iloveseo.com https://iloveseo.com The Friendliest Source of Industry News and Information Wed, 07 Dec 2022 02:30:44 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 Google Trends Search: The Definitive Guide https://iloveseo.com/seo/google-trends-search/ Wed, 07 Dec 2022 02:30:44 +0000 https://iloveseo.com/?p=8445 Google Trends Search: The Definitive Guide on iloveseo.com by Brian Harnish

Google Trends Search is a fantastic resource for valuable data about trending searches on the web. In case you have been living under a rock and haven’t used it in...

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Google Trends Search: The Definitive Guide on iloveseo.com by Brian Harnish

Google Trends Search is a fantastic resource for valuable data about trending searches on the web. In case you have been living under a rock and haven’t used it in your SEO strategy yet, you may want to do so.

With Google Trends, it’s possible to add another dimension to your search data, by identifying which searches are more likely to improve or decrease over time.

And, by narrowing your results, you can pinpoint when that’s likely to happen.

Although it’s not a complete problem solver, this can help you immensely when it comes to creating evergreen content for your website.

The Value Of Google Trends

Google Trends is one of the most popular online tools used by marketers today. It allows you to see what people are searching for around the world. You can use it to find out what terms are trending worldwide, and even within specific countries.

But while Google Trends provides accurate information about the popularity of different topics, it does not actually tell you how many searches are being conducted for each term. So, how do we know whether the number of searches is really increasing or decreasing?

We don’t. We just look at trends over time and make educated guesses based on our experience. For example, if we see a sharp increase in the number of searches for a particular topic, we assume that there must be a lot of interest in that topic. On the other hand, if we see a decrease in the number of searches, we assume that the interest in that topic is waning.

Of course, this isn’t always true. Sometimes, the opposite happens—interest in a given topic increases without a corresponding rise in the number of searches. This is why it’s important to keep track of both the number of searches and the percentage change in the number of searches over time.

So, all the search numbers that you see on Google Trends are not the search volume. Instead, it is a scale that measures how interesting a particular topic actually is over time.

Screenshot showing example of statistics on Google Trends.

How To Use Google Trends For SEO

Google Trends is a great tool for discovering what people are searching for online. But it doesn’t always tell you exactly how many people are looking for something.

For instance, a search for “best pizza delivery near me” might show high volumes of searches for “pizza,” “delivery,” and “near me.” This could mean that lots of people are searching for pizza delivery nearby. Or it could just mean that lots of people use those three words together in every single search.

To find out whether a particular term is actually being searched for frequently, you’ll want to look up that term on Google Trends and see how much search interest there is for it. Then, compare that number against the same word used in a different context. If the latter is showing a lot more search activity, you’re probably dealing with a popular topic.

You can also compare the popularity of a term across multiple countries. For example, if you wanted to know how well a certain term performed in Australia versus the United States, you’d check both countries’ trends for that term.

If you’re interested in seeing how a specific term performs over time, you can set up Google Trends to track a term for a period of time. Simply enter the date range you want to analyze, choose a location, and select the terms you want to monitor.

Screenshot showing interest by subregion within the Untied States on Google Trends.

Once you’ve done that, you’ll be able to view the historical data for each term. From there, you can drill down into the exact dates and times that people searched for the term.

Screenshot showing interest in a specific location.

About Google Trends Data and How It Works

Google Trends uses the same algorithm as Google Search, which means that it measures the number of searches performed per month. However, Google Trends doesn’t use the exact same data sources as Google Search does. For example, Google Trends doesn’t include the number of searches performed on mobile devices, while Google Search does.

In addition, Google Trends doesn’t provide absolute numbers of searches, but rather a percentage change compared to previous months. This makes sense because the number of searches performed each day varies greatly depending on factors such as seasonality, holidays, etc.

So, what are we left with? We’re left with a graph showing the relative popularity of a particular term over time.

The reason why Google Trends doesn’t display absolute search volumes is because it wants to avoid giving the impression that certain terms are trending just because they’ve been searched more frequently recently. In fact, Google Trends tries to make sure that the curves aren’t skewed by seasonal fluctuations in search activity.

For example, let’s say that every February, millions of people around the world start searching for “Valentine’s Day flowers.” If Google Trends displays the search volume for this phrase during February, it could give the false impression that Valentine’s Day flowers are a popular topic now. But the real truth is that the spike in interest happened earlier in January, and the search volume dropped off again in February.

To prevent this, Google Trends adjusts the curve based on historical data. So, even though the search volume for the phrase “Valentine’s Flowers” increased dramatically in January, the search volume actually peaked in December.

This is why the search volume for “Valentine’s Flowers” looks different in Google Trends versus Google Search. And this is also why the search volume for the keyword “flowers” in Google Trends looks very similar to the search volume for the same keyword in Google Keyword Planner.

Notice when searching for “Valentine’s Flowers” in Google Trends shows an indicator number, rather than the actual search volume number.

Screenshot of search volume for the keyword phrase "Valentine's Flowers."

Here is an example of actual search volume numbers for “valentine’s flowers” using Keywords Everywhere:

Screenshot of Keywords Everywhere trends data for Valentine's Flowers.

Search Trends: Identify Seasonal Trends

Seasonal trends affect many businesses. If you sell umbrellas, you know that sales fall during summer because it rains less often. But what about other types of products? How do you identify seasonal trends in your industry?

Google Trends allows you to analyze how often certain terms are searched over time. This tool can help you identify seasonal trends, such as the start of summer or winter holidays, and plan your content accordingly.

For instance, let’s say you sell pumpkins. If you know that sales increase during the Halloween season, you might consider creating a blog post about pumpkin carving safety tips for kids. Or maybe you could write a listicle about the best pumpkin carving templates.

You can use Google Trends to find out what types of searches are trending in different regions around the world. Then, you can use this information to determine when it makes sense to publish content related to those topics.

For example, here is a search being done for “pumpkins.” This particular search peaks in October, because pumpkins are – surprise – likely to peak around this month because of Halloween.

Screenshot of Google Trends data for "Pumpkins" peaking in October.

Remember how we mentioned earlier that you cannot really tell search volume from these numbers by default? That’s by design. But, with the Keywords Everywhere extension, it’s possible to combine search volume with your Google Trends research. Check out what’s possible using this combination below:

Screenshot showing comparison data between Keywords Everywhere and Google Trends.

Avoid Keyword Unicorns

If you’re trying to pinpoint the best keyword to target for your next content piece…don’t just start writing. Instead, check out Google Trends to see what people are searching for in relation to your chosen keyword.

The reason behind this thought process is because you don’t want to rank for topics that are failing in Google Search. But, it’s important to note that seasonal topics and products are not necessarily failing products. Sometimes you have to do research beyond the current year to assess product seasonality.

For example, let’s say you wanted to rank well for “covers for umbrellas.” A quick look at Google Trends reveals that there aren’t many searches being done for “covers for umbrellas” when compared to umbrellas. However, the term “umbrella covers” is seeing a lot of activity. So, you could decide to go ahead and write about that. Or, you could do some research into why people are searching for “umbrella covers” and come up with a compelling article idea based on that information.

If you’re looking for a specific type of product, such as a certain brand name, you might find that the most popular terms associated with that brand are actually quite different from the ones you would use to optimize for generic products.

This is why looking for different types of specific keywords is important. You never know which ones will have the right search volumes you are looking for unless you incorporate this research into your keyword research.

Screenshot of Keywords Everywhere trends data for the keyword phrase "Umbrella Covers."

The following shows what happens when you search for the other keyword variations: it doesn’t have nearly enough search volume, so a Keywords Everywhere search volume box does not show up in Google Search. Instead, you get related keyword suggestions that have lower volume searches:

Screenshot that shows related keywords in Keywords Everywhere when high enough search volume isn't present.

This is where your keyword research using Google Trends can be so powerful. It helps you avoid keyword unicorns that may show something entirely different than the actual searches turn out to be.

Find Relevant Trending Topics

Using Trending Searches, it’s possible to find search queries that have experienced a sudden spike in interest over the past day. This data is compiled based on searches performed on Google Search, YouTube Search, and Instagram Search across different locations.

Trending Searches can help you identify popular topics that are likely to increase in popularity within the next few days. For example, if you notice that people are searching for “Oscars,” you might consider creating a post about the upcoming awards show. If you notice that people are looking for “best picture nominees,” you could write a piece about what movies are expected to make the cut.

But don’t just take our word for it. Here’s how one blogger used Trending Searches to generate traffic for his site:

First, they noticed that people were searching for “Best Picture Nominees.”
Then they wrote a post about the upcoming Oscar nominations.
A week later, they checked Trending Searches again and saw that people had been searching for “Best Picture Winners.”
So they updated their article to include information about the winners.
And guess what happened? Their traffic increased by 600%.

This is where relevant trending topics can be powerful traffic drivers for any blog.

Plan Your Content Calendar

Google Trends data can tell us a lot about what people are searching for online. We can use it to find out when topics spike in popularity. For example, we can use the term “Oscars” to determine when people are most interested in celebrities and awards ceremonies.

We can also use it to understand how popular certain keywords are. Take the word “Oscar” for instance. When did the term start trending? What does the trend look like over the past five years? How do the peaks compare to previous years? These questions can help inform our content calendars.

So how do you use Google Trends data to help you plan your content calendar? Here are 4 tips to keep in mind.

1. Don’t Rely Solely on Google Trends Data

If you’re planning to write about Oscar winners, you might want to start thinking about making some predictions now. But don’t stop there. There are plenty of other topics that could benefit from a little research into what people are searching for. For example, if you sell shoes, you might consider writing about shoe trends. Or maybe you’d like to focus on the latest fashion trends. By researching different keywords related to your industry, you’ll find many ideas for articles that you can publish throughout the year.

2. Look Beyond the Big Events

There are lots of things happening during the year, including holidays, sporting events, political elections, etc. These events tend to dominate the news cycle, but they aren’t the only stories worth covering. Take a look at the trending terms for the month of January, for instance. What did people search for in January? Did they search for “New Year’s resolutions”? Or “Happy New Year!”? Maybe they searched for “best places to eat in London.” Whatever the case, there are tons of interesting topics to cover outside of major events.

3. Make Sure You Know What People are Searching For

It’s important to remember that Google Trends isn’t an exact science. It doesn’t always provide accurate results. Sometimes, the same topic will appear multiple times in the list. This means that you need to check each result carefully before deciding whether or not to create a new post.

For example, let’s say you’re planning to write a post about the best places to visit in Paris. You see that the top three searches are all related to travel. However, one of those posts is actually about the best places to stay in Paris. That’s because the same topic appears twice in the list. If you were to add this second post to your content calendar, you would end up with two posts about the same thing.

4. Use the Right Tools

You can use Google Trends data to get a better idea of what people are searching for, but you still have to be careful about interpreting the information. For example, you should never assume that every time someone searches for a particular keyword, they’re looking for something specific. In fact, it’s quite possible that they just typed the phrase randomly. So make sure you take the time to read through the entire list before drawing any conclusions.

Google Keyword Trends: Use Related Queries for New Keyword Ideas

Google Trends allows you to see what people are searching for around the world. You can use this tool to uncover some interesting trends about how people search for your product/service.

For example, let’s say you sell sneakers. Using Google Trends, you can see that people are searching for terms like “best sneaker brands,” “cheap shoes,” and “where to buy cheap shoes.” These are all good keywords to include in your content marketing strategy.

But you can do much more than just identify popular keywords. In fact, Google Trends can help you discover related searches that people make when they search for your products/services.

Let’s take another example. Let’s say you want to start selling socks online. You know that people often search for “how to choose socks,” “what socks should I wear,” and “where to buy socks?”

Using Google Trends, you can learn that people also search for “buy socks online” and “online sock store.” This gives you several additional keywords to consider including in your content marketing strategy.

In addition to helping you find new keywords, Google Trends can also give you insight into how people search for your products/ services.

You can use this information to better understand your customers’ “search journeys.” A search journey is the path that someone takes when looking for something online.

The below shows related keywords. But, it’s not foolproof. There are a few keywords that are “unrelated” if you take a look at the screenshot below.

But, it is quite useful for identifying keywords that you might want to use in addition to the “standard” keywords being shown by Google Trends.

Screenshot showing example of related queries tool in Google Trends search.

Identify Opportunities in Other Locations

Google Trends allows us to see exactly where people are searching for certain keywords. In fact, it even tells us how many searches there are per region. So we can use this information to pinpoint our target audience. For example, let’s say you’re selling outdoor heaters. You want to know which regions are hot spots for buying one.

So what do you do? Well, you could just look up every state and see where the highest number of people searched for “outdoor heater.” But that doesn’t tell you much. What if you wanted to find out where people specifically searched for “outdoor heaters,” rather than just “heaters”? Or maybe you’d like to know where people are looking for “outdoor heat” vs. “indoor heating?”

With Google Trends, you can easily compare different queries to see which ones are most popular. And you can even drill down into specific locations.

For instance, here’s a map showing the popularity of “outdoor heater” in the United States. As you can see, the Northeast is clearly the hottest spot for purchasing one.

Screenshot showing interest in "outdoor heater" keyword by subregions in the United States.

Now let’s take a closer look at some of the individual states. Here’s a map comparing the popularity of “outdoor heater” in each state.

Screenshot showing interest trends for a specific topic in each state.

As you can see, Oregon is the clear winner. But why? Is it because it’s cold there? Maybe. But it might also be because there are fewer people living there. Or perhaps it’s because Oregonians care quite a bit about heating their homes.

But let’s zoom in on the entire state. Now we can actually see the differences between different parts of that state by comparing different metros within the state:

Screenshot that shows interest in a topic which is being zoomed in per metro area.

Refine Your Video SEO Strategy Using YouTube Searches

Google owns YouTube, but that does not mean the popularity of a specific search query is equal across the two search engines. In fact, it isn’t. Here’s the Google Trends web search data for “computers,” since 2008. You can see quite clearly how the popularity of this term peaked in 2015, but has fallen consistently since. Here’s the trend graph for YouTube.

Screenshot showing video SEO strategy research with YouTube searches.

(Yes, Google Trends lets us filter for YouTube trends—hit “YouTube Search” on the drop down menu.)

You can see that, while the popularity of computers has fallen steadily over the years, the popularity of videos related to computers has risen dramatically. This is because YouTube is a destination where people go to learn about things like computers.

Here is an example of a graph that shows the keyword search interest for “Gaming computer”:

Screenshot that shows searches for the keyword phrase "Gaming computer" on YouTube searches.

So, what do we learn from this? Well, there are some obvious takeaways. For example, you don’t want your video to be too long. These factors affect whether someone watches your video or not. Statistics show that people are gravitating more towards shorter videos, such as those that are shown in YouTube Shorts. In fact, according to Hubspot, 36 percent of marketers say that the optimal length of a video is around one to three minutes.

But there are other less obvious lessons to be learned. For instance, you might think that the most important thing to know about “Gaming computers” is that they’re popular. But actually, the most important thing to understand is why they’re popular—and that’s because people are looking for them. Finding out the “why” is the second part of finding out the “what”.

So, what else can we learn from this? Let’s start with the idea that you shouldn’t just focus on one channel. If you’re trying to rank well for a certain keyword phrase, you should look at multiple channels. Why? Because each channel tends to specialize in different types of topics. So, if you’re trying to rank for “Gaming computer,” you’ll probably find that the best place to start is with a channel that specializes in those kinds of videos.

Next, keep in mind that the popularity of a topic is often driven by the number of videos being uploaded to YouTube every day. So, if you notice that a lot of videos are getting uploaded about a certain topic, chances are that topic is becoming increasingly popular.

Finally, remember that even though the popularity of a topic might seem stable, it could still be growing or shrinking. So, if you see that the popularity of a certain topic seems to be rising, you should ask yourself whether it’s really increasing or decreasing after you review that particular Google Trends data.

Example Of How To Pinpoint Search Volume

Google Trending Searches is a great tool to find out what people are searching for around the world. You can even adjust the date range to see trends over longer periods of time.

Step 1: Find Search Trends For Target Keywords

Here is a simple process for finding specific trends for your targeted keyword phrases:

  • Go to google.com/trends
  • Enter a keyword phrase into the search box
  • Click “Trends”
  • Select the date range you want to view

The way we do it is to find out what people are searching for. If you’re looking for information about Arnold Schwarzenegger, you might want to know his stats, his career highlights, or even just some news about him. You could go directly to google.com/trends, type “Arnold Schwarzenegger,” and see what pops up. But there’s another way to look into trends.

Step 2: Find Known Search Volumes

You can find out what people are actually searching for by typing in a keyword phrase and seeing how many times it appears on Google’s trending page. This metric is called search volume.

For instance, let’s say we wanted to learn more about a certain actor or actress. We’d type their name into Google Trends, and it’ll show us how often the person has been searched over the past few months. But, as we mentioned before, this is just a scale, not an exact search volume.

We can also compare the interest of a specific term to a broader trend. Let’s take a look at the search volume of the word “anime.” We can see that anime has been searched for more frequently than most other terms.

This is because anime is one of the most popular topics among Japanese speakers. So it makes sense that searches for anime would rise and fall together with the popularity of Japan.

Step 3: Compare Searches With Actual Results

On Google Trends, you’ll notice that there are two sets of numbers. One set represents the number of searches for the target keyword phrase, while the second set represents the total number of searches for the entire world.

If you enter a keyword phrase, you’ll only see the first set of numbers. However, if you enter the same keyword phrase but change the location from the United States to China, you’ll see the second set of numbers.

These numbers represent the actual results for each country. So when you see that the U.S. search volume for a particular keyword phrase is higher than the global search volume, this means that Americans are searching for that keyword phrase more than anyone else.

In contrast, if the U.S. volume is lower than the global volume, then Americans might not be as interested in that keyword phrase as others might be.

Step 4: Find Out Which Countries are Interested in a Specific Topic

When you click on the country dropdown menu, you’ll see all the countries where the search volume for a certain topic is high enough to make it appear on the list.

In the example below, you can see that the U.K. is searching for “how to draw anime characters” more than any other country.

So if you’re trying to promote your website to British audiences, you might want to focus on creating content related to anime.

The U.S., meanwhile, isn’t very interested in anime. So if you’re targeting American audiences, you might want to create content that appeals to them.

Discover Insights From Time-based Trends

Google Trends allows you to see how many people searched for something over a specific period of time. For example, you could check out what people were searching for around the release date of Star Wars Episode VII. Or, you could compare searches during different times of day. If you notice that there is a spike in searches for something around 4 p.m., you might want to consider posting a blog post about the topic.

Longer term trends help you understand where audiences are coming from. Are they coming from mobile devices? What countries are driving the most interest? How do audiences change throughout the week? These insights can help inform future decisions about content creation.

Short Term Trends: You can use short-term trends to determine whether a particular topic is trending now. For example, if you notice that searches for “Star Wars” spiked on April 5th, you know that fans are excited about the upcoming movie.

Upward Short-Term Trends: These trends indicate that the audience is growing. If you notice that searches for a certain topic are increasing, you know that the topic is becoming more popular.

Downward Short-Term Trends: “This downward trend indicates that the audience is losing interest.”

If you notice that searches for something have decreased, you know that the audience has lost interest.

Once you’ve identified which countries are interested in a given topic, you can drill down into the data and find out exactly who these audiences are.

Screenshot showing worldwide searches for the keyword phrase "HTML Tutorials" as an example.

Related Topics And Queries

Google Trends provides you with a list of keywords that share a common theme. These keywords are identified based on the number of searches performed over the last 90 days. You can see what people are searching for in terms of trends, seasonal patterns, and popular themes.

You can use the Related Topics feature to identify topics that are gaining popularity, such as “how to make money online,” “best ways to save money,” or “how to find cheap flights.” You can also use it to identify topics that are declining in popularity, such as “what is a good diet?” or “computers.”

  • Related Topics are searches that share a common topic.
  • For example, you might see that someone searched for “organic food.” If you’ve ever wondered whether there’s a market for such products, now you know it exists.
  • You can use Related Topics to learn about what people are searching for in relation to your brand.
  • You can also use Related Topics to figure out closely related topics that show up.

Related Queries

The Related Queries feature allows you to explore similar topics. For example, if you’re looking for a topic about “how to make money,” you might want to check out the Related Queries section to learn more about “making money online” and “how to earn money.”

  • Related Queries are searches that share a similar meaning.
  • These types of queries give insight into the way consumers think about your brand.
  • They can help you understand how people are thinking about your brand and what they’re looking for.

The following includes an example of related topics and related queries:

Screenshot that shows the example of related topics and queries tool in Google Trends search.

Short-Term Trends Can Bring Massive Traffic

Viewing keyword trends in the shorter views can help you capitalize on rapidly changing search trends, especially when it comes to targeting specific days of the week. For example, if you notice that there is a lot of traffic coming from searches for “pizza delivery,” you might want to consider creating a landing page for that topic. If it looks like there is a spike in interest during the weekend, you know that you should start thinking about creating a landing page for pizza delivery on Saturdays and Sundays.

The same goes for news stories. If you notice that there is lots of traffic coming from searches related to the latest breaking news story, you should think about creating a landing page around that topic. Using Google Trends, you could also use it to see if there has been a recent spike in searches for a certain term. If there is, you know that you need to make sure that your site is ready to handle the influx of visitors.

Using Google Trends Can Provide So Much Insight for Keyword Research Purposes

Although Google search provides significant insight into what searches are performing right now, using Google Trends can help you add another dimension to your search research.

This other dimension is time. By identifying which searches are likely to not be continuous revenue generators, it’s possible to tweak your overall ongoing search strategy to assess the searches that are likely to decline in the future, vs. searches that are likely to improve.

Even though no method is 100 percent perfect, this one can help mitigate risk and improve results in the longer term.

When do you plan on integrating Google Trends Search into your overall SEO strategy?

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A Guide to SEO Acronyms and Terms https://iloveseo.com/seo/seo-acronyms/ Tue, 06 Dec 2022 01:27:18 +0000 https://iloveseo.com/?p=8440 A Guide to SEO Acronyms and Terms on iloveseo.com by Brian Harnish

SEO acronyms are important! In the world of SEO, there are plenty of acronyms. So many, in fact, that it can be difficult in the beginning to keep track of...

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A Guide to SEO Acronyms and Terms on iloveseo.com by Brian Harnish

SEO acronyms are important! In the world of SEO, there are plenty of acronyms. So many, in fact, that it can be difficult in the beginning to keep track of the many acronyms you might come across.

That’s where this list of SEO acronyms comes in!

Feel free to print it out and use it at your leisure (if you use a printer for this, anyway). Or, just bookmark it for yourself to use as a reference later.

ALT: Alternative Text Attribute

The alt attribute is one of the most important attributes you can add to your webpages. It allows you to describe the picture or graphic that appears when someone mouses over the link. For example, if there is a photo of a building on your site, you might want to include the name of the building along with the image. This way, people who are visually impaired can still understand the information on your site.

If you don’t provide an alt attribute, the image may not display properly in some browsers. You’ll lose out on potential visitors because they won’t know what the image is about and it might contribute to a bad user experience.

AJAX: Asynchronous Javascript and XML

This is a technique used by many websites today. AJAX is basically a method of retrieving data from a website without having to reload the page. Instead, it loads new content asynchronously while the user continues reading the current webpage. The advantage to this is that users will not have to wait for pages to load before they can continue browsing.

Another advantage of using AJAX is that it makes the website more responsive. When a visitor clicks on a link, the browser sends a request to the server asking whether the requested file exists. If the file does exist, then the browser receives the response immediately. However, if the file doesn’t exist, the browser has to wait until the server responds before it knows whether the file was found or not. With AJAX, the browser only needs to send requests to the server once. After that, the browser can receive responses whenever they become available.

Another benefit of using AJAX is SEO. Because search engines crawl the entire website, they see all the links on every page. Therefore, if you use AJAX to retrieve content, the crawler will be able to index the content faster than if you had just loaded the page normally.

API: Application Program Interface

An API (Application Programming Interface) is a set of rules that allow software programs to communicate with each other. APIs are usually written in a programming language such as PHP, Java, C#, etc. In order for two different applications to work together, both parties need to agree upon how they will interact.

For instance, let’s say you wanted to create a shopping cart application. One option would be to write the code yourself. Another option would be to purchase a ready-made solution. Both options require you to develop the same functionality. However, the second option requires you to learn how to program in the chosen language.

The third option is to use an API. By using an API, you don’t have to worry about learning any coding languages. All you have to do is download the API and follow the instructions provided. Once you’ve downloaded the API, you simply plug it into your own application.

AR: Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality (AR) is a technology that overlays digital information onto real world objects. For example, when you look at a building through Google Street View, you may notice that there is a virtual version of the building next to the physical one. This is AR.

