How to Reach Customers Near You with Good Local SEO

How to Reach Customers Near You with Good Local SEO

Local SEO can help nearby customers find your business online, whether they’re using their smartphone, their laptop, or smart speaker. But what does a good local SEO strategy involve?

Here are four great tips from our Orange County SEO agency to help you get started.

Target Local Keywords

Focus on local keywords for effective local SEO. For example, if you’re targeting parents and caregivers looking for kids’ clothes near you, one location-specific keyword might be “child’s clothing store in Orange County”.

When creating your content marketing strategy, focus on local events, community news, and any other topics likely to appeal to nearby customers. This ensures you can pepper plenty of local keywords throughout your site organically.

Take Advantage of Your Google Business Profile Listing

Google Business Profile (previously known as Google My Business) is a free tool that can help your company be more visible on SERPs. Use it to set up a distinctive local profile for your business, featuring key information, images, videos, and reviews. To avoid missed opportunities, update your Google Business Profile whenever your contact details change.

It’s crucial that you claim your Google Business Profile as soon as possible (if you haven’t already), or someone else could. Fortunately, you can reclaim it if that happens, so don’t worry!

Welcome Customer Feedback and Reviews

Feedback and reviews can make a big impact on your local visibility. Positive feedback alongside your results on SERPs will give you more credibility, which is vital for small enterprises.

Almost 70% of online shoppers read 1 to 6 customer reviews before they decide whether to buy something or not. If you have a selection of varied, honest, but ultimately encouraging reviews to your name, a large number of potential customers are likely to check them before they do business with you.

Ask customers to review your products and services after each transaction. Make the process as quick and simple as possible to reduce the risk of people giving up.

Optimize Your Website for Voice Searches

Voice search plays an important part in local SEO. Imagine a potential new customer asking their virtual assistant “where’s the best pizza place near me?” while walking within two minutes of your new Italian restaurant.

If your site is optimized well for local SEO, you have an invaluable opportunity to bring someone new into your venue, impress them, and convert them into a repeat customer.

Here are a few tips for voice search optimization:

  • Use conversational keywords (“where’s the nearest towing company in Orange County?”).
  • Include clear but detailed answers to common questions in your content (e.g. in an FAQ).
  • Design pages for easy use on mobile devices (critical for good local SEO).

Start Reaching Local Customers with Our Orange County SEO Agency Now

Our Orange County SEO agency is ready to help you boost your visibility and reach more local customers with a bespoke SEO strategy.

To find out exactly what we can do for you, get in touch today!

 

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What 2024 SEO Trends Do You Need to Know About?

What 2024 SEO Trends Do You Need to Know About?

A new year brings new changes to the world of SEO. And staying up to date with the latest shifts, whatever they are, is crucial to maintain or improve your SEO performance.

To help you do that, our Orange County SEO agency will look at 5 of the top SEO trends for 2024 below.

Mobile-Friendly Websites are Critical

According to Pew, more than 83% of people use their mobile devices to access the internet in the U.S., and this is the only way 15% of Americans can go online.

Consumers’ increasing reliance on smartphones and tablets for browsing the web means that optimizing websites for mobile devices has never been more important. Creating responsive sites is vital to ensure that they’re properly formatted and usable on any screen, so a mobile-first approach will continue to be a priority in 2024.

Optimizing Websites for Voice Search

Voice search has grown and grown in recent years with the rise of virtual assistants and smart speakers. And that looks set to continue in 2024, as voice search optimization remains an important element of SEO.

Using long-tail keywords that are more natural and conversational is vital to match the way people speak when performing voice searches (such as “Chinese restaurants near me”). Creating an FAQ section on your site is a simple and effective way to cater to voice queries.

Video Content Will Stay Prevalent

Videos commonly appear in search results, covering everything from tutorials to news reports. Businesses will keep using video content to boost SEO rankings in 2024, which is a great way to build brand awareness and engage potential customers.

Companies can use videos to showcase their new products in a dynamic way, show how their services work, and generate wider interest.

