Dinosaur SEO Tactics that Do Not Belong In Any SEO Strategy Today!

Do you know about the meteor that hit the Earth millions of years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs and yet people still talk about them. The same can be said about certain ancient SEO tactics and strategies. They’ve been around for ages; seem to be too entrenched to ever change and simply don’t work anymore because of the ever-evolving Google Algorithm.

To continue the metaphor, this blog post is essentially a meteor that will wipe away dinosaur SEO tactics that are holding your website back from achieving digital greatness!

Here’s what you need to be wary of:

Only Focusing On Number One Rankings

This is the Tyrannosaurus Rex of SEO— it’s the oldest and the baddest— it will eat your site alive if you don’t avoid it. Being number one on SERPs is undeniably important; but it’s not the only strategy there is.

You’ll probably find hundreds of SEO ‘experts’ who talk about the number one organic search ranking as the only thing you should focus on. Let’s be real. There are almost 2 billion (!) websites out there today. The chances of being first on every keyword that’s relevant to your business are very slim. Is all hope lost then? Should you just get a GoDaddy refund and give up on your dreams? Not a chance! There are ways to smartly gain visibility.

Let’s get down to brass tacks; you’ll probably never get a ROI on the amount of money you spent getting to the top of a SERP. What should you do instead? Focus on other SERP features; for example, the featured snippet.

The featured snippet is used very often with voice search; and unlike traditional searches, voice search can even choose from the 10th number on the SERP list. What’s more, click-through rates on voice searches are astronomically high.

What are some other things you can focus on? How about Image SEO so you get ranked on Google Images? Or focusing on long-tail keywords that are both voice friendly (we tend to search with longer phrases when using our voice) and don’t have as much competition. In a similar vein, make those long-tail keywords as local and specific as possible.

Keyword Research Based On AdWords/Keyword Planner

Google AdWords data used to be the holy grail of SEO and keyword research. Even today, while websites have diversified, it always seems to be the first point of entry. Many SEO optimization sites still harp on ad nauseam about its accuracy.

The truth? The numbers and queries it presents don’t fully reflect everything that’s happening in the backend of Google Search.

AdWords and Keyword Planner have a problem. They sometimes group certain keywords on a whim, even if it does make ‘sense’ to their algorithm. ‘Search Engine Optimization’ and ‘SEO’ are collapsed into the same category, and show the same monthly search and advisable bid price numbers.

This is exacerbated when, as a business, you optimize for both, not knowing they have been collapsed into each other, and expect double the click-through rates because the graphs shown don’t unbundle the two terms, even though they have different traffic.

Keyword Planner also collapses keywords that ‘stem’ from each other. Words like ‘grab’ ‘grabs’ ‘grabbing,’ etc. all show the same amount of traffic, when it is quite evident that this should be impossible.

What’s more, the average monthly searches shown are too broad, they don’t even align with Google’s own Trends tool, and it hides keywords it believes don’t have strong commercial intent.

All of this sounds like a major pickle. What are you to do then, instead?

Clickstream to the rescue! What is clickstream you ask? At its most basic level, it’s all the web pages a user visits, and the entire ‘stream’ of clicks they generate as they do that. So what’s the hype about? Traditionally, clickstream data was only available if you owned a domain. With recent algorithmic advances, though, we can now accurately construct this information, thus having a much more detailed picture of how people conduct their searches, what keywords they search, etc.

Tools like SEMrush, Keyword Explorer, and Ahrefs are a godsend for this. They show you accurate difficulty and CTR percentages, proper keyword traffic, and don’t bundle ‘similar’ keywords.

Being Obsessive About Keyword Placement

Too many people make the mistake of worrying too much about H1s and H2s, keyword placement in those tags and areas, making sure keywords follow the exact syntax that AdWords told you, etc. As with the last section, there is no doubt that these things are still important to an extent. It’s just that this obsession is better suited to a million other things that will actually yield results.

So while, yes, you need to have the keyword used in the title, it’s more important to focus on things that Google actually considers significant. As of now, this is giving search engine users the most personalized and accurate results. This means focusing on related keywords as well as the main keywords.

For example, your business could be selling garage doors in Houston and isn’t listing despite you getting everything about the title, H1, and H2 right to a tee. If you instead start optimizing for areas around Houston like Cinco Ranch, Greatwood, and Sugar Land, your ranking will shoot up far beyond what ‘accurate’ keyword placement can do.

