Get Top SE Rankings with Latest Social Media Practices

Social media marketing and search engine optimization are strategies used by businesses to create a unique identity of their businesses to attract more customers to their websites. These two strategies are highly related since an organization’s availability on social media platforms such as Facebook boosts its search engine rankings.

Business owners often fail to understand the relationship between social media and search engine optimization and how the two can significantly influence Google rankings.

Understanding the relationship between these two aspects and monitoring possible social media practices is crucial for the growth and popularity of your business. Several social media practices can be implemented by your SEO team to improve Google rankings. Here are some latest social media practices that can boost your search engine optimization.

1. Increase the Number of Your Social Media Followers

The Number of followers that any social media profile has greatly influences search engine ratings. Followers of a given website can influence can influence its search engine ranking through search engine optimization boosting. For example, a company with many Facebook likes and twitter followers get a boost in Google ranking compared to its competitors with fewer followers.

It’s essential for a company to attract and build its followers in a more organized and acceptable manner since Google detects any mischievous practices such as paying for twitter followers and Facebook likes. Practices such as opening discussion forums, writing and posting articles are powerful ways of increasing followers on social media platforms.

2. Encourage Social Media Sharing

Enhanced sharing on social media is among the top ways of increasing product awareness and improving your search engine optimization efforts. Make use of external links to access market segments through continuous social media sharing. When you invest heavily in social sharing, there will be increased popularity of your products and brands among customers which influences SEO.

To benefit from social sharing, you need to ensure your posts are creative and attractive. Potential customers are willing to share great your great content across different social media platforms. Increased sharing of your content boosts the number of posts that have your links which boosts your search engine optimization ranking.

3. Optimize Social Media for Searches

This strategy helps in opening up channels to direct your profile viewers to your various posts. These posts can be videos, articles, or even newsletters. Posts are meant to provide opportunities where the company becomes popular on social media and increases the chances of your website ranking better.

Optimization of content on social media platforms will always have a positive impact on your SEO efforts. Focus on providing quality information in your industry through your social media posts. Optimization of social media posts helps in making your website more visible hence pushing forward your search engine optimization strategies.

4. Enhance Your Brand Awareness

The popularity of your site and brand positively correlates with the results of your search engine optimization campaign. Increased brand and site awareness increases the traffic to your website. Social media, therefore, can be used to boost the reputation of your business. Attracting and retaining customers together with increasing the number of searches is greatly influenced by the ability and strength of social media utilization.

As a marketer, you can take advantage of social media platforms to inform your audience on the latest unbeatable discounts, promotions, and new products that you are offering. This will help you to attract more social media users to enhance brand popularity. You will end up attracting more potential clients which increases the number of visitors who come to your site.

5. Optimize Posts Locally

Optimizing and promoting social media posts within your local community provides significant benefits to your SEO campaign. It’s worthy to adapt local search engine optimization since local clients facilitates your business promotion posting information related to your company. You can also engage the local community through various events to boost the popularity of your business brands. Any content on social media from the local community boosts the search engine optimization process.

6. Encourage External Inbound Links      

Social media platforms offer you a great opportunity to link your content to external sources. The external links you have, the higher the Google ranking you get. To attract more visitors, you will have to publish high quality and authoritative content to attract authoritative external links as well. Also, remember to use social media channel to spread your useful and original content which serves as a bait to social media users. Doing so not only increases your chances of attracting authoritative external link but also boosts your social media reputation.

Get Better On-Page SEO Impact on Your Business Websites

With so many businesses being launched everyday, how can you ensure that yours stands out? If your business has a good, first page ranking in search engine results, what can you do to stay on top?
  
Studies show that on desktops, the top-ranking page in Google search results has a conversion rate of almost 35%. And on mobile devices, its conversion rate is almost 32%. This shows how important it is to improve your search engine ranking and boost your site’s visibility.

SEO helps you optimize your website so that more users are able to find you on the internet. 61% of marketers say that SEO is a top priority when it comes to inbound marketing. This means that the competition is getting tougher. You need to build your brand’s presence online by taking steps to improve search engine rankings. 

Optimization of keywords, meta tags, title tags, and URLs are some of the common ways to improve a website’s SEO. But with changes and updates in how search engines rank a website, you need more than that. That is where on-page and off-page SEO come in. And this post is going to focus on on-page SEO.

