To maximize visibility in organic search results for industry terms, brands must increase ‘domain authority’ with Google. This is often achieved by securing a meaningful quantity of inbound links from high quality websites trusted by Google. While SEO companies often rely on begging for or buying links for clients, a strategic approach can be far more effective: leveraging public relations best practices. The following article outlines best practices for securing both quantity and quality inbound links from local business directories, publications, and industry websites.

Here are 20 effective ways to build links to a website recommended to achieve higher rankings and organic traffic to your website.
1. Conduct Competitive Analysis: Research competitors’ link profiles and reach out to sites linking to them that may also be relevant for your site. Tools like Semrush and BuzzStream can help identify link opportunities with or without competitive information.
2. Promote Existing Quality Content: Promote your new content across social media, email, and other channels to increase natural shares and links. Make content highly shareable.
3. Leverage Unlinked Brand Mentions: Audit the web for mentions of your brand that don’t include a link and reach out to ask for a link to be added to the mention. This article provides a helpful overview. Brand24 is a helpful brand monitoring tool.
4. Submit to Directories: Submit your website to reputable, niche-specific directories. Be cautious with this approach, as overusing directories, especially low-quality ones, can have a negative impact on your SEO. Here is a list of the top 50 free business directories as a starting point.
5. Explore Sponsorships: Sponsor industry events, publications, or other high-authority sites relevant to your audience in exchange for a link.
6. Monitor Your Backlinks: Regularly monitor your backlink profile to ensure that links are of high quality and that there is no toxic or spammy links. Tools like Google Search Console and Ahrefs can help with this.
7. Reclaim Old/Dead Links: Reach out to sites that used to link to your site but no longer do, and politely ask them to reinstate the link or add a new one. Secondarily, identify broken links on industry websites pointing to 404 pages and offer to replace them with one of your relevant pages. Use tools like Ahrefs to identify broken links.
8. Participate in Online Communities: Engage in relevant online communities, forums, and discussion platforms. Provide helpful answers and insights, and when appropriate, link to your website as a source of additional information.
9. Build out a Resource Page: Identify websites that have resource pages related to your niche. Reach out to the website owners and suggest adding your content or website as a valuable resource.
10. Utilize Giveaways & Contests: Running competitions and giveaways that encourage links as part of the entries.
11. Collaborate with Influencers: Partner with influencers or bloggers in your industry for collaborations or features. Influencers often have a wide reach and can help you gain exposure and backlinks.
12. Create High-Quality Content: The foundation of any successful link-building strategy is creating valuable, informative, and engaging content. When you publish high-quality content, other websites are more likely to link to it naturally.
13. Create Linkable Assets: Develop valuable resources, such as research studies, calculators, ebooks, or tools that are relevant to your niche. Create helpful, resource-style posts with lists of links to other useful sites and resources. Make sure to include a brief description for each link. Promote these assets to gain natural backlinks.
14. Create Infographics and Visual Content: Visual content like infographics can be highly shareable. Create visually appealing and informative infographics and share them on your website. Encourage others to use it and link back to them.
15. Secure Guest Blogging Opportunities: Reach out to other blogs and websites in your industry to contribute guest posts that include links back to your site. Focus on high-quality sites with good domain authority.
16. Secure Links via Email Outreach: Identify websites or influencers in your niche and send them personalized outreach emails. Explain why your content or website would be valuable to their audience and request a link.
17. Leverage Your Network: Build relationships with others in your industry, through social media, events, etc. and swap links where relevant.
18. Create Ego Bait: Mention influential people, websites, or products in your content and then let them know about it. They may share or link to your content to showcase their inclusion.
19. Utilize Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI): Create accounts with ChatGPT and Bard for researching links, building databases, outreach scripts and compelling, linkable content.
20. Tap PR: leverage public relations activities, including press release distribution, speaking at industry events, syndicating articles on industry websites and pitching the media as a subject matter expert via free platforms including HARO and Qwoted, although there are additional options available.

Once the above strategies are consistently implemented over time, your company will see an increase in domain authority, resulting in higher rankings, increased traffic and ultimately, sales. The key is to focus on building genuine, editorial-style links from quality sites, not just spamming low-quality directories. Vary your link building strategies over time and monitor success with link tracking tools. Regardless of your level of marketing savvy, development resources or budget, these time-proven strategies will give you an edge over your competitors over time.

The post Build Domain Authority and Search Engine Rankings via These 20 Effective Link Development Strategies appeared first on SEMpdx.

