Top SEO Tips for Niche Companies

07/16/201808/21/2018 mwon

Are you operating in a niche market?

If you are, then you’ll know marketing a smaller company can be incredibly difficult. However, an effective, well-structured SEO campaign can help you promote your company properly and grow your customer base significantly.

If you’re looking to expand your niche business’s reach in an organic way, read on for some top SEO tips.

Engage your customers to build brand loyalty

You need to make engaging your customers and prospects a priority from day one. Your digital marketing campaign should include social media marketing (SMM), incorporating both paid ads and regular posts.

Make a real effort to engage users, whether they’re current followers or not. Visual content is critical to grab attention on social media, so use images and videos throughout your posts.

The more eye-catching and clear to understand your marketing materials are, the more likely people are to share them. Brand posts with images have been shown to achieve more interactions than those without.

Never bombard users with a slew of promotional posts. Focus on captivating rather than selling, selling, selling.

Visual content is obviously just as important on your website. Keep your text brief and to the point, but make sure your blogs, product pages, and more are rich with visuals too. Short videos introducing your brand and your team can convey background information in a much more accessible way than expecting a visitor to read blocks of text.

Check out your competition

Even in niche businesses, you’ll face some competition. Unless you’ve created a product or service that nobody else on the planet has, you should be able to research what rival companies are doing to expand their reach.

What are they doing on social media? How are their blog posts distributed and what traction do they get?

Take the time to look at the competition ahead of you and behind you. See what to do and what not to do in your own SEO campaign.

Make friends in high places

One particularly effective SEO technique for niche businesses is to make connections with useful websites.

For example, if your business specializes in creating accessories for games consoles, consider trying to forge links with a high-profile blog focused on games. Can you get them to review some of your products, whether this is in blog posts or videos on YouTube? Are you able to make an impact with their audience?

However, only choose blogs or sites that aren’t in direct competition with you or already linked to other rivals of yours. Do your research first.

At Nett Solutions, our Orange County SEO team can help your niche business expand your reach and build a bigger reputation. Give us a call to discuss your options now!

5 Pro SEO Tips for SMEs

07/12/201807/09/2018 mwon

While some larger brands can rely on the power of a good reputation and repeat custom for ongoing success, SMEs have to work hard to establish an audience.

A well-planned SEO campaign plays a critical role in increasing your visibility and building authority, but organic search can be daunting to newcomers. How do you know which techniques are most effective for growing your brand?

Below, you’ll find five pro SEO tips for SMEs to help you reach a bigger, wider audience online.

Quality Content is Still King

Content is one of Google’s key ranking factors, and it’s vital to make it the best you can.

Avoid temptation to stuff keywords into every paragraph on every page: Google will penalize any website trying to use such outdated, underhand tactics.

Long-form content tends to rank better than shorter pieces, but the value it offers readers is paramount. You need to provide visitors with helpful, relevant information every time.

It’s okay to go into detail on subjects, rather than feeling you need to rush everything to suit today’s busy lifestyles.

Embrace HTTPS

HTTPS is another ranking signal for Google, and has been for a few years now.

HTTPS is used by a staggering 81 of the top 100 websites, and businesses that avoid upgrading to HTTPS may see a negative result soon.

Why?Because all HTTP websites will be labeled as ‘not secure’ in Google Chrome as of July 2018.

Potential customers may view your HTTP site as being a security risk in the very near future. All SMEs should make an effort to upgrade as soon as possible.

Build Solid Links

Not so long ago, companies could buy dozens or hundreds of links to their website to boost traffic. It was a case of quantity over qualify.

This has all changed now. Google and other search engines want to see high-quality links rather than those with little relevancy.

Concentrate on building solid backlinks from quality content, and choose popular websites that have similar themes or topics to your own.

Cater to Mobile Users

Google’s mobile-first indexing means the search engine crawls the mobile version of your website primarily, rather than the desktop site.

This makes perfect sense, given that more and more of us are searching on our smartphones and tablets. Any SME that fails to establish a mobile-friendly website is putting itself at a big disadvantage.