The Persistent Power of Analytics

Businesses can learn a lot from analyzing the wealth of data generated through digital marketing, and analytics will remain a valuable aspect of SEO in 2024.

Google Analytics, for example, offers a comprehensive insight into website performance, visibility, and more. You can use this data to learn more about your site and what changes you need to make to improve your SEO performance.

Personalization of Search Results

In 2024, personalization looks likely to become more commonplace as AI helps search engines improve the relevance of results.

Personalization is key for delivering the most relevant search results based on a user’s online activity. That reduces the amount of irrelevant content, products, and services presented to users, and offers a more satisfying experience overall.

Want to Improve Your SEO Performance?

If you want to take your SEO ranking higher in 2024 and beyond, working with a professional team of SEO experts is the simplest, most effective solution.

Our Orange County SEO agency is here to help you improve your rankings and reach the right customers. Contact us today to get started!

 

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What Can Video Ads Do for Your Digital Marketing

What Can Video Ads Do for Your Digital Marketing?

Video ads are a staple of digital marketing. Any time you watch a video on YouTube or browse your favorite social network, you’re sure to run into at least one video ad promoting a business, product, or service.

If you’re not already using video ads as part of your marketing strategy, what can they do for you?

Join our Orange County digital marketing pros as we explore four ways video ads can benefit your business.

Engage Users with Different Types of Video Ads

Google Ads offers a range of video ad formats to choose from based on your digital marketing strategy, budget, and goals. These include:

  • Skippable In-stream
  • Outstream
  • In-feed
  • Non-skippable In-stream
  • Bumper

By giving you a choice of formats for video ads, Google Ads allows you to take a flexible approach to your video advertising and discover what works best for you. However, the variety of formats can be daunting for beginners.

Fortunately, Google launched its Video view campaigns (VVC) program in September 2023, which can make setting up your ads easier.

Promote Your Business Across Diverse Channels

Using video ads helps you expand your digital marketing campaigns across various channels. They will increase your chances of building brand awareness and growing your audience.

You can reach viewers on YouTube, with the formats discussed above, as well as on other social media channels —- TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook to name just a few. Your video ads will also play on sites that belong to the Google Display Network.

Show Your Products and Services in Action

A photograph, even a great one, can only do so much to make your products and services appealing to customers. But videos are a more dynamic way to show why your business is the best choice.

For example, if you run a plumbing company, why not demonstrate your team’s unparalleled skills with footage of a real job? Video ads that focus on your products and services can make a stronger impression than static images alone.

Add Credibility to Your Business

Visually appealing ads that are easy to understand can make your company more credible to newcomers. They don’t need to look as sleek as the latest blockbusters, but they should at least show that your business takes digital marketing seriously.

Whether your video ads are filmed by a professional crew or by your own team, they should have a clear message and address a particular pain point. The more engaging and specific your ads are, the more likely they are to impress your target audience.

Start Building Ads that Boost Your Digital Marketing

Video ads can be a powerful part of any successful marketing strategy. You have multiple formats to choose from, you can boost engagement across multiple channels, and you can demonstrate products in action to whet customer appetites.

Not sure if your PPC strategy is as good as it should be? Our Orange County digital marketing agency is ready to help you with campaigns tailored to your goals, audience, and budget. Contact our team now to get started!

 

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How to Set the Right Digital Marketing Goals for Your Business

How to Set the Right Digital Marketing Goals for Your Business

A good digital marketing strategy is a must for any small business today. There are more than 33 million of them in the U.S. and competition is often fierce, but strong marketing campaigns can help you reach the right people, in the right places, at the right time.

But to get the most out of your digital marketing, you need goals. And setting ones that suit your business, your budget, and your resources can be tough.

So, join our Orange County digital marketing agency as we explore a few ways to make it easier.

Define What You Want to Achieve

Think carefully about what you want to achieve with your digital marketing. Why are you prepared to invest precious time and resources into it?

Common digital marketing objectives include:

Defining your reasons will help you get off to a stronger start than if you dive straight in. Don’t worry if they seem vague or abstract at first — you can make them more specific later.