On-page SEO involves optimizing a web page through internal organization, while off-page SEO refers to external configurations. 

Here are some of the best ways you can improve your on-page SEO:

1. Maintaining Website Speed

47% of customers believe that it shouldn’t take longer than 2 seconds for a web page to load. And even a second of delay can reduce your pageviews by 11%, and your conversions by 7%. A fast loading website is the key to an engaged audience. On the other hand, a slow-loading page makes people impatient, which leads to a higher bounce rate. 

For Google, a website that loads faster gets a higher ranking in search engines. Google’s PageSpeed Insights helps you determine the total time taken for your website to load. Once you know what’s slowing you down, you can take the necessary steps to improve your website speed.

2. Using AMP

Mobiles account for over 50% of website traffic, and this number is only going to increase in the coming years. For this, it is important that websites load almost as fast on mobiles as they do on desktops. This is what led to the creation of Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP.

AMP is nothing but a coding standard that helps websites load instantly on mobile phones. When you do a simple Google search, all the top-ranking results have an AMP tag, especially when it comes to news stories. You’ll be able to see a little lightning bolt symbol on top. 

Although it is not owned by Google, it has the company’s support. This basically means that when it comes to indexing websites, Google’s search engine algorithm will consider AMP. With AMP, websites have seen a 20% increase in sales conversions.

3. Responsive Site

A responsive site means that the site has been designed to cater to the design needs of different devices. In 2015, Google announced that mobile-friendliness of a website will be an important criteria in search engine rankings.

Mobile search optimization is important for strong on-page SEO since there are more people using smartphones. At least 90% of people in the U.S. use a smartphone. People use smartphones for searches to buy things, to read, and to access social media. 

Desktop websites are heavy and cannot load as well on mobiles and tablets. To improve user experience, businesses need a responsive design so that desktop, mobile, and tablet users all have the same experience. The idea is to ensure that the website understands which device is in use, and then adapts to it.

4. Creating Engaging Content

Nothing beats good content when it comes to search engine rankings. Original and relevant content gets a better search ranking. 

For Google to crawl a website, the content needs to be at least 500 words. In fact, the average length of articles on the first page of Google ranking is 1,890 words. Long-form content of over 1,000 words tends to get more likes and shares. This means more visibility in search engines.

Make sure that the content is written in a simple and concise way. People should be able to understand what you’re saying so they can stay engaged, otherwise they will simply bounce away. 

Using Long-tail Keywords for Optimizing Content

Keyword optimization is important when it comes to SEO but with long-tail keywords, your website will get more diverse and relevant traffic. There will be plenty of websites which may be using same or similar generic keywords but if you want to target your niche, you need to stand out.

A long-tail keyword may not be used very often in search engines but they lead to a target relevant audience. Long-tail keywords are valuable and more specific to a customer’s needs.

Run a competitors search and figure out all good keywords that your competitor is targeting then start from there to get some traction. There could be 100’s of long tail keywords to monitor for which your website might be ranking but that are unknown to you. A ranking tracking tool like ProRankTracker can be a great help in this area.

5. Use of Internal Links

Internal links connect a web page with another page on the same website. If your web page contains 2-3 internal links, then it helps the search engine determine the relationship between the pages. A search engine crawler then gets an idea what your website is all about and then ranks your site accordingly.

That’s why internal links are important for good on-page SEO. They help a user navigate your website smoothly. And even for a search engine crawler, if there are no internal links, those web pages are left out of indexing and they simply don’t exist. A good website should have links to other relevant internal pages spread out evenly throughout the website.

6. Use of HTTPs

In 2014, Google made HTTPS encryption for URLs a ranking signal. HTTPS or Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure is basically a website security certificate known as the SSL or Secure Socket Layer certificate.

This makes any kind of data breach difficult by making any external sharing of data almost impossible. HTTPS makes a website trusted by Google. It is very important for ecommerce and banking websites especially when more people are making online transactions.

It is believed that HTTPS enabled sites get a very minor boost in search engine rankings, but it is still important for on-page SEO, especially since Chrome puts a “not secure” mark on non-HTTPS sites. Seeing this mark could alarm many of your visitors, who could end up leaving soon after landing on your site. This will increase your bounce rate, affecting your search ranking. 

7. Use of Structured Data

Structured data is nothing but organized data. In SEO, structured data means a markup on the web page that provides more details about its content. It helps search engines to go through your website and understand what it is about.