Separate Domains/Subdomains

Some brands aren’t content with just having the first SERP rank. They want all 10! If you’re looking to completely destroy your competition, historically, you would put in a whole lot of subdomains to your site or buy separate ones so that you can have a listing for each.

However, Google now lists a bunch of queries (branded or unbranded) from the same domain together. Think to when you search for a generic question, and you get 10 Quora questions bundled as one result. This makes it much harder to have 10 listings.

What do you do if you’re an overachiever, then? As Captain Haddock would say, “blistering barnacles!” No, we don’t mean you should go fishing. In fact, we’re talking about barnacle SEO.

Just like a barnacle attaches itself on a ship, it’s useful sometimes when you’re a smaller site to attach yourself to another, bigger site.

Let’s go all in with the dinosaur metaphor.

Imagine you own and operate a dinosaur museum and just can’t seem to rank on SERPs. The fact of the matter is there are too many young kids searching for dinosaurs for your museum to ever make it. What do you do then? How about contributing dinosaur pictures to Wikipedia pages? Or answering questions with your official account on Quora? Wherever you see a gap in a larger website, fill it with content that’s branded as yours.

Another way to do this is focus SEO resources on hosted blog platforms and hosted subfolders. Blog platforms like Medium and Tumblr have networks that your site may not have otherwise, and optimizing your content on them will potentially give you more listings.

A hosted subfolder is a good idea if you already have a lot of domain authority. You can put your blog in a hosted subfolder, giving it the leverage of your existing domain, while also helping its ranking through relevant quality content.

Search Berg is one of the leading small business SEO service providers in the United States. We recently completed our 15,000th SEO project and have a bevy of happy customers who are ranking higher than they ever imagined. We have a highly experienced team of SEO experts who always stay up to date with the latest SEO trends.

Get in touch with us and we’ll help transform your website and brand’s presence online.

Earning Backlinks with Infographics in 2018

Infographics have always been loyal companions to link builders.

A quality infographic has always something unique to share. It uses a communication medium that makes messages effective and quick to grasp. It provides content ideas in dearth of creativity. Plus, to use it in a piece, all a web admin needs to do is copy and embed its HTML code on their web page, and there it is standing proud and live.

Add all these features together, and it’s easy to see why publishers love using infographics. And every time they share (or publish) them, you get (earn) a backlink in return.

However, the use of infographics to earn backlinks has recently been brought to question. As recent as 2018.

The premise?

The oversaturation of infographics in the content marketing world.

Every business is creating infographics regardless of their expertise level in the domain. Consequently, many infographics out there today don’t hold true to the principles that originally made them successful and popular among publishers.

They simply seem to be adding to the noise without voicing anything of value.

As a result, the gap between created infographics and published (or shared) infographics has widened; more infographics are being created and less are being shared.

Less sharing means less backlinks.

That does not mean though it’s right of us to question the ability of infographics to earn backlinks. Infographics are still very much relevant in this present age, it’s just that a significant majority of marketers and business people are not designing them correctly.

Google’s Matt Curtis sums up this shortcoming of present-age infographics perfectly:

This begs the question:

How do you design an infographic that earns backlinks in 2018?

As someone who is already familiar with creating infographics for link building, you don’t really have to do anything novel, new or reinvent the wheel; you just need to make sure you stick to the principles that originally made infographics a success.

You need to keep your infographic visually appealing, unique, precise and linkable.

Designing a neat, visually appealing and linkable infographic is not difficult, thanks to the many design software and services available both online and offline. The real challenge, however, is making an infographic that is visibly unique and delivers necessary information at a quick glance.

To do that, you need to come up with content ideas that haven’t already been created into infographics— ideas that resonate with your audience.

  • You can use Google Trends, industry-related forums, Facebook pages, Twitter streams, LinkedIn groups, competitor’s websites and other tools and platforms to find topics that your customers are most interested in discussing.
  • Performing a quick search on Google (“keyword” + “infographic”), Pinterest, Topsy and Visual.ly will help you determine if an infographic already exists on the topic.
  • Various data resources available on the internet and informational input from your staff will help you gather facts on your selected infographic topic.

Once you have adequate information on the topic, shape it into an infographic format.

