If you’re the only business in town, you’re always going to show up first. However, if there are hundreds of similar businesses nearby, it can get quite frustrating, especially if you’re new in the game. Incorporating the right Google My Business tips can make all the difference in standing out.

Some people pay marketing agencies a lot of money to get their local business listings to the top of search results. What they don’t realize is that these companies often use unorthodox techniques, which can lead to issues like a hard suspension, causing you to lose everything, including your photos and reviews.

Whether you manage your business profile yourself or hire an agency, it’s important to follow best practices for Google Business Profiles (formerly known as Google My Business) to ensure your listing is safe and compliant. For local search, following Google Businesses guidelines is key to maintaining visibility and a strong online presence. Make sure to review a list of do’s and don’ts to keep your listing secure while avoiding risky practices.

1. Listing Information Dos & Don’ts
2. Reviews, Questions and Answers Dos & Don’ts
3. Photos and Videos Dos & Don’ts
4. NAPW (Name, Address, Phone, Website) Dos & Don’ts

1. Listing Information

The information you provide is the most important thing. It’s often the client’s first contact with your business and most of time time people are looking for basic information, such as your phone number, address/location or opening and closing hours.

Therefore, you should make sure you spend enough time crafting this section.

Dos:

Add accurate profile information: The first step is to have a Google My Business listing, of course. If you don’t have one, head on to https://www.google.com/business/ and claim your Google profile.

Sometimes, the listings might already be there, so make sure to search for your physical locations on Google Maps. If it’s there, you can claim it and start filling out your profile with key information like your name, address, and phone (NAP) to improve your local search rankings.

After creating your business, Google will prompt you to edit crucial information such as Name, Address, Phone number, website, working hours, business category, and more. Accurate NAP and a physical address are essential to building trust with Google and attracting more customers.

Optimize your profile: One of the key criteria for ranking in local search is relevancy, which is determined by how well your business profile is filled out. Ensuring your contact details are correct, including phone calls, will help boost your profile in search engine optimization (SEO) results.

Add main SEO keyword in your title: The title should always contain the name of your business, but it’s also smart to add a targeted keyword related to your services or location for better SEO for Instagram and Google. For instance, a med spa might include “Med Spa in Miami” in its title to attract local business.

For example, if my business were simply called Arcadia LTD and it were in the hotel industry, I would put the title like this: “Arcadia: Hotel & Restaurant in London”

Verify your listing: An unverified listing risks losing edits and changes, and worse yet, someone else could claim it.

Verifying it through the Google My Business dashboard is easy—just look for the verification message, then you’ll be able to edit key sections like business profile optimizations and monitor and respond to google reviews link and google messages.

After you verify it, you should see the representative shield icon near your listing name:

Don’ts:

Keyword Stuffing: Avoid cramming multiple keywords and hashtags in your title, which can lead to hard suspensions. Instead, focus on one specific keyword and leave others for your website or social profiles.

A good example of keyword stuffing which you should avoid is the following: “Arcadia: Hotel, Motel, Bed and Breakfast, B&B, Restaurant in London.”

Google doesn’t like that and will often hard suspend pages that do this, so avoid it.

List outdated information: Keep your name, address, and phone current across all locations. Outdated details not only frustrate users but can also harm your search engine optimization efforts and local business growth.

It’s even worse when the brand has multiple locations with outdated information.

Although the phone number is the most common, imagine the frustration felt when Google MyBusiness says that a shop opens at 8 AM only to get there and find out that you have to wait for one more hour.

Google doesn’t want its users to end up having bad experiences from using its site, so that’s why it’s possible to suggest changes. However, do you really want other people to suggest changes on your schedule, or do you want to manage it yourself?

If you’re a marketing professional, prepare an e-mail to ask your clients if they have any unverified listings on Google. If they do, then they (or you) should manage them.

Create fake locations: Only create listings for physical locations. For businesses offering services in different areas, select a service-area option to avoid confusion and comply with community guidelines.

I mentioned above the frustration about a business’s hours being wrong, now imagine someone going there and not finding what they were looking for at all!

If you have a digital store or run a company from home, you can always just select the Service-area option from the edit address section. There you’ll be able to select locations that you serve. Make sure you uncheck the “I also serve customers at my business address” box. This will prevent people from knocking on your door.

For better results, use Google Analytics, social media marketing, and social media tools to track performance and engage with accounts to build brand awareness. Incorporating social listening, customer stories, and seo hashtag strategies will enhance your marketing efforts across multiple platforms, whether you’re posting an update or using bio generator tools for more dynamic profiles.

2. Reviews, Questions and Answers

Reviews are a critical part of your Google My Business profile success. Not only do they impact local search rankings, but they also greatly influence potential customers’ opinions about your business and your online presence.

Dos:

When managing your reviews, do the following things:

Ask clients for reviews: 

When starting out, it can be tough to get reviews, but a good strategy is to ask early customers or friends to leave reviews for your business account. If customers are happy, encourage them to leave positive reviews, perhaps by offering a discount for their next purchase. This helps boost your listing in search rankings and builds trust with your audience.

It’s almost guaranteed for customers to leave a review if their experience is bad. To compensate for that, try to get your happy customers to leave positive reviews. This can be achieved by asking them to do it once they make a purchase in your store or via e-mail, if it’s eCommerce. You can add incentives like discounts for the next purchase in the menu, if they leave a review.

Get renowned local guides to review your place: Local guides reviews have a lot more weight into Google’s and potential customers’ eyes. They are known for visiting and reviewing places and do this on a regular basis. The higher their Google Guide Level, the better.

Getting a high level local guide to review your business can help your listing get a boost.

But how do you find these local guides? Well, the best way is to become a guide yourself. You don’t necessarily have to take this as a business opportunity. I’m sure you often visit places, so just take a couple of pictures and say 2-3 phrases about that location.

Then, you can meet other guides at Local Guides Connect. It’s probably a bad idea to pay them to review you. Some might accept, but others might leave you a negative review instead. However, if you invite them to your restaurant to check it out or tell them about your business when you chat you’re most probably going to get a review.

Try to make some new friends.

Incentivize clients to share photos: Encouraging customers to share photos along with their reviews adds authenticity to your Google My Business listings. Whether it’s a restaurant or retail shop, photos of your products or services can help enhance your Google Business profile and attract more customers.

This is pretty common in restaurants, but nobody says you can’t ask your clients to review the new T-shirt they bought by publishing a photo with them wearing it.

The photos will also add to the MyBusiness photo collection. Keep in mind that people can also publish photos with bad reviews, such as flies in their soup or bad quality products!

Answer questions and reviews: Engage with both positive and negative reviews. Answering questions or replying to reviews shows you’re active and attentive. Google determines local ranking partly based on profile optimizations and user activity.

Ignoring reviews, especially negative ones, can hurt your business. A thoughtful response can help turn a negative review into a returning customer.

Learn from your negative reviews: Negative reviews provide valuable insights into your business’s weaknesses. Take them seriously and use them to improve your services, which can, in turn, enhance your business growth.

Negative reviews can be a great way of learning how customers act and what makes them angry. Try to avoid the same mistakes in the future.

Don’ts:

When managing your reviews, don’t do the following things:

Ignore clients or argue with them: Ignoring reviews, particularly negative ones, can damage your reputation. Always respond politely and offer solutions, such as discounts, to resolve any issues. This shows potential customers that you care about customer service.

Never ignore the negative reviews! Always answer them and try to turn that negative review into a happy customer. You can offer a discount for their purchase.

It’s a small price to pay because this will prove to other potential customers who are researching your business that you are active and care about your customers’ thoughts.

Add fake reviews: Creating fake reviews can lead to penalties, including being dropped in search results or getting banned.

Even worse, customers will likely detect them, leading to a loss of trust and credibility.

This is even more dangerous, as they will most probably leave a review saying all other reviews are fake, which can greatly impact your business!

Also, keep in mind that people are more likely to leave a negative review than a positive one. You can create only so many accounts to keep reviewing your business 5 stars, but if your services aren’t up to the task, you’ll soon get outnumbered by the negative ones anyway.

Add negative reviews to competitors: Leaving negative reviews for competitors is not only unethical but also a waste of time.

Instead, focus on optimizing your Google Business profile, using GMB posts, and improving your service to stand out from the competition.

You can also get into trouble if people find out. You’ll ruin your business’s reputation.

Finally, verify your Google business to make sure your listing is secure, and take advantage of the Google My Business dashboard to monitor reviews, post type updates, and engage with customers. By focusing on profile optimizations and optimizing your Google business, you can boost your visibility, increase engagement, and drive more traffic to your business.

3. Photos and Videos

Photos and videos play a critical role in your business listing. People often want to see where they’re going, especially if it’s a restaurant or hotel. High-quality visuals can also improve local rankings by helping users recognize your business location and giving them a sense of what to expect.

Dos:

Include images in every category: When creating your Google My Business listing, make sure to upload photos in each category: Interior, Exterior, Products, Menu, Team, etc. This business information enhances transparency and can build trust with potential customers.

The “Team” section is particularly important, as it shows you treat your employees well, which often correlates with better customer experiences.

Add videos: Videos are a great asset to your business profile optimizations. Whether it’s a store or a restaurant, you can upload videos of the entrance or the products you’re offering. This not only helps customers find your location but also gives them a preview of what you offer.

Videos also enhance conversion rates because they help potential customers engage more deeply with your business.

If you’re a store, you can always make a video showing the entrance. Maybe it’s a little bit hidden and not really into the view. Help them out. You can also add videos of products, even say a word or two about those products. Invite them to the store. People like to be told what to do!

Optimize Google My Business with post updates that include images or videos regularly. Posting high-definition visuals can help keep your listing fresh and encourage more interaction, improving your local ranking on Google.

Again… it’s easy to get videos done. Everyone has a smartphone these days.

Go crazy with uploads on Google’s servers: When you upload images or videos to your Google My Business account, you don’t have to worry about file size slowing down your site.

Google’s powerful servers will handle the load. So, feel free to upload high-definition images that showcase your business in the best light.

If needed, Google will automatically resize them, helping to optimize your listing for search engines.

Don’ts:

Add fake images: Never upload images that aren’t from your business. This can hurt your credibility and may lead to copyright issues.

If you sell products like Nike shoes, don’t rely on official images from the Nike website. Instead, take your own photos of the products in your store. This keeps your local search results authentic and engaging.

Post pictures of clients without approval: Be careful about posting images of customers without their permission.

Even if someone tags your business, avoid adding those photos without consent. This can lead to potential privacy issues and affect business optimization.

I’ll share a story: there was this guy speeding on a highway. The static camera got him, so he received a ticket at home about 2 weeks later. However, his wife received the ticket first. She didn’t have any problems with the ticket, but with the location of the car. Turns out that the husband had lied about where he was going and, apparently, in the passenger seat a very pretty blonde woman could be spotted. The woman filed for divorce so the man sued the police and won the trial for them ruining his life.