Pay Attention to UX

UX (user experience) is essential in any good SEO campaign. You want to make sure your website gives users everything they need to maximize your chances of conversions.

Focusing on the best UX you can achieve ensures your website is more accessible to visitors and search engines. Great navigation, solid CTAs, fast page speeds, quality content, and good link structure all contribute to outstanding UX.

At Nett Solutions, we can create a bespoke SEO campaign for your SME. Want to learn more? Just give our Orange County SEO team a call now!

7 Tricks for Optimizing Your Mobile Site

06/02/201806/01/2018 mwon

Google’s mobile-first indexing has been a long time coming, but is now underway.

Websites which offer users a stronger mobile-browsing experience will be more likely to secure higher spots in SERPs. Every business’s website has to be optimized for high-performance on smartphones and tablets, but how?

Here are 7 ways to get started.

Boost Load Page Speeds

We all know the frustration of staring at our phone, waiting for a page to load. Research shows 53 percent of searchers will leave a mobile site with load times above three seconds.

Mobile devices tend to have slower load times than desktops, so make sure you focus on getting yours as low as possible. Reduce the size of all images, cut unnecessary content, and consider using AMP instead.

Text Must be Readable as Standard

All text on your mobile site has to be easy to read straight away. Users shouldn’t have to zoom in to make sense of your content, nor should they have to turn their device to landscape mode to fit it all on the screen.

Convenience is key. Any hassle will only frustrate users when all they want is to read what you have to say.

Check Your Images’ Mobile Compatibility

Are your images failing to load on the mobile site? Do you expect prospects to wait 30 seconds to actually see a picture?

Using outdated or incompatible files will make a huge impact on your users’ ability to enjoy your website. The simplest way to check this is to access your site from a smartphone, and take note of those elements that don’t work as they should. Address them as soon as possible to benefit from Google’s mobile-first indexing.

Make Sure Your Site is User-Friendly

Interacting with desktop sites and mobile sites is very different. In the former, you have a mouse for precise clicking, which means buttons and links can be smaller.

In the latter, though, you have to make interactive elements big enough for fingers to touch. Sites with buttons and links that are too small can end up directing users to the wrong pages, making accidental purchases, and more.

Test your mobile site’s interactivity regularly.

Streamline Your Ads

Trying to scroll along a mobile website that bombards you with pop-up ads or automatic videos can be unbearable. Yes, you need pop-ups to generate leads and revenue, but try to keep them to a minimum.

Too many will only slow your load times and chase users away.

Focus on User Experience

User experience is critical. Your prospects should be able to navigate your site, jump from one page to another, make purchases, access information, and communicate with your business with ease.

Browse your mobile site with your users in mind. Can you see the different pages available? Is it simple to interact with?

If not, make some changes!

Swap Flash for HTML5

Avoid using Flash video on your mobile site, as it might not work on most mobile devices. HTML5 is the must-have today, to ensure smooth performance and widespread compatibility.

If you have Flash videos on your site, you could be risking your ranking in Google’s mobile-first indexing.

Want help getting your mobile site the best it can be? Nett Solutions is an Orange County digital marketing agency with years of experience helping businesses just like yours achieve their goals!

Is Blogging Still Relevant to Your Business?

04/30/201804/26/2018 mwon

Is blogging really still relevant in a world where social media allows you to communicate with your potential followers directly?

After all, if you can either write a 500 word post on your latest service or share the key points on Facebook, some businesses might now gravitate more towards one than the other for the sake of convenience.

The truth is, blogging is absolutely still relevant to your business in 2017 – and here are some key reasons why.

Blogs Fuel Your Social Content

You need something to say on your social media channels, and somewhere to direct your current and prospective followers.

Simply sharing images and links to your product pages suggests you’re only interested in trying to sell, rather than engage. With regular blog posts, you can consistently share high-value content on your social accounts to entice people to your site with something more than a purchase.

