlying common errors include:

1. Pages that have a noindex attribute and that are submitted in a sitemap.
2. Pages blocked from being crawled in your robots.txt file but that are included in a sitemap.
3. 404 pages submitted in a sitemap.

Excluded URLs are pages that are not currently in Google’s index. This includes:

1. Pages excluded with a noindex attribute
2. Pages that redirect
3. Crawl anomalies
4. Canonicalization issues
5. Pages that are crawled but not indexed
6. Not found (404) errors
7. Pages blocked by your robots.txt file

Deeply analyze the report and only clean the areas of concern. Of course, these reports don’t need to always be cleaned up. Usually, there are specific reasons these exclusions happen, i.e., due to site migrations. Those are the best moment to clean those reports.

Page user experience is the main goal in Google’s future objectives. A combination of Core Web Vitals signals with Google’s for a better Search ranking which gives better metrics for page user experience is a feat.

Other Tips to Improve your SEO Audits

Be a social media butterfly. Use social media as your tool for your SEO efforts. Let the dynamics of this platform be a conduit for consistent backlinks and engagement. It has the power to increase the number of your backlinks.

Those who follow your content might be more likely to link to it. This increases your brand awareness through queries about your brand. Also, let us not forget the “mentions” and “tags” that social media can offer to your brand.

As we take everything into account, we have touched on some techniques on how to do SEO Audit. We have given tools and procedures on how to fix issues and deal with it to keep your site up to its rank.

Final Thoughts

Always bear in mind that search engine algorithms, best practices, market trends, and most especially your competitors are always keeping track. So make it a habit to keep your site up to date; address issues immediately after audit. Eliminate duplicates. Monitor your site analytics, and make sure you’re engaging in any social media platforms.

The more your presence you have in social media, the further you’ll push your relevant search terms. Be consistent, and your SEO ranking will soon reach the peak of success.

The post How To Easily Do An SEO Audit appeared first on Rad Websites.

How To Increase Traffic for Beginners

No matter what type of business you run – whether it’s online or offline – you should know what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is and why it’s important to increase traffic to your website which will ultimately bring you sales. First, we’re going to start with the basics.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

SEO is the process of increasing the online visibility of your website in a search engine – aka Google which is really is the only search engine that matters.

As a rule, the more frequently a website appears in a search results list, the more visitors it will receive from people Googling.

There are billions of web pages and in order to organize all these resources in a manageable way, Google constantly crawls each website with their bots, scanning each page for certain criteria. Google assesses the usefulness to the end user based upon a number of different criteria (which we’ll get to later in this post).

Although not always the case, Google generally functions on the concept that the more popular a page or a website is, the more important the information will be for its customers and the higher it will rank.

Why Is SEO So Important?

People trust Google to find them the results they are looking for. Nowadays its so easy to find information online, it’s almost second nature. If your website or blog is top-ranked for a certain topic, then there is a higher probability for users to come across your website, read your article and even purchase your product.

If your website is properly optimized, it will enhance your search engine visibility and credibility. By writing a quality content, you encourage others to link to it, increasing your results. What’s more, quality content makes you an expert, making the job of selling your product or service that much easier.

The Fundamentals Of SEO – Bringing Traffic to your Website

Here are three steps we recommend you should take if you want to dive into SEO by yourself. There is a lot more technical details, of course, that goes into building strong SEO, but here are some basic things you can do.

Step 1: Do your keyword research

Before you even begin to create content, take time to do keyword research. There are many ways that you will benefit from this in the short and long run.
You can find and focus on popular, searched ones. Play safe at the beginning and write on topics that people are already searching for information about. Of course, if you have already identified your buyer personas, you’ll already be familiar with what topics they are interested in.

If you’re stuck there are plenty of Keyword planner tools you can use. You’ll find related keywords on the related search terms at the button of Google’s search results. By simply typing a keyword, you can get more suggestions related to your original input.

Step 2: Meta description

The meta description is a short paragraph in the code of a webpage that introduces the main points of your website or your article. It’s basically a summary, that searchers can read at a glance.

A well-defined meta description can give your website a high click-through rate, rank it in Google results pages and help to convert visitors into leads or even customers.

Create a 155-character meta description, place your main keywords (from the research you did previously) in the description and introduce your value proposition of your website. Always keep what is your customer in mind and phrase your meta description as the solution to their pain points.

Step 3: Create Content

Google loves fresh, relevant content which helps establish your authority on a topic. And you’re working hard to be an expert on all aspects of a specific niche.