I consider the man ruined his own life, but if you don’t want to take any part in ruined marriages and get yourself in a hell of a lawsuit, you’d better not post any pictures with clients in them without their approval!

In conclusion, optimizing your visual content is key for optimizing your Google business and improving your local search rankings. Regular business profile optimizations using relevant and high-quality images help customers engage more with your business, increasing your chances of showing up higher in Google searches. Be sure to include all relevant contact information, business description, and relevant keywords in your posts to make the most of your Google My Business profile. And of course, always verify your Google account with the verification code to secure your listing and boost your local rankings.

5. NAPW (Name, Address, Phone, Website)

NAPW stands for Name, Address, Phone, and Website. It’s commonly referred to as NAP, but including the website (NAPW) is also important for online visibility.

Dos:

List the information on your website: Ensure the same information in your GMB profile (Name, Address, Phone) is also listed on your website. Including this in your footer is efficient, but be sure to also add your business name, business hours, and other relevant info on your contact page. This consistency is key for Google business profile optimizations and helps attract customers.

You can add those in your footer as they don’t take up much space, but on your contact page you should also add your company’s real name, opening hours and other relevant information.

Build citations: Citations are like backlinks for your Google My Business profile. They help boost local SEO and increase visibility in competitor profiles. To stay ahead of the competition, you can research their citations using tools like BrandMentions.

Make sure your citations are accurate and include your relevant category to ensure Google recognizes your business correctly.

Post on Google: Regularly post on Google through Google Posts to keep your profile active. Whether it’s a promotion, a blog post, or new updates, these posts help you stay relevant and attract new customers.

Use google qa to answer common questions and interact with potential clients directly through your business profile dashboard.

Optimize your business: To further improve visibility, optimize your business by enabling features like enabling messaging, which allows direct communication with potential customers.

This personal touch can improve engagement and enhance your digital marketing strategy.

Don’ts: 

Be inconsistent: If your citations, business hours, or other information vary between your website and Google My Business profile, Google will get confused, negatively impacting your local SEO. Consistency is crucial.

Even if you have multiple locations, include the city name in your GMB title to differentiate listings and ensure accurate local search results.

Avoid irrelevant categories: Ensure your business is categorized correctly. Choosing an irrelevant category can confuse search engines and customers, making it harder to reach your target audience.

By following these tips and tricks, you can optimize your business for local SEO success. Consistent citations, accurate business information, and regular Google posts will not only help you collect customer data but also boost your visibility in search engines.

And don’t forget to verify your business for better rankings!

Conclusion:

Having your business at the top of Google Maps might take some time, which is normal for any new business types. Initially, you’ll get noticed by people searching near your physical address, but as you continue to satisfy your customers, your reach will expand. Google determines local visibility based on factors like conversion rates, customer satisfaction, and google business profile optimizations.

Improving your listing is relatively simple—avoid shortcuts and tricks. Instead, focus on filling out your profile with accurate contact details, adding a complete business description, and selecting a relevant category. Keep your GMB profile updated with correct profile information, including your business name, phone calls, and post updates. Regular google posts and gmb posts will help keep your listing active and engaging. Also, ensure that you verify your Google business and claim your Google listing to avoid issues with ownership or edits.

Engage with customers by monitoring and responding to reviews and google messages. Answering common questions and enabling enabling messaging helps build trust, improving local ranking on Google. Don’t forget to include relevant keywords in your profile for better search engine optimization (SEO), which will enhance your visibility in google searches. Tools like Google Analytics can help you track your marketing efforts and see what attracts customers the most.

If you’re running a business, or managing a client’s Google My Business account, consistency is key. Update your business profile dashboard regularly, optimize your listing with business profile optimizations, and use a variety of post types to keep your profile active. Using a google reviews link in communications also encourages customers to leave feedback, which helps boost your ranking.

Lastly, make sure to optimize your Google My Business profile by ensuring all contact information is accurate and that you’re listed in the correct business category. Use these tips and tricks to help boost your local ranking on Google, and don’t forget to verify your business with the verification code provided by Google. Focus on business optimization and good digital marketing practices, and soon enough, you’ll see results. Have you had any issues or successes with Google My Business? Leave a comment, and maybe we or other readers can help!

The post DO’s and DON’Ts on Google My Business | Tips to Get Your Listing to the Top appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

But how did this happen? Why has everyone started using them like crazy over the past few years? And why is there still so little intelligence on how hashtags work within search engines or on the algorithms of a marketing platform? Despite their popularity, there’s a surprising lack of tips and educated advice on how to rank higher on social platform hashtag pages.

These questions, along with many more, have led us to dive deep into each platform. We aim to uncover what algorithm lies behind hashtagged posts, how keywords and hashtags interplay, and why some posts soar while others fall flat.

The thing is though, there aren’t many of us who know the hashtag game through and through. First, we need to understand the role of hashtags in social media. Second, we have to grasp how they work. And third, we should determine whether they can actually benefit our SEO campaigns in the long run. In short, are they any good for us? And most importantly, how can we go all out on them to see results?

Hashtags can play a key role in driving visibility, but to truly harness their power, you’ll want to integrate them with your SEO keyword strategy. By doing so, you can align your hashtag usage with the efforts you’re already putting into various SEO tools. This combined approach can elevate both your social media presence and your overall search engine rankings.

1. What Is a Hashtag and How It Was Born
2. How To Rank High on Social Media Using Hashtags
   1. How To Use Hashtags on Twitter for Maximum Engagement
   2. Instagram and Hashtags – A Story of Power and Charm
   3. Do Facebook Hashtags Offer Enough Exposure?
   4. Google+ Only Shows You Posts From Your Agenda
3. Why You Should Double Down On Hashtags

1. What Is a Hashtag and How It Was Born

A hashtag is a discovery tool, heavily used by both social media users and brands. It’s essentially a new function of search—a stream of conversation used by those with a mutual interest in something. Hashtags usually cover contemporary trends, known facts, niche hashtags, particular interests, or simply anything you write after the pound symbol.

All major search engines, like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, index hashtags. They’re a great invention of the 21st century, helping people come together, share common interests, and inspire one another. Hashtags for Instagram, for example, allow users to jump into discussions by following hashtag feeds or pages, which enhances communication, bonding, and growth.

Hashtags can even boost traffic and engagement for marketing campaigns.

The hashtag is a word or phrase following a hash/pound mark (#), widely used on social media channels such as Twitter and Instagram. It helps identify, gather, and generate conversations around a specific topic. Instagram’s SEO can benefit from a well-chosen hashtag strategy, especially when paired with a good hashtags generator to find trending and niche terms.

In the beginning, hashtags were used only by social media early adopters, but they quickly caught the attention of advertisers and brands. Now, hashtags have become central to marketing campaigns, whether they’re used in a video description or as part of broader customer care initiatives. By leveraging social media analytics and social listening, brands can engage with accounts more effectively and refine their hashtag strategies for maximum impact. Even choosing the right Instagram name and hashtag can help accounts gain visibility and connect with their audience on a deeper level.

Hashtags are now part of the pop culture.

However, every trend comes with its fair share of madness and blunders. With the current fashion of using hashtags on everything—both online and offline—it’s no surprise that many people don’t really know how to use them properly. As a result, hashtags are often misused, misunderstood, abused, or misplaced.

Also known by their technical name—metadata tags—hashtags are searchable links that can significantly relate to SEO efforts, driving referral traffic to your website. Established in 2007, they have continued to thrive, enchanting users and brands alike. Whether you’re using a caption generator to craft engaging posts or a name generator to brand your content, the right hashtags can make all the difference.

Many people overlook that hashtags related to their niche can help boost visibility, especially when optimized in places like the search bar or when monitored with tools like Google Analytics. Beethoven might disagree, but for today’s marketers, hashtags are a powerful tool for enhancing searchability and engagement.

IRC (Internet Relay Chats) were the first to use hashtags, establishing themselves as a precursor of today’s social platforms. Resembling in form and style with today’s social websites, IRCs were live chats and messaging means where people could gather and share similar interests. When adopted by Twitter, hashtags were initially used for tweet chats, running like open groups where people could talk about a particular topic. Chris Messina was the mastermind behind the hashtag integration on Twitter. His idea was to incorporate a tracking tool on the platform, one that could be easily accessed by people in, say, the tweet itself.

how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?

— Chris Messina (@chrismessina) August 23, 2007

Although Twitter initially rejected the idea, Messina’s followers and other users embraced hashtags immediately. Thanks to them, Twitter became the first platform where hashtags gained traction (and let’s not forget that Twitter was also one of the first major mobile-friendly sites). Just a couple of decades earlier, the pound symbol was merely a way to navigate phone systems or return to the main menu. Now, the hash sign has taken on a new life, allowing people with similar interests to connect in evergreen groups where posts stay live and fresh.

Today, hashtags are essential for increasing brand awareness and reaching broader audiences. The Instagram algorithm, for example, uses hashtags as one of its key ranking factors to determine how well posts perform. By using AI social media tools and AI social algorithms, brands can target specific keywords more effectively, optimizing their content to appear in searches or even through Instagram’s search function. This helps brands expand beyond niche markets and engage broader audiences. Whether your goal is brand visibility or SEO, hashtags remain a crucial tool in the digital marketing arsenal.

Remember when we said marketers were drawn to this new social media invention? The thing with the hashtag is that, whenever you want to optimize conversations, titles, content and any other type of text form with hashtags, your activity will get more visible to the audiences both on social media and on search engines. For marketers, hashtags are a way to engage their brand with their market, and they usually deploy 3 types of marketing strategies:

1. brand or campaign hashtags – create a hashtag for your particular brand/campaign (#CocaCola)
2. trending hashtags – seize the trends of the moment and post content related to them (#WinterOlympics)
3. content hashtags (hashtag random words in your post).

Hashtag words work as brand mentions if you want. Marketers all over the world use them to gather and analyze what others are talking about their brands. Hashtags track conversations and keep them safe on pages. Hashtagged-words are like long-tail keywords – when spot on, they promise low search traffic, (sometimes) low competition, and high conversion. 

As already mentioned before, Google crawls and indexes hashtags, be they from Twitter, Google+, or blog posts – they’re all there.

source: intelligenthq.com

Although listed first in the image, Facebook is not the most popular social platform for using hashtags. In the beginning, Facebook was against the idea of hashtags, but eventually adopted them after seeing Twitter’s engagement success. Most marketers and SEO experts viewed hashtags as a smart alternative to paid ads that appeared out of nowhere. Hashtags, by contrast, were relevant and organic, which led to better results in driving traffic to your website.

Slowly but steadily, Google+ followed suit, incorporating hashtags on their platform in May 2013. Looking back, Google+ and Google as a search engine did a much better job with hashtags than Facebook. While Facebook lacks depth, Google integrated hashtags into the SERPs, making them an essential part of SEO strategy and social media strategy alike. For example, SEO for Instagram relies heavily on hashtag optimization to boost increased visibility, while Google uses them in search to improve website traffic.

