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!

Rankings Are Not A Good Marketing Goal – Here’s Why

06/24/2016 mwon

orange county search engine placement Once upon a time, not so long ago, rankings were the be-all and end-all of internet marketing. Businesses hiring a team of SEO consultants would expect their brand to appear on the top page of Google permanently, and some were willing to pay for this result regardless of the techniques employed.

This focus on visibility over credibility or ethics led to websites carrying hidden content, keyword-stuffed text (which was all but unreadable for users), and paid links from poor-quality sites. Since then, thankfully, search engines have clamped down on such behavior, rewarding domains which rely on solid content and smart techniques while penalizing those with black-hat methods.

Today, rankings and rankings alone are not a good marketing goal; there are more important things in a successful campaign. Here’s why. (more…)

5 Ways To Speed Up Your Site

05/19/201605/31/2016 mwon

Your website has many plates to spin at the same time.

First, the visuals must be attractive enough to grab visitors and keep them engaged. Your layout must be clear and well-structured enough to navigate with ease. Your content must be well-written, easy to scan, and appropriate for your target demographic.

However, one area you might not give enough consideration is speed. (more…)

Does A Page Title Matter Anymore?

04/17/201605/31/2016 mwon

are page titles still important? As search engines evolve, businesses may well struggle to keep their websites optimized for the latest algorithm.

Failing to update a site is a huge mistake, and the subsequent drop in rankings can cause setbacks for a brand – and putting it right costs time and resources. Most of the changes implemented by Google are designed to improve user-experience and help sites of the highest quality perform better, but falling behind can be hugely annoying (to say the least). Knowing how to stay in-line with the latest trends, though, is hard. (more…)

Why Backlinks Will Always Be Vital in Online Marketing

01/15/201602/02/2016 mwon

What are backlinks?

Essentially, backlinks are viewed as votes of confidence in your website from others, helping to boost Google’s assessment of its quality. This is essential for building authority in search engines: the more domains directing traffic to one site, the more valuable it is deemed to be.

For several years, all digital marketers regarded backlinks as a crucial aspect of good search marketing, but with the various changes to Google’s algorithm (such as the Penguin and Panda updates), some professionals may have placed less importance on them than before, scaling back on them.

However, backlinks remain an indispensable component of a solid digital-marketing campaign for any business. Like most search-marketing techniques, though, there is a right way and a wrong way to integrate them into your strategy.

For maximum results, keep the following points in mind while building your backlinks. (more…)

The Importance of Keyword Intent for SEO

12/13/201505/31/2016 mwon

Keyword research intent — Image via: https://farm3.static.flickr.com/2482/3680078615_dfbf56e7b5.jpg

Not so long ago, keywords could legitimately be used to excess on a website, featuring ludicrous repetition designed for search engines rather than human readers.

In recent years, though, Google has evolved their search algorithms significantly to penalize websites employing black-hat techniques – particularly those overwhelming their users with keywords.

With this in mind, keywords still play a vital role in a website’s search performance. Keyword research is fundamental to an effective SEO strategy, and without this, businesses may well struggle to reach their audience as well as they otherwise could.

One area of keyword research that should never be overlooked is keyword intent. (more…)