  • Keep the layout of your infographic neat for easy navigation.
  • Use the right color scheme to make your copy more impactful.
  • Incorporate relevant images. Use PNG, JPEG, BMP, TIFF or GIF format as they are fastest to load and help reduce bounce rates.
  • Employ bold font for headlines to make them stand out from the rest of the content.

After you’re done designing the infographic, get an embed code and publish it underneath your infographic for easy sharing and backlinking.

And your infographic is all ready to go live and earn backlinks for your business.

Need help with designing a high-performing infographic that earns your business plenty of backlinks from high authority websites?

Search Berg can help you!

We’re a full digital marketing service firm in the United States, offering expert infographic design services to businesses in different industries. Our expert and experienced infographic team knows what it takes to produce a high-performing, backlinks generating infographic. Besides designing infographics, we also help businesses optimize their website for Google and improved traffic. Get in touch with us today to discuss your digital marketing needs.

Bye-Bye Google Plus!

While for some it came as a shock, others saw it coming and knew it was imminent—Google announced its plans to shut down the consumer version of its social network, Google+.

According to Google’s VP of Engineering, Ben Smith, 90% of user sessions on Google+ lasted for less than two seconds. A big problem no doubt, but what ultimately led to the platform’s demise was a much bigger issue that recently surfaced.

An unexpected bug in the Google+ code lead to a private data breach of profiles of up to 500,000 individuals. While there’s no evidence of the data being misused or the developers abusing the API, the platform will be shut down for consumers over the next 10 months.

What Caused The Breach?

In a detailed blog post published by Google, the reason behind this phenomenon was explained. A software bug in the Application Programming Interface (API) of Google+ gave third-party developers free reign over consumer data.

The breach was discovered back in March 2018 but since there was no evidence of misuse, it was exposed to the public only recently.

The Devil’s In the Details

Google+ users can choose who they allow access to their profiles. However, the bug granted unauthorized access to over 438 applications without the user’s knowledge and without these apps being marked as public.

The data that was breached includes names, age, gender, occupations, email addresses, and more. Note that no other data posted on or connected to Google+ was exposed. This includes Google account data, Google+ posts, G Suite content, phone numbers, messages etc.

Since the API log of Google+ was only kept for a couple of weeks, it cannot be confirmed who the victims of this breach were. Users were reassured that there was no deliberate misuse of the data.

Users can check their Google+ data by downloading it from Google’s Takeout. More information will be given on how to download and migrate existing Google+ data.

We Lost Google Plus, But Was It A Loss?

Although Google should be commended for launching an ambitious plan to introduce its own social network, the fact remains that the platform never really clicked with the target audience. This begs the question, ‘How Impactful Was Google+ To ROI?’

Google’s blog post admitted an uncomfortable truth about Google+ and consumer engagement. The post highlighted the fact that nearly 90% of the user sessions on Google Plus ended in 5 seconds or less—yikes!

This meant that a major reason that users were accessing Google+ was likely…by mistake. Once there, they didn’t find many satisfactory reasons to stay.

Not All Is Doom & Gloom—Not for enterprise customers, that is.

Enterprises found great value in using the network for their products. This was especially true in companies where co-workers engaged in internal discussions regarding a secure corporate social network.

From setting access rules to using central controls, there are many ways enterprise customers benefitted from using Google+. It seems like Google+ might have shut down for consumers but not for enterprise users.

So, What Does This Mean?

Created with the vision to eliminate the multiple audience dilemma, Google+ was meant to be a ray of hope for anxious network members concerned that their content reached the wrong audience.

Some believe that these supposedly good intentions were to blame for the early demise of Google+. It’s not such a bad thing after all, to see a post on social media which wasn’t mean for a particular consumer.

There was a time when Google tried to push the adoption of Google+ as a means to personalize search results. All this to say that although, its departure likely won’t be sorely missed, it’s worth noting that Google+ will be shut down for good.

Let’s discuss the impact this will have on:

  • Digital Marketers

If there’s one thing digital marketers know, it’s to not keep all their eggs in one basket. The digital media space is incredibly dynamic. The latest data breach from a tech giant is a lesson for marketers that whether it’s Facebook, YouTube, or Instagram, when it comes to developing a marketing strategy, we can’t predict what the future holds.

Issues like these cause consumers to lose trust in tech companies which is why marketers should never rely solely on any one marketing platform. Marketers would do well to remember that a strong social media marketing campaigns consists of a healthy variety of social networks.

As more and more of such breach scandals come to the limelight, maintaining consumer trust will become that much harder.