Hashtags depend on different rules dictated by each social platform. You can’t apply the same SEO guide to all of them because each platform has a unique approach. On Instagram, the Instagram search bar and hashtag search are critical for ranking higher. Incorporating the right Instagram keyword or targeted keyword into your Instagram content can make a big difference, especially when using tools like a description generator or video description generator to refine your captions. This is crucial because hashtags affect SEO, influencing user activity and how often your posts appear in hashtag feeds.

Writing alt text for images, using a specific word or phrase in your content, or optimizing your YouTube video description can all contribute to ranking higher in search results. A well-rounded social media strategy that takes into account these factors will help you see better results in terms of both hashtag rankings and overall website traffic.

2.  How To Rank High on Social Media Using Hashtags

It’s a good habit to clear the clutter from our lives, and the same principle applies to hashtags. We need to ignore the spammers who use popular hashtags that have nothing to do with their content or those randomly playing with words after the hash mark. Instead, we should focus on what truly makes a hashtag post successful. This means choosing relevant hashtags, especially since they have a short lifespan—though their impact on search engine optimization (SEO) can be long-lasting.

How does a word or phrase preceded by a pound symbol influence SEO and search results? What’s the algorithm behind hashtags that makes some posts rank in Instagram’s Top Stories while others show up in Most Recent? Why does the Twitter hashtag feed often seem chaotic, not following a clear set of ranking factors like engagement, page authority, or followers? Could it be that hashtagged posts are ordered based on a mix of your search, location, and interests?

These are common questions, echoing what you’ll find in SEO FAQs and online discussions. Hashtags are central to any strong SEO strategy, driving traffic and boosting online presence. Platforms like Instagram use branded hashtags and tools like an Instagram hashtag generator to help users optimize their posts for better reach. If you’re crafting an Instagram caption or generating hashtags for a YouTube video, tools like these can be essential for success.

Instagram recommendations guidelines highlight the importance of using hashtags that align with your content and audience, while the Instagram search feature helps users find posts with the most relevant hashtags. Employee advocacy can also play a role, as staff members can boost branded hashtags across their networks, further enhancing visibility.

Ultimately, a well-planned SEO strategy that uses targeted hashtags, whether generated by an Instagram search or a dedicated tool, can significantly improve search results and online engagement.

On our way to finding the answers to our questions, we realized we can’t take more than an educated guess on how social platforms rank hashtag posts on their timeline and what you should do in order to succeed with your hashtag marketing strategy. Afterall, this would be a guess made on other guesses, since nobody actually knows social media/search engines algorithms, but only try to read their behaviors and changes.  Plus, we wouldn’t be the only ones to try:

source: makelight.com

How To Use Hashtags on Twitter for Maximum Engagement

Given the little information we could find about what’s the algorithm behind hashtag pages, we had to look at the algorithm Twitter uses for their usual posts. However twisted and complicated it seems, one thing is certain: Twitter’s really secretive and stingy when they’re to give information on their workings. There are many educated assumptions on how Twitter might rank tweets and display them on the feed – so our first thought was that maybe the same situation stands for hashtags a well.

As if things weren’t tangled enough, on March 15, 2016, Twitter changed to a new algorithm that displayed a non-chronological selection of tweets on the top feed. 

Tweets you are likely to care about most will show up first in your timeline. We choose them based on accounts you interact with most, Tweets you engage with, and much more.
	Twitter team

Just like on any other major social media platform, engagement is a key factor in the Twitter timeline algorithm. It not only impacts your online relationship with your followers but also determines what content you’ll see first. In addition, tweets follow the rule of thumb—relevancy. This includes factors like freshness, overall engagement (likes, retweets, clicks, favorites, external shares, and time spent on the post), as well as the author of the post (your relationship with them, how often you’ve interacted), and your activity (how often you log in and how much time you spend on the platform).

For social media marketing, integrating hashtags for SEO into your posts can help improve visibility. Proper keyword research, including the use of keyword tools, is essential to ensure you’re using the right terms to drive engagement. Optimizing with alt text for images and linking content to your YouTube channel can further boost reach across platforms. By applying these SEO techniques, you can enhance your overall social presence and achieve better results on Twitter and beyond.

When you open Twitter after being away for a while, the Tweets you’re most likely to care about will appear at the top of your timeline – still recent and in reverse chronological order. The rest of the Tweets will be displayed right underneath, also in reverse chronological order, as always.
	Mike jahr
	Former Senior Engineering Manager at Twitter @mjahr

So, the logic is this: should you have skipped a few days or months since you last visited Twitter, once you eventually sign in, Twitter will show you posts in reverse-chronological order so that you’d be taking things over from where you last left them. These being said, is’ obvious – it all looks natural and clear now: Twitter doesn’t want you to miss on anything that might impact you. Twitter is faithful.

However, if you’re not really in the mood of revising everything you’ve been missing out while you were “outside Twitter”, you can always click “Happening Now” and check what’s cooking at that very moment on your timeline. 

Anyways, if you want to rank high with your tweets, then you’d better start using hashtags. The thing is though, you cannot apply any rule comes to your mind, or those that work on other social websites. You need to know the game. And studies show that tweets with hashtags had 2 times more engagement than those without, plus 55% more retweets. 

Employing a seo guide and keyword tools can aid in finding the best seo keyword combinations that boost brand awareness. For companies using employee advocacy, encouraging employees to share posts with popular hashtags can expand reach. Additionally, social listening and social media analytics provide deeper insights into how hashtags affect SEO and allow you to engage with accounts more meaningfully.

Speaking of Twitter hashtag techniques, the most effective tweets include not one thousand or one hundred, but 1-2 hashtags. Avoid adding too many or else you can ruin the audience flow to your post. The former 140, now 280 character-limit should make it obvious that hashtags should engage too much space. You are allowed to use as many you wish in your post, but hashtags won’t perform as good as you’d expect them to. 

source: searchenginewatch.com

Last but not least, make your hashtags relevant and a natural part of your tweet or post on Instagram. Hashtags should align with your content and, if possible, summarize the topic of the post. Avoid spamming with irrelevant hashtags, such as attaching a popular but unrelated hashtag on Instagram just for more visibility. This can irritate your audience rather than inspire them.

For a more effective approach, follow recommendations guidelines and incorporate Instagram SEO tips to ensure your hashtags improve your reach. Crafting a well-optimized Instagram bio with the right keywords can also enhance your visibility, helping your posts gain traction and making your account more discoverable.

Instagram and Hashtags – A Story of Power and Charm

If we were to make a top listing how hard it is for marketers to nail the hashtag ranking algorithm on various social platforms, Twitter would be head of the list, closely followed by Instagram, then Google+, and Facebook. 

The Instagram hashtag pages can be divided into two sections: “Top Posts” and “Most Recent. 

Instagram is a little bit easier to navigate, especially when looking at the “Most Recent” section of a hashtag page. I conducted an experiment by posting a random photo from my phone on Instagram using the #healthyeating and #butterchicken hashtags. And voila! They appeared in the Most Recent section. However, in the second screenshot, my post didn’t show up in the top three posts but was instead pushed down by others. The reason? That particular SEO hashtag is highly trending, so new posts appear just seconds apart.

This highlights that hashtags and visibility on social media platforms like Instagram have a very short lifespan unless a post has a large, engaged audience consistently voting, commenting, liking, and saving it. For social media managers, this is where effective use of Instagram Reels and optimizing SEO on Instagram becomes crucial.

Following community guidelines and leveraging the right strategy can help boost a post’s staying power in the feed. Implementing these tactics can ensure that your content continues to gain traction beyond the initial post window.

Today, Instagram is probably the best place to use hashtags in. It is heaven to hashtags. The more pound marks a post has, the bigger the audience. And digital marketers know it and use them to their maximum potential. The success recipe is to use 9 hashtags – these bring the best engagement ( studies show a rise of 28,548 interactions per post).

source: searchenginewatch.com

Even stories marked with a hashtag can get on the hashtag pages.

The good thing is that there’s no character or hashtag limit, hence you can add up to 30 hashtags per post. You have the chance to rapidly expand your audience, provided you have attractive content. You know it already – content is king. Along with many other factors that might matter only if you want to get a spot in Top Posts.

source: https://blog.bufferapp.com/instagram-algorithm

Longer hashtags have higher engagement. Just as with long-tail keywords, the more specific hashtags are, the better. Usually, the more generic and simpler ones bring less traffic. 

Instagram doesn’t like giving specific information on how hashtags work on their platform, opting for neutrality in answers. 

Do Facebook Hashtags Offer Enough Exposure?

When it comes to Facebook, there very little we can say in regard to their hashtag approach. They were the last ones to adopt this social media invention and didn’t seem to be willing to invest too much in it, like the two aforementioned social platforms did, creating a whole religion around it.

Similar to Instagram, people are able to see only posts either from their friends or coming from profile pages with public settings. So one step would be to set your brand page as visible as possible, that is to promote it. Then, pair your highly-engaging and attractive posts with brand/campaign, trending, or content hashtags.

There’s no limitation as to how many hashtags a post should have, hence, the increased interaction depends only on the right choice of numbers. The same Trackmaven studies show that more hashtags a Facebook post has, the weaker the engagement will be. If you want to score big from the very beginning, keep in mind that one hashtag brings more traffic than more – approximately 1,771.

source: searchenginewatch.com

On Instagram, using hashtags effectively is key to boosting SEO for Instagram. Instagram SEO tips suggest that optimizing instagram posts, instagram captions, and even instagram reels with hashtags for seo can enhance user activity and increase social media analytics insights. Tools like an instagram hashtag generator or hashtag generator tool help you find keywords and hashtags that drive traffic and engagement. These hashtags also impact the Instagram algorithm, influencing where your content appears in the instagram search bar or during a hashtag search. Adding a specific keyword or instagram keyword into your bio generator or instagram content further strengthens your online presence.

When it comes to the order algorithm behind how Facebook displays hashtag results, most probably it would be a mix of the following:

source: https://blog.bufferapp.com/facebook-news-feed-algorithm

Google+ Only Shows You Posts From Your Agenda

A quick search shows that Google is no longer displaying Google+ hashtag results in their SERPs. There’s no official press release from Google announcing this, but it appears you can now only see hashtagged posts shared directly on the Google+ platform.

Google+ operates similarly to Instagram and Facebook—you can only view posts from your connections and other public content. Truth be told, Facebook and Google+ are the least targeted platforms among the big four. However, you can still perform a hashtag search for any keyword that comes to mind, and also see trending hashtags by checking the “Hot Topics” section.

For platforms like Instagram, social media tools and Instagram SEO tools can help optimize your strategy to reach target audiences. Instagram recommends using relevant hashtags to boost visibility. By applying SEO tips and keeping an eye on what’s trending, you can maximize your post’s reach and engagement on social media.