AR is becoming increasingly popular among businesses. It allows them to add virtual elements to their products and services. These virtual elements could include product descriptions, price tags, directions, etc.

AR also has potential in education and medical fields. Students could view maps of foreign countries and practice speaking the native language by interacting with the map. Or, surgeons could use holograms of the human body to train for surgeries as if they were performing the surgery on a live person.

The possibilities of the applications of augmented reality are endless.

B2B: Business to Business

Business to business (B2B) marketing is a type of direct marketing where companies sell directly to another company instead of selling to consumers. B2B marketing involves sending out sales letters, brochures, catalogs, etc. to businesses, rather than individual consumers.

Because B2B marketing is so effective, most small businesses opt to use it. Smaller companies often find it easier to reach large numbers of people because they’re less likely to get lost in the shuffle.

However, B2B marketing isn’t always easy. There are many challenges involved. For example, some companies may not want to share their contact information with others. Others may be concerned about privacy issues. Still others may feel uncomfortable receiving unsolicited mail.

In addition, B2B marketing takes time and money. If you’re trying to market to a specific industry, you’ll probably have to spend more time researching the target audience.

B2C: Business to Consumer

Business to consumer (B2C) marketing is a type of marketing where companies sell to individuals instead of businesses. B2C marketing involves sending out sales flyers, catalogs, emails, etc. to consumers.

This type of marketing can be very effective if done correctly. But it can also be costly and time consuming. The reason why this type of marketing works well is because consumers like to buy things from brands they know and trust.

This means that if you send out a flyer promoting your brand, chances are high that someone will respond positively.

But even though consumers are receptive to these types of promotions, they still need convincing. That’s why it’s important to make sure that your message is clear and concise.

BH: Blackhat

Black hat SEO refers to any search engine optimization technique that violates Google’s Webmaster Guidelines or other rules. When black hat techniques are used, they usually result in low quality backlinks.

These links are generally spammy and don’t help your site rank higher. Some examples of black hat SEO tactics include buying links, using hidden text, keyword stuffing, and link farming.

The goal of black hat SEO is to manipulate search results to benefit a website or its owner. This is considered unethical and illegal.

The good news is that there are ways to avoid getting caught up in black hat SEO. One way is to hire an experienced SEO professional that doesn’t resort to those tactics.

BL: Backlink

A backlink is a hyperlink on a different page pointing to your own web page. These links are valuable because they increase the number of times your content appears in search engines.

Backlinks are especially useful when you’re trying to build authority. Authority is a measure of how much influence your site has within the world of online search.

If you have lots of backlinks, then you’ll appear as a credible resource. This helps you gain credibility and attract visitors.

If you’re looking to improve your rankings, then you should focus on building backlinks. However, it’s important to note that backlinks aren’t everything.

You also need to create great content. And you need to promote your content through social media.

BR: Bounce Rate

When people visit your website, do they stay long enough to see all of the pages? Or do they leave after just one or two clicks?

Your bounce rate measures how many people left your site without clicking anything else. It’s calculated by dividing the total number of visits by the total number of unique visitors.

A high bounce rate indicates that users are leaving quickly. So if you want to keep them around longer, then you need to work on improving your site design and/or content.

CAPTCHA: Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart

Captcha stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” Captchas are algorithmic images designed to prevent automated programs from accessing websites.

They’re often displayed at registration forms and login screens. If you use captchas, then you’re asking potential customers to solve puzzles before they can access your site.

Although they may seem annoying, captchas can actually be beneficial. For example, they can help protect against bots and viruses.

ccTLD: Country Code Top-level Domain

A ccTLD is a country code top-level domain (ccTLD). The most popular ccTLDs are .com, .net, .org, .info, and .biz.

There are hundreds of ccTLDs available. Each one represents a specific geographic region.

For example, .uk is the ccTLD for Great Britain.

CDN: Content Delivery Network

A CDN is a network of servers located across the globe. When someone types a URL into their browser, the request goes out to the closest server.

The result is faster loading speeds for your visitors.

Content delivery networks make this possible. They store copies of your content on multiple servers.

So if someone searches for your company name, then they get the best version of your content.

CF: Citation Flow

CF stands for citation flow, and is a metric specific to the third-party link research tool Majestic.

This metric shows how well other sites link to yours.

To calculate CF, you take the number of incoming links to your site and divide it by the number of outgoing links.

The higher the ratio, the more influential your site is.

CGI: Common Gateway Interface

CGI is a protocol that allows computers to communicate with each other over the Internet.

When you visit a website, the computer sends information about what page you want to see to the server.

Then the server returns the requested page back to your computer.

If you’ve ever visited a website, then you’ve probably seen a CGI script.

CRM: Customer Relationship Management

CRM stands for customer relationship management. It’s a software program that helps companies keep track of their relationships with their customers.

Companies use CRMs to organize all of their interactions with clients.

CRM systems also provide tools to automate marketing campaigns, sales processes, and customer service.

CMS: Content Management System

A content management system (CMS) is a type of software that enables users to create, publish, manage, and share digital content.

A CMS typically provides a user interface where authors can enter or upload content, such as text, images, videos, etc.

Users may also be able to create pages, galleries, menus, forms, etc.

In addition, some CMSes offer additional features, such as blogs, forums, wikis, file sharing, ecommerce, etc.

CMSs are often used to build websites because they are easy to set up and maintain.

CMSs have become increasingly popular since the advent of social media platforms, which require constant updating.

Some examples include WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal, and Magento.

You can even change the look of your site with themes.

COA: Cost of Acquisition

COA is a term used in advertising to describe the cost of acquiring a new customer.

It’s calculated by multiplying the price paid per acquisition by the lifetime value of the customer.

For example, let’s say you pay $10 per lead.

And let’s assume that the average lifetime value of a customer is $100.

That means COA would equal $10 x 100 = $1,000.

CPA: Cost Per Acquisition

CPA is another way to measure the success of your ads.

It’ll tell you how much money you spent to acquire a single customer.

But remember, CPA doesn’t account for the lifetime value of a customer.

CPI: Cost Per Impression

CPI is a very similar concept to CPM, or cost per thousand.

However, instead of measuring the amount of money you spend on impressions, CPI measures the amount of money you lose when someone clicks away from your ad before reaching your landing page.

CR: Conversion Rate

The conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who complete a specific action after viewing your ad.

For example, if you run an online store, the conversion rate will help you determine whether people are actually buying something.

CRO: Conversion Rate Optimization

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of optimizing your site so it converts more leads into paying customers.

This includes things like making sure your call-to-action buttons are visible, using clear language, creating a compelling headline, etc.

CTA: Call to Action

Call to action (CTA) refers to any button or link on a webpage that encourages a visitor to take a certain action.

For example, a CTA could be “Buy Now” or “Sign Up Today.”

CTR: Click Through Rate

Click through rate (CTR) is the number of times a person clicks on an advertisement divided by the total number of impressions.

If you want to know what works best for your business, you need to understand CTR.

DC: Data Center

Data centers are large buildings with lots of servers and other equipment needed to host websites and apps.

They usually contain multiple racks of computers, networking gear, power supplies, cooling units, and security cameras.

DFO: Data Feed Optimization

Data feed optimization (DFO) is the practice of improving the quality of data being sent to Google Analytics.

By doing this, you can improve the accuracy of your reports.

HTML: Hypertext Markup Language

Hypertext markup language (HTML) is the code that makes up web pages.

HTML is used to create text formatting, images, links, tables, forms, videos, and many other elements that you see on a webpage.

HTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol

Hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) is the standard communication method between browsers and websites.

When you visit a website, you send HTTP requests to the server. The server responds with an HTML page or some other content that is sent back to your browser.

The request and response are usually handled by a web framework like ExpressJS or Django.

HTTPS: Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure

Hypertext transfer protocol secure (HTTPS) is the same as HTTP, but uses encryption to protect sensitive information such as credit card numbers.

The most common use of HTTPS is for web pages that contain login forms or other sensitive data, and it’s a good idea to always use this method when you’re sending personal information over the Internet. However, there are many situations where you can safely use HTTP instead of HTTPS. For example, if you have an online store, you don’t need to encrypt your customer’s credit card number because they won’t be able to see it anyway.

NAP: Name Address Phone Number

Name address phone number (NAP) is a unique identifier used in email marketing campaigns.

It consists of your company name, address, and phone number.

NAP is used most often in Local SEO, where the business’ physical information is needed first and foremost.

PPC: Pay-Per-Click

Pay per click (PPC) is a type of advertising model where advertisers pay each time someone clicks on their ad.

This means that PPC ads appear at the top of search results, along with organic listings.

PPC is one of the oldest types of paid advertising, and it still has its place today.

However, there are many other ways to advertise online that don’t involve paying for every single click.

PR: PageRank

Page rank (PR) is a measurement of how important a webpage is based on the importance of other pages linking to it. This aspect of the Google algorithm was invented by Googler Larry Page, hence the name “PageRank”

Google assigns a numerical value to each webpage based on the importance of those pages.

Pages with higher PR values tend to get more traffic from search engines than lower PR pages.

ROI: Return on Investment

Return on investment (ROI) is the amount of money you spend divided by the amount of profit you make.

If you invest $1 into something and it returns $2, then your ROI would be 50 percent.

ROI is also known as return on capital, which simply refers to what percentage of your initial investment you get back after a certain period of time.

RSS: Really Simple Syndication

Really simple syndication (RSS) is a way to subscribe to news feeds.

You can read these feeds using any RSS reader, and they’ll show up in your inbox automatically.

RSS is very popular among bloggers, who use it to share new posts with their readers.

SEO: Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your site for search engines such as Google, Bing, and others.

The end goal of this process is to improve traffic, rankings, and your overall website performance.

SERP: Search Engine Results Pages

The search engine results pages are those pages that have…the results of a query that you type into the search engine.

On Google, they can take many forms and Google also has a variety of different types of results. Either way, these are the results that everyone is trying to get their website to rank number 1 for: organic.

SEM: Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing (SEM) is an acronym that usually refers to PPC (pay per click) ads, which show up above the organic search results on Google.

So now, when someone asks you what the difference between SEM and SEO are, you can tell them that SEM refers to paid results, and SEO refers to the free organic results.

Social Media Optimization: SMO

Social media optimization (SMO) is the process of improving the presence of a website within social networks.

SMO includes things like posting relevant updates, sharing interesting articles, and commenting on social feeds.

SMX: Search Marketing Expo

The Search Marketing Expo (SMX) is a conference held annually. With the pandemic, however, conferences have taken a step back to being virtual. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t still chock full of amazing speakers and information.

These conferences still bring together people from all different industries to discuss topics such as SEM, link building, conversion rate optimization, and much more.

SMM: Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing (SMM) is the practice of promoting brands through social networking sites.

Branded content is posted to social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and shares are generated through likes, comments, and retweets.

SMS: Short Message Service

Short message service (SMS) is a text messaging system that allows users to send short messages between mobile devices.

SMS is commonly used to send promotional offers or reminders to customers.

SPAM: Spamming

Spam is unsolicited email sent to large numbers of recipients.

SPAM is often sent via bulk mail services, but spam can also come from individual accounts.

TLD: Top Level Domain

Top level domain (TLD) is the part of an URL before the last dot.

For example, .com is the TLD for commercial websites, while .edu is the TLD for educational websites.

UX: User Experience

User experience (UX) is the overall impression that a user has when interacting with a product or service.

UX encompasses many aspects of design, including visual appeal, ease of navigation, and functionality.

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32 Best SEO Chrome Extensions https://iloveseo.com/seo/seo-chrome-extensions/ Sat, 03 Dec 2022 02:59:54 +0000 https://iloveseo.com/?p=8395 32 Best SEO Chrome Extensions on iloveseo.com by Brian Harnish

Google has a complete store filled with many different types of extensions meant to enhance your surfing and research productivity. But, did you know that SEO Chrome Extensions have a...

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32 Best SEO Chrome Extensions on iloveseo.com by Brian Harnish

Google has a complete store filled with many different types of extensions meant to enhance your surfing and research productivity. But, did you know that SEO Chrome Extensions have a fond place in our own arsenals, and that we use them on a daily basis?

Picture this scenario: you are embarking on the beginning of an SEO campaign, but you just can’t put together the initial research and information necessary to get that data that you need.

Enter Google Chrome SEO extensions. These types of extensions are meant to help assist SEO professionals with many mundane and repetitive tasks, but can also be wonderful and fun additions to anyone’s arsenal.

There are many reasons why you should consider using free chrome extensions instead of paid ones. For example, some paid chrome extensions require you to sign up for a monthly subscription. This means you’d have to spend $10-$20 every single month just to keep your extension active. With free chrome extensions, you only have to install once and never worry about paying again.

These include everything from keyword research tools to link building tools. So, we have compiled a list of 16 of the best free chrome extensions that will help you optimize your site for search engine rankings (as well as other productivity-enhancing extensions).

Keywords Everywhere

Find the extension here: Keywords Everywhere.

One of the most popular keyword research tools is Keywords Everywhere (KE). KE allows you to enter keywords into its interface and then shows you all the places where those words appear on the web. It also provides suggestions for related terms.

It’s free. You can add up to 100 keywords. The results aren’t perfect, but they’re pretty good. You can also export the data in CSV format. This makes it easy to import into Excel or any other spreadsheet program. The results are updated daily. In addition, it’s cheap, and for a small sum you can get 100,000 keyword searches a month. For those SEO professionals who are on a budget, this tool is an excellent choice.

Screenshot of Keywords Everywhere SEO Chrome Extension

WAVE Accessibility Chrome Extension

Find the extension here: WAVE Accessibility Extension.

The WAVE Accessibility Chrome Extension helps you identify accessibility problems on websites. It does this by checking the HTML code of each page against the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 Level A standard.

It provides specific instructions based on accessibility best practices, and can tell you if there are serious issues.

This extension is great because it gives you an overview of the accessibility issues on a website. It’s easy to understand and it makes it clear exactly what needs to be fixed. Even if you’re an accessibility newbie, it will help provide context and information that will make it easier for you to fix things.

Screenshot of WAVE Accessibility SEO Chrome Extension

View Rendered Source

Find the extension here: View Rendered Source.

The View Rendered Source Chrome Extension allows you to compare the original source code against anything that any JavaScript files on the page physically change. This is useful for investigating why certain pages aren’t loading properly.

This extension is really handy when you need to figure out why a particular page isn’t designed with accessibility features in mind. It’s simple to use and it lets you quickly view the original source code. Its interface is also simple in terms of how it functions: green on the right window shows you unchanged code. Red shows you code that has changed as a result of the preceding JavaScript file.

Screenshot of the output of the View Rendered Source SEO Chrome Extension

Semrush’s SEOQuake

Find the extension here: SEOQuake.

This is one of our favorite SEO tools. It’s a free service that provides a nice data overlay on the Google Search results, revealing exactly what metrics are showing for the results on the page. It also lets you export all results to an Excel file, allowing you to save those results for later analysis and use.

It’s a handy little tool for quick data analysis and identifying the overall search engine results landscape.

It’s easy to use. It’s also comprehensive. And, it provides some great features – and all of this for free. These features will help you accelerate your SERP analysis and help you collect competitor analysis ranking data on other websites and locations very quickly.

Screenshot of the output of SEO Quake's SEO Chrome Extension

SEO Pro Extension by Marketing Syrup

You may find the extension here: SEO Pro Extension.

Marketing Syrup’s SEO Pro Extension is another great tool for analyzing specific potential SEO issues, with website page elements rendered up front and at a glance. The easy-to-read format is a bonus as well.

It’s a free extension and it’s well worth it. It’s a powerful tool that provides a lot of insight into how well your page is optimized.

We love the fact that SEO Pro includes top SEO features on a page in a very easy-to-use interface. Its at-a-glance layout provides the page title, meta description, URL, canonical, meta robots tags, core web vitals, along with the page heading tags. Using this in conjunction with competitor page analysis will help you identify what your competitors are doing, while providing insights on what your site is currently doing.

Also, it has been developed by trusted SEO professional Kristina Azarenko.

Screenshot of the Marketing Syrup SEO Chrome Extension

Check My Links Chrome Extension

Find the extension here: Check My Links Extension.

If you want to check the links on a webpage, then Check My Links is a must have extension. You can easily see which links are broken or missing from a page. The extension also highlights the anchor text used in the link, so you know whether or not the link is relevant.

In addition, this extension also calls out errors on the visible page links. By using red and green colored background boxes, it’s easy to see exactly which links are broken and which links are valid.

We love the simplicity of this extension. It’s easy to use and has a simple and clean interface. It’s also fast and responsive. Plus, it’s completely free! In addition, it helps you identify issues that may not be the direct cause of links.

For example, if you have too many resources on the page that are preventing the accurate crawling of your links, the many red errors being called up is a sure sign that your page has that kind of issue.

Screenshot of the Check My Links SEO Chrome Extension

Ayima Redirect Path

You can find the extension here: Ayima Redirect Path.

This extension is a must have for any SEO practitioner. Ayima Redirect Path allows you to see redirect URLs based on their path. This means that with the extension, once you visit a website and pull it up, it will show you the redirect path of every URL to that page.

This will help you identify redirect issues, and determine if any redirects are causing conflicts with Google.

We love the fact that this extension is free. It’s also incredibly useful. It’s one of those extensions that we’ve had installed for years. It’s always helped us analyze our own sites and identify potential problems. Also, its simple interface allows you to see exactly that: just the redirects. And nothing else.

Screenshot of the Aiyama Redirect Path SEO Chrome Extension.

SEO Meta in 1 Click

The extension is available here: SEO Meta in 1 Click.

The SEO Meta in 1 click extension is an amazing tool for quickly identifying the most important elements of a page. With this extension, you can view all of the meta tags of a page in one place in an easy-to-read format. It’s a great tool to help identify SEO issues on the fly.

We love the fact it’s both free and extremely helpful. It’s a quick way to get a snapshot of a page’s meta data. If you’re looking for a quick fix of low-hanging fruit SEO opportunities, this is a great option.

Screenshot of the SEO Meta in one click SEO Chrome Extension.

Keyword Surfer

You can get the extension here: Keyword Surfer.

Keyword Surfer is a keyword research tool that makes finding keywords easier than ever before. It’s a chrome extension that lets you search for keywords with a nice amount of data, especially for a tool that’s free. You can find things like keyword search volume, domain-level traffic estimates, and other types of data that are gleaned directly from the Google SERPs.

It also shows you a nice graph outlining recent search trends for that particular keyword phrase.

We love the fact that it’s free. It works really well and provides some interesting insights into what people are searching for. It’s also very
easy to use. It checks off all the boxes for a free keyword research tool that lets you mine for high-value keyword opportunities.

Screenshot of the Keyword Surfer SEO Chrome Extension.

Google Tag Assistant

Get the Google Tag Assistant extension here.

For Chrome Extensions from an SEO audit perspective, this one is pretty cool. The Google Tag Assistant is a chrome extension that gives you access to how many GA tags are on the page. Multiple GA tags could point to several problems, including over-reporting (and inflation) of SEO data. If this is an issue, then the site could be over-reporting.

But, multiple tags by themselves are not an issue. What IS an issue is if you have more than one instance of a GA tag. This means that your data is inaccurate. And when your data is inaccurate, you cannot make sound SEO decisions.

This extension allows you to uncover this issue and vet your pages to ensure that you are not shooting yourself in the foot with additional instances of Google Analytics being installed.

We love the fact the extension is free (of course). It helps you spot errors in your analytics installation, and you can figure out exactly where things are going wrong with overreporting (or underreporting) of such data. This is a great extension to have in any SEO pro’s arsenal.

Screenshot of the Google Tag Assistant SEO Chrome Extension.

Open Multiple URLs

Find the Open Multiple URLs Extension here.

If you want to open multiple URLs at once, Open Multiple URLs is a Chrome extension that will do just that. It’s a handy little tool that allows you to open up as many tabs as you need. You can even set them to not load tabs until selected, load tabs in a random order, or load the tabs in a reverse order. This is very useful, especially when you’re working on analyzing large batches of URLs, and you simply need a way to automate opening them all at once.

With this extension, just open it, copy and paste your URLs, and click on “Open URLs” and you’re done.

Again, this is another entirely free extension that doesn’t have a paid option. It also has the ability to grab URLs from specific text, so you don’t always have to copy/paste a list of URLs.

Screenshot of the Open Multiple URLs SEO Chrome Extension

SERPTrends Search Analysis

You can get the SERPTrends Chrome Extension here.

For evaluating the dynamics of current URLs within the search results, this is an amazing extension. It allows you to check things like: whether a URL is new in the search results, how it has moved, and other practical pieces of information.

This will allow you to better prioritize your page optimization efforts, and help tweak pages on your site that may not have improved.

SEPRTrends is an amazing extension that is valuable when it comes to identifying reasons why a site may (or may not) have improved in search. It also has a quick link to AHREFs, so you can perform an almost-instant overall backlink analysis.

Screenshot of the SERP Trends search analysis SEO Chrome Extension.

Hunter.io

You can find the Hunter.io Chrome Extension here.

If you specialize in doing outreach for link building, then Hunter.io is a great Chrome extension for you. This extension will return contact information for just about anyone who is related to managing a particular website domain.

You can then export this information to a spreadsheet for easy processing and outreach list building.

Its interface is simple, it’s free (for a few searches) and allows you to see exactly who may be in charge of a website. It’s one of the best link building outreach tools on the planet. The paid version allows you to perform more searches per month.

If your primary task is link building, then this may be the tool that you need.

Screenshot of the Hunter.io email finder SEO Chrome Extension.

HREFLANG Tag Checker

Get the HREFLANG Tag Checker Chrome Extension here.

Are you doing some international SEO for your website? Then this tag checker is for you. It is a Chrome extension that’s designed to automatically check for how correct your Hreflang tag deployment actually is. But, it doesn’t just simply list the tag data. It actually identifies whether they are physically linking back to the page that you are on. This is highly useful for quickly identifying errors in a site’s Hreflang implementation.

Of course, it’s free. But, it also provides significantly more context than other Chrome extensions, allowing you to really narrow down your testing criteria on the fly. It will also help you identify weaknesses in how these tags are created, so you can make adjustments as needed.

Screenshot of the HREFLANG Tag Checker SEO Chrome Extension.

MST SERP Counter

Download MST SERP Counter.

This Chrome extension is very useful simply for counting the listings in the search results! Have you ever had the situation where you couldn’t tell where you were, especially when you have your search results set to 50 or 100? Enter MST SERP Counter!

It’s main claim to fame includes the ability to add orange arrows that point to each organic result, and this also includes the position number. This one extension can help make organic research much easier, allowing you to spot-check and identify where sites might be showing up in the organic search results. All without having to fire up Google Search Console or Google Analytics.

MST SERP Counter SEO Chrome Extension

Meta SEO Inspector

Download Meta SEO Inspector

This Chrome extension is a powerful tool for checking for errors in your meta tags. Which is a big deal, because even some of the smallest errors can have a negative impact on your rankings.

How this Google chrome extension works is: you load up the page you want to inspect your meta tags for. The box pops up, and it will tell you whether or not you have errors in your meta tags.

By making sure that you include this Chrome SEO extension in your arsenal, it is possible to uncover any errors that you may not have seen in your meta tags before.

Screenshot of the Meta SEO Inspector Google Chrome Extension

Ubersuggest – The Google SEO Chrome Extension

Download Ubersuggest Keyword Research Extension

Even though you might have already gone to the Ubersuggest website once or twice to do some light keyword research, why not download the Google Chrome Extension meant for both site research and keyword research?

How Ubersuggest works is: when you click on the extension to enable it, it pops out a menu to the right of your browser screen. You have four tabs which include Domain Overview, Keywords by Traffic, Backlinks, and the SEO Analyzer.

Using this Chrome Extension, it’s possible to come up with a comprehensive SEO strategy that will help you outrank your competition.

Screenshot of the Ubersuggest Google SEO Chrome Extension

Site Checker for SEO Issues

Download Site Checker

This particular SEO Chrome Extension allows you to check many different SEO attributes of a specific web page, all while never leaving your Google Chrome web browser window.

The way it works is: all you do is navigate to the page you want to check. Then, click the extension. It will generate all of this particular data that you can then use to improve the optimization of a specific page. As you can imagine, this is very useful for quick analysis of individual pages.

Site Checker SEO Chrome Extension

Live HTTP Headers

Download Live HTTP Headers!

Have you ever had to check the HTTP headers of a page instantaneously? No, we’re not talking about the page headers. But the headers that are generated by the server. Why is this useful? Sometimes, you might have to identify whether a page is being noindexed by the server, above robots.txt and at the page level.