Share snippets of your blog posts as a teaser, along with eye-catching images that tell a story relevant to the content itself.

Blogs are Still Effective for SEO

Blogging on a regular basis enables your business to boost your visibility and authority in a number of ways.

For starters: keywords. Back in the day, brands could write blog posts consisting of endless search terms offering little value to the reader, but now Google’s algorithm is far wiser.

The emphasis is much more on the quality of your content rather than the keywords, but they’re still important. Use your most effective ones a few times in a post, but always make sure they don’t affect its readability.

Blog posts add fresh content to your site regularly, which is crucial for solid rankings, as are social signals. Bear this in mind: 82 percent of markets blogging on a daily basis converted a customer using their blogs, while only 57 of those publishing posts once per month did so.

Blogs can Help You Build Credibility

Having a wide variety of blog posts on your business’s website builds your credibility. How so?

Blogging gives your brand an opportunity to become a thought-leader, sharing innovative insights and influencing others. This can lead to your blogs gaining a wider readership by peers and customers alike, driving more traffic to your site over time.

Your business will appear more reliable and professional with a portfolio of well-written, well-presented blog posts, rather than a bare-bones site.

Blogs Allow for Deeper Communication than Social Media

You have to establish a style and voice for your business on social channels, and Facebook, Twitter etc. are ideal places to communicate with your customers.

However, blog posts enable you to tell deeper, richer stories unsuited to the shorter, sweeter structure of social accounts. Yourself and / or your team can explore your processes, motivations, missions, products, and opinions in more detail.

Your readers will get to know you better, and feel more invested in your brand.

Looking to start blogging for your business, or want to improve future posts? At Nett Solutions, we’re an experienced Orange County digital marketing agency dedicated to helping companies of all sizes build better results! Give our expert team a call now!

Are you Sabotaging your own SEO?

04/25/201804/26/2018 mwon

Are you Sabotaging your own SEO?

In our years as an Orange County SEO agency, we’ve seen businesses of all sizes trying to handle their own digital marketing campaigns.

We’ve also seen them make the same mistakes again and again.

You simply cannot underestimate the negative impact even the smallest errors can have on your rankings. You could be sabotaging your own SEO strategy without even realizing it.

How? Let’s take a look.

Are you Using Too many Keywords in your Content?

Choosing the right keywords to suit your brand, your customers, and your place in the market is key.

So is using them properly.

Keyword stuffing is less prevalent than it used to be, but some websites still try to manipulate search engines by overdoing it.

When you stuff keywords into your content, you’re sacrificing the readability for your visitors. Google has steps in place to penalize sites employing this shady tactic too, so you could be sacrificing your place in the SERPs too.

Google cares more about relevance and context today, so including keywords in a natural way without overloading them is vital. The most important ones should appear higher up the page too, to maximize their impact.

Are you Neglecting your Title tags and Meta Descriptions?

Your title tag and meta descriptions are vital to attracting prospects and improving your rankings.

Your title tag and description appear on the SERPs, telling searchers and crawlers what to expect from your site. You should include a keyword in your title tag and description where possible, and sell the value of your content honestly.

Pay attention to how your biggest competitors or those high-authority brands you want to emulate appear on SERPs. How do they phrase their titles and descriptions? What about them makes you want to click?

Does your Website load too Slowly?

How many websites have you left because the pages took too long to load, or simply didn’t load at all?

Think about how frustrating it is. Do you want to put your customers through that?

Google’s research shows that load times of between one and three seconds increase your bounce rate to 32 percent, while one to five seconds sees this figure jump to 90 percent.

Anything up to six seconds creates bounce rate increases of 106 percent. Load times of up to 10 seconds? Your bounce rates increase to a staggering 123 percent.

Compressing images and text can make a big difference to your load times. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) give you the power to make your mobile site incredibly fast, targeting the ever-growing mobile audience.

Is your Content Good Enough?

Your content should be well-written, informative, and offer visitors real value.