Try the SMART Goals Approach

The Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely (SMART) goals framework is popular in digital marketing. It can help you create a clear, focused plan. Let’s break it down.

Specific

Your digital marketing goals should be specific. You want to boost conversion rates? Focus on what that means in real terms, such as getting more visitors to sign up for your newsletter. When you define a goal in plain terms, you can start taking actions to achieve it.

Measurable

Measuring your progress is essential. Otherwise, how do you know if you’re doing the right thing?

Set a specific goal, with a figure or percentage attached, so you can see how close you are to hitting your target over time (e.g. increase traffic to your website by 10% in 3 months).

Achievable

Setting achievable goals for your digital marketing is a must to avoid pushing yourself to hit impossible targets.

Be too ambitious and you’ll become demotivated when you fail, even if you’ve made great progress along the way. Still, try to make your goals just ambitious enough to inspire you to work at your best.

Relevant

Make sure your digital marketing goals align with your long-term business plan. Otherwise, you could waste time, effort, and money chasing objectives that offer little value.

Timely

Set a specific deadline for your digital marketing goals. That’s vital to motivate you and to make sure you can measure your progress accurately within a set period.

Consult a Digital Marketing Agency

Last but by no means least, working with a professional team is the most effective way to set the right digital marketing goals for your business.

Our Orange County digital marketing agency will create a bespoke marketing strategy for your business, encompassing SEO, Retargeting, Display Ads, and more. Contact us now to get started!

 

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How Can Retargeting Ads Help with Abandoned Carts

How Can Retargeting Ads Help with Abandoned Carts?

Why do customers abandon their carts?

Reasons vary. For example, in 2021, 37% of North American shoppers abandoned a purchase because estimated shipping times were too long. Other factors include finding a better deal elsewhere or getting distracted.

Identifying the most common reasons why users are abandoning their carts will give you the insight you need to create a better experience for new visitors and increase conversions gradually.

But building effective, persuasive retargeting ads can help you bring those shoppers back to your site to complete their purchase sooner rather than later. How does this work?

In this post, our Orange County digital marketing pros will explore retargeting ads and how they help with abandoned carts.

How Do Retargeting Ads Work?

Retargeting ads are a simple way to re-engage visitors who showed an interest in your site.

To get started, you add Google’s remarketing tag (a piece of code) to your website to track users. You can use it to track page visits and actions, such as putting a product into a shopping cart.

When the tag is in place, you’re all set to target potential customers with ads that promote your business or specific products and services they showed an interest in. Your ads might remind them that they have one or more items in their cart on your site. And if they return and complete that transaction, you’ll have your retargeting ads to thank.

But even if they don’t lead to a fast conversion, retargeting ads are valuable for building brand awareness too. They can help your business linger in a potential customer’s mind long after they visit your site.

How to Make Your Retargeting Ads More Effective?

Creating retargeting ad campaigns that bring potential customers back to their abandoned carts isn’t easy. But putting time and effort into retargeting ads will pay off if you get them right.

Here are a few tips to help you make yours more effective.

Grab Attention with Discount Codes

If a visitor has shown enough interest in a product to add it to their cart, even if they left it there, you could whet their appetite by promising a discount in your retargeting ads.

Use Time as an Incentive

If you notice that certain products are left languishing in carts more than others, consider putting them on sale for a while. Create retargeting ads that promote these “limited-time deals” with a sense of urgency, and potential customers may feel more inclined to take the plunge.

Be Sparing with Ad Frequency

Avoid showing your ads to the same potential customers too many times each day or you’ll put them off your business. Sensible frequency capping will help, but knowing when you’re showing ads too little or too often is tough.

Make it easy on yourself: let us take care of your retargeting ad campaigns for you. Our Orange County digital marketing agency will build tailored campaigns to help you reach the right people with the right ads.

Speak to us today to get started!

 

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How to Create Your Content Marketing Strategy

How to Create Your Content Marketing Strategy

A clear content marketing strategy is a must for any business trying to engage and expand its audience. But a survey by the Content Marketing Institute revealed that only 40% of B2B marketers have a clear strategy. Meanwhile, 33% had an undocumented one, 20% planned to set one up in the next year, and 7% had no such plans.