Enter Live HTTP Headers. Using this extension, you can examine all of the HTTP headers that are being sent by the server to the page. As a result, you can troubleshoot certain indexing issues that you might not otherwise have found.

Live HTTP Headers SEO Chrome Extension

Clear Cookie and Reload

Download Clear Cookie and Reload!

This SEO Chrome Extension is somewhat related to SEO, although not entirely. Have you ever worked on a website that just didn’t load correctly? Or perhaps one of your favorite websites got stuck during a cookie recording event, so now you always have to login to a specific page at first, before proceeding through the rest of that website?

Enter Clear Cookie and Reload. This extension lets you do a full, hard cookie dump of a page you are on. Once you have dumped the cookie, you can hit ctrl+F5 (if you’re on a Windows PC) to hard refresh that page. This is insanely useful for getting rid of stubborn cookies that just won’t budge on single pages, and you just can’t part with your historical data through a data purge.

There is no associated screenshot for this extension, because it’s just a button you can click that automatically refreshes that page without the cookie present.

Page Size Inspector

Download Page Size Inspector!

The Page Size Inspector Google Chrome Extension does exactly what you would expect: it inspects the page size of a particular page you are on. It will check all your resources, specific requests, and give you a total size measurement metric (in bytes).

This extension, again, is very useful for figuring out the metrics of a particular page you are on in your browser, and you can troubleshoot issues as needed.

Page Size Inspector Google Chrome Extension

Google Lighthouse

Download Google Lighthouse!

We had to include this SEO Chrome Extension in our list because of how critical it is for measuring page speed. We don’t know of any SEO who doesn’t at least have one instance of Google Lighthouse installed. But, if that’s you, we recommend installing this extension.

For example, the following is a generated report from within Lighthouse that features a recent post on the iloveseo blog:

Google Lighthouse SEO Chrome Extension

Loom Video Recorder

Download Loom Video Recorder!

If you are looking for an efficient video recording application for your browser, you have come to the right place. The Loom video recorder extension is for you! For anyone who needs to instantly record and present problems on a website to their client, this SEO Chrome Extension is huge.

Not only can you record a browser window, you can also use the desktop version of the software to record your desktop. While it’s not exactly free, the paid version is not that expensive.

Loom Video Recorder SEO Chrome Extension

H-tag Heading Tag Inspector

Download H-tag Heading Tag Inspector!

Have you ever wondered if there was an option to examine heading tags visually, so that you didn’t have to go through the code? This SEO Chrome Extension is for you. By highlighting specific heading tags that are on the page visually, it’s possible to see the page’s overall heading structure so you can troubleshoot SEO issues.

For example, let’s say that we were working on auditing AHREF’s website. If we activate the extension, it will show the specific page headers, like in the screenshot below.

This makes it very easy to present screenshots to a client, or otherwise create recommendations based on those that the client can see. This is super useful for presenting changes that might otherwise be more challenging to get buy-in on.

H-tag Heading Tag Inspector SEO Chrome Extension

SERPWorx

Download SERPWorx Today!

Have you ever wished that you could see SEO data entirely overlayed on the search results? Now, you can! With the SERPWorx Google Chrome SEO Extension, it’s possible to display overlayed SERP data from your favorite SEO Tools.

It will show you the following:

  • Majestic Trust Flow, Citation Flow, and Trust Ratio,
  • The types of categories from Majestic,
  • The total links in Majestic using a domain/pages ratio,
  • Moz Page Authority and Domain Authority,
  • The Moz spam score for the domain, followed links, and total domains/pages linked,
  • Semrush Total Keywords Ranked and Total Monthly Traffic,
  • The numbers of H1s, H2s, H3s, and H4s on the page,
  • The page’s total word count,
  • The page’s total Keyword Density,
  • How many years the domain was first archived, including the SERP average,
  • How many Facebook Shares,

Here is an example of how this looks:

SERPWorx SEO Chrome Extension

G-Mail Show Time

Download G-Mail Show Time!

Have you ever wondered where the time goes when you’re working to check your email in Gmail, and you only have dates by default? That’s where this Google Chrome SEO Extension can come in handy!! Using this extension, you can add the time that the email came in, and it will show up next to the date within your Gmail list.

This is extremely useful because you will no longer have to click on the email first to see when the email actually came in. If you’re one of those people who are more precise than the initial data that Gmail shows, this extension is perfect and should whet your appetite for more data!

Gmail Show Time SEO Chrome Extension

SEO Minion

Download SEO Minion!

One of the best things about SEO Minion includes all of the on-site SEO analysis that it does. It will show you things like a page’s on-page SEO, highlighting all links, checking broken links, HREFLANG, SERP preview, as well as a SERP location checker.

You can get a very in-depth overview of any page straight from this particular extension.

SEO Minion SEO Chrome Extension

Savvy Time – A Time Zone Converter

Download Savvy Time Time Zone Converter!!

If you work with people internationally like me, then you have no doubt run into issues with making sure that you are assessing the right time zone correctly. It can be a challenge to be sure. But with this SEO Chrome Extension, you will be able to work with your international clients with ease.

Just enter your time zone (PT, for example) or City (such as Newport Beach, California), and it will bring up choices from a database of locations that you can add to the tool. You can also toggle between am and pm, and you can toggle between 12-hour and 24-hour time variations. There is also a light mode along with a dark mode you can choose from for the skin.

Savvy Time SEO Chrome Extension

Awesome Screenshot

Download Awesome Screenshot today!

Are you stuck creating screenshots for clients with a lower quality application that doesn’t have the ability to allow you to use symbols like arrows, and others? This SEO Chrome Extension is for you! It lets you select only the partially visible part of your page, the entire page, or a selected area that you can define. In addition, you can save it to your local disk or cloud storage.

After doing the capture, it takes you to a screen with a variety of different markup tools, allowing you to create a presentable screenshot for any client.

This is one screenshot tool that’s great for any SEO professional who needs to create screenshots regularly.

Awesome Screenshot SEO Chrome Extension

Google Docs Quick Create

Download Google Docs Quick Create!

Have you ever been in a situation where you need to create a relatively quick Google document? Perhaps a Google doc, a Google spreadsheet, or Google presentation?

This SEO Chrome Extension is one you definitely don’t want to be without. Right from your browser, you can automatically generate a new Google doc, Google spreadsheet, Google presentation, drawing, or form without ever leaving the browser to do so.

This extension is especially useful for anyone who works with Google docs on a frequent basis, and they need to really create documents quickly.

Google Docs Quick Create

Giphy for Google Chrome

Download GIPHY for Google Chrome!

Imagine this scenario: say that you were creating a brand-new blog post, and you are addicted to well…all the memes. But, you just can’t rack your brain together to find the memes you need to convey that one particular thought…well…perfectly?

Enter Giphy for Chrome. This SEO chrome extension is a fabulous way to uncover memes you might never have thought about using.

GIPHY for Google Chrome

What Runs Chrome Extension

Download What Runs!!

Picture this scenario: you’re trying to do competitor research on other sites belonging to the competition. And, you want to figure out what technology the competitor is running. This would usually fall under poking under the hood, so-to-speak, and doing some code analysis, right? Wrong!

With this Chrome extension, you can identify what technology competitors are using on their websites with just a click.

What Runs SEO Chrome Extension

Using AHREFs.com for our example, we can see the technology that’s running their website. This includes the fact that they are running an Nginx server, they are using the Google Font API, Intercom for their communications framework, as well as React and jQuery 1.9.1 for their JavaScript Frameworks.

Pretty cool, huh?

If we wanted to use Semrush as another example, we would see the following.

What Runs SEO Chrome Extension

They use Google Analytics, InspectJet, and NewRelic for their analytics platforms. For JavaScript Graphics, they use Highcharts. And, for tagging page elements for data reasons, they use Google Tag Manager. And they also use many Javascript Frameworks, including Lo-Dash, Modernizr 1.7, RequireJS, jQuery 2.1.4, jQuery UI 1.10.3, and of course they use CloudFlare as their CDN.

Which Google Chrome SEO Extension Will Help You?

From extensions that help you uncover data, and others that allow you to uncover the right images to help you convey your thoughts properly, we hope this post was very helpful in that regard.

Whether you need a Chrome extension for identifying glitching server-side HTTP headers, or perhaps one that lets you do the right SERP research, our lists of Google Chrome SEO extensions should help you find just what you need.

When are you installing your next Google Chrome SEO extension?

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Parameter URLs: A Guide for Beginners https://iloveseo.com/seo/parameter-urls/ Fri, 02 Dec 2022 04:41:28 +0000 https://iloveseo.com/?p=8383 Parameter URLs: A Guide for Beginners on iloveseo.com by Brian Harnish

Parameter URLs are a critical SEO asset that you must get right. They are invaluable assets in the hands of seasoned SEO professionals. And query strings oftentimes create major challenges...

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Parameter URLs: A Guide for Beginners on iloveseo.com by Brian Harnish

Parameter URLs are a critical SEO asset that you must get right. They are invaluable assets in the hands of seasoned SEO professionals. And query strings oftentimes create major challenges when it comes to your site’s rankings.

From duplicate content issues, to creating issues with crawling and indexing, it’s important to get these things right because parameter URLs can cause major problems that will rear their ugly heads when you least expect them to.

For this reason, it pays to have the right URL parameters implemented on your site.

What Are URL Parameters?

URL parameters are used to add extra data to a web address. They allow us to filter and sort our way through the Internet without having to type out long, complicated URLs every single time we want to reach a specific piece of content.

For example, let’s say you wanted to find out what the weather is like today in New York City. You could use a URL parameter to tell Google exactly where you want to go. If you typed out the full URL, it might look something like this:

But if you just entered the city name into the browser bar, you could save yourself some typing and still end up at the same place. Instead of typing out the entire URL, you could simply enter the following:

The”?” symbol indicates that there is a question mark after it. This tells Google to look for a special keyword called a “parameter.” In this case, the parameter is q, which stands for “question mark.”

Now, the next part of the URL contains another set of letters and numbers. These letters and numbers stand for the words “keyword?value?&…” Here, the word keyword represents a keyword you might be using, while v stands for “value.” So, the complete URL now reads:

/nike-shoes?airjordans345&8239

For another example, let’s say you wanted to display different pricing options depending on whether someone typed in “cheap” or “expensive” into a search box. You could do something like this:

/cheap-pricing?50-500

Where the numbers 50 through 500 represents $50-$500 as the cheap range of the pricing.

For expensive items, you could set the pricing at over $500, with a range of $500-$1000. This would look like the following:

/expensive-pricing?500-1000

Although URLs are rarely as simple as the above, these examples are meant to show what URLs might look like assuming they have the ranges as discussed above.

Semrush provides a demonstration of what parameters in URLs actually are. For example, the text below is highlighted in purple, which denotes the URL parameter:

Demonstration of parameters in URLs.

How to Use URL Parameters (Examples Included)

URL parameters are a great way to organize data on a web page. You can use them to filter out certain categories, display related articles, or even sort content based on criteria like price or popularity. In fact, you can use them to make it easy for visitors to browse your site without having to scroll down too far.

Here’s how to add a parameter to your URLs:

Open up the address bar and type in the URL of the page you want to modify. 2. Add the parameter to the end of the URL. So, if you wanted to add sorting options to the home page of your ecommerce site above, you’d enter index.php?sortprice&orderdescending into the address bar. This adds the parameter “sort” to the end of the current URL.

Now, go ahead and test the changes. If everything went well, you’ll see the new parameter show up in the URL.

To remove a parameter, simply delete the existing one from the URL. Just remember to keep in mind what you added earlier.

Once you’ve removed the unwanted parameter, refresh the page to check whether the change worked.

Finally, don’t forget to save your work!

Semrush explains below how to use URL parameters and what happens when you have more than one query string appended to a parameter.

This is a very basic guide meant to demonstrate how URL parameters work. It assumes several things, including: that your server is configured to utilize URL parameters in the URLs you are testing, and that you are using similar URL parameters as described by the graphic below.

Graphic that shows how to use parameters in URLs.

How Do URL Parameters Work?

URL parameters are used to add information to URLs without changing the address bar. They are typically added to the end of a URL, like this:

https://somedomain.com/?somename?somevalue?page-number-234123

Graphic showing how URL parameters actually work.

Above, AHREFs demonstrates how URL parameters actually work, using both single parameter values and a URL that has multiple parameter values.

The most common use case is adding additional information to a URL. For example, you might want to display different content based on what category someone clicked on. You could do this by modifying the URL itself, but it’s much easier to just pass some extra data along with the request. This way, you don’t change the URL, and the visitor doesn’t even know you did anything special.

There are two kinds of URL parameters: active and passive. Active parameters modify the content displayed on a web page. Passive parameters simply provide additional information about the current page.

Active Parameters

Active parameters are similar to filter queries. They allow you to change the content of the page without changing the URL. For instance, if you want to show different products based on what color the product is, you could use active parameters to do it. You might add something like “?colorred&sortprice” to the end of the URL. This tells the search engine to display only red products sorted by price.

This type of parameter works well for things like sorting, filtering, and grouping. However, there are limitations. If you try to sort by multiple values, such as “?colorblue&sizelarge,” the search engine won’t know how to handle it. Also, if you don’t include enough information in the URL, the search engine may return no results.

For example, if you wanted to show different content depending on whether someone came from Facebook or Twitter, you’d use an active parameter. If you did that, visitors coming from Facebook would see one thing, while people coming from Twitter would see something else. This type of parameter is useful because it allows you to customize the experience based on what channel the visitor uses.

Passive Parameters

Passive parameters don’t change the content of your site; they’re simply used for tracking purposes. An affiliate ID is a good example of a passive parameter. When you add an affiliate ID to a link, it tells us how many times that particular link was clicked. We can use that information to determine how effective certain campaigns are. For example, we might find out that a specific campaign generated $10,000 worth of revenue, but only resulted in 10 conversions. From there, we can figure out why that happened. Was the landing page too complicated? Did the offer lack credibility? Were the calls-to-action confusing? These are all things we can learn from analyzing the data.

The key difference between passive and active parameters is that passive parameters aren’t changing the content of your site, whereas active parameters are modifying the content.

Semrush shows (below) different types of query strings and what they are typically used for.

A chart showing the different types of URL query strings and what they are used for.

When Do SEO Issues Occur With URL Parameters?

URL parameters are one of those things that seem like a good idea at the time. They make it easier to update content without having to rewrite everything, and they allow you to add information about the page without changing the URL itself. But there are some problems with how they work.

The most obvious problem is that each URL is treated independently by search engines, meaning that if you use a URL parameter to show different variations of the same page, you could end up with multiple copies of the same page indexed. If you don’t want that, you’ll need to either exclude the URL parameter from your sitemap or avoid adding duplicates altogether.

Another issue is that if you’re trying to rank well for certain keywords, you might find yourself creating lots of URLs that look identical, except for the keyword. For example, let’s say you sell shoes online. You might have a shoe store page, a men’s shoe page, a women’s shoe page, and a kids’ shoe page. Each of those pages uses the same product images, descriptions, and meta tags, but they all include a unique URL parameter that identifies the type of shoe being sold. So you’d have four separate URLs for the same page, and none of them would actually tell anyone what the page is about.

If you’re worried about duplicate content, you can solve that by excluding the URL parameter from your site map. Or you can try to keep the URLs short enough that they won’t cause too many problems.

SEO Issues With URL Parameters

URL parameters are used to modify the URL of a web page without changing the content of the page. They are commonly used to track visitors, measure conversions, and provide additional information about a site.

However, some URL parameters cause problems for SEO because they create duplicate content. This happens when the same page appears multiple times under slightly modified URLs.

For example, consider the following URLs. Both lead to the exact same page. However, the second one contains a parameter that changes the URL.

The first URL is considered canonical while the second is not. In other words, the first URL is preferred over the second.

This problem occurs because the second URL leads to the exact same page as the first URL. Therefore, it is considered duplicate content.

The act of the URL parameters changing dynamically makes it easy to pass data to a server side script or include dynamic content into a page. However, there are some common issues that arise when you use URL parameters.

Using URL parameters creates duplicate content.

Often, URL parameters make no substantial difference to the content of a webpage. A re-ordered version is often not so different to the original. A page URL with tracking codes or a session ID is exactly the same as the original. For example, the following URL returns the exact same content as the original.

The following URL returns the same content as the original, but adds a second parameter.

A third URL uses a URL parameter to append a value to the end of the URL.

In these cases, the only real benefit of using a URL parameter is to change the order in which the page appears on a website. But this doesn’t really add any new information to the page. It just rearranges the order of the links.

Therefore, if you use URL parameters, you should be aware that you may be causing duplicate content issues.

URL parameters are difficult to maintain.

When you update a page, you typically do so by editing the HTML code directly. However, if you use URL paramaters, you must also edit the corresponding JavaScript file.

URL parameters slow down load time.

When you use URL parameters, the browser has to send extra requests to the server. These requests take longer than normal requests.

URL parameters aren’t supported by all browsers.

Some older versions of Internet Explorer don’t support URL parameters. You can still use them in newer versions of IE, though.

URL parameters are hard to debug.

If you have an error in your JavaScript, you will probably find it very difficult to trace back to the source.

URL parameters are hard for users to remember.

URL parameters are much harder to remember than traditional forms of navigation. Users tend to forget where they came from and what they were looking at. This means that they won’t return to the same page again.

URL parameters are hard on mobile devices.

URL parameters are particularly problematic on mobile devices. Mobile browsers usually cache pages locally. When you visit a page, the cached copy is used instead of fetching the latest version from the web server.

URL parameters are hard when you use AJAX.

When you use AJAX, you can create a URL parameter that changes the state of the application without reloading the entire page.

URL parameters are hard because they require more data.

For example, if you use URL parameters to pass a username and password, you will need to store those values somewhere.

URL parameters are hard in HTTP/1.0.

HTTP/1.0 does not allow you to specify parameters within the URL itself. Instead, you must use query strings or POST methods.

URL parameters are hard with HTTPS.

HTTPS requires that every request include a valid certificate.

URL parameters are hard after redirects.

After a redirect, the browser no longer sends the URL parameter because of that redirect.

URL parameters are hard as soon as you deploy your application.

Once you release your application, people start using it. It becomes increasingly difficult to change the URL parameters.

URL parameters are hard even if you use hashbang URLs.

A hashbang URL looks like this: #!/path/to/file?parametervalue.

They are hard because, in general, they are not a recommended best practice. There are also several types of URLs that can potentially be spammed to death with keywords. If you run a site that utilizes hashbang URLs this is something that you might want to keep an eye out for.

URL parameters are hard unless you use a framework.

A lot of frameworks automatically generate the correct URL parameters.

URL parameters are hard until you get comfortable with them.

It takes some practice before you become comfortable with URL parameters.

URL parameters are hard once you get into the habit of using them.

As soon as you start using URL parameters, you will notice how much easier it makes things.

URL parameters are hard only if you use GET requests.

GET requests do not send any information about the URL parameters.

URL parameters are hard regardless of whether you use GET or POST requests.

Regardless of which method you use, you should always encode all characters.

URL parameters are hard whenever you use cookies.

Cookies are sent along with each request. If you want to use URL parameters, then you have to remove the cookie first.

URL parameters are hard for SEO purposes.

SEO experts recommend against using URL parameters.

URL parameters are hard to debug.

If you find an error in your code, you may be able to see the value of the URL parameter. However, you cannot easily tell what was passed to the URL parameter.

URL parameters are hard on mobile devices.

Mobile devices often cache pages locally. This means that you will probably end up using the same URL parameter over and over again.

URL parameters are hard due to security concerns.

Some websites prevent users from passing certain types of parameters.

URL parameters are hard when you use JavaScript.

JavaScript is used to dynamically load content. Dynamically loading content can be difficult to keep from being duplicated if you don’t have a process in place. Because of this, unless you’re well acquainted with how JavaScript works and can make these things difficult for search engines, you may end up getting substandard results as a result.

URL parameters are hard if you use PHP.

PHP is a server-side scripting language. And, it has several layers of complexity added to it. Because of its complexity, if a developer is not seasoned, these parameters can cause issues with duplicate URLs, appending URLs incorrectly, in addition to duplicate parameters being auto-generated when they should not be. This is where the oversight of programming in regards to URLs is valuable: because it can help prevent issues such as these.

URL parameters are hard at times of high traffic.

When there are a large number of simultaneous requests, the server might run out of memory, which is especially possible if the server is not configured for high server loads.

URL parameters are hard because they require more bandwidth.

The larger the amount of data being transferred, the higher the cost.

Also, internal linking for URL parameter URLs then present an issue.

A graphic showing examples of how to do internal linking with multiple parameter URLs.

Take for example, the image above from Semrush.com. All of these are different versions of parameter URLs for the same page. In this case, you always want to make sure that you link to the main static URL properly, as opposed to every variation of that URL.

These are just several reasons where URL parameters are hard to use and why.

How to Utilize URL Parameters to Improve Your SEO

The majority of the aforementioned SEO problems point to one main cause. In fact, it is the root of many of them: crawling and indexing URLs with parameters. This problem arises because crawlers cannot differentiate between different types of URLs.

When you enter this URL into your browser, you see the blog post displayed on the screen. However, if you look closely, you notice that there is another URL hidden behind the ?post1 part. If you copy and paste the URL into your favorite search engine, you will discover that the same URL exists twice. One version displays the blog post, while the second does not.

This situation occurs frequently with URLs that contain parameters. For instance, let’s say you want to add a category filter to your site. Now, if you type this URL into your browser and press Enter, you will see the sports section of your site. Instead, there are multiple versions of this URL that do not include the category parameter.

To avoid this issue, you must make sure that every single URL contains unique content. To achieve this, you must tag each URL properly.

Please note: SEO issues arise whenever URLs containing parameters display duplicate content, i.e., those generated by passive URL parameterization. These links — and only those links — should not be crawled and indexed.

Integrating URL Parameters Into Your SEO Strategy

Parameter URLs do make things easier when it comes to doing things like changing or tracking content. Because of this, it’s worth including them when you need to. And this is especially true for larger websites.

This is where having a granular indexing strategy comes into play. You have to let crawlers know when they should and when they shouldn’t index URLs with parameters. Then, you want to make sure that the version of the page that’s most valuable is highlighted.

Be sure to exercise patience and decide wisely which parameter URLs are not supposed to be indexed.

In time, crawlers will have a better informed choice when it comes to navigating, as well as how to value your site’s pages.

When do you plan on utilizing parameter URLs?

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What Is Affiliate Marketing? How to Get Started Today https://iloveseo.com/seo/what-is-affiliate-marketing/ Thu, 01 Dec 2022 06:47:34 +0000 https://iloveseo.com/?p=8369 What Is Affiliate Marketing? How to Get Started Today on iloveseo.com by Brian Harnish

Have you thought about affiliate marketing, but you were never sure about where to start? This post is just for you! Do you want to make money online? Are you...

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What Is Affiliate Marketing? How to Get Started Today on iloveseo.com by Brian Harnish

Have you thought about affiliate marketing, but you were never sure about where to start? This post is just for you!

Do you want to make money online? Are you looking for another way to create a passive income stream for yourself other than the usual suspects?

There are many ways to make money online, but affiliate marketing is one of the easiest and most effective. In fact, it’s probably the fastest way to get started with online marketing.

Affiliate marketing is simply selling someone else’s product while earning commission for every sale you bring in. It’s very simple, yet very powerful. And since it doesn’t require any super-complex technical skills, anyone can learn how to do it.

Of course, with more technical skills, you can make things easier on yourself, especially when it comes to getting results. But, we’ll deal with that a little bit later.

What is Affiliate Marketing, Really?

Affiliate marketing is a form of internet marketing that rewards affiliates for each visitor or customer brought in by the merchant. In exchange for referring customers to merchants, affiliates receive compensation based on sales generated through the referral.

The most common type of affiliate marketing program pays commissions based on the total amount of sales generated by referrals. This method is called performance-based affiliate marketing.

In addition to earning revenue from sales, affiliate marketers also earn revenue from advertising. Some affiliate networks offer advertisers the ability to pay for impressions or clicks. For example, the publisher receives money every time someone views an ad on his/her site.

The most successful affiliate marketers use personal relationships and credibility to help build trust, establish authority, and generate demand for their products.

Authority Hacker explains what affiliate marketing really is:

Flowchart showing exactly what affiliate marketing really is.

How Affiliate Marketing Actually Works

Affiliate marketing is one of the most effective ways to make money online. There are many different types of affiliate programs out there, but the basic idea behind affiliate marketing is simple: you earn commissions by promoting products and services.

The best part about affiliate marketing is that you don’t even necessarily have to sell anything yourself. All you have to do is provide a link to the merchant’s site where people can buy the product. When people click on that link and purchase something, you receive a percentage of the sale as compensation.