No prospects want to waste time reading text filled with typos, half-finished sentences, and baffling jargon. Your content has to give them the information they need in a clear, simple way.

It doesn’t need to be an industry-leading piece of work, but content should at least appear professional and provide searchers with the solution they were promised by your title tag and description.

If you think your website could be sabotaging your rankings, don’t worry. Nett Solutions is an Orange County SEO agency with the skills to transform your online performance. Just give us a call for a friendly, transparent chat!

5 SEO Trends Every Business Should Embrace

03/26/201804/26/2018 mwon

Struggling to keep up with the ever-changing trends in the world of SEO?

You’re not alone, but you have to make an effort to embrace the newest, most important ways to boost your organic search to beat competitors. What are the biggest SEO trends for 2018 you need to know?

Go Secure for Increased Rankings

Secure websites (those with a HTTPS in their URL) tend to receive higher rankings in search engine results pages. Though there are correlations between HTTPS sites and high placements, cutting-edge security is more of a tie-breaker used alongside other ranking factors.

If two sites are both well-optimized but one has better security than the other, the HTTPS element will win out.

Users are notified if a website they visit is not secure. Don’t give them a reason to leave.

Voice Searches for Accurate User Intent

Voice search is far more convenient than having to type your query using a cluttered mobile keyboard, and consumers are more increasingly likely to use it.

You need to focus on building content based around searcher intent rather than a strict list of keywords (though they are still essential). Your content has to be crafted to answer prospects’ questions, using a conversational tone.

More than ever, content must feel organic and valuable.

Focusing on User-driven Content

Following on from the point above, you need to make sure your content is worth readers’ time.

Put yourself in searchers’ shoes in relation to your products or services. What questions would you be asking, and what answers would you expect? What information do you need to be converted into a customer?

Try to avoid hitting readers over the head with directions to buy, buy, buy. Engage them, make sure you don’t waste their time, and they will be more likely to remember your brand even if they don’t actually make a purchase.

Video – A Growing Force

Video will account for 82 percent of consumer traffic online by 2021. It’s already everywhere, from social media to news pages and FAQs, and you’re missing out if you don’t use it already.

Create entertaining, informative videos on various topics. Make demonstrations for your products, take users on a tour of your business, introduce your team, and present customer testimonials.

Get on YouTube too: it’s the world’s second biggest search engine.

AMP for Stronger Mobile Engagement

The speed of your mobile site affects your ranking, and users simply don’t want the hassle of slow-loading pages. AMP is an ideal solution, creating mobile sites that are faster to load, easier to navigate, and make for a smoother browsing experience overall.

Integrate AMP into your campaign to make sure you maximize your mobile service.

Our team of Orange County digital marketing experts can create a bespoke SEO strategy for your business, incorporating the latest trends. Want to know what we can do for you? Give us a call!

What is A/B Testing?

02/22/201804/26/2018 mwon

A/B testing (or split testing) is mentioned again and again in the world of digital marketing, but what is it?

This can be an incredibly powerful part of optimizing your website and boosting your conversions. Performing an A/B test lets you compare two versions of a web page to identify which one works best.

This involves presenting the two pages to visitors at the same time, and whichever achieves higher conversion rates becomes the final version.

A/B testing gives you the power to make the most of your current traffic, and it can be applied to virtually any element of your website which impacts visitors’ behavior. This includes your headlines, sub headlines, testimonials, text in paragraphs, images, links, and more.

After all, Google is used to perform billions of searches each month, and you need to do everything you can to grab prospects’ attention.

Gathering Key Data

Before you run your A/B testing, you need to gather data that will ultimately help you identify the strongest variation.

Visitors’ behavior is one area to focus on, and certain tools can show obstacles that might prevent conversions or cause prospects to click away. For example, uninformative text which is too clustered together for comfortable reading, unattractive images, or an unclear CTA button can all contribute to a lack of conversions.

After exploring the results of such analysis, you would then be able to see where a potential new page would have to go. If you have problems with your CTA button or your text’s layout, you can create a new one with the same content presented differently.

