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temptation to stuff keywords into every paragraph on every page: Google will penalize any website trying to use such outdated, underhand tactics.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

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 Must-Have Features for Every Business Website

08/30/201709/07/2017 mwon

A staggering 46% of small businesses are operating without a website, but 24% plan to build one in the near future.

Today, every company needs a website that caters to your customers’ exact needs. Any prospect looking for information on your business, ethics, products, shipping process, and anything else they could possibly need to know before buying should be able to find it.

Which features must be on your website?

Social Media Integration

Social media is critical for every business. It allows you to market to existing and prospective customers, and reach a wider demographic. After all, 22 percent of the planet’s population is on Facebook, while over 50 million companies have Facebook Business Pages.

Beyond Facebook, 93 percent of Pinterest’s users plan or make purchases, and 88 percent of companies use Twitter as a marketing tool.

Add buttons to your website and enable visitors to check out your social pages with just a click. This helps to boost engagement and is invaluable as a fast customer-service tool.

Multiple Contact Channels

If customers go to your ‘contact us’ page only to find an email address or an international phone number (with expensive charges), they may well be put off. It appears unprofessional and suggests your business has little interest in receiving feedback.

Provide users with email addresses (one for product queries, one for complaints), local phone numbers, and live chat. This latter option is vital today, providing a free chance to exchange text-based messages with support agents in real-time.

High-End Security

Never take security for granted. For businesses handling online transactions, an SSL certificate will show customers that you take their safety seriously, and all critical details (credit card numbers, bank-account numbers etc.) are encrypted.

With an SSL certificate, a tiny green padlock will appear to the left of your HTTPS URL. Today’s online consumers are security-savvy, so invest in the best you can.

Clear, Logical Navigation

Make navigating your website as quick, simple, and logical as possible. Use clear names for pages in your tabs and site maps (About, Contact, FAQ etc.), and use calls to action to help visitors find the most important pages, such as specific product catalogs or live chat.

Imagine yourself as a customer visiting your website for the first time. Where would you want to go first? Would you be able to get their with your current design? Explore the site with this mindset and make note of any potential problems.

A Comprehensive FAQ

A variety of contact channels is key, as we mentioned above. However, add an FAQ to your website so visitors can help themselves before having to get in touch with your support team.

Again, put yourself in your customers’ shoes. What would you want to know? List as many questions as you can think of, and then add any others being asked on a regular basis.

At Nett Solutions, we’re a leading Orange County digital marketing agency. If you want to know more about boosting engagement and maximizing your online performance, give us a call now.

3 New SEO Audit Checks for 2017 And Beyond

07/27/201709/07/2017 mwon

Regular SEO audits are essential for every website. This relates to all of the elements that are integral to your domain’s visibility, and a thorough audit may well improve your performance.

An SEO audit will let you examine why you may be struggling to achieve the SEO results you hope for. You can identify the weakest aspects of your campaign, giving you the information you need to formulate a new direction. You should aim to perform a full SEO audit in each quarter, or whenever you feel your progress has stalled.

If the time has come to run an SEO audit on your website, here are three new checks for 2017 – and beyond!

Run an Audit on your Internal Links

Your internal links help to establish your site’s architecture: you want to have relevant pages connected to each other, to help increase your ranking and ensure users can navigate your site in a logical way.

Wikipedia is testament to the power of good internal links, and helps explain how that site manages to retain such authority: practically each page on Wikipedia is packed with relevant, organic links to other pages right across the site.

If you haven’t performed an audit on your internal links, make sure you do this from now on.

Your keywords should be scattered across your site’s content organically, rather than clustered together. Your anchor text should use high-quality keywords, and pages linked together have to be related (directing a user to an irrelevant page may chase them away).

Your most important pages should always be within three clicks of your homepage, while any broken links have to be fixed (or replaced) immediately.

Check Indexing

When search engines index your website, they collate information on its relevancy and quality. Effective internal links are vital to help search engine crawlers navigate your site properly, to avoid missing any important pages.

Part of running an SEO audit on your site is deciding which of your pages are meant to be indexed and which should be left alone. Any pages lacking valuable content, such as your terms and conditions, should be excluded from the indexing project. Duplicate content needs to be left out of the indexing process, too.

You can tell crawlers to exclude a specific page by creating a ‘no index’ meta tag to said page’s HTML code.

Make Sure Your Site’s Mobile-Friendly

Every website has to be mobile-friendly today, given that Google has started indexing mobile domains rather than desktop ones. As a result, you need to make sure your website is optimized for mobiles as a priority.

You can use Google’s Mobile Friendly Test application to evaluate your site’s compatibility, and identify any major weaknesses. You should also track your mobile rankings, and consider switching to AMP(Accelerated Mobile Pages).

These are pared-down, lightweight pages designed to load within 8 seconds. These run without certain elements found in standard HTML, such as submission forms and JavaScript.

Want to know more about how an SEO audit can boost your online visibility? Get in touch with Nett Solutions – we’re an Orange County SEO agency ready and willing to help!

Why We Do Link Building The Hard Way

05/03/201705/03/2017 Brandon Celotto

Link building is an essential aspect of search marketing, but it can be a daunting area for businesses unfamiliar with the process.

Once upon a time, companies looking for short-term gains would pay for links as and when they could. However, Google’s regulations and penalties are tougher today, and so the risks of lazily buying links outweigh the potential benefits.

While simply paying a website to host a link to yours seems like a time-saver, any company looking to make a lasting, fair impact in the online marketplace must practice manual link-building instead of paying for placements. Here are the reasons why.

Donning Your White Hat

You may have heard of white-hat and black-hat strategies. The former are those SEO tactics that aim to bring real value to users, engaging your audience and boosting traffic through fair means. The latter, on the other hand, are focused more on gaining higher rankings through underhand methods.

Using black-hat tactics can see you penalized, which may affect your reputation. You will also need to invest time and effort to correct your mistakes, costing you resources that could be better spent elsewhere.

Building Ethical Links

You can create ethical links through the following techniques:

Publish regular posts with internal links (as often as you can, with high-value content)
Reciprocal linking (provided these are relevant and not excessive)
Writing guest posts for blogs and sites relevant to your industry (these must be high-value and not feature excessive links)
Create testimonials for manufacturers of products or service-providers you use

These are just a few ideas, but they can all play a big part in driving traffic to your website. If you can create valuable content, such as in your own blog or guest posts, you’ll build your brand’s visibility and credibility.

On the other hand, creating badly-written content which serves as thinly-veiled link generators for your site can have a negative impact on your brand in the long-term.

Take the time to build informative, entertaining content with natural links, and you will gradually create a stronger online presence.

One Link can be Stronger than the Other

Getting a link from a website with no authority and no relevance to your business or niche is not a terrific way to build visibility. All links are not alike.

The trick is to nurture relationships with websites that are relevant to your brand and are viewed as a trusted domain. Getting links from high-authority sites is an endorsement of your own site, whereas those from questionable domains can raise eyebrows.

Seek out websites covering topics related to your business or industry, prioritizing the biggest influencers, and reach out. If you can start placing guest posts at popular domains, you can drive real traffic your way over time.

Branching Out

Other options for manual link-building include:

infographics that people will want to share
lists
case studies
white papers
reports on your own studies

At Nett Solutions, our expert Orange County digital marketing team can help you build links that really matter. Give us a call to learn more!