There are several reasons why affiliate marketing is such a great way to make money online. First, affiliates usually work independently. They don’t have to rely on anyone else to promote a product. In addition, they can use tools like Facebook ads to target specific audiences. This allows them to reach very specific customers without having to pay for advertising.

Another benefit of affiliate marketing is that it doesn’t require much upfront capital. Many merchants offer free trials or low rates for hosting services, so you won’t have to spend thousands of dollars to start earning revenue.

ReliableSoft.com explains how affiliate marketing actually works:

What Are The Different Types of Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular methods of making money online. There are many different kinds of affiliates out there, each with their own unique way of working. In this article, we’ll take a look at the three main categories of affiliate marketing:

Direct sales – These are the people who sell products directly to consumers. This includes things like selling t-shirts and mugs.
Affiliate networks – These companies act as middlemen between merchants and affiliates. They handle payments, deliver traffic, provide analytics tools, etc.
Referral programs – Sometimes called “referral marketing,” these programs pay affiliates based on how much traffic they send to the merchant.

In addition, here are the other types of affiliate marketing. They include unattached affiliate marketing, related affiliate marketing, and involved affiliate marketing.

Unattached Affiliate Marketing

The first type of affiliate marketing involves having no authority in the niche or industry of the product you are promoting. You simply provide a link to someone else’s site where they sell the product. This is called “unattached affiliate marketing.”

You might think that unattached affiliate marketing is easy, but there is much work involved. You must find products that are related to your niche, research keywords, write articles about the topic, and promote the product.

In addition to writing, you’ll need to develop a relationship with the manufacturer of the product. They will want to know how many sales you’ve generated for them, what percentage of traffic you send to their site, and whether you are generating positive reviews.

Once you establish yourself as an expert in the field, you can start building a list of customers. Once you have enough email addresses, you can start selling directly to them.

Related Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketers often promote products and services they haven’t actually used themselves, but that they think might be useful to their readers or followers. This type of promotion is called “related affiliate marketing.”

An affiliate marketer in this context has an audience, whether that’s through blogging, YouTube videos, TikTok, or another channel. They also have influence, which makes them trustworthy sources for recommending products, even though they’ve never used them personally.

While related affiliate marketing can generate a lot of affiliate revenue, it comes with the risks of promoting something you’ve probably never tried yourself. You could end up promoting the worst product or service imaginable, and you’d never know about it because you’re not familiar with it.

You could even make money off of someone else’s mistake. For example, a blogger writes a review of a product he or she hasn’t used himself, and ends up getting paid for it. But there’s always the chance that the reviewer doesn’t like the product enough to write a good review, and the customer ends up buying something subpar.

The best way to avoid making mistakes is to do some research into what you’re promoting. Read reviews, check out testimonials, look at how similar products perform, and see if anyone has had success selling it. If you still want to go ahead with promoting it, try to find a reputable affiliate network where you can put your link.

Involved Affiliate Marketing

Involved affiliate marketing is a type of marketing which involves more than just sharing links. It requires a personal connection to the product or service being promoted, and a willingness to share honest opinions about the product or service.

In order to become involved affiliate marketers, you must first decide on a niche. Niches are specific areas of interest within a particular industry. The most popular niches include health, beauty, fitness, home improvement, and technology.

Once you’ve decided on a niche, you’ll need to choose a product or service to sell. There are many different ways to do this. You can create your own product, buy existing ones, or simply sell affiliate products.

If you’re going to create your own product, you’ll need to determine its value. What will people pay for it? Will it be something they can resell themselves? Or will it be something they can only get through you?

Involved affiliate marketing is – usually – a more trusted form of affiliate marketing when compared to others, because you are focusing on high quality, while also creating value for your users because of your direct experience and expertise with that product.

What Are The Advantages and Disadvantages of Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways to earn money online. While there are many benefits to being part of the affiliate marketing network, there are some drawbacks too. Affiliates must pay a commission to the merchant each time someone purchases a product via their link. This commission can range anywhere from 5 percent to 50 percent.

Another benefit of affiliate marketing is that it offers great flexibility. You can start small and build up your business slowly, or you can jump into the deep end and try to make a lot of money quickly. Either way, affiliate marketing gives you the opportunity to work flexible hours and set your own pace.

The Advantages of Affiliate Marketing

There are many benefits to affiliate marketing in general. It can be easy to execute, which means you don’t have to invest a whole lot of time and effort to get affiliate marketing off the ground initially. Although it can be an involved and challenging process to learn, once you have the process down after doing it a few times, it becomes exponentially easier.

Affiliate Marketing is Generally Easy to Execute

The truth is, you don’t need to know how to code to build a successful online store. In fact, it’s easier to start out without coding knowledge because there are fewer moving parts. But once you do learn some basic HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you’ll find yourself able to add features quickly and easily. And while you’re learning, you can focus on getting customers into your funnel. Once you’ve got those customers, you can turn your attention to growing your business.

You’ve heard it before – “If you build it, they will come.” But what does that really mean? In today’s world, there are many different ways to market products online. And while some people still believe that creating a great product is enough to make sales, it’s actually just one part of the equation. Marketing is equally important. If you’re trying to sell something online, you’ll want to focus on both sides of the equation.

The first step is to find out where your target audience hangs out online. This could be social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, etc., or forums, blogs, newsgroups, or review sites. Once you know where your customers hang out, it’s time to start thinking about how you can reach them. For example, if you’re selling a product that requires technical support, you might consider setting up a landing page on your site that provides information about your product and offers help if someone needs it. Or maybe you could set up a free trial period on your site, allowing potential buyers to try your product without having to commit to buying anything.

Once you’ve found a way to attract traffic to your site, it’s time to figure out what type of conversion you’d like to see. There are three main types of conversions:

  1. Sales
  2. Lead generation
  3. Brand awareness

Sales conversions happen when a visitor buys something from your site. A lead is someone who wants to buy, but hasn’t done so yet. Brand awareness refers to gaining visitors’ attention and keeping them interested long enough to learn about your brand. Both lead generation and brand awareness require good copywriting skills.

It is Usually Pretty Low Risk

Even though affiliate marketing is pretty low risk, this doesn’t mean it won’t cost you anything. There are many ways to make money online, and affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ones. But it’s also one of the least understood. In fact, some people still don’t understand what affiliate marketing even is. So here we’re going to clear things up.

Affiliate marketing works like this: You partner with a company and agree to promote their products and services. If someone purchases something because of your promotion, you receive a cut. This simple concept has produced billions of dollars in sales across thousands of companies. But while it’s very easy to sell just about anything on the Internet, successful affiliates require specific skills and knowledge.

The best way to find out whether you qualify as an affiliate marketer is to look for yourself. Here are some questions to ask yourself: Do you enjoy writing articles? Is your blog focused on a particular topic? Can you write well? Are you good at researching topics and finding information? What do you know about digital marketing? How much experience are you willing to put into promoting products?

Once you’ve answered those questions, think about how you’d answer them for potential clients. Would you say “I’m a writer who specializes in…”? Or maybe “I help small businesses grow their customer base by providing them with high quality content.”

If you want to learn more about becoming an affiliate marketer, check out our guide on how to become an affiliate marketer.

Affiliate Marketing is Also Relatively Easy to Scale

Affiliate marketing offers the potential to dramatically increase your sales without having to hire extra help. This is because you can introduce new products to the same audience while continuing to generate affiliate revenue in your existing work.

Before you get too excited, however, know that great affiliate marketers are built on trust. They don’t just push products; they’re interested in helping people solve problems and make money. So, even though you might find yourself working hard promoting a variety of different products, it’s important to stick to what you’re good at.

While there is a seemingly endless amount of products or services to sell, it’s best to limit your focus to those you actually use or would recommend. If you’re passionate about something, chances are others are too. And, since many affiliates aren’t paid based on how much traffic they send to a site, they’ll appreciate being able to recommend products that fit into their existing hobbies.

Even when a product interests you, it’s still worth taking the time to become a great affiliate marketer. After all, no one wants to work with someone who doesn’t care about his or her success.

The Disadvantages of Affiliate Marketing

Although there are still quite a number of benefits to doing affiliate marketing, there are some drawbacks. Before you start, you may want to consider things like hidden costs and subscriptions, things you are going to need to get going quickly, and more.

Low Payouts

The payouts aren’t great. Most affiliates earn less than $100 per sale. And there are exceptions — people do well making over $2,000 per month. But even those earning big bucks rarely see more than $5,000 per month.

High Costs

You’re paying for advertising, hosting, tools, and training. You could spend thousands of dollars just getting set up.

Time Consuming

If you don’t have experience doing something, how will you learn quickly enough to compete? This isn’t like selling products where you can take shortcuts and still succeed.

This Type of Marketing Requires patience

Affiliate marketing is not a quick way to make money online. In fact, it takes time and effort to build up an audience and gain influence over potential customers. This means you must dedicate yourself to building relationships with people who are interested in what you have to offer. If you don’t have a strong following already, you’re going to have to work hard to attract visitors to your site. Once you start getting traffic, though, you can use paid advertising to increase conversions.

You might think that affiliate marketing is just another form of PPC (pay per click), but there are some key differences. For one thing, affiliates typically earn commissions based on sales generated by their referrals rather than impressions. They also tend to have lower costs because they don’t pay for ad campaigns. However, they do require a lot of upfront investment to set up and maintain.

Also, it takes time to build up trust and authority with your audience, and therein lies the rub. You must be committed for the long haul. If you aren’t committed, and you think you might give up after only a few months, it may be a good idea to reconsider whether affiliate marketing is really the right thing for you.

It Is Commission-based, So It’s Not a Guaranteed Salary

The biggest misconception about affiliate marketing is that there is just one way it works. In reality, there are many different types of affiliate programs out there, each with their own unique rules and regulations. Some pay commissions based on sales while others pay for leads. Others still pay for clicks. And some even pay for conversions.

There’s no boss handing you a monthly check as an affiliate marketer, so you might have something to worry about if your next check doesn’t come in. Companies use a temporary browser cookie called a tracking pixel to keep tabs on what you’re doing. If someone takes the desired action, you receive the payout based on how much money the advertiser spent on advertising.

Affiliates earn income via three different methods: pay per lead, pay per click, and pay per sale. Pay per lead is where advertisers pay affiliates every time someone fills out a form on their site. This method works well for sites like Amazon, eBay, and others that sell products online.

Pay per click is similar to pay per lead except it pays commissions based on how many times someone clicked on an ad. For example, let’s say you wrote a blog post about a product and included a link to a retailer’s website. If someone clicks on that link and makes a purchase, you’ll receive a percentage of the sales price.

Pay per sale is one of the most common ways to make money as an affiliate. In this scenario, you’d write a review about a specific product and include a link to the merchant’s website. Once someone buys the product, you’ll get a cut of the transaction.

You Have No Control Over the Third-Party Affiliate Program

Affiliate marketing programs are often confusing because there are so many different companies offering them. Some affiliate marketers like to think of themselves as having complete control over their program while others don’t want to give up any control at all. In reality, most affiliate marketing programs are controlled by third parties. These third parties typically offer tools and resources to help affiliates market products and services. They also provide tracking software to keep track of sales and commissions earned. However, these third parties usually make it difficult for affiliates to customize the way their campaigns work.

The good news is that most affiliate marketing programs allow some level of customization. This gives you the ability to adapt your campaign to suit your audience and your budget. If you’re looking for a simple solution, consider a hosted affiliate marketing platform such as Commission Junction. There are several reasons why hosting affiliate marketing platforms are beneficial for affiliates. For one thing, they take care of the technical aspects of running an affiliate program. They handle the traffic generation, payouts, and customer support. Most hosting platforms also offer free trials, meaning you can test out their features without committing to anything long term.

Buildapreneur.com outlines the advantages and disadvantages of affiliate marketing:

A table showing the advantages and disadvantages of affiliate marketing.

How Do Affiliate Marketers Get Paid?

There are a number of payment models that exist in the affiliate marketing industry. From pay per sale, to pay per lead, pay per click, and more. The trick is to choose the payment model that is going to net you the most amount of money for your time and effort.
You don’t want to spend so much effort that getting to number 1 on Google is going to be a chore, but you also don’t want to spend so little effort that you don’t build the critical authority that your site needs that will translate to dollars.
So how do you balance it out? By learning about the different models, the affiliate companies, their payment terms, and make decisions based on your own capability.

This may be challenging in the beginning, but don’t fret. Some of these tips can help you identify where to focus your efforts properly.

Pay per sale: Getting Paid per Physical Sale of Services and Products

The first type of affiliate marketing is called “pay per sale.” This is where affiliates receive payments based on the number of products purchased by visitors to your site. For example, let’s say you’re an affiliate marketer for a company that sells dog food. You might choose to promote a particular brand of dog food, and if someone buys that product, you’d earn a commission.

This model works well for companies that sell physical goods like books, CDs, and DVDs. When people purchase items from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iTunes, etc., they often use the same affiliate link to send customers to the retailer’s website. If the customer makes a purchase, the merchant pays the affiliate a percentage of the sale price.

Pay Per Lead: Getting Paid Based on Conversions

Affiliate marketers are compensated when someone completes an action on a merchant’s site. This could mean signing up for a free offer, making a purchase, filling out a contact form or subscribing to a mailing list. Affiliates earn money when consumers perform actions on the merchant’s site. Pay per lead affiliate marketing programs compensate affiliates based on conversions, such as the number of people who sign up for a free offer or make a purchase.

The program requires the affiliate to convince visitors to take the desired action, which is why it’s called “pay per lead,” because affiliates are paid based on how many people complete the desired action. The payout structure varies depending on the type of transaction completed. For example, some merchants pay 10% of the sale price while others pay 30%. Merchants typically choose what percentage to pay based on the value of the transaction.

A third option is to sign up with an advertising network such as Commission Junction, ShareASale, LinkShare, or AdThrive.

Pay Per Click: Getting Paid Based on Ad Views

Pay Per Click (PPC): In this model, advertisers bid against each other to put ads on your site. When someone searches for your product, your ad appears in the sponsored section of the search results.

Affiliate marketing is largely about getting people to click and take action. While SEO (search engine optimization), which focuses on increasing the visibility of a website within search engines, is important, it doesn’t necessarily translate into sales.

That’s where pay per click (PPC) advertising comes in. Pay per click programs focus on incentivizing affiliates to redirect consumers from their site to the merchant’s website, thereby driving increased traffic to the merchant’s website and ultimately, more sales.

The affiliate is paid based on how many times the affiliate directs visitors to the merchant’s website via their link.

Pay Per Install: SAAS Industries Operate on Pay Per Install Basis

This type of affiliate marketing model is becoming increasingly popular because it allows merchants to track every single action taken by affiliates, including how many times they clicked on ads, what products they viewed, and even whether they downloaded apps or installed software. This information helps retailers determine which affiliates are most effective at converting traffic into sales.

The downside is that it takes a lot of work to set up and run a PPI campaign. Affiliates must manually enter data about their campaigns, such as the number of impressions, clicks, conversions, etc., and keep track of all of those numbers themselves. They must also monitor their performance over time and make sure they’re meeting their goals.

InfluencerMarketingHub.com explains how affiliate marketers get paid:

Graphic that explains how affiliate marketers get paid.

Passive Income: Create an Ongoing Passive Income Stream for Years

We hear about it all the time. But what does it really mean? And how do you actually make it happen? In today’s digital world, there are many ways to generate passive income – online jobs, freelance projects, side hustles, and even social media. However, one of the most popular forms of passive income is affiliate marketing.

Today, there are thousands of companies selling different types of affiliate programs. They range from very simple, straightforward programs that pay a commission percentage of a sale, to complex programs that require signups or monthly fees. Some programs offer rewards programs where participants can earn points that can be redeemed for cash or merchandise. Other programs provide access to premium content or newsletters on the advertiser’s website. Still others give away free ebooks, tools, webinars, or other material to attract new customers.

The great thing about affiliate marketing is that once you set up your account, you can start promoting almost immediately. All you need is a web browser and some basic knowledge of HTML. You don’t need special software or design skills to get started. There are plenty of places where you can learn both of those things though.

You can find advertising networks that specialize in affiliate marketing, and you can always use Google Adwords to advertise your affiliate links. If you want to go down the path of building your own affiliate sites, we recommend learning WordPress because it makes setting up your own blog fast and easy. Once you understand how to build a blog, you can move onto creating your own affiliate sites.

If you decide to become an affiliate marketer, you will need to choose a niche and develop content for that audience. Then, you will promote that content via social media, email campaigns, and ads on other websites. As you gain followers and traffic, you will eventually monetize that traffic by partnering with brands.

As you build your website empire, you too will eventually realize the benefits of seeing a completely automated passive income stream. However, we want to set clear expectations: it’s not going to happen overnight.

Work From Home

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways to make money online today. And it doesn’t require a lot of work. In fact, some people are doing it full-time. But there are many different strategies to making money online. One of the easiest ways to start earning money is to sell something. So why not use Amazon to sell those extra things you don’t need, that you already have around the house?

You don’t even need to go to the store to find items to sell. There are plenty of companies that buy used books, CDs, DVDs, games and electronics. All you need to do is ship the item(s) to them and wait for them to send you the cash.

The best part about this method is that you can scale up quickly. Once you’ve built a reputation for yourself, you can open an eBay shop and start selling more items. Plus, you won’t need to pay sales tax because you’ll be shipping the product directly to customers.

Cost-Effective

Affiliate marketing doesn’t require a lot of overhead costs like most traditional online ventures do. You don’t need to purchase expensive equipment nor do you need to hire employees. In fact, it’s one of the cheapest ways to make money online.

You’ll find that many affiliates use paid advertising to generate traffic to their sites. Paid advertising, however, is different than what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about free methods to promote your offers to people browsing the web. This includes things like promoting on social media platforms, running ads on Craigslist, or even writing posts on relevant blogs.

There are plenty of companies you can partner up with to help you promote your product or service to consumers. You might pay the blogger directly or you might provide the blogger with discounts or other types of incentives. Many large enterprises choose to outsource lead generation to third party providers, due to the volume of leads needed to be generated and managed.

The best part about affiliate marketing is that there are literally thousands of companies willing to pay you to advertise their brand. For example, I am a proud member of the Amazon Associates program and I receive credit every time someone purchases a book or DVD via my link.

If you want to learn how to start making money with affiliate marketing today, check out Earn Easy Money With Affiliate Marketing.

Convenient and Flexible

As an affiliate marketer, you are generally working from home, so there is a convenient and flexible schedule that you can take advantage of. And because you are also a freelancer, there comes with it the ultimate independence when it comes to setting your goals, redirecting your path if you feel you need to, choosing the products and services that pique your interest, and choosing your own working hours. When it comes to this convenience, you can choose to diversify your website portfolio on a whim, or you can focus on simple and straightforward affiliate campaigns. Also, because you own your own office, there are no company restrictions or regulations in place aside from the affiliate company’s own rules.

Performance-Based Rewards

Affiliate marketing is one of the most lucrative ways to make money online. But it requires a lot of hard work and dedication. If you want to succeed, you must keep learning, growing, and improving. There are many different types of affiliates out there, and each offers something unique. Some offer products, while others provide services. And some pay per sale, while others pay per lead.

But regardless of how much you’re earning, you shouldn’t feel like you’re working forever. In fact, you don’t even have to work every single day. As long as you’re consistently putting forth effort, you’ll eventually see steady growth in your income.

WebsiteSetup.org talks about the generalized types of affiliate programs and where they are categorized:

A table that shows the generalized types of affiliate programs, based on ease of use, payouts, and more.

Common Types of Affiliate Marketing Channels

Affiliating is one of the most popular ways to make money online today. There are many affiliate programs out there, but some are better than others. Some affiliate marketers focus primarily on one type of program while others mix it up. Here are three types of affiliate marketing you might want to consider.

Influencers

The term “influencer” gets thrown around a lot these days. But what does it really mean? And how do you find one?

In short, an influencer is someone who has built up a sizable audience over time, usually via social media. These people have the ability to influence others, whether it’s about fashion, beauty, fitness, lifestyle or just about anything else.

They’re often very active online, both in terms of posting their own content and commenting on other people’s work. In fact, some influencers might even have their own YouTube channel or blog.

But finding an influencer isn’t always as simple as looking on Facebook. You’ll want to make sure that the person you choose is truly influential within his niche. After all, there are plenty of people out there who try to build a brand by being famous, rather than actually having something worth saying.

By targeting influencers in your niche, and sharing your articles with them on social media, it’s possible to gain links, improve your authority, and gain trust so that they can send your links to their followers as well.

Bloggers

The term “blogger,” once synonymous with a person who wrote online diaries, has evolved into a full-fledged career choice. Blogging is now a viable option for people looking to make money online, especially those who are willing to do it part-time. There are many ways to blog and make money online. Some bloggers earn extra income writing articles and selling advertising while others use blogs to build their personal brands. Still others blog simply because they enjoy doing it.

As an affiliate channel, you can reach out to other bloggers and ask them for legitimate guest posting opportunities. Or, you can ask them for a link back to your articles.

Either way, you want to treat other bloggers as a potential channel who can eventually advertise your site on their own networks too.

Paid Search-Focused Microsites

Microsites are small, highly targeted landing pages designed to convert visitors into customers. They’re typically developed as part of a larger marketing campaign, such as a paid search program. A microsite might offer a product demonstration, provide information about a special promotion, or simply sell a single item.

The goal of a microsite is to generate revenue, whether it’s through ecommerce transactions, subscriptions, or some other form of online transaction. Microsites often use affiliate programs to promote products and services, and many times, affiliates receive commissions based on each sale generated through the link.

Affiliates may also be able to drive traffic to microsites using various types of ads, including banner ads, text ads, display ads, and sponsored posts.

Email Lists

Affiliate marketers often forget about one of the oldest forms of online advertising: email marketing. While it might seem like a relic of the pre-Internet era, there are still plenty of people who rely heavily on email marketing to help sell their products.

Some affiliates have email lists they could use to promote the seller’s products. Other affiliates may leverage email newsletters that contain hyperlinks to products, making money after the consumer buys the product. Still others may use email lists built up over time to send out emails regarding the items they are promoting.

The most popular way to make money via email marketing is probably affiliate marketing. Affiliates earn commissions based on sales generated through their networks of merchants.

The following example from marketingminds.co.nz explains the overall arrangement of potential affiliate channels and how they influence your site’s success:

Graphic that shows, in-depth, the variety of affiliate marketing channels that you can use.

Tips to Help You Become A Successful Affiliate Marketer

Are you ready to get started on building your own successful affiliate website empire? Here are a few tips that will help you get started:

Develop a Rapport With Your Audience

Affiliate marketing is a great way to earn money online because it doesn’t require much work upfront. However, it does take some effort to build up a loyal following over time. You’ll need to develop a rapport with your audience, and there are several ways to do this.

The best thing about affiliate marketing is that you don’t have to spend a lot of money to start making money. In fact, you can even make money while you sleep. All you need is a computer and an internet connection. But, how do you find customers for your affiliate program?

You can use social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and YouTube to reach out to potential customers. Once you’ve built a good relationship with your followers, ask them what they’d like to see in your next post. If you’re posting regularly, you’ll notice that you’ll begin to gain more followers.

Another option is to write articles and post them on article directories. There are many free article directories where you can submit your articles for publication. Some of the popular ones include HubPages, Squidoo, and ArticleBase.

Once you’ve developed your list of leads, you’ll want to nurture each lead. Nurturing involves sending emails to your leads, asking questions, offering incentives, etc. To automate this process, you can use tools such as MailChimp, AWeber, GetResponse, InfusionSoft, and others.

Make It Personal

The best way to build trust with potential customers is to show that you’re willing to put yourself out there. If you’ve got something unique to offer, you’ll find plenty of ways to market it online.

You don’t necessarily need to start selling directly to customers; you could opt for affiliate marketing, where you earn commissions by promoting products that are sold by others. Or, you could sell your own product or provide a service that helps businesses grow.

If you’re looking to begin with affiliate marketing, building up a blog might be one of the easiest ways to do it.

Start by Reviewing Products and Services

If you want to start making money with Amazon FBA, it’s important to know what you’re selling. You don’t just pick a product and start listing it; you have to research it thoroughly. If you do the work to learn about the product, you’ll be able to provide useful information to buyers. This helps them decide whether or not they want to buy it, and how much it costs.

You can start by researching the product itself. What does it look like? How big is it? Where did it come from? Is it brand new or used? Does it require assembly? Are there any reviews out there? And most importantly, what does someone else think about it?

Once you have some idea of what the product looks like, check the seller’s feedback. Look at the number of positive and negative reviews. Do people love it or hate it? What makes it good or bad?