With this in mind, don’t target just one keyword. Research all keywords that are related to your field of expertise. This strategy will allow you to keep top of mind of both your customers and Google – a win, win situation.

When you have done everything you can, and you still want that extra umph! Contact Me! AJ Frey, The Best SEO in Canada or Canada’s Best SEO I Respond to Both. Call now 250-801-6588

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Why WordPress Is Still The Best

WordPress is by far the most popular open source CMS (content management system) – around 60% of all websites use WordPress and for good reason. In fact, over 10 million websites use it, with 500 new ones added each day, As of July 15 2018.

According to the latest statistics. as of March 11, 2021 some 455,000,000 websites are using it right now!, which means that around 20% of all self-hosted websites use it, too.

It also holds a whopping 61.8% of the Content Management Software or CMS that market share eclipses all the rest combined, That’s Drupal Joomla, Wix, go ahead name one.

In this blog article, we’ll go through the reasons why you should choose WordPress over other CMS systems such as Shopify, Wix, Joomla or Drupal. if you were not paying attention please re-read the first paragraph. Here we go.

WordPress Is Still Easy to Use

It’s a simple system which you can use with only minimal coding or even no coding skills. It just takes a single click to install and it is ready to go.

Once installed, you can start creating and publishing pages to your specifications. It’s possible to customize colours, design, and even features of a WordPress theme.

If you still feel hard to use there are literally hundreds of tutorials out there for you to learn from.

WordPress Is Still Free and Open Source

As we mentioned, it is free to use, edit and redistribute. That’s why you can easily find its original source codes publicly available. Because it’s free it ensures there are plenty of options and support available if you need it.

There are no monthly or yearly fees from it – you just have to pay for a domain and hosting.

Create Any Website With WordPress, Still

Today, it has a lot of versatility and gives you full flexibility to create any type of website. It has a wide range of themes and plugins increase its functionality to a great extent, giving you the ultimate flexibility.

You can build anything from an infomercial site to an ecommerce website which you can use to sell your products online. WordPress gives you several powerful plugins like Woo Commerce and WP eCommerce that make it easy to handle shipping and taxes.

WordPress is also quite good for supporting membership website. For example, you can sell subscriptions of any premium service or digital products that you have.

Still Lots of Troubleshooting Help Available

WordPress has a massive community of active users and developers. Its well-maintained support forum contains millions of queries and solutions to troubleshoot problems. You can also search for your query to get the answer to your question.

Post your questions unhesitatingly, and you’ll get a solution almost immediately.
Apart from its official forum, there are a number of other WordPress dedicated forums run by developers where one can ask queries and get solutions if you have more complicated or specific problems.

WordPress Still Has High Security

It has a high-security standard which is extremely important for any business. If your site is down, you lose money, customers, and potentially data.

Since it is so popular it also makes sense that hackers are continuously trying to find loopholes to get into your backend. But not to worry. Regular updates provided by WordPress strongly protect you from this vulnerability.

You should also ensure you have regular backups just in case.

WordPress Is Still Easily Integrated With Any Application

Default WordPress has a lot of built-in functionality but you can even make it more powerful with plugins.

When you install Plugins, it will add extra functionality in your WP website. Some plugin and free and others are premium. There are around 41000+ plugins available at its repository.

WordPress Is Still The Most SEO Friendly

What’s the point of having an amazing, beautiful website if nobody can find it, right? Google and all search engines show and rank websites in search results on the basis of various predefined parameters.

The more parameters you fulfill, the better your website ranks in search results. And it also checks all those boxes. Things such as fast loading speed times, navigation, site maps, and social media integration are all things that are easy with it.

One advantage it has over other CMS’s is user experience. Of course, user experience is great for the individual user, but with Google concentrating on how flexible a CMS is, it gives WordPress an extra boost.

WordPress Sites Make Up 14.7% of the Top 100 Websites in the World

The most successful companies in the world prefer WordPress as their CMS, including: Sony, Microsoft, UPS, Disney, TED, NBC, CNN, TechCrunch, People magazine, the NFL, Best Buy, Facebook, and even Star Wars . These are just a few, powered by WordPress.

If you still need more help please call The Best SEO in Canada AJ Frey. He can Help you with some rad marketing and a rad website. Using WordPress of coarse. Call now 250-801-6588

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Small and medium-sized businesses rely on local search more than ever. Seven out of 10 consumers search Google to obtain local information. So, if your business website isn’t optimized for local search, you’re likely missing out on more than half of your prospective clients.