  • Social Media and SEO

It’s no secret that social media and SEO go hand in hand.  Social media platforms proved to be useful ranking tools to boost SEO efforts. Google+ was used to combine both these features to help companies increase their conversion rates.

Google+ contributed to building a site’s online authority, despite not being an official ranking indicator. Even though it was Google’s own network, when the loss in audience engagement started, it didn’t significantly impact SEO.

Social media might not be the most crucial factor to constructing a solid SEO strategy. However, the position of your SERPs can be affected by YouTube and the popularity of your social media channels.

Still, the loss of Google+ might not be such a loss, after all.

Get Social With Search Berg Social

Search Berg offers proactive lead generation on a number of popular social media platforms. Our comprehensive social media marketing packages start from $199 only. Our social media marketing strategies are designed to boost active client engagement, organic website traffic, and revenue.

We aim to help our clients establish their business in the social arena. We offer engaging, content-driven social media marketing services to create buzz about their brand and offerings. From daily progress reports to relevant community engagement services, our packages cover them all.

The ingredients in our expert social media optimization packages include identifying audience search, gauging customized social media presence, reporting in-depth analysis, and managing reputation building as well as community development.

Call us at 855-444-4777 to start building your social media presence!

Why You Need Video Content for Your Website If You Want to Gain New Customers And Strengthen Your Brand Online

Content marketing is ever evolving in the sense that new and better forms of content have emerged and in some cases replaced older approaches. Take print media and digital media for example. Before people used to get their news from the local newspaper. Now they get it online, from their tablet. Nothing against print media which is still there in some form. But with this shift, we basically witnessed an example of content evolving to serve the vast interest of the public.

Today, we are seeing another similar paradigm shift where digital media is being replaced by Video media.

Video content has been here for some time, and it has been gradually shaping up into a VERY strong trend. It’s turning into a super content marketing craze.

And for some very impressive reasons.

No Medium Attracts Traffic Faster and Larger than Video

The results are in. Study after study has shown people response more to Video which is why Video content has big admirers across the globe.

Case in point—YouTube— the giant boasts a viewership of 1.5 billion monthly active users.

Our current worldwide population is nearly 7.6 billion.

That means, one out of every five people in the world has a YouTube account and since you don’t actually need an account to view YouTube, imagine how many people actually use it in their daily lives — now that would be a massive number!

And of course, with huge audience, comes huge traffic.

According to the Aberdeen Group, a leading market intelligence firm, companies using videos on their websites generate 41% more web traffic from search engines than those that don’t.

The takeaway: If you want more traffic on your website, start creating videos of your products or services.

Videos Leads To Sales!

Okay, traffic without conversions isn’t really impressive.

But who says videos don’t convert?

Latest data reveals, video users enjoy 27% higher click-through rates and 34% higher web conversion rates, compared to non-users.

Another study reveals adding video to a landing page boosts conversions by as much as 80%.

One case study that makes for a strong case is that of Dropbox.

When Dropbox was first launched, the concept was foreign to most.

Users could not understand what it was about and how it operated.

As a result, the company struggled with conversions.

Later, they decided to add an introductory video to their landing page.

And guess what?

Their conversions instantly increased!

The takeaway: If you want more conversions on your website, start investing in videos

Videos Sell Products and Services

Arguably the strongest point of videos is that they sell a product or service effectively.

It has been found that companies that use video boost revenue 49% faster year-over-year than companies that don’t.

This can be attributed to four factors:

  • Videos communicate marketing messages and product concepts in a clear manner.
  • Consumers trust video content more in comparison to other content pieces
  • It’s easy to retain information about a product when communicated through video, thereby increasing the likelihood of conversions.
  • Consumers consume video content more thoroughly than blogs, articles, whitepapers and e-books.

The takeaway: If you want to increase business revenue, start investing in videos.

This is THE TIME to take advantage of the opportunity

Businesses around the world have already started creating marketing strategies around video content. And they’re very aggressive in their plans.

According to State of Inbound 2018, 45% of marketers are planning to prioritize video next year. More will definitely join them in the future when they see video attracting traffic, boosting conversions and increasing business revenue.

Interested in creating videos for your business website?

Search Berg can help you!

We’re one of the leading content marketing service providers in the United States, specializing in video content creation and video voiceovers. Get in touch with us today to discuss your video marketing needs.