For the past twenty years, websites have provided a critical touch point for prospects and customers. Despite the increased popularity of social media platforms and more recently, ChatGPT, websites are still an important component of an online presence and marketing mix. As such, it’s essential that your website not only provides relevant information but also offers a seamless and engaging user experience. If you’re considering a website redesign, it’s a significant step that requires careful planning and execution. In this article, we’ll explore the key considerations and best practices to ensure a successful website redesign.

Define Your Goals and Objectives
Too many times in the past, I’ve discussed website redesigns with clients that had no clear vision or objective for the new site (other than I don’t like the current site, or it seems dated). Before you embark on a website redesign, it’s crucial to outline your goals and objectives. What do you aim to achieve with the redesign? Are you looking to enhance user experience, boost conversion rates, improve SEO, or align with current design trends? By clearly defining your objectives, you’ll have a solid foundation to guide the entire process. Bonus tip: make sure every page has a relevant call-to-action (CTA) to maximize conversions.

Set a Realistic Timeline
Allow plenty of time for the redesign – at least 2-3 months for a small business site. Building in time for planning, design iterations, development, testing, content migration, and launch is essential. Trying to redesign a site too quickly can result in key steps being skipped. While redesigns often move more quickly than new websites due to existing content and structure, a refresh provides an opportunity to leap ahead of competition, so pad timelines for adequate planning, inevitable delays and surprises.

Audit Your Existing Site and Create a New Sitemap
Thoroughly evaluate your current website before making changes. Look at site architecture, navigation, page load speeds, forms, product/service pages, and more. Identify what’s working well and what needs improvement. Create a new sitemap reflecting how you want users to navigate and find information on the redesigned site. Ensure the information architecture and navigation schemes make sense. Bonus tip: ensure you’ve built in email capture (via a popup window and/or include an email signup in the footer of your website template to build your email list). In the ‘cookieless’ age, this is particularly important.

Know Your Audience
Understanding your target audience is paramount. Conduct user research, gather feedback, and analyze user behavior on your current site. Knowing your audience’s preferences and pain points will help you tailor the new website to their needs, resulting in a more engaging and satisfying experience. I recommend developing customer personas (typically three to five for an optimal balance between accuracy and simplicity).

Revisit or Create a Content Strategy
Content is king, and a website redesign is an ideal time to review and enhance your content strategy. Identify which content is still relevant and which should be updated or removed. Ensure your content aligns with your brand and resonates with your audience. A well-structured content plan will contribute to a successful redesign. The content should be tailored to your goals. Add, revise, or remove copy to enhance SEO, user experience, and conversions. Create new page titles, meta descriptions, alt text, and calls to action. The highest performing SEO-friendly content includes FAQs and a blog. Ensure all new content is truly unique (both across the website and across the Internet). Bonus tip: create ‘linkable’ content (i.e., podcasts, webinars, white papers, calculators) to boost domain authority and credibility with Google.

Select a Content Management System
Depending on your industry, company size, budget and objectives, selecting a platform can be tricky. The more robust the CMS, the more limiting it in terms of customization and site speed. The slower the website is, the less Google favors the site as it creates a lackluster user experience. WordPress is one of the most popular, SEO-friendly and scalable platforms on the web today and is a great starting point for small and mid-sized businesses, although it is also used by global corporations.

Revise Information Architecture
Information architecture (IA) plays a vital role in the user experience. Organize content logically, create user-friendly navigation menus, and ensure that visitors can easily find what they’re looking for. A clear IA simplifies the user journey and minimizes frustration. Hire UX experts, benchmark against competitors and solicit input from heads of key departments to minimize revisions down the road.

Address User Interface and User Experience (UI/UX)
The website’s UI/UX should be a top priority. A well-designed user interface should be aesthetically pleasing, but it should also be intuitive and easy to navigate. UX considerations should focus on making the user’s journey as smooth and enjoyable as possible. A good user experience translates to better rankings in search as well. Bonus tip: consider incorporating a chatbot to streamline sales and customer service.

Enhance Visual Design
A visual refresh can modernize the look and feel of the site. Explore new color schemes, fonts, layouts, and branding elements. Balance aesthetics with usability. Research emerging colors, technology and messaging to ensure the visual language feels fresh, current and relevant.

Address Accessibility
Ensure that your website is accessible to all users, including those with disabilities. Comply with web accessibility standards like WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines). This not only expands your audience but also ensures you meet legal requirements in some jurisdictions. An additional benefit: Google and other search engines are “disabled” because they are blind, so following best practices for compliance benefits organic search visibility.