If you can establish which of your options has the power to make a stronger impact on visitors, you should be able to increase conversions and build your user-base.

Trial and Error

It’s vital to make both variations as high-quality as possible, and give both a fair chance. Don’t be tempted to effectively sabotage one version of a page if you prefer the other, because what you prefer might not necessarily match your audience’s tastes.

A/B testing allows you to try different styles and presentation formats too. For example, if you feel your copy may be a little bland, your B page can be quirkier and funnier. If you find this garners fewer conversions during your sample period than the A page, you could perhaps try another new version that resembles the original more.

You can try again and again over time, eliminating less-successful variations and gathering data from the best to transform your site.

At Nett Solutions, our Orange County SEO team is passionate about helping businesses just like yours maximize your visibility, boost conversions, and ultimately achieve higher rankings. Give us a call now to see what we can do for you!

SEO Trends to Watch Out for in 2018

01/11/201804/26/2018 mwon

As we come to the end of another year, it’s time to think about what we can expect to see in the next. 2018 looks to be a big year for changes in the world of SEO, and it’s best to prepare for them now to stay ahead of the curve.

So, what’s in store?

The Future is Mobile

Mobile is a major player in SEO, with the approaching mobile-first index meaning that Google will look for mobile content before desktop.

Businesses should have been optimizing their content for mobile devices for a few years now, but as more and more of us browse the internet on our smartphones and tablets, this takes on a greater urgency

Mobile-friendly sites stand a better chance of ranking ahead of non-friendly domains, and local SEO will become more important in 2018 to help businesses target customers on the go. Expect to see more Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) in the next 12 months.

Greater Focus on Voice Search

Voice search has been on the rise in recent years, with almost half of American adults using it every day, and it will only become more important to effective SEO campaigns in 2018.

You need to focus more on natural language and long-tail keywords to cater to voice-searchers’ conversational approach.

Feeling the Need, the Need for Speed

Making your site’s pages load as quickly as possible will be more imperative in 2018.

Speed is a key ranking signal and makes a significant impact on your visitors’ user experience (UX). Pages should load within three seconds to minimize the risk of chasing customers away to faster alternatives.

What can you do to make your pages load faster? Try making your images smaller, assess whether all of your plugins are really necessary, and look into compressing your content. All of this can make a big difference to your site’s UX, on mobile and desktop devices.

Visual Search will Become More Visible

The popularity of visual search will rise in 2018. Google Lens, the giant’s visual-search app for their own Pixel smartphones, enables users to aim it at a piece of visual information (such as a shop sign) and retrieve details on its business hours, reviews, and more.

People want to look at products, locations, venues, and more rather than just taking a business’s word. More companies will have to embrace the power of visuals, creating strong branding, product, and service images across their sites.

Machines, Learning, and RankBrain

Machine learning will play a bigger role in SEO throughout 2018, as the RankBrain algorithm continues to refine Google’s search queries. This aims to provide users with the most relevant results possible and avoid directing them to pages of little value.

RankBrain studies how users are looking for information and across which devices. Businesses need to focus on making their content as relevant and valuable to visitors as they can, without any of the shortcuts black-hat SEO practitioners used to rely upon.

NettSolutions, an Orange County digital marketing agency, can help your business’s SEO reach all-new heights in 2018 — and beyond. Give us a call to learn more!

How Can Video Boost Your SEO?

10/19/201701/09/2018 mwon

Video is everywhere. It will account for 82 percent of all online traffic by 2021, and all businesses can boost their online performance by embracing its power now.

Whether you’re selling smartphones or video games, textbooks or cookware, videos can play a key part in your digital marketing. They offer a valuable way to engage your customers and increase sales, as proven by the 90 percent of consumers who admit that product videos help them to make purchasing decisions.

So, how can your business integrate video and reap the rewards?

Choosing the Right Content

So, your brand is going to start recording videos … but what should you actually be getting on camera?