Why You Should Double Down On Hashtags

Hashtags mean networking, discovering, community building opportunities, popularity, advertising, and loads of traffic. They work somehow as a library where you can find everything related to a certain subject (e.g. #Grammys, #Oscars). They do work but they show results only when you’re not doing overkill.

Knowing that Google indexes tweets, you should double down on using hashtags that can boost brand visibility and impact your SEO strategy by increasing awareness and brand searches. By incorporating hashtags into your social marketing strategy, you’ll create more opportunities for your brand name, content, and social media activity to appear in Google search results.

Utilizing a hashtag generator tool can help you find the most relevant and trending hashtags for your Instagram posts, ensuring better visibility. This is crucial, as the right specific hashtag can enhance social media engagement and drive traffic to your site. Whether you’re posting on Twitter, Instagram, Google+, or Facebook, using the hash mark properly allows users to discover your brand based on their interests and needs.

Speed is important for maximizing engagement, as a hashtagged post has a short lifespan, but when done right, hashtags can generate long-term traffic. Monitoring trends and being the first to post on a trending topic is key to visibility. For this, a tool like Hashtagify.me can be useful in identifying the most popular and relevant hashtags for your posts.

Finally, don’t forget to optimize other elements of your social media presence, such as using a bio generator to create a compelling Instagram bio. If you have insights into how hashtags work or how to rank higher in SERPs and timelines, feel free to leave a comment—we’d love to hear your thoughts!

Conclusion

Hashtags have evolved into a powerful tool that goes beyond simple social media posts, playing a crucial role in search engine optimization (SEO) and increasing brand visibility. For social media managers, understanding the nuances of using related hashtags, niche hashtags, and targeted keywords can greatly improve their overall social media marketing strategy. Hashtags help to boost social media engagement and connect with target audiences, making them indispensable in modern social media platforms like Instagram.

Adhering to instagram recommendations guidelines and community guidelines is also crucial for long-term success. Proper use of writing alt text, thoughtful youtube video description writing, and incorporating video description generators can further enhance visibility across platforms like Instagram and YouTube. For businesses leveraging AI social media tools, generating hashtags strategically helps amplify content reach and social media engagement.

Ultimately, the right combination of SEO on Instagram, hashtag on Instagram, and marketing platform integration can help you achieve increased visibility, drive traffic, and sustain a strong online presence. By optimizing content with SEO tools and applying Instagram SEO tips, businesses can elevate their brand’s performance across social media.

Article reviewed by Catalin Dracsineanu

The post Do Hashtags Influence SEO? Here’s How to Rank High Using Hashtags appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

This article will explain what chatbots are and how they can help you take your digital marketing to the next level. I’m not using “to the next level” as an idiom, because chatbot marketing might just be the next big thing. Incorporating chatbots in marketing can streamline customer interactions and significantly enhance your marketing strategy. It has the potential to revolutionize the marketing world!

Chatbots can improve and benefit your marketing and sales in many ways.  They apply to support requests, e-commerce and even personal or informational websites. You can find some of the best techniques in this article.

In a nutshell, Chatbot Marketing is about promoting products and services using chatbots.

Stick with me and below I’ll show you exactly how you can set up your own chatbot, and how you can put it to good work plus many more. 

1. What Is a Chatbot and How Does It Work ?
2. Why Chatbots Are the Future of Digital Marketing
3. Best Uses of Chatbots
   1. Personal virtual assistant
   2. Get Traffic & Grow Audience
   3. Buld e-mail list
   4. E-commerce & Conversational Commerce
   5. Customer Support
   6. Marketing Automation & Sales
4. Can ChatBot Marketing Improve SEO?

1. What Is a Chatbot and How Does It Work ? 

Chatbots are complex computer software designed to chat with persons and perform different actions, from simple conversation to customer support and e-commerce.

They are becoming increasingly crucial in social media and marketing efforts, helping businesses grow your business and boosting sales.

A chatbot is short for “chat robot”. We think of robots as machines, but ‘robot’ actually means ‘forced labor’.

Source: quickmeme.com

Marketing chatbots go beyond just basic interactions—they can play a pivotal role in lead generation, improving customer experiences, and streamlining customer care. By integrating a marketing chatbot into your social media strategy, businesses can enhance their interaction with customers, answer marketing messaging, and provide live chat services.

Chatbots are not only about imitating real conversations. Modern AI chatbots, powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, can learn from customer experiences to deliver more personalized service, which is particularly useful for holiday season promotions or loyalty programs.

These bots can be set up on various platforms, including a WordPress chatbot, allowing marketers to promote products, offer welcome messages, and manage marketing campaigns.

Businesses that set up marketing chatbots can see the benefits of chatbot marketing almost immediately. Whether it’s on landing pages, within shopping experiences, or even as part of a partner program, these chatbots help promote products and improve conversion rates. Moreover, chatbots can be a valuable marketing channel, helping businesses increase engagement on social media and content marketing efforts.

While chatbots aren’t yet perfect—they haven’t truly passed the Turing Test—chatbots for marketers are evolving rapidly. They now play a significant role in digital marketing, allowing businesses to efficiently manage customer interactions and collect customer data. For instance, chatbots can assist customers and seamlessly transfer them to a human agent when necessary, ensuring that the shopping experience is both efficient and enjoyable.

In conclusion, while there is still room for improvement, integrating chatbots into your marketing strategy can enhance customer experiences, increase social media engagement, and ultimately, help your business thrive.

Or, how Hamza puts it…

Here we go…someone had to do this meme in the end…#bots #AI #chatbots pic.twitter.com/w9EBQ7awtT

— Hamza Harkous (@hamzaharkous)

In the next section, you’ll discover why chatbots are becoming more popular and why companies started investing in them.

2. Why Chatbots Are the Future of Digital Marketing

In case you that chatbots are a big trend now,  here is a Google Trend from 2017; the interest started long time ago.  

The term had a big but very short trend somewhere between 2006 and 2007. This happened when the first chatbots appeared on the web.  Although cool at first, since they were not helpful in any way, people lost interest fast.

However, chatbots are becoming more sophisticated today and come in various forms, serving a wide range of purposes. Modern AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants are designed to provide more value, such as offering personalized recommendations and quick replies to common questions. These bots are improving customer interaction and customer satisfaction by keeping conversations flowing and guiding users to relevant solutions.

In 2015, Baidu, China’s biggest search engine, introduced an AI-powered chatbot called Melody, a medical assistant designed to help solve the healthcare crisis.

Melody can chat with people at home to assist in diagnosing possible illnesses, showing how aipowered chatbots can make a real difference by improving customer experience in critical sectors.

Today’s chatbots serve a wide variety of purposes, from messenger bots that engage website visitors and potential clients, to tools that enhance brand awareness by delivering news and updates directly to users.

Marketers can now build your own chatbot to fit specific needs, like segmenting traffic or providing personalized recommendations based on user preferences.

These chatbots guide users through processes and offer quick responses to FAQs, improving customer satisfaction and making customer interaction more efficient.

By integrating chatbots into their strategies, businesses can better manage customer interaction while providing personalized recommendations and guiding potential clients through their products or services. Whether you’re using a chatbot to segment traffic or to deliver news and updates, chatbots are a powerful tool for improving customer experiences and increasing engagement.

Abhimanyu Godara, founder of Bottr.me said that chatbots will fix the app clutter, as many apps can be replaced. He also said that soon, everyone will have their own chatbot.

Marketing is shifting from logos to faces, from brands to people. The chatbot talks to you, and the process becomes a lot more interactive, creating engagement.
	Abhimanyu Godara
	CEO at Bottr.me / @abh1manyu

Abhimanyu is definitely right:

You can see the personal brand business model become more and more popular (especially in the digital marketing industry). People like Gary Vaynerchuk, Neil Patel and Brian Dean and many others promote and use this model. Even Richard Branson is using his personal brand to promote his businesses.

Big brands will still be in the game, though. But every business will also have its own chatbot.

Here’s why:

Messaging apps are growing really fast. Faster than social media itself!

Business Insider

If they become the #1 way people talk to each other, businesses will have to find a way to engage with their customers there.

Mobile search is growing, and Google is testing the mobile first indexing. This tells us that people will use the messenger apps even more. Chatbots apply best to people using mobile devices.

One way would be setting up customer support departments. That is not cost effective, and many businesses won’t do it.

The other way, is having chatbots.

Chatbots can make small businesses much more competitive, especially in digital marketing. With the help of artificial intelligence and well-designed chatbot platforms, small teams can manage a significantly higher volume of clients and qualify leads more efficiently.

Even though it might sound crazy, chatbots may eventually challenge traditional apps and websites. An app requires space and needs to be downloaded, while websites take time to load, and many are quite slow. However, messenger chatbots and WhatsApp chatbots work instantly. You type something, and they respond immediately. This is where conversational AIs and AI agents excel, as they bypass the traditional user interface, completely changing how customers engage with your business. People can navigate content using their natural language, creating a seamless customer journey.

By integrating chat plugins with messaging apps like Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp, businesses can improve customer interactions and provide faster, more efficient service. Chatbots can also help in real estate, contact sales teams, and even gather valuable customer feedback.

For businesses looking to implement chatbots, chatbot builders are available to help you create a tailored chatbot marketing strategy. Some great chatbot marketing examples include using messenger chatbots to handle customer feedback, answer FAQs, and offer personalized recommendations.

Chatbots are not just a tool for large businesses; they can be a game-changer for small businesses looking to streamline customer service, enhance the customer journey, and qualify leads without adding more staff. By incorporating chatbots into their digital marketing strategies, businesses can provide a better user experience, improve efficiency, and stay competitive in today’s fast-paced world.

But don’t get too hyped yet! Chatbots are still far from becoming a standard.

Ilan Kasan, CEO at Exceed.ai said in January 2017 that the chatbot technology is going through the Gartner’ Hype Cycle. Back then, it was standing on the Peak of Inflated Expectations. Right now, it started to fall in the Trough of Disillusionment.

The Gartner Hype Cycle is a timeline of how new technologies appear on the market. This applies to most things in the IT field.

As Ilan said it…

Get ready for the Trough of Disillusion … it’s coming soon. With it, many chatbot companies will vanish. Eventually, as the technology improves and the market understand the best use cases for chatbots, winners will emerge.
	Ilan Kasan
	CEO @ilankasan / exceed.ai

My research kind of proves Ilan’s theory.

I’ve contacted some people who use chatbots directly on their website. So far, their results were either mixed or missing altogether.

The experience is still confusing so even if people are trying it, it’s telling from their messages that they aren’t sure what the chatbot does or how it works.
	Paul O’Brien
	Blogger at seobrien.com / @seobrien

Here’s another response:

I couldn’t get any real value so I stopped using it.

— Harsh Agrawal (@denharsh) June 14

Now that was… Harsh.