Optimize for Mobile
In an era where mobile devices dominate web traffic, mobile responsiveness is non-negotiable. Most of the website traffic today originates from mobile devices. Your website must function seamlessly on various screen sizes and devices. A responsive design ensures that your site adapts to the user’s screen, providing a consistent and user-friendly experience. Mobile-optimized sites are also favored in Google rankings.

Optimize for Organic Search
Maintaining or improving your search engine ranking is essential. Carry out comprehensive keyword research, ensure that your site’s structure is SEO-friendly, and implement search engine optimization (SEO) best practices. This includes optimizing images, creating unique and valuable content, and improving page load times. Additional code-centric elements for improved SEO include robots text, XML sitemap and schema markup. Most importantly, ensure keywords are in each page title tag (to boost visibility in search results) and the meta description tags are compelling (to maximize clicks).

Optimize for Social Media
Due to the proliferation of social media, don’t forget to integrate social elements into the website. The best place to start is to incorporate links (that open in new tabs) to the big seven social platforms (YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok and X/Twitter). Ensure all pages of the site are sharable to the two to three most popular social platforms to maximize citations and traffic. Bonus tip: integrate a social media feed (typically Instagram or X/Twitter) into the footer of the website template (or select pages) to send Google a signal that the site is updated regularly.

Focus on Page Speed
A fast-loading website is essential for user satisfaction and SEO ranking. Compress images, utilize browser caching, and employ content delivery networks (CDNs) to optimize page load times. Test regularly and optimize images, scripts, caches, servers, and code to improve load times. Http/2 and a content delivery network can also boost speed. Bonus tip: use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to maximize site speed.

Develop a URL Migration Strategy
To retain traffic and search ranking, set up 301 redirects from old to new URLs for all top pages. Use a crawler to identify broken links or orphaned pages. Migrate content systematically. To capture any orphaned pages, ensure a custom 404 error page is within a branded template and directs humans (and search engine spiders) back into the new site structure. Bonus tip: develop a link reclamation strategy, to identify orphaned (404 error) links on third-party websites and reach out to suggest an updated link to minimize negative impact on domain authority.

Incorporate Testing and Quality Assurance
Thoroughly test your redesigned website before launch. Check for broken links, functionality issues, and inconsistencies. Perform usability testing with real users to identify any potential roadblocks and gather feedback for improvements.

Validate Security Measures
Website security is a paramount concern. Implement security protocols to protect against cyber threats, including SSL certificates, firewall protection, and regular updates to your content management system (CMS).

Create a Backup and Recovery Process
Regularly back up your website to prevent data loss in case of a mishap. Have a recovery plan in place so that you can quickly restore your website if necessary. Ideally, back up the existing site during development and maintain it for reference for as long as possible, as context is important, even long after launch.

Create a Launch Plan
Promote a redesign launch via social media, email, press releases, and other channels. Announce key features and be clear if there are changes to site navigation. Monitor analytics closely after launch. The most important aspect of a site launch includes thorough QA testing before launch, validating SEO elements are completed and the site can handle traffic spikes if marketing does its job too well.

Conclusion
Redesigning a website is a multifaceted process that involves strategic planning and execution. It’s an opportunity to improve user experience, align with modern design trends, and enhance your online presence. By considering the factors outlined in this article and adhering to best practices, you’ll be well-equipped to achieve a successful website redesign that meets your objectives and exceeds user expectations. If you have any questions about this article or would like help navigating your website design, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or visit my networking group, pdxMindShare.

The post Website Redesign Best Practices: The Ultimate Guide for 2024 appeared first on SEMpdx.

Title: Digital Marketing Playbook for B2B Brands

Description:

In this session we tackle the challenges that come with running lead-gen campaigns for B2B Brands. We’ll help set you up for success with these tried-and-true strategies and tactics

The post Dave Roth Engage 2023 Session Description appeared first on SEMpdx.

Title: Using Automated Articles Successfully: Is it Possible?

Description:

Carolyn will walk the audience through a case study that takes a detailed look at the capabilities of automated journalism, news story requirements, and options for implementation.

The post Carolyn Shelby Engage 2023 Session Description appeared first on SEMpdx.

Title: Creating Actionable SEO Deliverables

Description:

Every day we are documenting and writing up JIRA tickets, talking with developers or clients, sending emails, submitting bugs, creating SEO recommendations, and much more. So, what do business owners, clients, product teams and dev teams care about? Dave walks through his years of working in the agency, in-house and consulting spaces to help you get the most out of your time spent digging and doing various explainers and writeups.