With so many changes every year, you feel a ton of pressure to update your SEO strategy. But it won’t matter if you’re not into local SEO.

You lost some ground last year, but this year is your chance for redemption. Build upon local SEO to keep your brand relevant, and this article serves as your comprehensive SEO guide.

Good Local SEO Practices

Start with Google My Business listing – If you haven’t done so, set up a Google My Business listing. It’s the digital equivalent of the Yellow Pages. If you intend to rank in the local search, a GMB listing makes perfect sense.

There’s no reason to skip this step – it carries weight in local SEO, plus setting it up takes minutes. See to it that you put all the details about your business.

This must include your products/services, the main business category, and the secondary business category. Filling out the subcategory is critical in your Google Maps rank.

List your business in online directories – GMB isn’t the only listing out there. List your business in other relevant online directories, but don’t overdo it.

The key term is “relevant” since all the others are trash and won’t do your business any good concerning local SEO. Focus your effort and time on these directories:

1. Angie’s List
2. Yelp
3. Bing Places
4. Foursquare
5. Super Pages
6. Yellow Pages

Review your NAP information – Be consistent with the business information you put on your listings, especially the name and place. Google wants the information to be accurate for it to trust your business.

Even an honest mistake on inputting the wrong phone number could become a red flag for Google, giving it a reason to stop displaying your listing. Even the smallest details must be consistent, like how you write abbreviations and company suffixes. If you prefer “inc.” instead of “incorporated,” do it in all your listings.

Focus on local keywords – Shift your attention to local keywords this year, but don’t ignore the value of long-tail keywords for your business, too. If you didn’t climb up to the SERPs last year, you might have undermined keyword research value.

This time see to it that you compare search volumes for a couple of almost similar search terms. You may feel like there’s no point in it, but there’s a significant difference in impact for “roof repair, Vancouver” versus “roof repair, VBC.”

Rethink your SEO strategy by using local keywords – Once you’ve figured out a new set of local keywords, the next step is to optimize your business website with them.

This isn’t a newfound strategy, yet it’s still as useful and indispensable this year as it was a decade ago. Optimizing your site is no cakewalk as it involves several components that are worthy of a separate discussion.

Anyhow, the fundamental rule is for your homepage and the product/service pages to showcase the local keywords, specifically in the following:

1. 1. Heading
   2. Meta description
   3. Title tags
   4. Body
   5. Footer

Gone were the days when you can insert keywords while ignoring the natural flow of content. Google hates keyword stuffing and unnatural placements, so see that you’re putting value to your content by flawlessly incorporating the local keywords.

Create local content – It only makes sense to fill your pages with local content since you’re shifting to local SEO this year. Unfortunately, your current content marketing strategy is all but local.

You’ve learned a while back that non-local content reaches a broader audience (and supposedly more web traffic), but you can’t take full advantage of it since you’re a local business. Maximizing your efforts in content marketing for an improved lead generation means creating local content.

Create a mobile-friendly website – You may skip this part if you’ve done this already, and we’d be surprised if you haven’t. You know how impactful a mobile-friendly website is for SEO in general, and it’s essential for local SEO, too.

Almost 40% of mobile searches are location focused. It means that almost half of consumers who stumble upon your site via a local search are using their mobile devices. Imagine the number of opportunities you’re missing out if your site isn’t mobile responsive. That’s scary.

Place value on inbound links – Inbound links boost local SEO when you know how to do it right. Put some effort in building those links this year but focus on the proven strategies.

Come up with a list of acquaintances who are in some way related to your business, i.e., wholesalers, contractors, business partners, and suppliers. Search for relevant pages on their respective websites where you’re allowed to place contextual links.

You’ll use this link to contact those businesses and then recommend the link placements. Aside from this strategy, you can also generate inbound links via guest posting. Offer to write content for related businesses with the condition that you place a link to your site.

Create location pages – If you happen to have branches of your business, then you must rank in local searches in those areas, too. The most convenient way to do this is by creating location pages.

Come up with a service page for each city instead of having just one service page for all your branches. You may optimize these pages for local search terms. But be sure that you use unique content for each page. The last thing you want is for Google to see it as duplicate content.

Final Thoughts

Though you’re setting your sights on local SEO for 2021, don’t turn your back on traditional SEO. Remember that Google factors in your website’s ranking in organic SERPs in local SEO.

The lack of implementation of some of the components of traditional SEO may even adversely affect local SEO.

Take this SEO guide and make the best of simple practices to make a profit of your website… but if you don´t have time, experience or any other related, then call us. Best SEO in Canada is here to help you out.

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