On the other hand, on platforms like Facebook Messenger, the read rates can get extremely high. Matthew Barby, Head of SEO at Hubspot tells us about his experience:

It’s still early days and I have a lot more experiments ongoing within Messenger in particular, but I’ve seen read rates of my push messages of over 90% – which is insane!
	Matthew Barby
	Blogger at matthewbarby.com / @matthewbarby

Still, even with all the current problems, setting up a bot can kickstart your site’s growth.

Sujan Patel, a renowned expert in growth hacking and co-founder of Voila Norbert, has been talking about chatbot marketing as a growth technique for a while..

Chatbots can definitely be a growth tactic as it could help increase leads, start conversions/engage with potential customers and get feedback.
	SUJAN PATEL
	Blogger at sujanpatel.com / @sujanpatel

Although people are barely scratching the surface of chatbots potential, it’s still a good idea to get started with them. Learning the technology now can gain you an advantage over the competition in the future. These types of software are prone to becoming popular in the days to come.

Let’s take a look at some of the best use cases for chatbot marketing.

3. Best Uses of Chatbots for Marketing

Chatbots have evolved significantly, and today they can be applied across various industries to enhance user experience and boost business outcomes. Whether you’re focused on lead generation, customer care, or improving conversion rates, chatbots are a key component of a modern digital marketing strategy. Here are some of the best ways to leverage chatbots in 2024:

3.1 Personal AI Assistant

A virtual assistant powered by artificial intelligence (AI) can help you save time by managing customer interactions when you’re unavailable. Well-designed chatbots app or AI assistants can handle common customer queries, respond quickly, and enhance the customer journey by mimicking natural language conversations.

Whether you’re in real estate or managing e-commerce, these assistants boost engagement and streamline processes. Examples like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp chatbots enable real-time communication with potential customers.

Nathan Hague, an awesome Australian marketer, uses one on his personal website. After a few seconds and scrolls on the website, the invitation to chat with it will pop up. The bot is an essential aspect of Nathan’s social strategy.

Clicking on the “Send to messenger” button will take you to Facebook messenger, where the bot takes action.

His bot is very well built and has an awesome vibe. You can see that Nathan did his best to showcase his personality through his bot.

On his page, Nathan uses the bot to let people know he will respond. And he does! (Thanks, man!)

Paul O’Brien took a more complicated approach. He tries to replicate himself altogether, using a bot on his website.

I’m seeking a virtual assistant clone of myself. Have looked into a good number of bots and have yet to find anything that works. Bottr plus Replika might come close.
	Paul O’Brien
	Blogger at seobrien.com / @seobrien

On Paul’s blog, in the bottom right corner, you can notice what looks like a live chat icon. What catches your attention is Paul’s face in the icon.

The bot still has a very long wait until it will be able to replace Paul completely. Still, you can pick from a set of questions and find more about Paul and his work. The answers are usually articles he has written on his blog or other websites. If the bot can’t answer something, it will put you in contact with Paul directly.

Having a personal virtual assistant can help you save time and get people engaged with your content. 

3.2 Get Traffic to Your Site and Grow Your Audience

Using messenger bots as part of your conversational marketing strategy can drive traffic from social media to your landing pages.

Companies like WholeFoods have successfully engaged users by sending personalized recommendations based on preferences, which increases brand awareness and helps to bypass social media algorithms.

Chatbots provided to your audience in their inboxes can achieve read rates of up to 90%, which is significantly higher than traditional methods like email.

On their Facebook bot, they engage with their audience by showing them interesting recipes. Before that, they narrow the posts down by the user’s preference.

Subscribing users to your bot can help you bypass the reach algorithms and all the other clutters on social media. While others will deliver posts in the news feed, you can send them directly into the users inbox. That’s where they chat with their friends, so you know they will see your message.

Remember, by engaging with your fans directly through their inboxes, you can get read rates of up to 90% of your subscribed users.

News publishers have been using this method in their content marketing strategy for a while:

3.3 Build an E-mail List

You can integrate your chatbot with marketing automation tools to qualify leads and collect contact information. For example, chatbot platforms can help you build email lists, offer welcome messages, and even segment users based on behavior.

Nathan Hague suggests set up marketing chatbots to gather customer info and use chat plugins to engage visitors, which is especially useful during peak seasons like the holiday season.

My very strong suggestion though, is to use the Facebook bot more and more instead of email marketing! Remember, you’re renting your presence on Facebook and it can be taken away from you at any time! Keep building your email list in case something ever goes wrong.
	Nathan Hague
	Blogger at nathanhague.com / @australiawow

Still, he says that the upgrade from e-mail open rates of 10%-20% to Facebook messenger open rates of 90% is invaluable.

Try to use Messenger instead of E-mails, but keep building your e-mail list as a backup in case your Facebook profile/page ever gets banned.

3.4 E-commerce & Conversational Commerce

E-commerce is shifting towards conversational marketing, where chatbot builders create bots to simulate an in-store shopping experience. Brands like Kayak and H&M use chatbots to recommend products and allow users to complete purchases seamlessly.

These bots can also help with lead qualification and providing product recommendations based on user preferences, all while boosting sales. After purchases, bots can even follow up with customer feedback to enhance loyalty programs.

Many companies are doing this. Here’s an example from Kayak, the travel search engine:

Some travel bots can even book your flight or your hotel room. Pizza Hut also uses a similar technique for their orders.

With a bot you can also classify prospects. It’s very easy to sort out consumer preferences. This also applies to all fields, from age, gender and location to interests and hobbies.

Fashion brands use this strategy to study new trends and learn about what their clients want.

Here’s an example from American Eagle:

Here’s another one from H&M, on Kik.

After you tell the bot your style, it sends you different outfits you might like. You can save them to favorites, skip them or select a specific product and buy it.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t purchase directly through the messaging app. Every time, the bot sent me to a website to make the final purchase. This is probably happening because I don’t live in the USA. Facebook Messenger payments are available in the USA since 2015, so we know it’s possible.

After a purchase is made, you can even set up the bot to follow-up and ask the user for feedback.

3.5 Customer Support

The most common use of AI chatbot technology is in customer care. AI agents can answer common questions instantly, reducing response time and improving customer satisfaction.

For instance, companies like 1-800-Flowers and Twitter use bots to handle initial interactions, before handing off more complex issues to a human agent.

This hybrid approach keeps conversations flowing and minimizes waiting times, while freeing up resources for the sales teams. Whether it’s through WordPress chatbots, messenger chatbot, or chatbots for marketers, integrating support bots can improve efficiency and increase user experience.

Twitter also has a support bot up and running. It’s a great way to learn about Twitter if you’re just starting out.

You can only talk to it by tapping the buttons, so you aren’t really chatting with it. Playing with it, I can say it’s more like a FAQ database and  knowledge base.

Big brands and businesses are already using this technology to reduce waiting time, and are even taking it to the next level. Enterprise chatbots for support might be expensive, but the investment is minimal compared to a whole support staff.

A friend of mine told me about an experience he had when calling a bank to solve an issue. He said that only by the time he ended the call did he realize he was actually talking to a robot.

There are many other ways you can use chatbots to improve your online marketing campaigns, but the ones listed above are the most popular and feasible. You can find many other ideas out there, from consumer analysis to personalized ads.

3.5 Marketing Automation & Sales

Chatbots can manage marketing messaging, engage website visitors, and promote products without the need for human intervention.

They can also be deployed in marketing campaigns to send generated leads directly to sales teams for follow-up. Some chatbot marketing examples include using chatbots to assist in loyalty programs, deliver real-time news and updates, and increase conversions on landing pages.

Bots with machine learning capabilities improve over time by analyzing interactions and offering more accurate product recommendations.

5. Can ChatBot Marketing Improve SEO ?

Having a chatbot-only website sounds cool, but one of the challenges with chatbots is that the content stored in the database is not indexable by search engines, limiting SEO benefits. Chatbots in marketing provide many advantages, but they don’t directly impact SEO in the same way as indexable content.

This is why marketing agency experts, like Sujan Patel, advise sticking to conventional SEO for important content. Make sure your key pieces of content are also posted on your website in a format that can be crawled by search engines.

Chatbots & SEO are two very different things. Make your content indexable and crawlable and stick to conventional SEO wisdom.
	SUJAN PATEL
	Blogger at sujanpatel.com / @sujanpatel

But chatbots directly on your website can bring some SEO advantages. Dwell time and bounce rate are linked to rankings. Improving them can also grow your position in Google.

However, there are still benefits of using chatbots for lead qualification and generated leads that can indirectly support your SEO. For example, chatbots can improve response time, keep customers engaged, and boost social media strategy by increasing customer queries and boosts engagement.

A chatbot that enhances the user experience will likely improve dwell time and reduce bounce rates, both of which are ranking factors for Google.

As Paul O’Brien says, AI customer interactions that encourage users to stay on a site, share it, or return to it can positively impact Google rankings.

SEO has far less to do with content and words than people think. Google ranks sites based on the experience people have with brands. If a bot can enhance that experience in such a way that people are more enthusiastic about a site – they share it, return to it, talk about it, and spend more time there, it will affect positively how the site appears in Google.
	Paul O’Brien
	Blogger at seobrien.com / @seobrien

On the other hand, Paul also tells us that if the bot negatively impacts the website, then the rankings can also drop.

Chatbots can also help you get links, likes and shares.

If you decide to build your own chatbot and integrate it into your partner program, chatbots can engage users throughout their journey, providing benefits of chatbot marketing like answering queries instantly, guiding them to relevant content, and improving overall customer engagement. This is especially valuable for lead qualification, where chatbots provided immediate responses and help convert visitors into leads.

To stand out in chatbot marketing, it’s crucial to be creative and original. Chatbots in marketing can enhance customer queries, offer real-time support, and boost generated leads through personalized interactions.

Incorporating chatbots into your social media strategy and website can provide the benefits of chatbots, such as improving the user experience, speeding up response times, and boosting engagement with potential customers.

In the constantly evolving marketing landscape, especially when targeting millennials, chatbot marketing is a powerful tool. By integrating AI customer interactions and chatbots into your overall marketing efforts, you can not only increase engagement but also encourage customers to engage more deeply with your brand.

Keep in mind, though, that it’s essential to balance this innovation with traditional SEO techniques to ensure your content remains visible and indexed in search engines.

If you liked this article, have any questions or feel I missed some points, please feel free to drop off a comment in the section below. Let’s get the conversation started!

The post Chatbot Marketing: Is It the Strategy of the Future ? appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Google’s rules and updates changed way too many times to be worth counting and the content writers on this blog have changed a lot as well, trying to uncover Google’s mystery box.  We’ve lost weight, hair, nerves, and money in the process but believe us, we have learned a lot and most of the times the hard way.