Next, take a look at the seller’s reputation. Read customer reviews and see what people say about the seller. They might mention things like shipping times, refunds, or return policies.

Finally, read up on the competition. Find out what similar items sell for and compare those prices to the price of the item you plan to list. Make sure you understand where your competitors fit into the market.

Use Several Sources

Instead of focusing on just an e-mail campaign, you can also spend time building up your brand with a blog, creating a landing page, posting on review sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor, reaching out to your customers on social media and even considering cross-channel promotions. You want to make sure you’re testing different types of campaigns and seeing what works best for your audience.

For example, you might test sending emails to your list about a product launch versus promoting it on Facebook. Or maybe you could try running ads on Instagram versus Twitter. Maybe you’ll find that people respond better to receiving an offer via text message rather than an email.

You don’t want to limit yourself to just one type of marketing strategy; you want to test many things to discover how to reach your target market the best way possible.

Choose Your Campaigns With Care

No matter how good your online marketer skills are, you won’t make much money on a bad product. You don’t want to waste your time on something that isn’t going to pay off. But even if you do find a great deal, there’s no guarantee that people will buy it. So what makes a product valuable enough to spend your time promoting it?

You’ve probably heard about the concept of “market fit,” where companies go out and test products to see whether consumers actually want them. If they do, they invest in advertising, marketing, and distribution to reach those customers. And if they don’t, well, they move on to the next idea.

But while that sounds like a pretty simple process, it’s actually very difficult to execute. Because let’s face it: most businesses aren’t Apple. They don’t sell millions of dollars’ worth of iPhones every quarter. Instead, they sell things that cost $5, $10, or $20 each.

So how does a small business know if a product is worth investing in? The answer lies in understanding the demand for a particular product.

The Demand Curve

Let’s say you run a clothing store selling T-shirts. You might think that making shirts costs nothing—you just print some designs onto fabric and ship ’em out. But that’s not true. There are many factors involved in producing a shirt, including printing, shipping, storage, and inventory management.

And because you’re running a small business, you probably don’t have the resources to handle all of these tasks yourself. In fact, you probably don’t even have the resources to hire someone else to help you manage them.

That’s why you need to look at the supply side of the equation. What can you produce? How much can you produce? And how much can you charge for it?

To determine this, you first need to calculate your unit costs. Unit costs are simply the amount of money you spend per unit (in this case, a single T-shirt). For instance, if you spent $1,000 to print 1 million T-shirts, then your unit cost would be $0.01 per shirt.

Now, you may be thinking that you could just raise prices to cover your expenses. But that doesn’t work either. Why? Because when you increase the price, you reduce the number of units you can sell. That means fewer sales, which means less profit.

In other words, you can only increase profits by increasing revenue.

These are just some of the other considerations when it comes to really figuring out whether a product is a great fit for your target market or not.

InfluencerMarketingHub.com has several examples of how to start a successful affiliate program:

Graphic with tips showing how to start a successful affiliate marketing program.

Affiliate Marketing, While a Worthwhile Pursuit, Is Not a Get-Rich-Quick Scheme

Even though affiliate marketing by itself can help you create a passive income stream, passive income does not necessarily mean that you have unlimited money coming in immediately.

In fact, it’s just the opposite. It can be months before you begin to see compounding results from your SEO campaign on an affiliate website, if you’re doing everything correctly.

By making sure that you observe all of the usual best practices, working through strategic implementation of your campaigns, and ensuring the highest possible quality service (and products), you should come out a winner at the end.

When do you plan on starting your own website empire?

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What Is Quora and How Does It Work? https://iloveseo.com/seo/what-is-quora/ Wed, 30 Nov 2022 03:31:13 +0000 https://iloveseo.com/?p=8344 What Is Quora and How Does It Work? on iloveseo.com by Brian Harnish

Quora is a wonderful way to engage with your potential users by asking questions about topics they might be interested in. So, if you are looking for a new way...

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What Is Quora and How Does It Work? on iloveseo.com by Brian Harnish

Quora is a wonderful way to engage with your potential users by asking questions about topics they might be interested in. So, if you are looking for a new way to market your site, and you haven’t tried it yet, you may want to consider using Quora.

Quora is a great way to build relationships with influencers and experts in your niche. If you want to become a thought leader or expert in your field, Quora can help you gain exposure and credibility.

Quora is an online question-and-answer community that allows users to ask questions and answer them. Users are able to create their own profile page where they can share information about themselves and their interests. Questions and answers are organized into topics which are then further broken down into subtopics. The site has over 300 million monthly active users.

With such a large user base, there are plenty of opportunities for SEO on this platform.

What Is Quora?

Quite simply, Quora is a question-and-answer site where anyone can ask questions or answer other people’s questions. The site has over 300 million registered members who post their answers anonymously.

It was founded in 2009 by two Stanford University students, Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever. They wanted to create a place where people could share knowledge and information freely.

Quora is a great way to get feedback from experts and gain new insights into topics you care about. If you want to start answering questions, there are plenty of opportunities to do so on this platform.

According to demandsage.com, here are some interesting statistics about the platform:

  • Over 300 million unique users visit Quora every month.
  • Quora had 100 million monthly users in 2016. The number rose to 190 million in 2017. And 300 million in 2022.
  • Today, It is among the top 20 social media in the world based on the user count.
  • Quora users engage in discussions of 400,000 topics.
  • Quora users ask between 3000 to 5000 questions on the platform each day.
  • According to estimates, each question on Quora receives an average of 6-7 responses, but this varies with factors such as the nature of the questions. If the topic is interesting, it may have over 5000 responses.

Clearly, Quora is a fantastic channel to market to, so you can help spread brand awareness along with content curation for your blog and more.

Screenshot of the Quora homepage

How Does Quora Actually Work?

Basically, anyone can ask questions and answer questions.

You don’t even need to sign up; you can simply browse the topics and find interesting questions. If you want to participate, you can either post your own answer or comment on someone else’s response.

The site is largely self-moderated in that good-quality answers get upvoted and poor answers are down voted. Additionally, there are moderators at Quora who review reported answers. They include employees or contractors.

There are also moderators that check out reports of abuse and spam. Users can file spam reports which works on both ends: moderators tackle the spam, while users also file the reports that moderators then act on if required.

Is It Possible to Link Back to Your Site on Quora At All?

Over on Search Engine Journal, Roger Montti explained the following from John Mueller on the validity of linking back to your site from Quora:

“The practice of using Quora for link building is essentially the same strategy for forum spamming and profile link spamming.

Forum Spam Tactic

Forum spamming is going to a community, answering questions and adding a link to your site for “more information.”

Some white hat SEOs view that as a win-win situation because you’re answering the question and linking to an article that has more information.

But most people who operate or moderate forum communities see this as spam.

Profile Link Building Tactic

Profile link builders are people who visit a forum, make a few useless posts and then disappear.

The way this low quality spam tactic works is that when a forum member makes a post, there’s a link back to their profile from their profile shown in the discussion. Then on their profile page there is a link back to whatever site that is being promoted.

As a moderator at WebmasterWorld for around 16 years, I can affirm that profile link building is easy to spot and aggressively acted upon by competent moderators.

Quora Link Building for Traffic

There are some who say that dropping (nofollow) links on Quora will result in massive traffic. It might result in a large amount of traffic but the traffic is highly likely to come from India.

Quora is highly popular in countries like India, Nepal, and Bangladesh.

That kind of traffic is not useful if the traffic you seek is from the United States, Italy, France, or UK.”

Although this might be considered a spammy link building tactic in nature, it may help increase other things that make it worth investing your time on this platform, including E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) and your overall authority.

How Quora Can Compliment Any SEO Pro’s Marketing Strategy

The thing that makes Quora unique is that it allows marketers to use it as part of a broader strategy. In fact, there are some things marketers can do with Quora that are impossible on most other platforms. Here are three examples:

Brand Awareness – One way to build brand awareness is to engage with influencers within your industry. You can find influencers on Quora by searching for topics related to your niche. Once you find someone interesting, you can start asking questions and engaging with them. If you’re lucky, they’ll mention your brand in their response.

Social Proof – Another great way to gain social proof is to post relevant questions on Quora. People love answering questions because it gives them something to talk about. When people see that lots of people are talking about your product, it helps convince them that it must be good.

Content Creation – Finally, another way to leverage Quora is to write articles based on the questions you receive. These articles can be used to promote your brand, attract traffic to your site, and provide value to your audience.

The following graph shows the overall search interest in Quora over time on Google Trends, since 2004.

Screenshot of Google Trends showing interest in Quora improving over time.

Why Quora Might Be a Critical Part of Any SEO Pro’s Strategy

While many marketers use Quora as a way to promote themselves, there’s much more you can do with this powerful tool. Here are some ways you can leverage Quora to build your brand and increase traffic to your website.

Answer Questions About Your Industry

You’ve probably heard that answering questions on Quora helps improve your reputation and rank. This is true. However, it’s important to note that Quora doesn’t just help you gain credibility; it also gives you visibility. When someone asks a question about your industry, you’re able to answer it directly. You’ll show up in search results for keywords related to your niche. In addition, you’ll receive more visitors to your website because people are searching for information about your topic.

Build Relationships With Influencers

If you want to become an influencer yourself, start by asking questions. People love to talk about what they know. If you ask a relevant question, you might find someone willing to write a guest post for you. Or maybe they’ll even give you tips on how to make your product better. Either way, you’ll have built a relationship with another person who could potentially refer customers to your website.

Create Content

People love reading articles written by experts in their field. So why not write something yourself? Write blog posts, publish videos, or host webinars. You can also take advantage of Quora’s publishing tools. You can add images, video, polls, and more to your posts. Then, link out to your website.

Altos Agency talks about several examples of Quora marketing, which should give further context as to how this can be useful for your business:

Examples of Quora marketing from Altos Agency.

What Can an SEO Pro Do With Quora?

There are plenty of things that an SEO pro can do with Quora to help increase results for an SEO campaign. Here are some ideas:

Find Keywords

Quora has over 300 million users. That means there are tons of potential keywords to target. Use Google Trends to determine which terms are trending right now. Then, look at the top questions asked about each keyword. Are any of these questions answered by your competitors? If so, you may want to consider targeting those keywords instead.

Promote Your Website

When someone searches for a particular keyword, Quora will display a list of questions and answers. The first result is usually the most popular one. Make sure your website appears near the top of the page. Also, try adding links to your website in the body of your answers. This will help drive traffic back to your site.

Increase Traffic To Your Site

As mentioned earlier, when someone searches for a certain keyword, Quora displays a list of questions and corresponding answers. One of the answers will likely be from your competitor. But if you answer the question, you’ll appear higher in search results than them. As a result, you’ll get more traffic to your website.

Answer Questions About Your Niche

If you’re interested in a specific topic, you should definitely answer questions related to it. For example, if you run a business selling custom-made shirts, you should probably answer questions like “How much does it cost to design a shirt?” or “Which fabric makes the best shirt?”. Not only will you gain knowledge about your niche, but you’ll also establish credibility within the community.

Wordstream talks about how SEO pros can take advantage of Quora in their blog post on the topic as well:

Screenshot of Quora optimization methods from Wordstream.

Why Is Quora Such a Great Site for SEO Pros to Take Advantage Of?

Quantcast estimates nearly 775,000 people access Quora each month in the U.S. alone, making it one of the largest social networks in the country. And according to Alexa, Quora ranks as the third most visited website in the United States. In other words, Quora is huge.

But it’s not just big numbers that make Quora attractive to marketers. There are several reasons why this platform is perfect for online marketing campaigns.

Engagement Rates

On average, Quora users spend around 30 minutes per visit. That means they’re spending time on your content. They’re actively engaging with your brand.

High Conversion Rate

According to DemandSage.com, when you advertise on Quora, Quora users convert at a rate of 4 folds higher than otherwise.

Targeted Audience

Quora users tend to be highly educated. According to Quantcast, 65 percent have college degrees. That means they’re likely to be receptive to your message.

Social Proof

People trust what others say. When someone asks a question on Quora, other users see it. They then click through to read the answer. This gives your company instant credibility.

Low Cost

It costs nothing to create a profile on Quora. All you need is a unique username. From there, you can start answering questions and building authority.

Creating an Optimal Quora Profile

Whenever you answer a question, there is a small part of your bio that’s shown near the top of your answer. This can help with branding quite significantly. You want to include your name, email address, and any relevant information.

Also, users can have bios that are topic-specific. It’s possible to mention your expertise on social media when answering questions, or explaining that you have engineering skills when you are answering a question about software engineering, for example.

You want to mention your brand as close to the beginning as possible. This way, you can make the most of that 50 character space.

This is also a great way to enhance some of your prowess and help show that you are indeed an expert about what you are discussing.

How to Track Topics on Quora By Using Notifications

One of Quora’s greatest uses extends to market research that’s more fun than the typical market research you might deal with.

The reasoning behind this is because it allows you to figure out what your audience is talking about, and find out the questions that people are asking within your niche.

This is a major benefit to your marketing strategy because then you can tailor your topics to your target audience, without worrying about whether you’re getting that targeting right.

To track topics with notifications, you can have all of these questions and answers emailed to you every day.

To get started, simply select the topics that appear when you search for them in Quora’s search box. This allows you to have specific topics that you follow just on Quora.

Quora will give you a list of autocomplete suggestions. When it does, and you click to go to a page about that topic, you will see even more related topics you can follow down the side of your screen.

This is a great way to do topic research and come up with questions that you can answer as a result.

This is how you can find notifications in Quora:

Screenshot demonstrating how to find notifications in Quora.

Find the Best Questions You Will Want to Have Answers For

Although you can answer just about any question you’d like on Quora, there are more strategic ways to answer questions that people are searching for.

You might want to consider the following:

Do a search for your chosen topic. By doing this first, you can help uncover the questions that you should be targeting more significantly.

If you don’t know where to begin, you can use the search bar at the top of the site.

Once you’ve done this, look for the questions that have been asked recently. These are usually the ones that are most popular and therefore the best ones to answer.

Look for questions that have already been answered by other experts. If they haven’t, ask them yourself!

Look for questions that are unanswered. There may be something interesting going on here that you could learn from.

Ask yourself if you would enjoy answering this question. If so, you’ll probably enjoy answering it too.

Make sure you read through the comments before answering. They often contain valuable information that you can add to your answer.

Find threads that have many upvotes. An upvote is Quora’s signal that a thread is of significantly high quality. At least, high quality enough to garner that many upvotes. When it comes to an answer’s popularity, it’s possible to achieve many thousands of views per day as a result.

Answer a Question Using Expertise and Authority About Your Niche

Expertise and influence are usually gained on Quora by spreading your knowledge and answering people’s questions about your niche.

The immediate benefit of being on Quora is that, as an SEO pro, this includes being seen as an expert on a certain topic.

By answering questions, providing significant value, and ensuring complete responses that help Quora’s users, you will find that your expertise and influence on the platform will soar.

What makes answers great on Quora?

One source, the CrazyEgg blog, explains that answers that use sources, references, and statistics are excellent answers. You want to provide a good, but short, answer to your audience’s questions that also links to an outside resource.

Use Questions From Your Blog as the Basis of Your Strategy (and Link Back to Your Answer)

This is a part of repurposing your content. And this is something that can make your blog’s posts provide significant value for a long time after they have been published.

For example: let’s say that you wrote an article that had many answers that addressed a common question, or a problem that your users have.

What you can do is dig out that blog post, curate the questions you answered, and find those questions (or their equivalents) on Quora.

Then, you can share answers to these questions on Quora, in which you can include a link back to your blog post which has even more complete details on the topic.

Use Quora to Supplement Your Link Building Efforts

Although links on Quora are nofollowed, they can still supplement your link building efforts by being included in your strategy.

As a supplement, they shouldn’t be considered as your main link building strategy because of the nofollow effect.

However, they can be considered a traffic source because of the traffic that can go back to your site from Quora as a result.

When do you plan on working with Quora as part of your next SEO project?

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How to Launch an SEO Campaign That Gets Results https://iloveseo.com/seo/launch-seo-campaign/ Tue, 29 Nov 2022 03:43:35 +0000 https://iloveseo.com/?p=8326 How to Launch an SEO Campaign That Gets Results on iloveseo.com by Brian Harnish

Are you looking for a way to boost your website’s rankings and traffic without spending thousands of dollars? Do you want to get more customers who will buy from you?...

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How to Launch an SEO Campaign That Gets Results on iloveseo.com by Brian Harnish

Are you looking for a way to boost your website’s rankings and traffic without spending thousands of dollars? Do you want to get more customers who will buy from you?

In order to achieve these goals, you need to focus on search engine optimization (SEO). This means making sure that your content ranks high in Google searches. It also means optimizing your site for mobile devices.

If you’ve never launched an SEO campaign before, then you might not realize how difficult it can be. From on site optimization, to content creation, to link building, there are many steps to the puzzle that are not always obvious or easy. In fact, getting results can be a very open-ended endeavor.

Without experience, it can seem like an insurmountable challenge that is a mystery to all of those but the most ardent professionals.

However, it’s possible to launch an SEO campaign that gets results successfully, even if you’re just starting out or haven’t been doing SEO all that long.

When setting goals for your SEO campaign, be sure to not lose sight of what you want to ultimately achieve. AHREFs provides what they call the SEO goal pyramid so you can use it to help you make sense of the framework you are trying to achieve:

The SEO Goal Pyramid Framework from AHREFs

What Is an SEO Campaign?

An SEO campaign is a coordinated attempt to improve a website’s position in search engines. This includes optimizing webpages for certain words and phrases, building backlinks, and using social media to promote the site. All of these factors are part of what makes up an SEO strategy.

The process begins with keyword research. Keywords are important because they help you find relevant content on your site. They’re also used to determine how much traffic you’ll receive from search engines like Google.

Once you’ve found some good keywords, it’s time to write some quality content. You want to make sure that each piece of content is unique and useful. Search engines look at several different factors when determining where to place a webpage in search results. One of those things is the number of times a page has been updated. If you update your blog frequently, search engines will see that you’re active and give your site a boost.

Next, you’ll want to build links. Backlinks are external sources that link to your website. These could come from another webpage or a blog post. When someone shares a link to your website, it tells search engines that there’s interesting information on your site.

Finally, you’ll want to use social media to promote your content. Social media sites are great tools for promoting your content. People love sharing interesting articles and videos, so you can reach a lot of people this way.

We will cover how to create an SEO campaign from scratch for an existing website, as well as the parts of the process that are different for creating an SEO campaign for a new website.

BriefCiel.com explains the essential elements of creating a successful SEO campaign:

Infographic that explains what an SEO campaign really is.

What is SEO Campaign Management?

When it comes to managing your online marketing efforts, there are many different types of campaigns to consider. Some are short term, while others could span months or even years. There are paid campaigns, organic campaigns, and everything in between. You might have a few campaigns running simultaneously, or maybe you’re just starting out. Regardless of what type of campaign you run, you’ll want to keep tabs on how things are progressing. This includes monitoring traffic sources, keywords, landing pages, conversions, and much more.

The best way to do this is to use tools that allow you to see all of your data in one place. With the help of some software, you can set up alerts, monitor performance over time, and make adjustments based on the information you receive. If you don’t know where to start, here are some tools that can help you manage your entire digital marketing strategy.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is free and easy to use. Once installed, you can log into your account and view detailed statistics about your site visitors. From there, you can segment your audience by age, gender, location, device, operating system, and more. You can also track conversion rates, bounce rates, and average session times. All of this information helps you understand what people like most about your site, and what changes you should make to improve your overall experience.

Moz Pro

Moz Pro is another great tool for tracking your progress across multiple platforms. It allows you to compare keyword rankings, competitor analysis, social media mentions, and more. In addition to providing analytics, Moz Pro offers insights into why certain keywords perform better than others. For example, you might find that certain terms bring in more leads than others because they are easier to rank for. By understanding this information, you can adjust your future strategies accordingly.

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is a web crawler that indexes websites and finds any broken links. It does this without having to be manually updated, which makes it perfect for long-term projects. The program has several advanced features, including the ability to crawl images, PDFs, and other files. It also provides a number of useful reports, such as a list of duplicate pages and a report showing the top 10 referring domains.

Semrush

Semrush is a powerful tool for finding relevant keywords and analyzing your competitors. It’s especially helpful when you need to find new ideas for content creation. The platform analyzes millions of search results every day, so you won’t have to spend hours searching through them yourself. You can filter your results by industry, language, and more. After you’ve found the right keywords, you can export them to Excel or Word for further research.

HubSpot CRM

HubSpot CRM is a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) solution that integrates with your email marketing service. It allows you to create automated emails that send targeted messages to specific contacts depending on their interests. The platform also tracks interactions with customers, helping you identify trends and opportunities for growth. This means you’ll always be able to provide exceptional service, even if you’re short on staff.

Brafton provides some examples of the methods that may be included in a successful SEO campaign:

An overview of search ranking methods that go into a successful SEO campaign.

How Important is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most effective ways to market your products and services online. It helps businesses gain visibility on the internet and increases the chances of getting found by potential clients. However, SEO isn’t just about making sure your site appears high up in the rankings; it’s about building lasting connections with people.

The best SEO strategies are built around the idea of creating long-term value for both your client base and yourself. You’ll find that there are several components to an effective SEO strategy, such as keyword research, link building, social media marketing, etc., but the main goal is always the same: to make sure your site gets found.

The world of SEO is constantly changing. However, there are some things about SEO that haven’t changed since 2012. One of those things is the importance of SEO. Whether you’re looking for a job or just trying to grow your business, SEO is one of the most effective ways to achieve success. If you’ve been thinking about starting an SEO campaign, here are five reasons why you should start now.

Search Engines Are Still King

Google remains the dominant player in the search engine space, which means that SEO is still important. Google’s algorithm changes frequently, but the company continues to put its focus on user experience above anything else. As a result, SEO will continue to play a major role in driving traffic to your website.

People Trust Organic Search

Organic search results are generally perceived as being trustworthy because they appear at the top of the page. They also tend to get higher click-through rates than paid ads. These factors mean that users are more likely to convert from organic search results than from paid ads.

SEO Can Be Effective With the Right Agency or Contractor

If you are looking to improve your rankings in the search results, you get what you pay for. And that holds true in SEO. Don’t think that spending $100 per month is going to get you anything beyond surface-level SEO for extremely easy keywords that may not bring you any traffic at all. Sure, you’re going to rank. But for terms that nobody is ever going to be searching for anywhere.

SEO Is Not Rocket Science

SEO is slightly more complex than knowing how to use a computer. There are many moving parts and things you have to know about so you can make SEO work correctly. But, once you understand the basic concepts, you can easily implement them into your own SEO strategy. It’s also not rocket science. The power of hiring others to do your SEO for you, though, is through scaling. By implementing an effective scaling strategy, you can multiply your efforts tenfold without those efforts taking a toll on your physical and mental health.

SEO is Easy to Maintain With the Right Staff

Once you launch your SEO campaign, it won’t take much effort to keep it going. You’ll only need to publish content regularly and perform minor tweaks every once in a while. Even if you’re not familiar with SEO, this shouldn’t be too difficult to master.

More competitive SEO strategies, however, will need an entire staff to implement well. They have many more moving parts that need to be implemented correctly. And while some might believe that SEO is as simple as operating a computer, it’s not. And it’s a complex discipline to master.

What Are the Benefits of an SEO Campaign?

There are many benefits of implementing an SEO campaign. From boosting your company’s credibility, to cheaper costs compared to other advertising channels, and supporting content marketing, just about any customer can realize the benefits of a successful SEO campaign. Usually, the only ones who don’t realize benefits have either 1. Not implemented things correctly on their campaign, 2. Are not doing something else that’s needed, 3. May have expectations that are misaligned, in spite of consistent education from the SEO company.

DigitalMarketingStudio.in provides examples of the benefits of an SEO campaign:

A chart that shows the benefits of an SEO campaign.

How to Create a Successful SEO Campaign for an Existing Website

There are two types of SEO campaigns that you will consistently run into: creating an SEO campaign for an existing website, and creating one for a new website. Most steps are similar, but there are different angles for each step depending on which type of SEO campaign that you are creating. For example, keyword research for a new website will focus on creating a batch of around 100 keywords that have high search volume, but lower competition, so you can rank quickly for the low hanging fruit opportunities before moving on to the more difficult keywords.

On the other hand, keyword research for an existing website is about looking where the website is at currently for their chosen keywords, refining keyword choices, and making adjustments to the keyword strategy where needed, depending on how user behavior has changed over time.

Analyze Your Existing Website’s Performance

Before you can move forward, it helps to know where you are currently at. If you’ve been working hard on your site for months, chances are you’ve seen some progress. But how do you know what needs improvement? Although you could review your analytics data, there are better ways to track your current position.