So, do you have a strategy for your content marketing?

If not, or if you’re looking to develop a fresh one, our Orange County SEO agency has a few helpful tips.

What is a Content Marketing Strategy?

A content marketing strategy covers the planning, creation, and distribution of your content. It encompasses everything relevant to how your business uses content to reach customers, grow your audience, and achieve your objectives.

Building a detailed strategy will clarify how you can help readers, viewers, or listeners better than anyone else.

Creating Your Content Marketing Strategy

Confirm Your Content Marketing Goals

What do you want to achieve with your content?

Identifying your goals can be a time-consuming process, but when you know what they are, rank them in order of priority. That will make it easier to create the right content for your business (and ideally your audience) in the short and long term.

Research Your Audience

To create the most valuable content for your audience, you need to know who they are. What types of content do they enjoy? How long do they prefer blog posts, videos, podcasts, and other content to be? And what content do they want but struggle to find?

Answering questions like these will equip you with the information you need to craft high-value content. You can use the following methods to research your audience :

  • Surveys
  • Social listening tools
  • User behavior analysis
  • Focus groups

Developing a content marketing strategy without research may be a little faster, but you’re more likely to miss the mark.

Brainstorm Concepts, Topics, and Exciting Ideas

Use your marketing goals and data gathered through your research to brainstorm content ideas. You can try various techniques, such as a mind map: write a topic in the middle of a whiteboard and surround it with anything that comes to mind.

Create Personas

Personas can help you create targeted content that’s more relevant and engaging to specific audience segments. They include concise information on a fictional reader representing a group, such as 30 – 40 year-old professionals with lots of disposable income and no kids. In-depth audience research is essential for building accurate personas.

Build your Content Calendar

Setting up a content calendar will enable you to stay consistent, organized, and aware of upcoming topics. That’s ideal if you need to research a subject or book a space for filming a video. It’s also helpful for promoting content via social media and email before it’s published.

Good content is fundamental for any digital marketing strategy. And if you need help with your digital marketing, including SEP and retargeting, leave it to our Orange County SEO agency.

How can we boost your online visibility? Get in touch to find out!

 

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Create Better Content with Personas

Create Better Content with Personas

Personas are a popular tool in digital marketing. A software business, for instance, might build user personas to understand who their new product is for. That can reduce the risk of launching a new program that fails to deliver the features that the target users need most.

Similarly, creating a persona for content marketing can help you bring the right information to the right people. You’ll find it easier to build content that engages the relevant audience segments and remains consistent.

But how do you create a persona for your content? Our Orange County digital marketing agency shares some tips to help you get it right

Research Your Audience

To create a persona, you need to know as much about your audience as you can. Here are a few ideas to keep in mind:

  • Send surveys to customers asking their opinion on your current content, the content they like to read, and what they find least appealing about content in general.
  • Chat with sales and support staff about common pain points. What drives customers to contact your business? What issues do they face? These insights can help you develop accurate personas.
  • Check your leading competitors’ content. What types of blog posts published on their site achieve the highest engagement? Which formats do they use most often, and how do readers/viewers react? You might learn more about what your shared audience likes and dislikes.
  • Pay attention to social media conversations related to your industry, business, and content. Social channels give you a direct connection to different audience segments, and can be vital when building personas.

When you gather information on your audience and how they engage with content, you can start crafting your personas.

Consider Your Target Readers’ Goals and Challenges

Use the information you gathered through your research to build a brief character study of your target reader, viewer, or listener. A content marketing persona should include essential details such as:

  • Age
  • Gender
  • Location
  • Occupation (mainly for B2B companies)
  • Goal (what they’re looking for when they come to your content)
  • Challenges (what’s preventing them from getting what they want)
  • Social media channels

You only need to provide basic details in each area — personas should give you and your team at-a-glance breakdowns of the target individual.

Understand What Each Persona Needs at Different Stages of the Customer Journey

Content is important throughout the customer journey, so bear that in mind when planning your publication schedule.