The post Dave Rohrer Engage 2023 Session Description appeared first on SEMpdx.

Title: The Future is Now – Responding to Google’s AI Changes with SEO

Description:

Google’s changes in 2023 have been fast and furious, and the launch and evolution of interactive, AI-generated search results has everyone nervous and wondering how their organic traffic will be impacted.

CEO & Founder of MobileMoxie, Cindy Krum has a proven track record of anticipating and predicting changes from Google, and she will talk us through what to expect next, and how smart SEO’s can plan for it. Bard is Google’s AI system that will now push the number one organic rankings down, further in the search results.

Learn how great SEOs can maintain or even gain visibility in search results that are crowded with Google’s new AI content. Drive rankings by embracing new SEO strategies, tactics and content formats by understanding the impact of language models that Google uses to process information, like BERT and MUM, and how they impact SEO and Search Generated Experiences (SGE). This keynote will walk you through what to expect, and how you can plan for the evolution and future of search.

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Title: GPT-Amped B2B & B2B2C Dossier Marketing: Automated LinkedIn/Sales Navigator Hacks to Build Brands & Crush Conversion

Description:

Build & run an SEO training program at your organization (or for your clients). Here’s the twist: Your audience will acLinkedin’s SalesNavigator is arguably one of the most powerful marketing tools on earth for converting both business and personal-use targets. Combined with GPT4, rad tools including PhantomBuster, Dux-Soup, and others, highly tuned target audiences, will self-discover your soft, NON-spammy, highly automated networking engagement tactics, request connection…and become yours for the taking. Conversions inevitably follow.

Attendees will learn how to

-Research integrated paid & organic (mind-melting) psychographic targeting to form lists of known individuals and companies (dossiers)

-Use GPT4 to quickly focus and expand audience research by methods previously not feasible -Insane automation techniques respectfully wielded, so powerful they’re dangerous in the hands of unscrupulous marketers

-Create a steady, predictable flow of new, focused inbound connection requests from audience members

-Shepard individual audience members towards both B2B and B2C conversions, from long cycle lead gen to non-business consumer conversions

-Build indelible brand identity to enhance conversions

-Integrate marketing tactics, organic, paid, and intra-channel

-Remain compliant to CCPA, GDPR, & emergent privacy concerns

-Vertical PR applications, which have resulted in many a link built, article placed, news sourcing, interviews accomplished, earned media, podcast appearances, and more.

Why mess around with the same old moderately effective techniques? Instead, gain market-busting results targeting lists of known humans. We have tons of data to document selling many millions, HR recruitment, media placement, and other uses. I’ll show everything and attendees will leave with powerful new weapons to crush B2B, B2C, & B2B2C marketing.

The post Marty Weintraub Engage 2023 Session Description appeared first on SEMpdx.

Title: Fighting For Attention: Running Internal SEO Training Programs

Description:

Build & run an SEO training program at your organization (or for your clients). Here’s the twist: Your audience will actually use it.

The post Ian Lurie Engage 2023 Session Description appeared first on SEMpdx.

Title: SGE, New Features in Google Search & How to Respond.

Description:

Learn the latest developments related to Google’s SGE (Search Generative Experience), Bing Chat, ChatGPT and other prominent AI tools that have the potential to change search and SEO forever. See how you can adapt your site’s strategy to ensure maximum visibility and accuracy in AI responses, plus how to leverage AI tools to create efficiencies in your SEO process.

The post Lily Ray Engage 2023 Session Description appeared first on SEMpdx.

I first discovered the power of incorporating keywords into websites to boost rankings in 1996. By adding a desirable keyword into the META keyword tag and repeating it frequently in the text, I ranked clients’ websites on popular search engines like WebCrawler and Lycos. It wasn’t simple however, as I was optimizing client websites for 14 search engines, which all had differing algorithms. While much has changed since Google introduced PageRank, many of the fundamentals I refined in the 90s still apply.

I originally shared my philosophy on search engine optimization (SEO) a decade ago with The 3 C’s of SEO. In my article, I identified three primary areas of focus for successful SEO: content, code and credibility. While social media has influenced Google’s algorithm, the 3 C’s still apply today. In this article, I will outline the most common (and timeless) mistakes and misconceptions about SEO.