So, we’re going to expose ourselves in a vulnerable matter; yet, if this article saves you from repeating some mistakes we did, we declare ourselves happy. 🙂 

The end of the year is usually a time to reminisce and reflect on the time that has passed and hopefully extract some amount of wisdom – no matter how small – to take into the new year. For many of us, 2021 will be different, since we’ve likely had to go through this exercise a lot earlier than the end of the year.

So, we decided to look even further back, in hopes that the lessons we find will speak to something greater than the general terribleness of this year.

We’ve run an SEO blog for ten years now. And we’ve learned one or two things along the way. Here are 13 of them (yes 13, in 2020):

1. Optimize Everything from URLs to Conclusions
2. Don’t Assume Anything! Check Grammar, Facts, Quotes
3. Being Consistent Is Difficult. It’s Also the Key to Success
4. Originality Is Good, but so Is Content Update
5. Google Algorithms Come and Go, Quality Content Stays
6. Creativity Is A Lot of Hard Work
7. Questions Are More Useful than Answers
8. Forget Academic Writing
9. Solve Your Readers’ Problems, not Your Dilemmas
10. The Title of the Article Will Influence Its Performance
11. Write Less but Write Better
12. Write Less, Promote More
13. Stick to Your Principles

Optimize Everything from URLs to Conclusions

I know, you already got this: you know that you need to have well optimized content, meaning that you need to use your targeted keyword within the title once and the body content at least ten times and Google will have no other choice than rank your content. And if it doesn’t, well, we all know that Google sucks so, it’s their fault.

Of course, this is an exaggeration. But it has a grain of truth in it.

As search marketing changed, we have evolved as well as learned what both our readers and Google expect from us. 

We all know that optimized content is the key to success. But optimization shouldn’t stop at the body of the content. You should also optimize:

• The Title
• The URL
• The Meta Description
• The Slug
• The Images 
• The Internal Links
• The Outbound Links
• The Text Length
• The Article Main Image

We used to overlook some of these items. Or, at least we did not give them the right importance. This is how we ended up with URLs like this: https://cognitiveseo.com/blog/26/the-best-link-building-blogs-experts-and-their-tutorials-from-2011/ or with three articles published one after another having the titles: How to Get Links, How to Earn Links and How to Acquire Links. 

You’ll find plenty of material on this blog on how to optimize all of those reminded above, so we won’t insist too much here. But here are some resources you might find useful:

SEO Writing for Copywriters

Internal Linking Strategy 

Title & URL Influence on Rankings Research

Link Building Campaigns

How to Write SEO Friendly Titles

Don’t Assume Anything! Check Grammar, Facts, Quotes

Do you know what Euripides and my manager have in common? They are both stuck in my head repeating this sentence: Question everything! 

While this might be an obvious one, take a sincerity test: when was the last time you double or triple checked a well-known fact? Even the basic ones like: cracking your knuckles will give you arthritis or Eskimos have dozens of words for snow.  You know this, so you use them in your content without checking them again. 

Whether it’s a well-known SEO fact, a very famous quote or an obvious grammar rule, double check it. 

Some time ago we published an article that talked about Wikipedia and whether advertising can be made on the big encyclopedia’s site. And as an example, we offered Gibraltar. 

We were super excited about the article and we thought it would stir a lot of controversies. And it did. Yet, the apple of discord wasn’t whether you can inject advertising, but whether Gibraltar is a country or not. It is a territory disputed between UK and Spain, we knew that, but we assumed that if it has its own capital and currency, it must be a country. Well, it’s not and we had to stop and moderate the comments section due to this issue. We changed the screenshot and transformed “country” into “territory” but, too little too late. 

We also had our share of “grammar shaming” from our users. Some more years ago, we published a few pieces (that we assumed were written correctly from a grammar point of view) and we got some emails from our readers that weren’t so flattering.

We had spent so much time in doing research, documenting and reading a lot, and what people noticed first were the grammar mistakes.

Of course, we were proud enough to assume that we knew grammar, and that it wasn’t what should have mattered first. But a few emails from our users later, we decided to collaborate with an English teacher. And that was one of the best decisions we took.  

When it comes to grammar, things are a bit tricky, we know. If your first language is not English, chances are you’ll need someone to look over your content. At least in the beginning, to give you some guidance. Even if you’re one of those who goes overboard when correcting grammar mistakes, a fresh eye is always a good idea.

Because you want your articles, your research, your blog to become an authority in your market, and this would be almost impossible with typos or style errors in your masterpiece. 

If someone else is checking your work, that doesn’t make you less of a content writer or copywriter. It will make you a better one. 

Being Consistent Is Difficult. It’s Also the Key to Success

Ever wondered why so many TV shows which go on forever sooner or later have a significant drop in quality?

Coming up with a good idea can happen to any of us. Coming up with a good idea every week for years and years? That takes more than creativity.

It takes hard work and discipline and accepting the fact that some weeks it’s going to be a lot harder than others. But the important thing is to keep going and keep wanting to put out good work. Things aren’t always going to be in a straight line. Difficult times are followed by better ones. And sometimes the best rewards come after a period of struggling and pushing through.

Do you see the screenshot below? It’s a pretty nice growth, isn’t it?  It’s a screenshot of cognitiveSEO’s visibility taken from our Site Explorer. 

The chart below looks this good because what we did two things:

1. We published constantly (we published at least once a week)
2. We optimized everything mentioned in the previous chapter, from URLs to conclusions. 

(I admit that I gaze at this chart from time to time when my motivation is gone, or I procrastinate too much.)

Yes, we also used our Content Optimizer a lot and it worked great for us. But we were consistent most of all.

We published frequently and we optimized everything for each and every article, be it an in-depth research or a short case study.

And it did pay off. 

Originality Is Good, but so Is Content Update

Coming up with original ideas is no doubt key to progress. But so is updating existing ones, despite being less glamorous.

Gaining knowledge tends to happen in small and uncertain steps, rather than in leaps and bounds. Part of the process is refining and testing existing knowledge. Which is why we’ve often opted to update articles and research rather than start from scratch.

And it turned out to be a very good decision. We even made an article on how content optimization increased our SEO visibility big time.

The results are summed up in the chart below. 

You surely have articles that are not relevant anymore. Or research you’ve worked so hard on, but now it is not bringing anything in terms of traffic.

Instead of letting them rot, try to resuscitate them, if it makes sense. You’ll win more traffic and improve your overall blog quality.

Worst case scenario, this strategy won’t bring you much more traffic but at least you’ll have your blog articles up to date. 

Google Algorithms Come and Go, Quality Content Stays

This is similar to the one hit wonder music bands.

We all remember the musical hit, we sing it at birthday parties for a period of time, yet we probably won’t buy the album just for that tune.

Same thing may happen to your content. If you want your readers to look at your blog/brand/name with respect and put you in the trustworthy content category, make a habit out of delivering quality.

As the saying goes, we are what we repeatedly do.

Excellence is not an act, but a habit.

You’ve written a blog post and you have thousands of shares and appreciations? That’s a great. Yet, that one-time performance won’t keep you on the top for long. On the contrary, once you’ve set the bar high, you need to keep up with it to have killer content. 

And yes, Google Updates are a harsh reality. Yet, we have thousands of readers, clients, users, and it rarely happened for very good quality content to be penalized.

We’re not saying that it didn’t happen. Unfortunately, we’ve seen good quality being penalized. Yet, take this as a prevention measure. 

If a policeman stopped you in traffic, would you be super confident that you did nothing wrong, or would you feel a bit panicked as you know you probably broke a few rules here and there?

Same with content and updates. I know, it’s waaaaaaay easier said than done, but try to write content in such manner, that if a quality update pops out, you won’t feel that scared.

But don’t take our word for granted. Here’s what Google says about what you should do when they update their algorithm. 

Creativity Is A Lot of Hard Work

The famous American television and radio host Larry King used to say to his audience a very witty story about his father.

He says that his father, of Ukrainian origins, came to the US thinking that America was the greatest land of all, where even the streets were paved with gold. However, shortly after arriving, his father realized three things:

1. The streets weren’t paved with gold.
2. The streets weren’t paved at all.
3. He was the one to pave the streets.

There’s a dangerous cliche about creativity being the sort of lightning in a bottle phenomenon, young hip creatives staying late at night and coming up with wild ideas out of thin air. And that’s… definitely a more exciting version than reality.

But the truth is that so many times creativity is time and patience and incremental progress.

And it’s a collaborative effort more than it is an individual one. Ultimately, you discover there is truth in the adage that spontaneous things take a lot of preparation.

Don’t pressure yourself in being creative 100% of the time. You might be creative most of the time, without even noticing. 

And we know it’s easier said than done but even if you don’t feel like, start writing. Just start, and the rest will follow. 

Larry’s King father was a great man, we’re sure of it. Yet, as inspirational as these success stories are, this is what they tend to remain: stories.

Of course, not all of them. Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.

Questions Are More Useful than Answers

We’ve asked a lot of questions along the years and we haven’t always been able to answer all of them.

Understanding the right question to ask is, more often than not, the more challenging task.

Getting access to large amounts of data is no longer a serious problem. What to do with the data will largely remain one for years to come.

So, whenever you want to perform research, or elaborate on some stats, please remember: it’s not just that statistical interpretation and analysis requires a certain skillset. There are also strategic and sometimes even ethical choices to be made about how to frame the results or even what to look at in the first place.

Over the years, we have performed research on billions of data points. And no, there is no exaggeration here. Literally billions of data points. 

Each and every time we started having a question in mind we wanted to get an answer for; yet, almost each and every time we realized along the way that we had asked the wrong question. 

Of course, this is the beauty of research. But don’t be too proud when performing research. Even if your computer blocks after tens of Excel documents open, even if your stats software crashes, never ignore the other questions that will pop up from the research. 

Take from instance this research on the infuence of Title and URLs on rankings. The initial plan was to analyze a few hundred article titles and see if and how a title can influence rankings. 

We ended up analyzing 35k keywords in both Titles and URLs because we realized that what we should actually look for is the importance of a keyword’s occurrence in a title, URL, domain, subdomain and URI. 

And as you can see in the chart below, in some cases, that huge amount of analyzed data told us…well…nothing relevant. Yet, it was still worth discovering it. 

Forget Academic Writing

We’re going to keep this short. When we talk about academic writing, we don’t necessarily mean scientific articles.

But there’s a certain rigor to that writing which might not appeal to the general audience. This is not to say you should dumb things down.

There’s a simple, two-step approach for making this happen:

Read what you’ve written out loud. If some parts don’t sound like something you’d say to a friend in real life, then change it.

Solve Your Readers’ Problems, not Your Dilemmas

A lot of content comes from wanting to share experience. You know something most other people – even those in your field – might not know. You are excited about that and want to make them aware of your newly gained wisdom. The important thing to remember is that the focus should stay on sharing and not on you as the source of wisdom. That’s not to say your opinions have no place in your writing, on the contrary.