Reviewing pages and seeing where those pages are ranking now can be a great indicator of the changes you’ll need to make with your next SEO campaign. This can also help you understand where your previous SEO efforts did well or even failed, making it easier to plan for the next one.

Since this information will be the basis for future results, be certain to include as much detail as possible. Include things such as:

  • Page Speed – How fast does your site load? Is it mobile friendly?
  • Keywords – What keywords are bringing traffic to your site today?
  • Content – Do you have enough relevant content? Are you providing quality content?
  • Links – Where are your most important external sources linking to your site?
  • Social Media – Have you invested in social media marketing?
  • Analytics – Which metrics are tracking best?

Define Your SEO KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and Goals

The next step is to define exactly what you want your SEO strategy to accomplish. This is where you decide whether you want to focus on improving rankings, increasing organic traffic, or boosting conversions. You might also consider setting goals around how much money you want to spend per month on paid advertising versus organic traffic generation.

Once you’ve defined your goals, it’s time to evaluate how to measure success. How do you know if you’re making progress towards achieving those goals? What metrics matter most to you? Do you care about monthly revenue growth? Or perhaps you’d rather see an increase in conversion rates. Whatever your metric of choice is, make sure you track it regularly.

For example, if you wanted to improve your rankings and click-through rates (CTR), you would want to track this data on a monthly basis in a spread sheet. This way, you can create comprehensive reports for your client(s).

Ensuring a comprehensive reporting process will help you continue to improve your credibility as an SEO agency worthy of continued business.

Create Awesome Content, Improve Your Existing Content, and Improve Your Internal Linking

If you want to rank for competitive keywords, you need to write great content. And you need to make sure people find that content. One way to do both is to create evergreen content. Evergreen content is content that doesn’t change much over time. You don’t update it every week or month. Instead, you post one article per quarter or once a year. This gives you a chance to build up authority around your brand while providing useful information to readers.

But what about those times when you need to add something new to your site? Or maybe you just want to write some new content to help boost traffic. Well, there are ways to do both. Here are three tips to help you create awesome content and improve internal link building.

Write Great Content

The best way to ensure that your content is amazing is to start out by writing good content. If you’re struggling to come up with ideas, try brainstorming. Brainstorming is simply taking a topic and thinking about how you could approach it from different angles. For example, if you wanted to write about “how to make money online,” you might think about starting off by listing the things you’ve learned along the way. Then, you might consider asking yourself questions like: What did I learn that helped me succeed? How did I fail? Why do I think others haven’t succeeded?

Once you’ve got your list down, take a look at each idea and ask yourself whether it’s really worth pursuing. Are you passionate enough about it? Do you know anyone else who’d be interested in reading about it? Is it something you could easily research and write about? If you answered yes to all of those questions, then you probably have a winner.

Now that you’ve written your initial piece, you’ll want to make sure it’s keyword rich. Keyword research is a huge part of writing great content. There are plenty of tools out there to help you find the right words for your niche, including WordStream, Moz, and BuzzSumo.

Once you’ve found the right keywords, use them throughout your content. Don’t just throw them into the middle of the text; sprinkle them throughout. This makes it easier for the reader to find them and helps them stand out.

Create Unique Content

While you should always strive to write unique content, sometimes you may not have the luxury of doing so. In these cases, you can still create great content by making sure it stands out.

One way to do this is to focus on creating high quality images. Images are often overlooked when it comes to content creation, but they can really set apart your work. They also allow you to include more than just text, making your content more visually appealing.

Another way is to look at other websites for inspiration (but don’t copy them). Look at what they are writing and talking about, and figure out how you can do better.

One great way to do this is to use the Skyscraper technique, which uses the principle of 10x content in content creation.

By creating the absolute best example of the content on your site in your niche, you create what Google loves to see, and it helps to improve the chances of your page ranking for the queries that you want.

Improve Your Internal Linking

On an existing website, internal linking can become a chore, depending on who is doing it. It can become very disorganized very quickly if you don’t keep track of your tasks.

This is why you must take a periodic look at your internal linking structure.

Doing so can help you identify errors, linked pages that were deleted but not redirected, as well as internal linking opportunities that can help improve the targeted page.

Don’t just link randomly. Use related, relevant pages to help boost your internal linking. If you don’t have relevant pages, then create some. And try to identify what kind of pages other sites are using in their internal linking SEO silos.

Check Your Technical Optimization

If you are looking to rank highly on Google, there are many factors that go into making sure your site performs well. One of those factors is ensuring that your site is technically optimized. While most people think about optimizing their sites for mobile devices, Google wants to see that you have optimized your site for desktop users, too.

Make sure all of your meta description and title tags match your intended keywords. This helps Google understand what your page is about. You want to make sure your meta descriptions are concise and descriptive, while your title tag should include your targeted keywords.

And double-check things like your broken links and other little issues that could make it harder to show at the top of the SERPs, such as having duplicate pages listed in the first page results.

If it makes sense to use Structured Data with your content, ensure that it is installed and working properly. This allows Google to better understand what your page is offering.

In addition to making sure you are optimizing your site for mobile devices, there are some other key areas where you might want to focus your attention. For example, one area that many brands overlook is their meta description. This is a short piece of text that appears under the URL of each webpage. It’s meant to give searchers a quick summary of what the page contains and why they should visit it.

The meta description tag is just another way to optimize your site for search engines. You don’t want to overdo it though. A good rule of thumb is to keep it less than 160 characters long. Longer descriptions tend to look spammy, while shorter ones can sometimes lead to people clicking away without reading anything.

Another thing you should consider doing is checking your page load times. If it takes longer than 3 seconds to load, it could cause visitors to bounce off your site.

You can test how fast your site loads by using tools such as GTMetrix and PageSpeed Insights. These sites offer free trials, so you can see exactly how much faster your site performs compared to others.

If you find something that needs fixing, take action immediately. Otherwise, you risk losing out on opportunities for ranking.

Trim Underperforming Pages, or Optimize Them

There are some who believe that you should delete underperforming pages – if they don’t receive traffic, then they should be removed because they are weighing down your site.

It is likely that they may be pages that are irrelevant. It’s important to make sure that you don’t delete pages just because they don’t have any traffic. That doesn’t mean they are irrelevant. If pages contribute to the overall topical authority, have relevance in terms of topic, and they count as your website covering that topic, then they should not be deleted.

If you have pages that are underperforming, all is not lost. It’s still possible to optimize them.

For example, say that you have a page that’s ranking on page 2 or 3, and it’s not receiving any traffic. If the page is relevant to your overall topic, don’t delete it! Instead, you want to do more research into the top 10 ranking sites on the search results (if you haven’t done so already), and identify where improvements will be needed. Maybe you need to add some FAQs from the People Also Ask section. Or perhaps you need to expand the content so it covers more of the topic in-depth.

Whatever the case may be, doing an internal audit of your underperforming pages and performing some comprehensive optimizations can deliver significant results after the optimizations have been completed.

Track your results

You’ve spent months building up your brand, creating great content, optimizing your site, and getting it ranked high in the search engines. But now what? You want to make sure that your efforts are paying off, but where do you start?

The answer is simple: track your traffic. If you don’t already have a tool like Google Analytics set up, there’s no better place to start than here.

Google Analytics allows you to track everything about your visitors’ journeys – including where they came from, where they went once they got to your site, and how long they stayed. This information helps you understand what works and what doesn’t work in terms of SEO, and gives you insight into whether you’re making progress toward your goals.

AHREFs provides an example that shows how the completion of a new website could potentially look:

An example of a complete SEO pyramid showing the completion of a successful SEO campaign, via AHREFs.

How to Create a Successful SEO Campaign for a New Website

When you are creating an SEO campaign for a new website, there are differences in how a campaign is managed. For example, you probably don’t have prior keyword research completed. You also probably don’t have a plan. For all intents and purposes, this kind of website is basically a startup. So, you have to come up with all of your targeted keywords, you have to identify your competitors, everything.

Step 1: Find Keywords

Keyword research is the first thing every SEO needs to do. If you don’t know what keywords people use to find your product/service, you’re missing out on a lot of traffic. You might think that you already know what terms people are searching for, but it’s possible that you haven’t thought about some of the most important ones.

Google Keyword Planner is one of the best tools for finding keywords. It’s a great place to start because it gives you lots of data, without having to pay anything. Here’s how to use it.

Find More Keywords Using Google Trends

Google Trends is another free tool that helps you find keywords. This tool lets you see how many searches there are for certain words over time. For example, let’s say you wanted to rank for “best dog food.” You could type that into Google Trends and see how many times it came up over the last few months. Then, you could go ahead and enter those same keywords into Google Keyword Planner and compare the numbers.

If you notice that the number of searches for “dog food” is much lower in Google Keyword Planner than in Google Trends, you may want to try something else.

Use Long-Tail Keywords

Long tail keywords are more specific and less competitive. They can help you target smaller niches within larger categories.

Use Keywords People Are Actually Searching For

And this means finding keywords with a high search volume. The higher the search volume, the more competition there will be for those keywords. So, if you want to rank well for a keyword that has low search volume, you’ll need to come up with creative ways to get attention.

Step 2: Publish Long-form High-Quality Content

The days of publishing short, 500-words blog posts are long gone. Today, we’re talking about writing comprehensive content that’s optimized for search engines like Google. This type of content includes longer articles, infographics, videos, podcasts, etc.

Longer content tends to perform better because it provides more information to readers. But don’t just write for length; make sure you’re providing value to your audience. If you do, you’ll see more traffic and conversions.

In fact, here are a few statistics about long-form content from SEO.co:

  • The average 1st result on Google has a blog length of 1,500 words. Source: Backlinko
  • Content with > 7,000 words gets more than 3x the number of shares and links. Source: MarketingCharts
  • Blog posts are getting longer: the average blog post length is now over 1,400 words long. Source: OrbitMedia
  • When it comes to the first five positions in Google, shorter length appears to have a higher correlation to first page rankings. Source: CognitiveSEO
  • Longer posts (2,000 words+) tend to rank higher and more readily appear in the top 10. Source: CapsicumMediaworks

If your blog has nothing but shorter content that doesn’t have much value, it would be a wise move to consider expanding your content and doing more search analysis on the keywords you want to eventually rank for.

Step 3: On-Site Optimization

After writing some great content, you want to work on making sure your site is optimized. This means that you are paying attention to things like keyword targeting, content length, keyword integration in your content, heading optimization, page titles, meta descriptions, and every possible optimization point on your pages.

We cover how to do this in our guide to on-page optimization here.

But, on-site optimization is still a critical task and should not be ignored. There is a major difference between how a site with too much code bloat and a site with optimized code performs in the search results. There is also a big difference between a site that has optimized images vs. a site that doesn’t.

Step 4: Build Backlinks

Even though you might have some of the best content on the planet, you still have to build backlinks. While on-site optimization can help you rank number 1 for certain queries, it won’t help you with all of them. In fact, you may have more work to do for much more competitive queries, because Google has a higher bar for ranking pages for these particular queries.

Be sure to read our entire series on how to build backlinks for your site here as well.

But what does “building backlinks” mean? Well, it doesn’t necessarily mean getting thousands of links; sometimes, one or two links can make a big difference if they are of a high enough quality.

Here are just a few ways that you can use to build backlinks to your site effectively.

Email outreach – This is probably the most common form of link building out there.

Press release distribution – Press releases are another great way to generate free publicity.

Content syndication – Syndicating your content across multiple sites helps increase traffic to your site.

Content Marketing – This includes creating high quality content like blogs, articles, videos, etc.

Social Media Engagement – This includes commenting on relevant threads on forums, answering questions on Quora, Reddit, etc.

Amplify Your Content On Different Social Media Platforms – This involves ensuring that you target the right influencers on social media. By targeting the right influencers, you can get links to your content and build your authority this way.

Step 5: Track Your SEO Results

To determine whether SEO efforts are paying off, it helps to track traffic sources. You want to make sure that your site isn’t losing visitors due to poor rankings.

You can find out where people are coming from by looking at your analytics data. In addition to tracking visits from specific keywords, you’ll also want to look at traffic from social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

You will want to track both traffic and rankings, because tracking one without the other means tracking a metric without context.

Also, comparison data is usually necessary in order to gauge improvements in results. For example, say that you went through and optimized some pages. You may want to take some initial benchmarks so you can identify how the new optimizations had an impact.

This is why results tracking is so important. It can provide context and additional insight into why your new strategy performs (or doesn’t perform).

AHREFs also explains a framework called an impact effort matrix, that can help you identify high-impact SEO opportunities:

Example of an impact effort matrix for prioritizing your SEO efforts - from AHREFs.

Launching an SEO Campaign That Gets Results Is Not Terribly Difficult

But it is complex and can have a lot of moving parts. However, complexity does not necessarily dictate the difficulty level.

Allow us to explain. Most of the parts could be classified as beginner-level. But, the chaining together of these parts could be challenging and end up becoming advanced because of nuances that vary by niche. For example, SEO for e-commerce would be very different compared to SEO for lawyers. More advanced SEO campaigns could include automations,

If you’re looking to launch an SEO campaign that gets results, there are a few steps to follow:

1) Make sure you have a clear understanding of what you want to achieve from your SEO efforts.

2) Start off small and build slowly.

3) Don’t forget to include keywords in your content.

4) Use social media to promote your site.

5) And finally, test everything before launching into full scale production.

When do you plan on creating and launching your next SEO campaign?

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Niche Keywords: How to Find the Best Keywords for Your Niche Site https://iloveseo.com/seo/find-niche-keywords/ Wed, 23 Nov 2022 02:24:24 +0000 https://iloveseo.com/?p=8310 Niche Keywords: How to Find the Best Keywords for Your Niche Site on iloveseo.com by Brian Harnish

Why are you looking to find niche keywords? Do you want to find those keywords that will help you dominate Google rankings? Or are you looking for these types of...

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Niche Keywords: How to Find the Best Keywords for Your Niche Site on iloveseo.com by Brian Harnish

Why are you looking to find niche keywords? Do you want to find those keywords that will help you dominate Google rankings? Or are you looking for these types of keywords so you can optimize your content properly?

There are many reasons why you might want to find niche keywords. Maybe you want to make extra money online, or maybe you just want to learn how to rank higher on Google. Whatever your reason, you should always look for these types of keywords that will help your website get found.

We have put together a process to mine keyword ideas that you can use to build websites that earn passive income. The process to unearth such keywords is perfect for beginners who are new to internet marketing. The process also works great for experienced marketers who want to expand their traffic and revenue streams.

What Are Niche Keywords?

Niche keywords are very specific terms used to describe products or services within a certain industry or category. They are extremely useful for driving targeted traffic to your site. For example, you could use the keyword “dog grooming” to target people searching for dog groomers in Los Angeles.

The problem with niche keywords is that they typically have low search volumes. You might see 10 searches per month for the term “dog grooming,” compared to millions of searches for “pet care” or “dogs.”

However, they do generate high quality traffic. People looking for dog grooming services in LA might be interested in learning about your business, so it makes sense to invest in these keywords.

But, when you do the correct keyword research, it’s possible to achieve higher search volumes by targeting broader keywords with a higher volume.

Chart that explains niche keywords and how they result in a traffic increase.

What Are Examples of Niche Keywords?

We want to see niche keywords that have a healthy search volume. Search volume is an indicator that consumers are searching for that keyword, which means that you will find many more results than otherwise.

For example, something like “gaming laptops” has a 1.2 million level search volume. This would fit the definition of a niche as well, because gaming laptops is all its own with many potential consumers. It has a popular product, along with something that you could write mountains of content about.

Here is another example: say that you are working on a site that sells nothing but computer monitors. Although not typically the case, this could be another individual micro-niche. With a healthy search volume of 287,000 per month, this has sustainable search volume as well as a marketable premise.

Where Do You Use Niche Keywords?

These types of niche keywords are important because they allow you to target specific audiences within your industry. They’re often less competitive and easier to rank for, making it possible to gain visibility quickly. You can choose to focus on one type of product or service, such as “commercial cleaning,” or you could go broader and try to cover multiple areas, like “cleaning.”

The key is finding the right balance between broad and narrow terms. If you pick too many broad terms, you’ll end up competing against lots of different businesses. But if you stick to just a few specific terms, you won’t be able to reach everyone interested in what you offer.

For instance, if you sell commercial cleaning supplies, you could choose a keyword like “commercial cleaning supplies.” This keyword targets people searching for commercial cleaning supplies and helps you show up in search results where they’re most likely to find what they’re looking for.

You can also use these types of keywords to target specific geographic areas. If you run a restaurant, you might choose a phrase like “restaurant near me,” since it includes location information.

If you’re selling something online, you can use keywords like “online shopping cart software” or “best ecommerce platforms.” These phrases include location information, meaning you’ll be able to show ads to people who live nearby or are planning to shop online.

You want to find a sweet spot where you can still compete effectively while being able to attract the right audience. This is why we recommend starting out with a handful of targeted keywords and gradually expanding your list over time.

Why are Niche Keywords Important to Your Business?

These particular types of keywords are different from broad, popular key terms. They’re much smaller in size and scope and tend to be highly specific. When people use them, they’re usually searching for something very specific. For example, if someone searched “organic cleaning,” it’s difficult to know what they wanted to see. Maybe they just want to learn more about organic cleaning. Or maybe they want to hire an organic cleaning company.

If someone uses a broad term like “cleaning,” it’s easier to guess what they want. But if they use a narrow term like “organic cleaning,” it becomes harder to determine what they want. This makes it hard to rank well for those queries.

So how do you figure out which ones are most relevant to your business? Here are some tips.

Start with the questions you ask yourself every day.
Ask customers what they want to buy, what problems they face, and what they don’t understand.
Use tools like Buzzsumo and Keyword Explorer to help you identify trends and niches within your industry.
Look up similar businesses to yours to see what keywords they’re targeting.

Broader keywords can lead to more ambiguity in your searches. If someone searches “organic,” it’s difficult to know what type of organic cleaning they’re interested in. Is it chemical free? Does it use natural ingredients? What is the difference between chemical free and green cleaning?

These questions lead us to believe that someone searching for organic cleaning might be looking for more information about the subject. This makes it easier to target ads to those individuals.

By targeting these keywords, you increase the possibility of ranking for them while lowering your competitive risk.

The following is a screenshot of a list of keywords within Google Search Console. In your own GSC, to the right you will normally see clicks, impressions, average CTR, and average positions of your page within the SERPs (when enabled).

Screenshot of niche keywords as they appear in Google Search Console.

Niche Keywords: How to Find the Best Keywords

If you want to find profitable keywords for your niche, it helps to know what types of words people use to describe products and services within your industry.

Once you’ve found some keywords, you’ll want to make sure that they aren’t already being targeted by someone else. To check whether or not a particular keyword is taken, we recommend using the Google AdWords Keyword Planner.

For example, the Keyword Planner lets you input multiple keywords and compare the number of monthly searches each one receives. If there are lots of competitors targeting a certain term, it might be worth considering another phrase.

Your keyword list has to be a specific list tailored to your website, and specific to you, as well as to your overall business. These keywords are only valuable where relevance to you is concerned, and you don’t have to utilize every possible variation of every recommendation. However, you do have to know about them. Some of these variations may show differences in purchasing behaviors, or other patterns that can be utilized to learn more about your industry. This is especially true if you adopt some of these methodologies for paid advertising like Facebook ads.

As you build up your authority over time, it will become easier to rank for the more challenging keyword phrases.

Define Your Niche

Before you start conducting keyword research, it’s important to define that topic area. This is where you’ll find out what type of products or services you offer. For instance, if you sell organic cleaning supplies, you’d likely want to target “organic cleaners.” But if you sell a variety of different products, such as cleaning supplies, home decor items, etc., you might want to narrow down your focus to one specific product category.

Determine if customers are searching for things: Once you’ve defined it, you will want to determine whether your customers are searching for information about your niche or products within it. If most people are looking for information about it, you’ll probably want to use a keyword like your primary industry keyword as your primary keyword phrase. On the other hand, if most people are looking for products within it, you’ll likely want to use those terms as secondary keywords.

Identify your audience: Now that you know all about your area, you’ll need to figure out who your ideal customer is. Who are they? What are they like? How much money do they make? Where do they live? Are they male, female, or another? Do they work full-time or part-time? These questions help you understand who your audience is and what makes them tick.

Discover your competition: You don’t want to compete against yourself. Instead, you want to find companies that are already doing well. They’re likely to be successful because they’re providing something that people want. By identifying your competitors, you’ll learn what types of products or services they offer, how they market themselves, and how they communicate with their audiences. However, you don’t want to go after super competitive keywords right off the bat. You’re not going to have authority at the beginning of a new site, so you have to build that authority first. After you’ve built up enough authority, you can then move forward with trying to rank for the harder keywords.

It helps to identify your competitors, and to do this we also recommend using a free keyword research tool like the Google Keyword Tool (such as Google’s Keyword Planner)  or Keywords Everywhere.

A woman and man trying to define their niche for their new website.

Use a Keyword Research Tool to Find Niche Keywords

Before you start building your site, you’ll want to make sure you’re choosing niche keywords that people actually care about. You might think that everyone wants to buy organic food, but that isn’t necessarily true. If you look closely at the organic food market, you’ll see that there are many different types of consumers out there.

You’ll want to find a niche that interests you, but one that isn’t too saturated. For example, you might not be interested in buying organic dog food because there are already too many sites selling organic dog food. Instead, you will want to focus your efforts on finding ways to improve the health of dogs without resorting to traditional medicine.

To do this, you’ll need to use a tool called a keyword research tool. These tools allow you to enter a list of words related to your topics and return a list of keywords that are most likely to bring visitors to your site.

The best way to learn about specific niche keywords is to perform a quick search yourself. Type in a few key phrases into Google and see what pops up. This will give you some idea of whether your chosen area is competitive enough to support your efforts.

Once you’ve identified a handful of keywords, you’ll need to decide which ones to pursue further. There are several factors to consider here. First, you’ll want to determine whether those keywords are relatively easy to rank for. Second, you’ll want to check whether those keywords tend to produce high volumes of searches per month. Finally, you’ll want to take a look at the competition for each term.

If you find that a given keyword produces low volumes of searches monthly, but doesn’t seem to have a lot of competition, you might still want to go ahead and add that keyword to your list. However, if you find that a given term does have a lot of competition and produces little volume, you’ll probably want to move on to another option.

The key with keyword research is to prioritize the keywords on your list that have relevance to your niche, as well as low search volume and lower competition, so they are easier to rank for and so you can gain authority. As you continue gaining authority, you can then go after the more competitive keyword phrases.

We recommend reading our free keyword research tools guide if you want to find free tools that can help you with this task.

Analyze Your Keyword List

Once you’ve compiled a list of keywords, it’s time to determine which ones to focus on. There are three things you need to consider when prioritizing your keywords: relevance, competition, and conversion.

Relevance refers to whether or not the keywords you choose are actually related to your product or service. For example, if you sell shoes online, you might target “buy men’s dress shoes.” This keyword isn’t very specific because it doesn’t tell searchers exactly what type of shoe they’re looking for. Instead, you’d want to include words like “brown,” “black,” and “menswear.” These keywords are much more specific and will help you rank better for queries like “men’s brown dress shoes.”

Competition refers to how many sites are already competing for those keywords. In our previous example, we could add “dress shoes” to increase our chances of ranking well for that phrase. However, adding too many variations of the same keyword can hurt your rankings, so make sure you pick keywords that aren’t already being used heavily by others.

Conversion refers to how likely someone searching for that particular keyword is to buy something, once they arrive on your site. For example, if your goal is to earn money online, you might target keywords like “make money online” or “how to make money online.” These keywords are more focused and will lead searchers directly to products or services that relate to earning money online.

By making sure that your list contains a broad distribution of keywords focused on relevance, competition, and conversion, you can create a keyword list that will help you continue to earn a profit for your business.

A group of digital marketers analyzing their keyword lists.

Refine Your Niche Keyword List

A list of keywords has no intrinsic value; it’s simply a suggestion. But like anything else, there’s a difference between having a good idea and actually executing it. If you want to make sure that you’re getting the most out of your list, here are some tips to help you refine it.

Find a niche.

The best way to narrow down your list is to focus on one particular area of expertise. You might think about where you work, what you sell, or even how you spend your free time. Whatever you choose, make sure it’s something that people care about.

Use the right tools.

WordStream offers a number of different tools to help you identify the perfect keywords for your business. There are other keyword research tools available. If you want to take a look at a few tools you can use to accomplish niche keyword research for free, be sure to read our free keyword research tools guide.

Add URLs.