For example, a potential buyer will find certain blog posts invaluable at the start of their journey (the awareness stage), such as a concise overview of a specific product or service.

Your content marketing personas can help you understand different readers’ goals and challenges at each stage of their customer journey. Consider how your content can engage them and encourage them to become loyal buyers. Brainstorm content ideas for each stage of the customer journey across your audience segments.

Our Orange County digital marketing pros are here to boost your business’s visibility on search engines through SEO, SEP, retargeting, and more. Contact us today to get started!

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Mobile SEO Tips: How to Help Your Website Rank Better

Mobile SEO Tips: How to Help Your Website Rank Better

While online, consumers all over the world spend more than half of their time browsing websites on a mobile device. But users may not be able to find your website in the first place if it’s not optimized for mobile. And that can have a serious impact on your rankings.

What can you do about that? Our Orange County SEO agency shares a few ideas to inspire you below.

Responsive Design is a Must

Mobile devices generate more than 60% of organic search engine traffic, so customers should be able to visit your site and enjoy a user-friendly experience on any device. Otherwise, you risk losing them: one survey found that 60% of consumers abandon transactions because of a poor user experience.

That’s why using responsive web design is a must for every mobile SEO strategy. Images, text, and other key page elements will be scaled to the appropriate dimensions for the user’s screen.

As Google gives preference to mobile-friendly sites that provide a positive user experience, responsive web design can help boost your SEO ranking.

Maximize Page Load Times

Page speed is critical. If your pages take longer than three seconds to load, you risk losing visitors and their business. Google also considers page speed a major aspect of quality websites and a positive user experience. If your pages take too long to load on mobile devices, it’s time to fix that.

You can increase page speed by:

  • Compressing images
  • Reducing redirects
  • Caching pages
  • Decreasing JavaScript, HTML, and CSS code

These are just a few ideas to help you get started. Keep making improvements until you get load times down to three seconds or less.

Target Local Customers

“Near me” searches have increased dramatically in the past decade, as smartphones and smart speakers allow consumers to find local providers with minimal effort.

More than 75% of people visit a brick-and-mortar location within 24 hours of running a local search on their mobile device, and almost 30% of those searches lead to a purchase.

Optimizing your site for local searches can increase your visibility on mobile. Create content with a local focus, set up a Google Business Profile, and enable customers to review your services. All this can make your site easier to find for local searches.

Create Mobile-Friendly Content

All content on your site should be easy to read and view on a mobile device. It also needs to keep visitors engaged enough to stay on your site and explore.

Try these tips:

  • Keep paragraphs concise to help visitors skim text
  • Embrace white space for easy readability
  • Use brief, punchy headlines
  • Break up text with videos and images (compressed, of course!)

Mobile-friendly content is essential for a great user experience, so optimize yours to boost your ranking.

Need a little help to take your rankings higher? Leave it to our Orange County SEO agency!

We’ll create a bespoke SEO strategy to increase your visibility and deliver a stronger user experience. Get in touch now to learn more!

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Mobile-friendly Websites: What are the Most Important Elements?

Mobile-friendly Websites: What are the Most Important Elements?

With more than 60 percent of Google searches originating from mobile devices, your website must be optimized to deliver a quality user experience on smartphones and tablets.

Otherwise, visitors might find browsing your site so frustrating they give up and try another. And one of your competitors could win their business instead.

But what makes a website mobile-friendly?

Let’s explore five of the most important elements.

Simple navigation

Navigating the best mobile-friendly websites is a breeze.

One of the most common setups is a hamburger icon (a stack of three short horizontal bars) in a corner of the page. Users can tap this to open a vertical menu.

And every page should feature plenty of space — clutter will only confuse and irritate users on smaller screens.

Unclear page titles and illegible text can also make browsing your site more trouble than it’s worth.

Straightforward CTAs to guide users

A call-to-action (CTA) tells users what you want them to do next. They should be simple to spot and easy to follow, e.g. “get your free quote”, “sign up now”.

Lead customers to your CTAs with concise content that explains why they need to take the specified action.