One solid choice is an introduction to your company and your team. This may be easier if you have a smaller workforce, as each member can briefly discuss their role and contribute to the overall brand persona. For a larger company with multiple branches and many different departments, videos should show glimpses from various locations to create an overall identity.

Explore your company culture and your goals. Make viewers feel welcomed and part of your team. Be as transparent as possible.

Other options include how-to videos on your products, case studies of satisfied customers, tours behind the scenes of your offices / production floors, interviews, and creative pieces (such as humorous commercials, Christmas singalongs etc.).

Keep your video content diverse and strive to establish a unique voice for your brand.

Be Relevant

No matter how good your videos are, you need to actually get them seen.

Include subtle keywords when writing video titles, descriptions, and tags,. These will help search engines identify your videos and make sure their relevance to users is unmissable.

You should also integrate transcripts for your videos, allowing viewers to get an idea of the video’s content by skimming the text. This is another simple but effective technique to add extra keywords to the page’s content too.

Share and Share Alike

You should upload your videos to YouTube as well as hosting them on your own site. This is one of the world’s biggest search engines in its own right, and receives billions of visitors each month. Creating your own business channel, with strong keywords and descriptions, can expose you to more prospective customers.

Add your URL to the video’s description and in the video. Invite people to share via social media, and share them on your own accounts. 100 million hours of video are watched on Facebook each day, and having your business factor in that staggering amount is a challenge, but it is possible with enough hard work.

The more consumers your videos reach across Facebook, Twitter, and other social platforms, the more traffic you stand to drive back to your site.

Want to learn more about how videos can boost your SEO? Trust our Orange County digital marketing agency to help you! Give us a call on (949) 330 7060 or drop us an email.

5 Pro Tips to Boost Your Rankings with Video

09/22/201710/26/2017 mwon

Video has power.

Just think of all those videos of dancing cats or uncanny impersonations in your social media feeds, many with millions of views and thousands of comments. Facebook alone generates an average of 8 billion video views each day as users across the globe share favorites with just a tap or two of their smartphone.

Your business can use video to build your online presence and climb the search engine results pages, but how?

Make Your Videos Interactive

Integrate annotations into videos, either elaborating on topics discussed or offering links to related videos or pages. Annotated videos are more likely to grab attention, and give viewers an element of control over your content if they choose to follow links.

Furthermore, a call to action at the end of the video takes viewers to your site directly. If a video promotes specific products, add individual links to those too.

Create Transcripts

A full video transcript is great complement to your videos: you can basically tell potential viewers what to expect, allowing them to get a feel for the content with a skim-read.

The key benefit, though, is that you’ll be gaining some sneaky keywords and telling search engines the video’s exact content. This is particularly useful with interviews, or videos covering statistics, as viewers will be able to find details without having to search back and forth through the video.

Cannibalize Your Video Content

This is nowhere near as gruesome as the headline suggests – promise!

Repurposing your video is a great way to get more out of your hard work. One idea is to break them down into bite-sized chunks and categorize them based on the material covered.

You can create slideshows and develop infographics based off the video’s content, too. All of these are ideal for sharing across social media, driving more traffic to your site from multiple sources.

Host Videos Yourself

Producing videos to improve your rankings can be hard work, so you want to get the most bang for your buck (literal and metaphorical). Uploading videos to YouTube is obvious and smart, given that it caters to 95 percent of the world’s Internet users, but hosting videos on your own domain prevents traffic going to YouTube itself instead of your site.

Ideally, you should create a new page for each video, adding more content to your site and making indexing easier.

Don’t Forget Your Metas

As mentioned above, you should slip keywords into transcripts of your videos, but metadata lets you use extra keywords too.

Make sure your meta titles and descriptions carry keywords, and describe videos’ content explicitly (to improve indexing). Tell search engine crawlers and viewers alike exactly what they’re about to see, hear, and read.

At Nett Solutions, we’re an experienced Orange County digital marketing agency dedicated to helping your business’s online presence grow. Want to know more about how video can benefit your enterprise? Just give us a call!