If you already have a blog or website, you can use a tool like Semrush to see how your site’s optimized for existing keywords. If you use a tool like Google Search Console, this tool allows you to see which URLs on your site are getting traffic for a certain keyword.

Determine How Competitive Your Niche Keyword Phrases Are

The next step is determining how competitive each keyword phrase actually is. If you’re just starting out, this might seem like a daunting task.

First, let’s take a look at what competition looks like in general. In the example above, the blue bars represent the number of competing sites for “best dog food.”

Now, let’s focus on one particular term: “dog food.” We’ll start by looking at the number of competing sites, followed by the percentage of those sites that rank organically for that term.

Next, we’ll examine the average position of the top 10 rankings. This tells us whether the term is highly competitive or not.

Finally, we’ll check to see whether the site that ranks #1 is optimized for the term. A high score here indicates that the site is likely to perform well for the term.

Once you’ve completed this exercise, you’ll know more about how to get your site to the number one position for your keyword phrase.

A group of digital marketers metaphorically being competitive against each other.

Monitor and Adapt Your Niche Keywords as Needed

Once you have the right niche keywords and integrate them into your site, your work continues. It’s vital that you constantly monitor your keywords and their effectiveness. This way, you’ll know what works best for your business, and you can also make any necessary changes accordingly.

When you add niche keywords to your marketing strategy, you need to monitor those keywords’ performance for a few months; otherwise, you might miss out on some opportunities. For example, if you’re trying to rank for a specific keyword, but you don’t see much movement, it could mean that there are too many sites competing for that term. In such cases, you may want to try different strategies to increase visibility.

If you’ve been monitoring a particular page for a few months and it hasn’t ranked well, you may need additional link building or need to optimize the page content to better suit search results. If you notice that one of your pages isn’t performing well, check the analytics to find out why. Maybe it’s because you haven’t optimized the page properly, or maybe it’s because someone else has already built links to that page. Either way, you’ll need to fix the problem so that you continue seeing improvement in your rankings.

Niche Keywords Aren’t Be-all, End-all, but They Can Improve Your SEO Results

By concentrating on a straightforward and easy to use process, it’s possible to create profitable keyword lists for any niche.

As you continue to work through the niche keyword research methodology for your sites, you will get better. You will also learn how to spot profitable niche keywords almost instantaneously.

Don’t worry if you don’t get things perfect the first or second time around. Like anything else, becoming successful at this process takes practice!

When do you plan on starting your next niche website and doing keyword research to support it?

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10 Best Digital Marketing Tactics That Actually Work https://iloveseo.com/seo/10-digital-marketing-tactics-that-work/ Tue, 22 Nov 2022 02:23:02 +0000 https://iloveseo.com/?p=8295 10 Best Digital Marketing Tactics That Actually Work on iloveseo.com by Brian Harnish

How would you describe your company? Is it a startup or a well established brand? What does your company do? How long has it been around? A successful marketing strategy...

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10 Best Digital Marketing Tactics That Actually Work on iloveseo.com by Brian Harnish

How would you describe your company? Is it a startup or a well established brand? What does your company do? How long has it been around?

A successful marketing strategy should always be aligned with your company’s overall goals. This way, you can ensure that your message reaches the target audience effectively. You also want to make sure that your strategy is aligned with your target audience, because it’s that target audience that will help determine exactly how you optimize, what you optimize for, and how you market.

Digital marketing tactics are constantly evolving. The key to success lies in understanding the latest tactics and adapting them to your business model. By working to improve your arsenal of digital marketing tactics, it’s possible to improve your results significantly.

By working with the following digital marketing tactics, and making sure that you nail your target audience down it’s possible to expand your site’s reach, create more sales for your product or service, and get more eyeballs on your content as a result.

10 Best Digital Marketing Tactics That Actually Work

Here are the ten best digital marketing tactics that actually work, and have worked for us many times:

  • Re-optimize your existing content to improve CTR and ranking.
  • Boost your traffic with editorial calendars.
  • Utilize content syndication to increase your content’s reach.
  • Curate your content to find unique topic ideas.
  • Take on influencers who are willing to spread the good word about your brand.
  • Repurpose your content into new formats to maximize effort.
  • Republishing your content for different channels vs. “Re-Optimizing your content.
  • Employ affiliate marketers to spread the word about your product or service.
  • Use social media marketing to amplify your content.
  • Revisit your landing pages and optimize them for audience retention.

What is a Digital Marketing Strategy?

A marketing strategy is a plan that helps you reach a specific marketing-related objective. It takes into consideration what you’re already doing well and what you’re missing in terms of achieving the objective you set. This makes you more likely to succeed in accomplishing it.

Also, you want to know how to uncover your potential customers before they ever find you. This requires analytics about certain types of data that comes with experience. It also requires digital marketing strategies that can stand the test of time, and can work on your site in a holistic fashion.

Your digital marketing channels are also important to consider. From YouTube to TikTok, from Facebook to Instagram, each of your digital channels has a unique set of circumstances that you also have to consider. By making sure that you target your digital channels properly, you can also reach potential customers before they may even think about you.

And this is the desirable situation: to really expand your reach through SEO so that your digital marketing strategies continue to remain effective, and that you can continue to expand your potential customers base to even more digital marketing channels.

This is also why it’s important to have a hold on what digital strategy is compared to tactics. Because at the end of the day, you might miss your mark if you don’t understand the difference between digital strategy and tactics.

What a successful marketing strategy looks like.

Marketing Strategy vs. Marketing Tactic

The difference between a strategy and tactics is often misunderstood. In fact, the word “strategy” itself can mean different things to different people. Some think it refers to a long-term vision while others equate it with a short-term action plan. But what do you call something that helps you achieve a goal over a period of months or even years? Strategy. And what does a tactic look like? It’s a step-by-step approach to achieving a specific outcome. So, how do you put together a strategy and tactics? Let’s take a closer look.

An example framework that explain the differences between what's a strategy and what is a tactic.

A Diagnosis of Your Challenge

To start off, you must understand where you’re coming from. What challenges exist in your industry? Are you facing competition? Do you want to increase sales? Is your product/service outdated? If you don’t know where you’re starting from, you won’t know where you’re heading. You’ll never know whether you’ve succeeded or failed unless you define your problem clearly.

A Guiding Policy for Dealing With the Challenge

Once you know where you’re starting, you need to establish a guiding policy for dealing with your challenge. This is the overarching principle that guides everything else. For example, if you want to sell more products, you might decide that you need to offer better customer service. Or maybe you’ll focus on increasing brand awareness. Whatever your guiding policy is, make sure it’s clear and concise.

Targeted Actions Necessary to Accomplish the Policy

Finally, once you have established a guiding policy, you need to identify the specific actions needed to implement that policy. These are called tactics. They’re concrete and measurable. They help you measure progress towards your goals.

For example, let’s say your guiding policy is to improve customer service. To accomplish this, you could create an email campaign that sends out surveys to customers who haven’t received their orders within 30 days. The survey asks them about their experience. Then, based on the results, you send follow up emails asking them why they didn’t receive their order.

You can also use social media to engage with potential customers. You can share content that highlights your company culture and values. This way, when someone sees your posts, they feel connected to your brand.

You can also ask your employees to be ambassadors for your company. Have them talk to friends and family about your services. Encourage them to tell everyone they meet about your company.

Now that you have a diagnosis of your challenge, a guiding policy, and targeted actions necessary to accomplish that policy, you’re ready to begin implementing those tactics.

Digital Marketing Tactics That Work

The world of digital marketing is continuing to evolve and is getting better and better. With this evolution, your tactics need to change as well. The following includes some of the best digital marketing tactics you can add to your arsenal, regardless of your SEO position.

Re-Optimize Your Existing Content to Improve CTR and Ranking

We evaluated the positions and engagement for every article, and decided which one needed to be updated. This way, we could find out what keywords were working best.

After analyzing the data, we found out that most of the articles had low engagement and high bounce rates. So we decided to refresh those articles.

Then we used the Keyword Tool and the Content Optimizer to find out which keywords would work best for the articles.

Finally, we optimized the text, images, videos and metadata for each piece of content.

The end result was a significant increase in traffic and conversions.

On a long enough timeline, certain search queries can have significantly different results depending on user behavior. This can cause either a dramatic increase (or decrease) in traffic. For example, if we examine the Google trends data for the query “cell phone,” we can see that it has lost a significant amount of traffic over time. This can be remedied by tweaking or rewriting your post entirely, depending on the shift in user behavior.

Screenshot of Google Trends that shows search query "cell phone" compared to query "smartphones" over time.

Boost Your Traffic With Editorial Calendars

The best way to increase your site’s visibility is by publishing high quality content regularly. This is why it is important to schedule your posts ahead of time. If you do not have a regular posting schedule, you risk losing out on potential leads and customers.

If you want to boost your site’s performance, you need to make sure that you publish new content frequently. By doing so, you ensure that your audience stays engaged and interested in what you have to say.

A good strategy for boosting traffic while keeping readers engaged is to include multiple topics within each post. For example, you could write about a topic related to your niche, followed by another article covering a different aspect of your industry.

You can also use this technique to generate additional revenue. When you promote affiliate products, you can link to a product review or a case study. These types of articles are usually longer than others, so you can charge more per word.

Another great idea is to write guest posts. Guest blogging is a great way to build up your reputation and attract visitors to your site. However, you need to make certain that you provide value to your readers.

To help you achieve this goal, you should consider scheduling your posts ahead of time, to avoid rushing around during busy times.

This is one example of an editorial calendar over on Hubspot:

Screenshot of a blog editorial calendar as created by Hubspot.

Utilize Content Syndication to Increase Your Content’s Reach

Content syndication is a tactic where you publish your content on external sites owned by third parties. For this tactic to work, you have to find authoritative publications.

For example, if you own an eCommerce store, you might choose to share your blog posts with other blogs that cover similar topics.

This will allow you to reach a wider audience and potentially drive more traffic to your website.

In addition to sharing your content with other websites, you can also create your own syndicated content. This means that you will create original content that you then share on other sites.

In order to get started with content syndication, you first need to identify relevant websites. You can do this by using Google search queries such as “best sites”.

Once you have identified these sites, you can start promoting them through social media channels like Facebook and Twitter.

By following these steps, you can easily boost your site’s traffic.

Business2community.com has some advice about dos and don’ts when it comes to content syndication:

Example list of content syndication dos and don'ts.

The idea of syndication is to provide rights to other publishers to republish your work. Sharing to social media is not the same as syndication, however. Sharing on social media is just re-sharing your content. The syndication part means that you are sharing your content on multiple sites with a major presence in your niche, and the syndicated article is often unchanged from your original article. This is where the republishing rights come into play.

The goal here is to ensure that your audience sees your content across multiple platforms. If you want to see how much traffic you can generate from one piece of content, try publishing it first on your own channels, then syndicate it to others.

Hubspot.com shares some strategies for effective (and free) content syndication:

A flowchart showing effective strategies for content syndication from Hubspot.

Curate Your Content to Find Unique Topic Ideas

In today’s world, it seems like everyone wants to be a publisher. But what does that really mean? And how do we know whether our efforts are actually helping people find information online?

The answer lies in content curation. This process involves gathering content from multiple sources — both owned and unowned — and presenting it in one place. You might use social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube, etc., to collect content. Or you could use tools like BuzzSumo, Semrush, and Ahrefs to discover the best content out there. Then you can either take ownership of the content yourself, or simply pass along the curated content to others.

For example, let’s say you want to write about the latest trends in digital marketing. You can go directly to the source and research the topic yourself, or you can find some great articles written by experts in the field and share those. Either way, you’re providing value to your readers and potential clients.

ContentMarketingInstitute.com explains the following successful content curation process:

A flowchart that shows exactly how the process of content curation works.

Take on Influencers Who Are Willing to Spread the Good Word About Your Brand

Influencer marketing is one of the most powerful ways to engage customers today. A study by Qualtrics revealed that nearly half of social media users base their buying decisions on recommendations from friends and family. And according to Qualtrics, over 90 percent of consumers trust peer reviews and word-of-mouth information about products and services. Also, they say that 93 percent of consumers have said that online reviews have a major influence on their decision to purchase.

Influencer marketing is another channel that allows businesses to leverage the power of word-of-mouth advertising. This type of marketing involves partnering with people known within a certain niche – such as bloggers, YouTubers, Instagrammers, etc. – to promote products or services to their audience.

Brands can leverage the power of influencer marketing by partnering with people in relevant industries and sharing authentic, branded experiences. These influencers are often thought leaders in their fields, and their loyal audience trusts what they say. By reaching out to influencers, brands can connect with their followers and prospects, and generate buzz around their products and services.

Brands can pay influencers to host product demos, review items, or even just post photos and videos about brands. By enlisting the help of influential individuals, companies can increase awareness of their brand while simultaneously providing helpful tips or advice about their products.

The best part? People trust what they hear from someone they know and respect, so there’s no need to worry about whether a company’s claims are truthful. As long as you choose your partners carefully, influencer marketing can work well for both parties involved.

Repurpose Your Content Into New Formats To Maximize Effort

If you’re looking to make the most out of your content creation efforts, there are some things you can do to help you get the most bang for your buck. One way to do this is by turning your existing content into something else entirely. This could mean taking your webinars and turning them into videos, or turning your blog posts into ebooks. There are many ways to go about doing this, but one thing to keep in mind is that you want to avoid creating duplicate content. If you’re already posting content online, why not use what you’ve already written to create another form of content?

This will allow you to maximize the amount of effort you put into each piece of content you produce. It’s also important to remember that when it comes to repurposing content, quality matters more than quantity. So if you have an ebook that has been downloaded thousands of times, chances are it won’t be very effective at converting traffic into leads. However, if you have a short video that only gets viewed once, then it might actually be worth repurposing.

This is especially true if you’re trying to target a specific demographic. For example, if you’re selling weight loss supplements, you may find that a lot of people who buy your product aren’t interested in reading a lengthy ebook. Instead, they’d rather watch a quick video that explains how the supplement works.

In addition to making sure your new content isn’t duplicating what you already have on the internet, it’s also important to think about what kind of content would be most valuable to your readers. What types of articles or videos would they be most likely to share with others? How can you take what you already have and turn it into something new?

Figure out how you can take your existing content and repurpose it into things like: blog posts, website articles, newsletters, facebook, twitter, and more. This handy chart should help you:

A comparison of longform content vs short form content vs visual form content.

Republish vs. “Re-Optimize”: What Is the Difference?

When you publish the same piece or content type in multiple places, often after optimizing it for increased visibility, you are doing what we call “republishing.” Republishing is a great way to spread awareness about your brand, product, or service, but it doesn’t always work out well for your rankings.

In fact, there is evidence showing that publishing the same content in different places decreases your chances of getting better rankings. This is because Google considers each place where you published the same content as a separate URL. So, even though you might have optimized one version of the content to rank higher, Google won’t consider those optimizations when calculating your overall site performance.

The good news is that you don’t have to stop publishing the same content across channels. You just need to make sure you optimize it differently for each channel.

For example, let’s say you want to promote your blog posts. If you write a blog post, you could simply copy and paste the text into a social media message and make some alterations to the message so it’s suitable for social media consumption. Or, you could take some extra steps to ensure the best possible results. For example, you could add images to the message, use relevant hashtags, and include links to your original blog post.

If you do decide to republish the same content in different channels, here are a few things to keep in mind:

  • Optimize the content for each channel separately.
  • Make sure the content is unique.
  • Use the right keywords.
  • Use the right format for each channel, whether it’s TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, or Pinterest. Different platforms will require different formats, so it’s important to be mindful of the format of your content, so you can make sure it gets shared widely and correctly.
  • Make sure your content is targeted to the right audience.
  • Make sure that you include any platform-specific changes to that content for marketing purposes (this is different than tweaking the format).

By re-publishing your content, you could breathe new life into it compared to how it would exist otherwise.

Employ Affiliate Marketers to Spread the Word About Your Product or Service

Affiliate marketing is where a third party earns commissions by referring others to purchase a particular product or service. The affiliate marketer does not manufacture the product; rather, he/she promotes it. In return, the affiliate receives a percentage of each sale generated by his/her referrals.

The affiliate marketer must find merchants willing to pay him/her for every referral. Some affiliates are paid per sale, while others receive a flat fee regardless of how many sales occur.

There are several types of affiliate programs, including cost-per-sale, revenue sharing, pay per lead, and pay per registration. Cost-per-sale programs pay affiliates a set amount for each sale they generate. Revenue sharing programs give affiliates a portion of the merchant’s profits. Pay per lead programs pay affiliates for each customer they send to the merchant. Pay per registration programs pay affiliates a fixed amount for each customer they refer.

For example, if you were an SEO company selling an application on a SAAS (software as a service) model, you would want to find external third party affiliate marketers who would be interested in pursuing your affiliate marketing product. To do so, you could (hypothetically) offer them a percentage of each sale. If you sold the software at the $150 per month subscription, you could pay the affiliate marketer 50 percent of the sale, and 65 percent of the sale on recurring payments. Recurring payments are a situation where the customer stays subscribed to the service month after month.

The following explains, in a nutshell, how affiliate marketing actually works:

Chart that explains how affiliate marketing actually works, from the beginning to the end.

Use Social Media Marketing to Amplify Your Content

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is the process of leveraging social media platforms such as Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. for promoting brands, businesses, and events. SMM helps companies build relationships with customers and prospects online.

The term “social media” refers to all types of digital technologies used to connect people and organizations over the internet. These include social networking sites, microblogging platforms, mobile apps, video sharing sites, wikis, blogs, forums, and many others.

In the early days of social media, marketers used social media platforms to market brands. They posted messages about brand awareness, product announcements, and customer support. As social media became more mainstream, companies began using it as part of a broader marketing strategy. Today, many large organizations use social media platforms such as Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Facebook to reach out to current and prospective clients.

Social media marketing strategies vary based on the objectives you want to accomplish. For example, some companies focus primarily on building brand awareness while others concentrate on increasing sales.

There are many ways to approach social media marketing, including:

  • Creating great content
  • Using influencers
  • Running contests
  • Engaging with customers
  • Promoting your product/service
  • Generating leads
  • Increasing traffic
  • Building relationships
  • And much more…

Despite skepticism from some people, social media is not just a way to “waste time” on the Internet when you don’t have anything else to do during your work day. It’s a fantastic platform for engaging with other influencers, expanding the awareness of your brand, and spreading the word about your company website. Using these resources properly, it’s possible to increase your ROI (return on investment) tenfold.

Revisit Your Landing Pages and Optimize Them for Audience Retention

This is a bit different than before. Instead of optimizing them for ranking, we’re going to re-optimize landing pages for audience retention.

If you’ve already created a landing page for your digital marketing campaigns, are you sure prospects are going to return?

All marketing experts reiterate how landing pages are the nucleus of successful in-bound marketing. However, many marketers don’t realize that visitors who land on their site aren’t necessarily interested in buying now. In fact, some people even go away without making a purchase.

The problem is your landing page might not be very appealing at the moment. You could be missing out on potential customers because it doesn’t offer enough value. So, what do you do?

1. Make Sure Your Landing Page Is Mobile Friendly

Most consumers use mobile devices for online shopping. They want to find information quickly and easily. When they arrive at your site, they’re looking for something specific. A good landing page will help them find exactly what they’re looking to buy.

2. Include Calls To Action

When someone lands on your landing page, there should be clear calls to action. This means you need to provide links or buttons that let users know what to do next.

3. Add Value

Your landing page needs to add value to your business. If you can’t answer questions like “Why should I choose you?” or “What makes you better than your competitors?” then you’ll struggle to convert visitors into buyers.

4. Keep It Simple

Don’t make your landing page too complicated. People won’t stick around if they feel overwhelmed by all the options. Focus on one goal per page.

5. Use Visuals

People love visuals. They also tend to remember things better when presented visually. Images and videos are powerful tools for getting attention.

6. Be Consistent

People expect consistency. If you change your design every few months, you’ll lose credibility. Stick to a single look and feel throughout your entire campaign.

7. Test Different Designs

You may think you have an idea for a winning landing page layout. But, until you test it, you really don’t know.

8. Create Multiple Variations

You can create multiple variations of your landing page. For example, you could create a version for desktop browsers, another for tablets, and yet another for smartphones.

9. Track Conversions

It’s important to track conversions so you can see which versions of your landing page perform best. You can use Google Analytics to measure this data.

10. Measure Success

Once you start tracking conversions, you’ll get a better sense of whether your landing page is working as intended.

11. Improve Over Time

As you gain experience with your landing pages, you’ll learn more about what works and what doesn’t.

12. Don’t Forget About Email

Email is still one of the most effective ways to communicate with prospects. You can send emails directly from your website using services such as MailChimp.

By revisiting your landing pages on a regular basis, you avoid the situation where they might become stale. And, you can improve your SEO metrics in the process.

Digital Marketing Tactics Can Help Improve Your SEO Results

By concentrating on a few digital marketing tactics, you can use them to help improve your SEO results.

If you spread your efforts too thin without the right amount of effort needed to see such results, you might dilute your efforts too much.

This is why having a few digital marketing tactics in your arsenal is always a good idea. Once you have them and if there are some that you don’t really want to do on your own, you can farm the work out to somebody else.

When do you plan on implementing these digital marketing tactics in your next SEO campaign?

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The Different Content Types: How to Use Them in Your SEO Content Strategy https://iloveseo.com/seo/content-types/ Sat, 19 Nov 2022 03:19:03 +0000 https://iloveseo.com/?p=8275 The Different Content Types: How to Use Them in Your SEO Content Strategy on iloveseo.com by Brian Harnish

Focusing on the different content types you can use in your SEO content strategy is never an exercise to take lightly. This can mean the difference between success and failure...

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The Different Content Types: How to Use Them in Your SEO Content Strategy on iloveseo.com by Brian Harnish

Focusing on the different content types you can use in your SEO content strategy is never an exercise to take lightly. This can mean the difference between success and failure of your digital marketing efforts.

There are several types of content that you’re likely to encounter on your way through the web. Some of them are blog posts, some are eBooks, some are podcasts, and some are infographics. The key thing to remember is that each of the different content types has its own purpose and should be used appropriately.

Content marketing is essential for businesses who want to succeed online. In order to write effective content, however, you need to know what kind of content works best for your audience. But first, you have to know your audience well to be effective.

Without knowing your audience first, you won’t understand how to win them over with the right kind of content.

Content Types: How to Use Them to Your Advantage

There are many different types of content out there. From blog posts to infographics, videos, podcasts, etc. But how does each type of content help your brand stand out? What makes it unique? And how do you decide which ones to focus on?

In our opinion, there are three main types of content that organizations tend to use. They are:

  1. Product/service-based
  2. Brand awareness
  3. Content marketing

Each of these categories contains several subcategories, but let’s take a look at some examples of each category and see how you could apply them to your own work.

Product/Service-Based Content

This is the most common form of content that we all create. It can be anything from an infographic to a blog post or even a video. The key here is that this content should be about something that your audience cares about. If they don’t care about it, then why would you?

Brand Awareness Content

A lot of people think that brand awareness content is just for big brands like Coca Cola or Nike. However, it doesn’t have to be expensive to produce. In fact, it can be as simple as creating a short video with a catchy title. This type of content will get shared more than any other kind of content because it’s so easy to share.

Content for Content Marketing

This is probably the most important type of content that you need to create. It has become increasingly popular over the past few years. Why? Because it helps businesses build their online presence by providing information that their customers want.

If you’re looking to improve your website’s performance, you may be wondering if there’s a way to increase its traffic. There are many ways to boost your site’s visibility, including social media marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and paid advertising.

If you’ve been thinking about starting a podcast, you might be wondering where to start. Here are five tips to help you get started.

The following from MarketingCharts.com shows statistics for the different types of content used by B2C digital content marketers:

Statistics showing the top content types used by B2C marketers.

What Are the Different Content Types?

The different content types you can use for SEO include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Articles
  • Emails
  • Blog Posts
  • Guides
  • Case Studies
  • Ebooks
  • E-Courses
  • Video content
  • Email Marketing
  • Infographics

Diversifying and using a variety of content types in your SEO campaign effectively can lead to better results, rather than focusing on one single type of content.

Why Are Content Types Important?

Content marketing is one of those things that people either love or hate. There are probably many reasons why you might dislike it, but there are plenty of good reasons to like it as well. Content marketing is often seen as something that is done solely for the purpose of generating leads and sales. But what happens when we look beyond just lead generation and sales conversion? What about the fact that content marketing helps us build trust with our audience? Or how it can help us generate brand awareness?

The truth is, content marketing offers a lot of benefits. In fact, here are three of the most significant ones.