Here’s how it will look in search results pages. People will be able to see details such as the star rating, number of reviews, price, stock status, etc.

Search engines like Google have a markup tool that can help you with structured data for your website for improving on-page SEO. Structured data means enhanced search results with more images, videos, GIFs and other styling elements. This increases click-through rates and drives traffic.

Conclusion 

Google, the undisputed market leader in search engines, has made a lot of changes in its search algorithm in the last few years. With these new factors for website ranking such as good loading speed, AMP, HTTPS, internal links, structured data, and engaging content, SEO has become all the more technical. 

Boosting on-page SEO through these techniques is time-consuming, and can be a problem for someone who doesn’t understand these technicalities. If you know more ways to improve on-page SEO, let us know in the comments below.

Tips to Improve E-commerce Sales with Product Recommendations

Businesses know that acquiring new customers is more difficult and costlier than selling new products to existing customers. This is why eCommerce businesses prefer to invest in a good loyalty program. And product recommendations is one of the best marketing tools that a retailer can have in its arsenal. After all, the right recommendation helps sell more products to existing customers.

Simply put, recommendations are suggestions made by the retailer on various things that the customer might also be interested in. But in order to do this, the company has to know its customers and what they want. This is to avoid scenarios like recommending red stilettos to a client who prefers white trainers.

The question now is how to successfully use recommendations to improve eCommerce sales. Here are five suggestions:

1. Generate Personalized Product Recommendations

Personalized recommendations are carefully calculated and chosen products that are offered with the customer's shopping behavior and history taken into consideration.

Amazon is a prime example of personalized recommendations. First-time site visitors will initially see some generic suggestions that are either crowd sourced bestsellers or what other visitors are checking. But once a purchase has been made, they'll see recommendations based on items they've bought or searched for recently. These suggestions are found in the product description of the item a customer is currently checking or on the homepage that they're logged into.

2. Have Well-Timed Customized Email Recommendations

Email marketing is still one of the most effective marketing strategies. It's affordable, practical, and can boost conversions. But to have a more robust customer engagement, personalized email recommendations are the way forward. After all, the more relevant the email's content is, the higher the rate of emails opened, website visits and sales.

Amazon is again a good example of this strategy. The company's AI sends well-timed emails that recommend products that the customer has just browsed on the site. The emails are also sent as soon as the customer leaves the site, thereby ensuring that they're still receptive to recommendations.

3. Make Product Pages More Appealing With Relevant Suggestions

The product page is one area where you can make more recommendations. However, it's important that you find the best way to showcase your items because at this stage, you'll either push your client towards the checkout process or drive them away altogether. Data-backed recommendations can provide shoppers with more choices at this key stage. By putting together selections based on the customer's interest, the odds of conversions can increase by as much as 411%.

Brands can boost conversions by suggesting complementary items. For instance, if the shopper is looking for shoes, they can cross-sell by suggesting a shoe rack. Product recommendations can also be based on the shopping patterns of other shoppers. For example, if previous shoppers also bought a necklace after buying a blouse, then the product page would recommend what “people who bought this product also bought.”

4. Don't Stop at a Confirmed Order

A successful order confirmation doesn't mean you have to stop making recommendations. This stage of the shopping process can still be a good arena for recommending items that the customer could buy. Think of it as a last chance to add more products to the deal.

There are two good ways to make the most of order confirmations. One would be to have recommendation popups. Aside from thanking your customers for their latest purchase, include messages that suggest “you might be interested in this product.” The second way would be to integrate recommended products in the order confirmation email. Make your offer more compelling with the promise of freebies or discounts in their next purchase.

5. Making Friendly Referrals

As already mentioned, recommendations shouldn't stop just because a purchase has been made. Recommendations can be used as a referral tool, one that can push a brand further, generate traffic, and boost more sales.

Brands can do this by asking customers to share the news of their latest purchase with their friends via social media. Bear in mind that people are more likely to buy or use the same brand that a trusted friend has used and recommended. To make this easier for your customer, integrate a “Share This” button on the customer's order confirmation page.

There's no question that recommendations have positive results. It's a marketing strategy that eCommerce businesses can easily adopt. So this year, put more emphasis on recommendations and see your sales numbers grow.

Happy New Year - 2018

Wishing all a Prosperous, Peaceful, Good Health and Happy New Year 2018 !!