Content
One of the most formidable challenges with SEO is the creation of fresh, unique, relevant and compelling content. Creating copy, photography, infographics, video or other forms of content is both time-consuming and costly. Over the past few years, Google has dedicated substantial time improving the algorithm’s understanding of natural language. With the BERT update in 2019, context came into play, and marketers were presented with another challenge: supporting search intent. As Google’s search algorithm develops and matures, marketers make a few common mistakes when attempting SEO without adult supervision, most of which centers around quality, relevance, and search intent.

For starters, marketers often mistake the value of quantity vs. quality of content. Nowadays, Google has thousands of page graders who manually review individual web pages, and their major criteria includes E-A-T which stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. In short, Google wants to ensure that websites within their search engine provide up-to-date, factual information that users can trust. Google places strict responsibility on pages that offer medical information, financial information, or other highly impactful topics. These pages are aptly referred to as “Your Money or Your Life” pages because the information could significantly affect one’s livelihood, happiness, financial situation, or safety. Ecommerce sites are included within this category as a result of customers imputing credit card information. Thus, marketers should avoid generic, unprofessional or generally low-quality content, which includes outdated information, short blog posts, fact-less articles or poor-quality images and video.

When creating new content for a website, too many marketers fail to keep voice search in mind. While voice search can be performed through voice assistants such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home, the majority of voice searches are now completed through smartphones using Siri and Google Assistant. Not only are queries more informal and conversational, but they also tend to be phrased in the form of an actual question instead of 3-5 topical keywords. A related oversight by some marketers is the failure to localize content for different countries, languages or business locations. The internet is both global and local and Google rewards brands that understand this fact.

Even if marketers can create truly compelling content, some are still working off outdated strategies. The biggest mistake website content can make is not supporting search intent. If the information on your page does not provide a valuable resource to what a searcher needs, Google will never offer your site to their users. How can we begin to understand search intent? Break down queries and target keywords to construct your content. Does the searcher need an answer to a question? Is the searcher looking to do research or make a purchase? Developing your content to address the answers will help prove that your website will provide the best possible support to searchers which gets rewarded with better rankings.

Technical/Code
Google cares a great deal about the technical makeup and performance of websites which involves site speed, schema markup, and user experience. Content Management Systems (CMS) such as WordPress and Shopify are incredible tools that allow novice website owners to create complex and personalized websites without coding knowledge or experience. Even so, there are a handful of technical strategies to consider, and to forego any could significantly impact a website’s visibility. First and foremost, the code must be clean, fast, and responsive. Second, a website should always utilize some form of schema markup which not only provides a search engine with coded information about elements on a page, but it qualifies your website to show in Google’s Rich Results which means more attention and engagement.

The most common problem with CMS platforms is that users rely on plugins to install advanced functionality onto a website which comes with large amounts of code that slows down site speed. Site speed is not only important from a user-experience perspective, but poor site speed can impact how many pages a search engine can crawl. Google recognizes and rewards exceptional user experiences, which includes designing with mobile users in mind. Also known as responsive design, mobile-friendly websites render a page differently depending on screen size. Luckily, Google provides several testing tools that provide clear opportunities for improving site speed.

With or without a CMS platform, websites should be designed with CSS, minimal JavaScript and optimized image and video files for maximum speed and usability. Far too many websites rely on outdated versions of HTML or other coding platforms, or have been built or rebuilt over the years, making them slower, less reliable and more difficult to index. I still come across prospective clients that do not have a current XML sitemap or robots.txt files to help guide search engines. Marketers may also not realize the impact of a sites’ architecture and structure can impact rankings. Historically, Google has preferred a flatter site hierarchy, which sometimes directly conflicted with a deeper structure that was more challenging to navigate and spider.

Google is constantly changing how information gets displayed and how users can interact with results. This means that marketers have endless opportunities to enhance the appearance of their website which ultimately helps to stand out against competitors. To qualify, websites must utilize structured data on appropriate pages. The most accepted form of structured data is JSON-LD which stands for JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data, and there are hundreds of acceptable schema types that websites can use. Currently, FAQ schema is the popular type; however, the other commonly used types include local business schema, product schema, and video schema.

While I haven’t experienced code trickery like cloaking for years, some marketers are still committed to black and grey hat SEO, meaning they are willing to bend or break rules for short-term gains. Unfortunately, Google always catches up and once penalized, websites may not recover for months, if ever. Along the same lines, many sites are not properly secured with an active SSL certificate which means trustworthiness suffers. While we’re on the topic of trickery, it should be noted that Google does not like duplicate content, whether intended or not.