Differentiate Yourself From Competitors

Differentiation is key to success in today’s market. If you don’t stand out from the crowd, no one will find you. This is where content marketing really shines. When you publish unique pieces of content that are tailored specifically towards your target audience, you become that much more relevant to them. You are able to differentiate yourself from your competition because you aren’t simply trying to sell products to everyone. Instead, you offer value to your customers. This makes you stand out from your competitors and gives you the edge over them.

Build Relationships

When you write great content, you are building relationships. These relationships are built on trust and authenticity. Your audience trusts you because they know you care about them and understand their needs. They feel like you are someone they can connect with. And that connection creates loyalty. Loyalty drives repeat purchases. Repeat purchases mean more revenue for your business. So, as long as you continue to provide quality content, you will keep getting referrals and word of mouth.

Increase Traffic

You have heard this before, but it bears repeating. The best way to drive traffic to your website is through content marketing. People visit websites to read articles. Articles are written to educate, entertain, inform, inspire, or even make them laugh. Once people click on an article link, they are taken to another page. That page could be a blog post, a video, a product description, or anything else. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that they land on a new page. Then, they may decide to stay on that page and read more. Or they may leave immediately. Either way, they are now exposed to your brand.

Photo of a man using binoculars to spy on his competition.

How Do You Create Content?

There are two ways to go about creating content. One is to hire writers to produce content for you. The other is to use tools that allow you to easily create content. Which method should you choose? Well, if you want to save money, then hiring freelancers is the way to go. However, if you want to get the job done quickly and efficiently, then using a tool such as HubSpot’s Content Management System (CMS) is a great option!

HubSpot has created a CMS that allows users to create content without having to learn any code. With HubSpot’s CMS, you can add images, videos, text, links, and forms to your web pages. You can also embed these elements into social media posts and emails.

How do you create great content?

What Content Types Work Well?

There are different types of content that work well. Here are some examples:

Blog Posts – A blog post is a piece of writing that provides information. Blog posts are usually longer than shorter pieces of content. For example, a blog post might include a list of 10 tips for improving your sales process.

Here is an excellent example of a blog post on iloveseo.com: 14 Effective Techniques to Increase Your Organic Traffic in 2023.

Infographics – An infographic is a visual representation of data. Infographics are typically used to illustrate statistics, trends, and facts. For example, an infographic showing how many calories are in popular foods would be a good type of content to share on Pinterest.

Here is an example of an infographic that we like – SEO FAQs – a Guide.

Case Studies – A case study is a detailed account of an actual situation. They are often used by businesses to show what happened when certain actions were taken. For example, a company might use a case study to explain why its customer service team was so effective at resolving customer complaints.

The following is an example from the masters of case studies over at Hennessey.com. We love this one featuring their client Ben Crump.

Product Descriptions – A product description is a short piece of text that describes a specific item. For example, a product description for a pair of jeans might say “These jeans fit perfectly and look amazing.”

White Papers – A white paper is a document that explains a particular topic. For example, a white paper explaining the benefits of implementing a CRM system might include details like “CRMs help companies manage their customers better.”

Video Tutorials – A video tutorial is a series of short videos that teach someone something. For example, a video tutorial teaching someone how to build a website might include five separate videos. Each video includes a step-by-step explanation of each part of the process.

The following video tutorial over on AHREF’s YouTube Channel by Sam Oh is an excellent example of the perfect video tutorial.

Content Types Help With Scaling

Content creation becomes much easier and quicker when you have a variety and reusable structure for content, and repeatables that make it easy to scale.

For example, let’s take a look at how we might use a few different content types to build a blog post. We’ll start off with our headline, followed by some text body copy, images, and video. Then, we’ll add a callout box and embed a listicle. Finally, we’ll attach a PDF file and link to another article.

The process isn’t rocket science, but it does require some planning and forethought. It helps to think about what type of content you want to produce and whether there are certain elements you’ll reuse over and over again.

Once you’ve got those things figured out, you’re ready to go. Now, you just need to figure out where to put each piece of content.

Content Types Benefit Your Audience

Not everyone in your audience consumes your content in the same way, nor are they all able to be reached via the same channel. This means that you must diversify your content creation efforts across different formats and platforms.

In fact, according to HubSpot research, 89 percent of consumers are more likely to make another purchase after a positive customer service experience. In addition, 63 percent of consumers expect businesses to know their unique needs and expectations.

So, it stands to reason that you want to make sure that your audience gets access to your content no matter what format they choose. And there are many ways to do this.

Content Types Help With Audience Research

Content marketing is about creating content that resonates with your target audiences. But what do those people actually want to read about? How do they behave online? What are their interests? And most importantly, how do they respond to different kinds of content? These questions can provide insights into your audience and help you develop better strategies for reaching them.

Audience behavior changes over time. You might think that everyone wants the same thing, but it turns out that some people prefer reading articles while others like watching videos. Some people love short posts while others enjoy long ones. There’s no one size fits all approach to content creation, and the best way to find out what works best for your particular audience is to ask them.

The good news is that there are many ways to collect information about your audience without spending too much money. For example, you can use social media analytics tools to see where your followers spend their time online. You can also use surveys to gather feedback from real people, and you can even conduct focus groups to learn more about why certain topics resonate with your customers.

The general advice that we have is, to create content that’s better than your competitors. But, what does “better” mean? Sam Oh over at AHREFs provides some great advice in this video:

How to Use Different Types of Content

Content marketing experts often talk about the importance of having multiple forms of content on your site. You might say you already do, but what does it mean exactly? There are five main categories of content that you can use to meet specific needs and achieve certain objectives:

  • Text
  • Video
  • Audio
  • Graphics
  • Interactive

The text category includes everything from blog posts to product descriptions to FAQs. Videos include things like YouTube videos, webinars, live streams, and podcasts. Audio includes audio files such as MP3s, music playlists, voice memos, and audiobooks. Graphics include images, infographics, charts, diagrams, illustrations, and maps. And finally, interactive content includes quizzes, polls, surveys, games, applications, and simulations.

Each type of content has its own strengths and weaknesses. For example, video is great at capturing attention, but it doesn’t work well when you need to explain something complex or show a process step-by-step. On the other hand, graphics are great for explaining complicated concepts, but they don’t have nearly the impact of video. So, which should you use? It depends on your goals. If you just want to get visitors to click through to your website, then go ahead and use whatever makes sense for your business.

But if you want to build trust and credibility, then you need to consider using only high quality content that will benefit your readers.

The below includes some useful statistics called The Content Marketing Matrix that should help you figure out when and how to use the best content types, from Michael Brenner over at MarketingInsiderGroup.com:

The Content Marketing Matrix - a framework explaining how and when to use different types of content.

Different Types of Content Require Different Formats

Each type of content has its unique strengths and weaknesses. That means you need to know what kind of content will be most effective for your business before you start writing. In addition, you need to understand how each format works so you can write effectively. Here are three common mistakes that new writers make when trying to create content:

They try to force every piece of content to look the same. This is a mistake because not every piece of content requires the same format. A blog post may be written as an article, a podcast episode may be recorded as a transcript, and a white paper may be presented as a slide deck. Each format has its own advantages and disadvantages, so you need to choose the right one for each piece of content.

They forget to add links back to their websites. When you link to another page within your own website, this is called internal linking. Internal linking helps search engines crawl your pages more efficiently by giving them all the necessary information they need to index your content correctly. Links between two separate sites are known as external links. External links help drive traffic to your website, but they also increase the risk of getting penalized by Google. Make sure you always include links back to your website whenever possible.

They don’t provide enough context. Context is important because it tells the reader why you’re sharing this particular piece of information with them. Without context, people won’t know whether they should read your content or not. You can give context by including keywords throughout your content and expanding your content to include relevant details. Another way to do this is to tell a story about yourself or your company. Or, you could simply share some statistics about your industry.

Here are the different types of content that can help you win with your own SEO content strategy:

Articles

When it comes to promotional content, we file articles under this category. Really, though, any type of content will do for articles. The key thing to remember here is that you shouldn’t try to cram too much into these pieces. Instead, focus on providing value to your audience.

The main difference between articles and blog posts is that articles are more evergreen, although both content types can exist as evergreen content and timelier news-style content. But, we don’t want to blur the lines too much to be confusing. So, for the purposes of this post, we can consider article content to be 1. evergreen, 2. stands the test of time, 3. more scholarly and educational in nature, 4. longform content, 5. along the lines of long-form content that are around 1,100 words or more.

Blog posts can be 1. news-style posts, 2. personal posts, 3. address timely topics with a fresh angle, 4. more along the lines of short-form news-style posts that are around 1,000 words or less.

For the purposes of this post and our discussion, that’s how we will separate articles and blog posts into a desired quantity.

Emails

Email is one of the most versatile forms of digital content out there. Marketers can use it to send information about their products or services to customers, build relationships with leads, and even generate revenue.

The good news is that email marketing doesn’t require much effort. You don’t need to spend hours creating unique messages; instead, you can simply copy and paste some text into a template that already works well for your audience.

You can also automate many aspects of your campaigns. For example, you can set up autoresponders to automatically follow up with people who haven’t responded to your initial communication. This helps you keep track of what’s working and what isn’t, and adjust your strategy accordingly.

There are several different types of emails that you can send, each with varying purposes and audiences. Here are just a few examples:

Newsletters – These are regular communications that provide useful information to your followers. They’re great for sharing content like blog posts, videos, product announcements, etc., and can help you nurture existing relationships.

Webinars – These are live presentations where you talk directly to your audience over video chat. They’re effective because they allow you to interact with your audience, answer questions, and give instructions.

Sales emails – These are usually sent to people who’ve expressed interest in buying your products or signing up for a trial offer. They’re typically short and sweet and include a link to purchase or signup.

Promotional emails – These are used to promote new products or services. They’re often longer than other kinds of emails and may contain links to additional pages within your website.

In addition to the different types of emails, there are also different ways to create them. Some of the most common methods include:

Email blasts – Sending an email to multiple recipients at once. This is a popular way to share important information with a large group of people.

Landing page emails – Creating an email that directs users to a specific landing page on your site. This is a great way to encourage visitors to take action and convert.

Autoresponder series – Using an automated sequence of emails to get people to respond to certain actions. For example, if someone signs up for your newsletter, you could send them a welcome email, then another email every day until they confirm their subscription.

Welcome emails – A simple email that welcomes new subscribers to your list. It’s a great way to start building trust and credibility with potential clients.

Thank you emails – An email thanking people for taking action on something you offered them. This is a great opportunity to remind people why it was beneficial for them to do so.

Event reminder emails – Sending out reminders about events that are coming up. This is a great time-saving tool when planning big events.

Reminder emails – Sending out reminders to people who have not taken action after receiving previous emails. This is a great method to encourage people to complete tasks.

Newsletter drip campaign – Sending out one email per week for a month. This gives people a chance to read through all the emails before deciding whether or not to open the next one.

Social media post drip campaign – Sending out one tweet or Facebook status update per day for a week. This encourages people to check back daily to see what’s new.

Blogging schedule – Setting aside a certain amount of time each day to write blog posts. This helps you stay consistent and focused.

Product announcement emails – Sending out an email announcing a new product or service. This is a great strategy for getting more exposure for your business.

Special offers – Sending out special deals to customers who have bought from you recently. This is a great marketing tactic to keep people interested in your brand.

The following statistics from Hubspot shows estimated e-mail marketing revenue worldwide from 2020 to 2027, in billions of U.S. dollars.

Clearly, there is a significant amount of revenue to be generated by email marketing, even this late in the game.

Statistics showing the estimated rise in email marketing revenue from 2020 through 2027.

Blog Posts

For the purposes of our discussion, we differentiate articles from blog posts. In this case, blog posts refer to types of posts that are more timely and relevant than articles might be. Articles are more comprehensive, scholarly, and educational deep dives into your topic than might otherwise happen.

Blog posts are more timely, news worthy style posts that are less than 1,100 words in length. Although these are still substantial and relevant posts for your blog, they are used to promote news, product offers, and other types of trending topics that are not part of the educational and scholarly articles curriculum.

Blogs are one of the best ways to build trust and authority online. They allow you to explain how you work, who you are, and what makes you different. In fact, according to HubSpot, blogging is the single biggest driver of leads and sales. But it doesn’t matter whether you write about your industry, your niche, or something completely unrelated; the important thing is that you’re writing. And you’re doing it consistently.

There are several types of blog posts, but the more popular include: How To posts, Lists, and Questions. Each type is designed to appeal to a specific audience. For example, a How To blog post might teach readers how to perform a task such as installing WordPress or creating a Facebook ad campaign. A List blog post could show readers how to choose the perfect gift for someone. Or a Question blog post could ask readers how they make decisions and how they approach problems.

Still not convinced that focusing on blog posts are correct for your business? The following statistics from financesonline.com should change your mind:

Statistics showing some key blogging stats that you should know for 2022.

Guides

Guides are one of the most effective forms of content marketing because they provide comprehensive coverage of a specific topic. They can be written in a variety of formats, including blogs, infographics, videos, podcasts, ebooks, whitepapers, etc., and they can cover almost anything under the sun.

But what makes a guide different from other types of content is how it builds upon itself. A good guide typically includes several distinct sections that serve different purposes.

For example, a guide about how to buy a car might include sections like “What type of car do I want?,” “Where should I look for cars?,” “How much does it cost?,” “Which dealer should I go to?,” “How do I finance my purchase?,” and “Do I qualify for financing?”.

Each section focuses on a different aspect of buying a car, and each section provides information that helps readers make decisions about the next step.

A Guide is an excellent way to educate your target market with practical advice and tips. It’s also a great way to increase traffic to your website by providing valuable information that will help them solve their problem.

Case Studies

Case studies are one way you can demonstrate your expertise and experience to potential clients. They provide a great opportunity to show off your knowledge and skills while demonstrating why you’re qualified to help solve problems. In addition, case studies can be used to prove ROI and justify investment decisions.

The best case studies include real examples of the client’s success. This helps illustrate the value of your solution and provides evidence that it works well in practice. You’ll want to make sure your case studies are thorough and cover everything you did to solve the issue and achieve the desired outcome.

The following is yet another excellent example case study from Hennessey Digital. This time, featuring the Simmrin Law Group. Notice how Hennessey Digital talks about their strategy, solutions, and results in a detailed manner.

Case study from Hennessey Digital showing how they increased rankings and performance for The Simmrin Law Group.

Here are some tips to ensure you write compelling case studies:

Start with the Problem

Start by explaining the problem your client faced. Why did they need your help? What were their goals? How did they approach solving the problem?

Tell Your Story

Next, describe the process you went through to find a solution. Who else was involved? What happened next? Did you use data analysis? If so, what tools did you use?

Show Results

Finally, explain the impact your work had on the client. Was there a measurable improvement in performance? Better conversion rates? Higher revenue? Lower costs?

Include Lessons Learned

Ebooks

Instead of an in-depth, blog post-based guide like we discussed above, some content marketers turn their expertise into an ebook. This type of content doesn’t require much writing; it just requires a lot of editing. If you’re looking for a way to generate leads without having to write a single word, consider turning your expertise into an ebook.

As mentioned earlier, there are several ways to go about creating an ebook. You can either hire someone else to do it for you, or you can take the plunge yourself. Either way, here are some tips to help you succeed:

Choose Your Platform

There are plenty of options out there for turning your expertise into an eBook. Some people prefer to use platforms such as Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), while others opt for Microsoft Word or Adobe InDesign. Whichever method you choose, make sure you pick a format that works best for your audience. For example, if you’re targeting small businesses, you might want to stick with KDP because it allows you to offer free samples. On the flip side, if you’re targeting consumers, you’ll probably want to go with something like Microsoft Word.

Create A Table Of Contents

The table of contents is arguably the most important part of any book. Without one, readers won’t know what sections they should read next. To avoid losing potential customers, make sure that your TOC includes the following information:

– An overview of the entire book

– A list of chapters

– A summary at the end

Write Chapters That Are Unique

If you’ve ever tried to create an outline for a book, you know how difficult it can be to come up with ideas for each chapter. It’s even harder to think of unique topics for every chapter. Instead, try brainstorming ideas for only a few chapters. Then, narrow down those ideas based on which ones seem most relevant to your target market.

Add Images And Graphics

Images and graphics add personality to your content. They also provide visual interest. When choosing images, keep in mind that the more detailed the image, the better. The same goes for graphics. Try to include both high quality photos and illustrations.

Proofread Before Publishing

If you publish your ebook online, chances are good that you’ll need to proofread before publishing. Make sure that all spelling errors are corrected, and that grammar mistakes aren’t too glaring.

Promote Your Book

Once you’ve published your ebook, don’t forget to promote it! There are many different ways to get the word out. Here are three examples:

– Post links to your ebook on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

– Send emails to your email database.

– Offer discounts to your newsletter subscribers.

Keep Up With Updates

Ebooks are updated regularly. If you want to stay competitive, make sure that you update yours at least once per year.

This author, Brian Harnish, is the author of a number of ebooks about SEO. In fact, he wrote the 60-page Ultimate SEO Audit Template that you can see on this website.

Screenshot of the landing page for the Ultimate SEO Audit Template from Brian Harnish.

E-Courses

A course is a digital learning experience that usually includes text, video, interactive elements, and assessments. They are typically delivered online via desktop computers, mobile devices, tablets, or TVs. Courses are often used to teach people about topics like how to code, how to use social media, how to manage finances, etc.

E-courses are becoming increasingly popular because they allow learners to learn at their own pace without being tied down to a classroom environment. This makes it easier for busy professionals to complete courses while still getting work done.

How Do You Choose E-Course Platforms?

There are several e-course platforms available today. Each platform has its pros and cons, so it’s important to do some research before making a decision. Below are some things to consider when selecting an e-course platform:

Course Length

Most e-courses are somewhere between 10-20 hours long, depending on the topic. However, longer courses are possible if needed.

Learning Style

Some people prefer to learn through reading, others through watching videos, and yet others by doing hands-on activities. Determine what type of learner your audience is, then select an e-course platform accordingly.

Assessments

You may have to create multiple tests throughout the course to ensure that your students are learning properly. Be sure to choose an assessment tool that will help you determine whether or not they are learning correctly.

Curriculum

Some e-course platforms offer pre-made curricula. Others require you to build your own curriculum from scratch. Decide which option works best for you.

Support

Most e-course platforms offer support either through live chat, phone calls, or email. Some even offer free trial periods where you can try them out first.

Pricing

Pricing varies depending on the e-course platform you decide to go with. It’s always worth checking out the pricing plans offered by each platform.

Social Media Integration

Many e-course platforms integrate social media into their courses. For example, you might be able to share your progress with friends and family using these platforms.

Mobile App

Many e-course platforms also provide apps for both iOS and Android users. These apps let you access your course content anywhere you have internet access.

Other Features

Other features include quizzes, forums, and more. You should check out each platform’s website to see what other features they offer.

The following statistics from upskillwise.com show that, clearly, online learning is a booming industry with a lot of growth potential for the right instructors.

Statistics showing the rise of the online learning industry.

Video Content

Video content is one of those things that seems like a no brainer. You see videos everywhere – on TV, online, in email campaigns, etc. But how do you use it effectively? Here are some tips to help you maximize your efforts.

Know Your Audience

Who is your target market? What are their interests? How much time do they spend looking for information online? Do they prefer watching videos over reading text? If you don’t know your audience well enough, you’ll never reach them.

Create Videos For Them

If you want people to watch your videos, you need to give them what they’re looking for. This could mean creating educational videos about topics related to your industry, or product demos. Or maybe you’d rather make entertaining videos that entertain your audience. Whatever you decide to do, keep your audience in mind. They’re the ones that matter most.

Make Sure Your Content Is Relevant

What makes a great video? A lot of times, it’s something that’s relevant to your audience. Maybe it’s a funny joke, or a helpful tip. Whatever it is, think about why someone might want to watch it. Then, make sure your content addresses that issue. If you’re trying to educate your audience, don’t just talk about general facts. Give specific examples to illustrate your points. And remember, if you’re doing a product demo, make sure you show off your product. People love seeing things in action.

Videos are another great way to educate your audience. Videos can be created in many different formats including short clips, full length movies, and animated GIFs.

In fact, according to Hubspot, 81 percent of video marketers report that using video in their marketing strategy is responsible for a direct and positive impact on sales:

Statistics showing the percentage of marketers who have increased their leads by using video in their marketing campaigns.

Create High Quality Videos

Here are some tips for creating high quality videos:

Research

Before starting a video project, you need to know who your target audience is. What types of videos would they find interesting? What kinds of information would they want is one of the most effective ways to educate your audience. Videos are easy to consume and digest, and they tend to hold attention much better than written content.

Consider Your Audience

Video is one of the most effective ways to communicate information. Video content allows you to show off your personality and expertise, as well as demonstrate how something works. Videos also allow you to create a personal connection with your audience.

Videos are great for creating tutorials, demos, product reviews, and much more. The following types of videos are commonly used in SEO content marketing:

Think About Your Core Message

When you create a video, you want your video’s focus to be about the core message of your video. Are you educating your client? Or are you selling something? Or, even better: are you showing them about a special way to use your product or service? In any event, you want to make sure that you focus on your core message in your video and make sure that you deliver on what you promised the client when selling your video.

Why Video Marketing Is Important

Videos are great for video marketing and are extremely powerful. In fact, according to HubSpot, video marketing generates over 40% of all traffic. That’s why we created this guide to show you how to create high quality video content that will get results.

If you’re looking to grow your business, you need to start thinking about video content. Video content is one of the most effective ways to increase brand awareness and is one of the most effective forms of content marketing. In fact, according to HubSpot, 80% of consumers watch videos on YouTube every day. That’s why it’s essential to create high quality videos that engage viewers.

If you’re looking for ways to improve your video content strategy, here are a few tips to get started:

Create Videos That are Of High Quality – Create your concept and script before you get in front of the camera. Also, use a teleprompter. There are plenty of cheaper teleprompters that are available on Amazon. This will help you stick to the script and look at the camera while you are speaking.

Keep Your Video Short – Creating videos that are super long is acceptable for webinars. But, on YouTube or TikTok, unless you are doing a webinar, you want to keep your video generally short. Training video should be around 1 to 4 minutes. If you have significant ground to cover in your videos, keeping them in smaller, bite-sized chunks is preferable compared to creating one long video.

Video Script: Ensure that your message remains clear. The script should be driving nearly everything else in your video. It drives its visual content, call-to-action, and length. This is why having an appropriate and approved video script is critical to a successful video. And the best scripts include a conversational, to the point, and authentic tone of voice. The story should be something that is concise, clear, but also engaging. It should also be focused on the action that you want your viewers to take at the end.

Video Content: This content should match and support the script. If you’re talking about SEO, make sure that your content matches the topics discussed in the script. Don’t ramble, and try not to veer off-topic unless it is something that is closely related to what you’re talking about. If you are utilizing stock videography, select the most natural and relevant scenes you can find that support your content. Don’t use overly staged videos, and don’t use cliches.

Video Format: Be sure to match the overall format of your channel. Also, you want to make sure that you match the requirements of the social networks you have chosen to distribute your video to. For example, TikTok uses a 9:16 vertical format aspect ratio. The aspect ratio refers to the physical dimensions of your video. Traditional widescreen video is 16:9, or 16×9. Traditional square footage is usually in a 4:3 aspect ratio. Both of these formats have their benefits and drawbacks, so it pays to consider them before you ever start shooting. Make sure that you include the right formats for your particular situation and distribution channel. For example, don’t shoot a 4:3 video and post it to TikTok’s 9:16 format.

When it comes to creating videos, the following stats from Wyzowl show that 74 percent of videos that marketers create are explainer videos. These are videos that take a particular topic and do a deep dive to explain it all, from basic to advanced.

Statistics that show the different purposes that content serves for percentages of marketers.

Infographics

Infographics are one of the best ways to communicate information quickly, visually, and effectively. They help people understand complex topics, such as health care reform, education policy, and technology trends, in an engaging way. And since infographics are usually long and narrow, they’re very popular on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

Infographics are one of the best ways to bring data into a story. They make it easier for people to understand complex information quickly and easily. Plus, infographics are visually appealing, making them ideal for sharing via social media.

There are many tools out there that can help you design an effective infographic. One such tool is Piktochart, which allows you to build infographics without coding knowledge. You simply drag and drop elements onto the canvas, add text, images, arrows, shapes, charts, etc., and publish directly to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and even email.

The Type of Content You Use Depends on Your Goals

Whether you are trying to penetrate new markets, or share relevant information with your existing audience, the type of content you choose depends on the goals that you want to accomplish.

But, by working to ensure that your content is of the highest quality, and that you include attractive visuals, along with ensuring the proper optimizations are in place, the type of content you choose can have a significant impact on your SEO campaign.

When do you plan on creating your next piece of amazing content for your audience?

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