But always ask yourself these 3 questions:

1. Will this info help my readers better understand the subject?
2. Will this info help my readers better apply this knowledge for doing something practical?
3. Will this info help me look cool but not add anything valuable to this piece?

If the answer to the first two questions is a resounding “Yes”, then you should definitely include that piece of information in your copy. If the answer to these questions is “No” and the only “Yes” comes from the third question, well… you’ve got yourself a pretty good conversation opener for the next party.

The Title of the Article Will Influence Its Performance

We’re not talking here only about the fact that keywords used in the titles of your copy have a high ranking importance. We’ve conducted a study where it seems that keyword appearance in the title makes a clear difference between ranking 1st or 2nd. But also about the “catchiness” factor.  And no, I am not talking about click bite titles, but about titles that are relevant in your industry.

We’ve published so much, and some content registered success while some didn’t, but one thing is sure: if it has anything related to Google in the title, it’s going to perform pretty well. 

When comparing any study, research, opinion article that we’ve published to one that has “Google” in the title, chances are that the latter will get the most traffic, shares, links, etc. 

So, you might be thinking: why don’t you add “Google” in all titles? And now we come back to the previous points mentioned here: we don’t want to do click bait only; we want to be relevant, to offer quality and respect for our readers. 

When creating the title of your content, you should really think things through, as the title must not be only relevant and attractive but also SERP friendly.

Write Less but Write Better

I am sure you’ve noticed this as well for years: fluff content in most of the industries (especially digital marketing).

There seems to be very little focus on SEO, audiences, conversions, and how articles/content will be helpful for the readers. All of these things should be figured out BEFORE you write anything. It is obvious when something was written strictly for an SEO goal;

Without value, fluff content isn’t going to help you even if you rank well for it.

There is no reason to create content so that you have it. You have to plan each piece of content based on which audience(s) you want to reach, what goals you have for each piece of content, how you will use it in social media to further your goals, and how you are hoping to rank.

This takes a lot of time and effort, but it is better than wasting time and resources on content that brings nothing to your company. Without showing the ROI for your work, your job becomes expendable.

Write Less, Promote More

Don’t neglect content promotion. You might be overly focused on content marketing processes. And that’s definitely a good investment!

However, a lot of content marketers tend to skip the steps related to content promotion. We know, we did. 

Without promotion,  the majority of your work never reaches your targeted audience.

We recommend writing less and devoting more time to content promotion. Start your content plan by writing a list of channels and influencers that can help you reach more relevant users and will allow you to start getting traffic and leads from each published post. 

source: multichannelmerchant.com

Stick to Your Principles

There will be many cases when you might be tempted to write click-bait articles or write just for the sake of writing, without offering real value.

Because you’ll be looking at your competitors, and you’ll see that they might get results even with not-so-qualitative content. You’ll invest time, money, and nerves in well-documented researches that will not always perform the way you want. You will get angry, and you will swear you won’t spend another night trying to bring quality to the Internet world.

I am sure this happens to any content writer at least once. Yet, if you do stick to your principles, if you do invest time and quality in each and every article you write, it does pay off. These are not just empty words. Long time effort in content writing does pay off.

Don’t write anything you wouldn’t read. 

There are no easy gains, indeed. Yet, what matters at the end of the day is to have good long-term performances. 

You might have read this article thoroughly, or you’ve just browsed the main titles, saying to yourself: I knew that. Knowledge is power. But what matters at the end of the day is what you do with that knowledge. All the actions you perform daily define who you are as a person, a marketer, or a business owner. So make sure your actions have an impact on something, no matter how big or small. 

The Canadian writer Margaret Atwood once said that the internet is 95 percent porn and spam. So, let’s make that 5% be damn good. 

The post 13 Things We Learned from 10 Years of Writing SEO Friendly Blog Posts appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Google doesn’t necessarily favor “fresh” content. Some search queries definitely deserve freshness, while others not so much. However, fresh content can impact SEO through some indirect “freshness” factors.

1. What Does Fresh Content Even Mean?
   1. Freshness & Frequency
2. What the Google Freshness Update Was All About
   1. The First Google Update (Caffeine)
   2. The Second Google Update (Freshness)
   3. Who Does the Freshness Update Actually Affect?
3. Does Fresh Content Impact SEO?
   1. Queries that Deserve Freshness (QDF)
   2. Updating Old Content (Keeping It up to Date)
   3. Publishing New Content
4. What Actually Affects SEO
   1. CTR (Possibly Impacted by ‘Freshness’)
   2. Quantity & Targeted Keywords
   3. Domain Performance

To better understand the concept, we first must detail a little what “fresh content” actually means.

What Does Fresh Content Even Mean?

What do you understand by fresh content? Content that has been published today? Content that is regularly updated?

The term “fresh content” represents content that is dynamic in nature (especially in meaning).

Therefore, it’s not as much “new” content in relation to time and when it has actually been created or published, but new in meaning and what the data behind it reflects.

Many people believe that fresh content is content that has been recently published. Sometimes, they even mix up freshness with frequency.

Let’s start with content that has been recently published. If I am publishing a piece on “The History of England”, would you call that fresh content?

Most likely not, because people have been writing about the history of England for probably hundreds of years. It’s nothing new.

The post is new on my site, of course, but common SEO sense says that new content without any backlinks and amplification will have a harder time ranking, especially in very competitive niches, such as history (where Wikipedia probably dominates). You’ll have to make huge link building efforts to dominate the results with a new page and we all know how risky that is! (it usually results in a penalty).

Freshness & Frequency

Now frequency is very similar to freshness and they often intersect, but it’s not always the case. I could post something fresh once per week, or I could post something fresh every day.

Frequency will ensure that your site gets crawled more often (thanks to Caffeine).

That means search engines will use more of their resources on sites that publish more often, because they need them.

If you’ve been publishing once per month for the past year, why would Google check your site daily? It would be a waste of resources.

However, if your site publishes 25 articles each day, then Google has to make sure it checks your site multiple times per day to index those results as soon as possible (thanks to Caffeine) and be able to display them to the users if they request it (thanks to the 2011 update).

One common misconception is that stale websites will be negatively impacted. That’s been proven wrong.

Brian Dean made this pretty clear with his blog. He publishes rarely, so his website is mostly still. However, his content always ranks at the top. I also have a blog in Romanian on which I haven’t posted in over 6 months. 9/10 articles are ranking on the 1st page and 6/10 are ranked in the top 3 positions.

If there’s something that has changed over time, it’s that those rankings have actually increased.

You see, you don’t need to publish too often when you can actually go into the Google Search Console and ask Google to immediately index your web pages by hitting a single button.

What the Google Freshness Update Was All About

This all started back in 2009, but just like many events, it has developed into a big conspiracy over time.

The First Google Update (Caffeine)

If you were in business back in 2009, you’d remember about the Google Caffeine update and how much of a big deal it was. The update is often referred to today as the Freshness Update, because Google used the phrase “fresher results”.

Although the update was announced back in 2009, it took almost a year until it finally rolled up.

The thing is, unfortunately, that many people got it all wrong.

The Google caffeine update has nothing to do with rankings. It’s main focus is indexing. Rankings and indexing are two very different things.

Indexing is when Google takes a first look at your content and adds it to the index. That means it has the potential to be ranked.

Ranking however, is a completely different story, with a much more complex algorithm behind it. This algorithm, which was updated in 2011, was actually older than you might think.

The Second Google Update (Freshness)

Ranking “fresh content” at the top was actually happening way before that. In 2007, Amit Singhal had developed an algorithm that favored freshness for some particular subjects and queries.

Note how I say “some specific queries”. Wait, let me make that bigger.

Google favors fresh content only for some specific queries that deserve freshness, widely known as QDF.

QDF stands for Query Deserves Freshness. If a particular search phrase is a QDF, then Google will show up the most recent results. This happens a lot in particular areas, as Matt Cutts explains in the following video:

In fact, in its official post about the update, Google specifies exactly what types of queries the update will impact:

• Recent events or hot topics: Such as celebrity news or natural disasters (kind of one and the same)
• Regularly recurring events: Conferences such as Brand Minds
• Frequent updates: Anything that keeps having new content added to, such as product reviews or anything in the technology space

I know there have been some speculations that only by changing the date to an article you could make it look fresh and you could abuse the algorithm changes to make Google keep you at the top. However, they are what they are (speculations) and I promise you that for each example you give me of “fresh” content ranking at the top I can find at least 1 example of “old” content ranking at the top.

In fact, I’ll give you some examples right now, from the SEO field. It’s a field that frequently changes and you always have to stay up to date in order to be relevant.

There’s no way a guide from 2015 or 2010 would still be useful, right? Well… Google thinks otherwise:

And here’s another example:

You might argue that “fresher” results rank better than those. Well, you’re right but that doesn’t prove anything, because one can say “fresher results also rank below and they even come from big sites such as Hubspot”.

However…

There are factors that might influence rankings in this situation and we’ll talk about them soon, so keep reading!

But thinking that you’ll rank better just by having a more recent publish date is silly. And I’ll crush it even more soon.

Who Does the Freshness Update Actually Affect?

Both Caffeine and the 2011 Freshness Algorithm Update affect mostly news sites. This is the broader category, in which you can include celebrities, general news, politics, technology, you name it.

I’ll give you an example:

Notice a difference from the SEO examples I gave before? No article from 2009 or 2010 here, right? They’re all from 2019, posted hardly one month before me writing this post. The second article doesn’t even list the date, but instead the number of days it was posted ago. It can also be hours sometimes instead of days.

Why do you think this is the case?

Because in this case, a 2009 post would be horrible as a search result. People want to know the latest phones, not the outdated ones from 2009. Google knows the user’s intent so it tries to match the results to fit it.

Does Fresh Content Impact SEO?

Do we have an official answer? Sort of. And it’s pretty recent:

No

— ? John ? (@JohnMu) August 18, 2018

I have to say, I’m not quite pleased with the answer, because John has the habit of being very vague in his answers. I mean… I’ve just proven above that Google favors fresh content in certain cases.

Sure, we also have to get the context of his answer. That question about freshness has been asked after John tweeted this:

“As a user, recognizing that old content is just being relabeled as new completely kills any authority that I thought the author / site had. Good content is not lazy content. SEO hacks don’t make a site great. Give your content and users the respect they deserve.”

So, basically, John Mueller, Google’s representative, is trying to tell you that updating the post date every day is a bad digital marketing strategy and it won’t help you rank better.

I have to admit, I miss those days when Google used to be a lot more detailed and explicit in its answers. Why?

Because, as discussed, before, Google does favor fresh content, but in certain areas! And John’s answer should’ve reflected this reality, which also includes QDF.

Queries that Deserve Freshness (QDF)

Queries that Deserve Freshness is a reality! Matt Cutts talked about this before. There are certain search phrases, such as “best android phones” which I’ve shown above as an example, that deserve freshness. Users want to see the latest posts, so here, you might have the upper hand if you keep everything up to date.