How can you draw attention to CTAs? Display text in eye-catching colors, make the buttons big, and use a font that visitors can read without needing to pinch-zoom.

Responsive design suited to all devices

Responsive design ensures your site will adapt to fit any screen, across all devices. Pages will reformat automatically to avoid poor layouts and cluttered content.

Your customers will enjoy a seamless experience no matter how many devices they switch between.

Click-to-call buttons for direct communication

Click-to-call buttons empower visitors with a fast, direct way to contact your business.

This saves them the time and potential irritation of scouring your website for a number/email address or completing a form.

Let’s say you run a local Italian restaurant. A hungry customer is in the mood for a pizza, so they use voice search to find businesses like yours. They try your site, and find a click-to-call button on your homepage.

This makes it incredibly easy for them to book a table within seconds of discovering your restaurant, without trying to find your contact page while they’re standing on the street.

Images optimized for mobile

Images that work fine on your desktop site may cause issues on mobile devices if they’re too big. They’ll increase load times and leave users waiting longer than they should to browse.

And that’s a real risk when more than half of mobile site visits will be abandoned if a page takes more than three seconds to load.

Resizing and compression will bring images down to a more manageable level for mobile devices. Prioritize speed and convenience over visual flair.

These five elements are essential in mobile-friendly websites, so frequently check your site’s performance to identify improvement opportunities.

Want to learn more about how a fantastic mobile site can help your business? Get in touch with our Orange County SEO specialists!

 

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6 Tips to Enhance Your SEO Performance with Images

6 Tips to Enhance Your SEO Performance with Images

Do you optimize images to improve your SEO performance? Or do you never consider their impact on your ranking?

If you aren’t taking the time to optimize your images, you could be missing an opportunity to drive more traffic to your site and boost your SERP position.

With the ongoing rise of visual search, images are returned for around 20 percent of Google searches. That’s why we named it one of our top SEO trends for 2021.

But what can you actually do to improve your SEO performance with images?

Be clear when naming image files

Descriptive file names are a must. Vague or generic names (e.g. “image001”) won’t help Google understand exactly what an image shows.

Think carefully about how a file name can help a search engine recognize the contents of an image. Be specific, descriptive, and include keywords (such as “men’s-black-Nike-sneakers”).

Take advantage of alt text

On a similar note, alt text brings a wealth of opportunities to increase an image’s visibility. Alt text is required under the American Disabilities Act (ADA) to ensure users with visual impairments understand what images contain (via screen readers or text-to-speech solutions).

But alt text also helps search engines clarify the contents of an image and the page it’s on. As with image file names, focus on clarity and precision. Include relevant keywords but be subtle (i.e. no stuffing).

Pick your image format carefully

JPEG and PNG are two of the most common image formats online (along with GIF and TIFF). But each has its advantages and drawbacks.

JPEG images tend to be of a lower quality but load faster than PNG. And with PNG, quality is higher but file sizes are bigger. So, choose carefully.

Always compress images before you publish

Uploading uncompressed images can have a serious impact on user experience: images, and the pages they’re on, will take longer to load. And users are more likely to abandon your site if they’re waiting too long — bounce probability rises 32 percent when page load jumps from one second to three seconds.

Various tools and plugins can compress images for you. Aim to keep images below 100kb to reduce the risk of performance issues.

Incorporate images into sitemaps

Sitemaps are crucial for good SEO, as they help search engines discover a site’s pages.

Including images in your sitemap will increase the likelihood of a search engine indexing your images. And that could bring more traffic your way.

Either add images to your existing sitemap or create a new one just for your pictures.

Keep images mobile-friendly for smartphone users

Responsive images will scale to align with your site’s size on any device. This is so important when so many of us use smartphones to find products or services. For example, half of mobile users are more likely to use a business’s mobile site when shopping instead of downloading their app.

If you overlook responsiveness, you could chase users away with slow load times and poor overall performance.

Nett Solutions is an Orange County SEO agency with years of experience helping businesses just like yours rank higher through tailored campaigns. To find out how we’ll optimize your site and increase your visibility, get in touch today!

 

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