Tag: Orange county marketing

5 SEO Trends Every Business Should Embrace

5 SEO Trends Every Business Should Embrace

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?

What is A/B Testing?

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

SEO Trends to Watch Out for in 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!

 

5 Must-Have Features for Every Business Website

5 Must-Have Features for Every Business Website

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.

SEO Audit Checks

3 New SEO Audit Checks for 2017 And Beyond

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!