The final area of oversight relating to code best practices, revolves around a website’s metadata. Believe it or not, despite a proactive focus on SEO, many marketers fail to incorporate keywords where it matters most: Title and header tags. While meta descriptions no longer directly impact rankings, they do serve as the elevator pitch to a webpage which means they do impact click-through-rate (CTR). To Google, a website with a lower CTR means it was a bad match or a poor resource to searchers. Additional keyword-optimization opportunities include ALT tags, anchor text and file names.

User Experience
Search engines want to provide their users with the best possible resources available which does not include a website that is slow, unaccommodating, or malfunctioning. Throughout the content development and technical support, marketers often overlook whether or not their website provides a positive experience.

Recently, Google has announced that the Core Web Vitals scores will be considered as ranking signals come May of 2021. The Core Web Vitals scores measure page experience and focus on three major components: loading (CLS), interactivity (FID), and visual stability (CLS). Google rarely provides warnings on algorithm or ranking signal updates, and it would be a mistake to not take advantage of it. It is also important to note that the Core Web Vitals and technical makeup of web pages go hand in hand, so websites with poor technical components will most likely have poor Core Web Vitals scores.

Another major mistake marketers make with regards to user experience – ignoring or unfamiliarity with ADA Compliance. Websites are now responsible for ensuring that websites are fully accessible to all users, and that can be harder than it sounds. For example, visually impaired users rely on screen readers to navigate throughout a website. A button simply labeled “Click Here” makes it impossible for that user to know where that button will lead to. Other common web features that are not ADA compliant include: flashing graphics, videos that auto play without the control to stop it, and images without any set alt-text.

Credibility
While the need for quality content and clean code has not changed in the last 20 years of search engine marketing, credibility factors have changed dramatically. Since Google came on the scene in 1998, with an innovative algorithm that focused on the hub-and-spoke model of authority, SEO professionals have put a good deal of effort into securing inbound links. Unfortunately, too many marketers have forsaken quality links (from popular and reputable websites) for quantity (typically lower quality websites with questionable domain authority).

We’ve known for years that quality trumps quantity when it comes to inbound links. Some marketers are holding out on that insight and continue to purchase links from high domain authority websites or even create or buy into link farms, which has been out-of-vogue for nearly a decade, but still retains the allure for desperate marketers.

While links continue to be a major focus for SEO professionals, there has been discussion around the weighting of inbound links in Google’s algorithm. Recent research unveiled by Stone Temple Consulting at SEMpdx Engage Conference, indicates that links are still a significant factor in the ranking algorithm. The vote of confidence an inbound link (or citation) provides a website is still a key factor and should be considered heavily in marketing efforts.

One area that marketers continue to debate is the impact of SEO initiatives on graphic design, copywriting and coding. In the early days of Internet marketing, I would get into arguments with my interactive agency counterparts about copy, code and design, in which SEO best practices would appear to conflict with design best practices. That issue has largely resolved itself, as Google has become more sophisticated and focuses more on the user experience and high value content. As a result, sites that are beautifully designed with unique content and artful coding tend to out-rank sites designed solely for SEO and not the user.

Credibility covers a host of elements, many of which are unknown or misunderstood by unwashed marketers. One example is domain history, which includes the age of the domain and when it expires. Google likes old domains that expire many years from now, so stop auto-renewing annually and renew every 5-10 years. Domain authority, which is available via Moz, indicates how likely the site is to rank for unbranded terms. A strong domain authority is over 50 out of 100. Off-site factors including quality and quantity of inbound links weigh heavily in the Open Site Explorer domain authority ranking.

A clear majority of businesses have a formal address. Regardless, every business should claim and optimize its Google My Business local listing. The biggest mistake in this aspect is most marketers believe small, local businesses should have an optimized Google My Business profile. However, all businesses and corporations should have an up-to-date GMB profile which is now the top consideration for local SEO rankings. Far too often, marketers overlook the claiming and optimizing of local listings, including Facebook, Yelp and other third-party feed providers for maps and business directories. Another factor related to local listings is reviews. Business reviews can make or break a business, and to take this a step further, reviews must be addressed, particularly reviews on your GMB. Marketers are particularly bad about ignoring bad reviews and not securing a meaningful number of positive reviews, which directly impact revenue, per recent research. Adding one additional star in the 5-star economy, adds 9 percent to topline revenue.

Learn from the mistakes of others and follow best practices when optimizing your website. I’ve included a few helpful SEO resources below, to ensure you are up-to-speed on the latest SEO strategies, tactics and tools.

The post 22 Common SEO Mistakes To Avoid in 2021 appeared first on SEMpdx.