Does that mean that you can keep ranking at the top by constantly changing the post date? No.

Does it mean that some articles will outrank other articles because of the date when they were posted? Yes.

But there are a lot of factors that signal freshness. Not just the date. Is the topic growing popular on social media platforms? Are the articles getting any new backlinks? In other words, is it something that’s happening now?

Are those answers contradicting one another? I don’t think so. In the end, Google’s not perfect. It’s just an algorithm. Do you think a human person could determine better what the best result for the masses would be? I highly doubt it.

Updating Old Content (Keeping It up to Date)

Will updating old blog posts help you rank better? Probably. But not just by changing the date. Google sees those changes and it accounts for “hacks” like this.

In this article, Search Engine Land stated that Google told them about one of the factors that determine freshness. It’s not the date!

“Google now tells us that one of the freshness factors — the way they determine if content is fresh or not — is the time when they first crawled a page. So if you publish a page, and then change that page, it doesn’t suddenly become “fresh.”

One of the factors that determine freshness is the time when Google first crawled the page.

So no, Google doesn’t care if you keep changing the date.

Does that mean you shouldn’t update your articles? No!

You should always keep your articles up to date. But not just with the date. Also with the content, quality and relevancy!

Has something changed since you’ve first written the article? Go and update it. Make your updates visible. This will allow users to also have a historical view on the events.

As Cyrus Shepard put it in this article:

The age of a web page or domain isn’t the only freshness factor. Search engines can score regularly updated content for freshness differently from content that doesn’t change. In this case, the amount of change on your web page plays a role.
	Cyrus Shepard
	Owner @ Zyppy / @CyrusShepard

So the page’s age (when it was first crawled) is important, not just the publish date in the article, which can be faked. If you’re going to make small, insignificant changes, there are small chances that you will see any effects on the rankings.

If you feel like your post is outdated but you don’t know exactly how to improve it, use our Keyword & Content Optimization Tool.

On the right side, it will give you a list of keywords that you should use in your article in order to make it more relevant. You can view them as topics you should cover when you’re writing SEO content. The ones with dots are the most important ones.

If you want to know exactly what we did to gain 70% more SEO visibility, you can take a look at our content optimization results.

Keep in mind that any changes to your content might also result in negative impacts. Be prepared for this in case it happens. If you have an article that’s already ranking #1, it’s probably a better idea to leave it like that!

Publishing New Content

As mentioned before,  new content lacks authority, distribution and links. It’s unlikely that it will outrank older content.

However, publishing new content does expand the number of keywords your site is targeting and thus it results in more traffic.

It’s just simple math. Will a higher post frequency increase your rankings overall? Probably not, although it can result in more backlinks which leads to higher domain performance over time.

However, a higher post frequency is almost guaranteed to increase traffic. No matter what others say, if you have 1000 followers and they read you once per week, if you make them read you twice per week, you’ve increased your traffic. It’s simple math.

But remember, you also need to post good content. You have to structure it well. You have to account for your audience’s needs. Not just blindly post things there.

Make sure to use the Keyword Tool to maximize your chances of ranking higher on Google when you create new posts.

What Actually Affects SEO

I don’t want you to be upset with me, so I’ll tell you some things that will actually impact your rankings and they’re closely related to freshness.

CTR (Possibly Impacted by ‘Freshness’)

Click Through Rate is a ranking factor. This has been tested and proven countless times. If users click your headline more and stick with your website, it signals Google that your site is a good result.

But what impacts CTR? Well, mostly it’s the position you’re ranking for, but the 3 things that affect CTR are the Title tag, the URL and the Meta Description, because they’re all shown in Google’s search results.

I hope you can see where this is going. How many times have you seen the current year or “Updated 20xx” in a title? Probably often. I mean just take a look at the “best android phones” example! It’s full of it! Why?

Using the current year in your title might positively affect CTR, which can result in higher rankings.

Should you change your title anually to feature the current year? Probably. But make sure your article is still up to date, otherwise Google’s going to catch that and punish you for it. If the article is still up to date, you can leave it like that. If not, you should probably improve it.

You can also reshare and redistribute your content as “new” on you social media platforms. This will help you gain new backlinks and traffic if the article was previously successful.

Quantity & Targeted Keywords

If you post new content frequently, you can expand your search visibility by targeting new keywords. This is almost guaranteed to bring more traffic if you do it right.

We’ve started doing this since November 2016 and the results have been promising. Have our rankings improved overall? Yes. Was it because we published more content but with the same high quality? It certainly had an effect (more backlinks, more shares, more topical authority).

Domain Performance

Closely related to quantity is the performance of your site’s domain. This is dictated by the number of unique domains that link to your website and, very important, also by their quality. 

If you publish more content, target and distribute it properly, then you can increase the number of backlinks to your site, which will result in a better domain performance.

If you want to check your domain performance, you can use the CognitiveSEO Site Explorer.

The domain performance has a positive impact on all your articles, because Google starts to trust your site as being qualitative. Just think about it. If you buy a domain today and write something about SEO (let’s say it’s the same quality), do you think you can outrank cognitiveSEO right away? It’s hardly the case.

Conclusion

Still confused? Here, I’ll summarize everything, just for you:

• Google does favor freshers results, but only in certain cases, such as news sites.

• Freshness factors, like the current year in your title, can impact your CTR, which may result in higher rankings.

• Publishing more new content can also help you gain more links, which leads to more authority.

What do you think about fresh content? Are you in a niche where fresh content is vital? How often do you publish on your site? Have you ever tried changing the date to rank higher? Has it worked? I doubt it has, but prove me wrong in the comments section. 

The post Content Freshness & Rankings | Does Fresh Content Impact SEO in 2024? appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Haven’t you heard?! SEO is dead!

Dead from all the bad jokes about it.

Of course, SEO isn’t actually dead, but there are a few reasons why SEO might not be working for you and your site.

We’ve gathered 14 top of mind reasons why your SEO might not be working for your website.

Let’s go through them and see if something rings a bell.

1. You don’t stick to the basics
2. You don’t really understand what SEO is
3. SEO just doesn’t fit your business/idea
4. Your expectations are too high
5. You’re not patient enough
6. Your budget is too small
7. You’re not focusing on mobile
8. You don’t analyze and you underestimate your competition
9. You’ve skipped keyword research
10. You’re not prioritizing the right things
11. You’re ignoring structure, click depth & internal linking
12. You’re ignoring backlinks
13. You don’t understand your audience
14. You’ve externalized to the wrong SEO agency
15. You’re not monitoring your results

1. You don’t stick to the basics

When people say SEO has some relation with magic, what they actually mean is that it’s very complex.

It would take several very long articles for me to fully explain how it works. 

Yes, it implies user experience, link profile, content strategy, referral traffic or marketing campaigns. And all these SEO efforts might seem very complex.

However, SEO is more simple that you might think, in some ways.

In a nutshell, it’s the multitude of criteria which makes a website the best result for a particular keyword, in the sense that it satisfies the user’s intent.

What you must understand is that Google isn’t trying to rank websites based on some checklist.

Sure, it follows a list of criteria, but it also looks at historical data in the SERP and since Rank  Brain has got involved, machine learning really made things a lot more complicated.

It’s hard for us humans to keep pace with how Google decides what actually makes a web page ‘the best one’. At this point… I’m not sure even the makers themselves have any idea how things work anymore.

So, instead focusing on the latest trends and techniques, try to focus more on the basics. Do them well and do them consistently.

Sure, SEO and digital marketing experts like Neil Patel and Brian Dean always try new techniques and tweaks, but one thing’s for sure: They haven’t stopped posting!

Being consistent is difficult, but it’s also the key to success!

2. You don’t really understand what SEO is

So, we know Google is trying to rank the best page.

But what does that actually mean?

Does it mean the page with the most targeted keywords? The page with the best links? The page with the best content?
Who wins the Google top organic results?

It’s the page that best satisfies the user’s intent. And in some cases, the website alone can’t do it!

Let’s say you want to rank high in the search engines for a very competitive eCommerce keyword. Well… if your offer isn’t good enough, you probably won’t.

If you want to rank for “shoes” but you only have 3 products in your store, you won’t be getting far.

If you want to rank for “cheap” but your prices aren’t cheap, again, you probably won’t have much success with it even if you optimize your website in this direction.

Moreover, many people don’t understand that high rankings within search results also reflect the quality of a business, at least to some extent.

For example, bad reviews on Google My Business can affect your local SEO rankings and your business listing and people don’t leave bad reviews because your SEO campaign sucks.

Sure, you can invest in search marketing and pump links into a website and get it to the top, but if the business itself doesn’t have the necessary infrastructure to properly satisfy clients (quality, shipping, support), the results won’t last for long!

I’ve seen sites pumping bad links and rushing to the top, only to fall ungracefully a short time after because they did not meet their user’s expectations.

3. SEO just doesn’t fit your business/idea

Another thing you should consider is that your business type should match SEO.

Usually, if you want to promote a short-term trending product, such as the fidget spinner, investing big and long term on SEO might not be the right choice!

Furthermore, if you need a quick turnover and you’re just getting started… SEO might not be the right channel for you, and you should look for PPC advertising or social media remarketing instead.

However, it’s not always a matter of SEO vs PPC. Usually, they go well together.

4. Your expectations are too high

The higher the expectations, the bigger the disappointment.

To be satisfied with your results, you’ll need to have realistic goals.

With SEO, you can’t really expect top rankings and huge websites traffic in a month or two, if your domain has just been registered.

You can’t expect to outrank the online presence of a strong competitor with thousands of links, with a tight budget and no scaling even if you apply some good SEO tactics.

In some cases, the entire competition might be way out of your league. That’s when you have to dig in deeper, to find those keyword opportunities that are easier to rank for.

You should still start with SEO as soon as possible, but start small. Look for keywords with lower competition and build your way up before saying that SEO does not work for you. 

5. You’re not patient enough

Sometimes you just need to be more patient.

Most SEOs will tell you upfront that it can take from 6 to 12 months to see the top positions.

Some will claim that they can get you to the #1 spot in the first month. It’s probably false and you should stay away from them.

You should always see progress in the first month.

If it’s a new website, that might be as little as the first pages getting indexed.

So, if you’re not yet in the position you’ve wished for but have increased in rankings compared to the previous month, just give it a little more time. You’re on the right path.

If you want to find out more about why it takes so long to rank in Google and other search engines and what you can do to speed things up, check out this article.

6. Your budget is too small

Actually… you CAN have high expectations. But for the right budget.

If your budget is too small, you might not be able to do everything you want and you might end up saying that SEO does not work for you. 

SEO includes things like: good server, fixing technical SEO issues, keyword research, content marketing, social media, investing in links and many others.

If you want to scale it up quickly and efficiently, the truth is that you will need a substantial investment.

Clients often ask me: “Why is it that SEO takes so long?”

Sure, part of the answer is: “Because Google.”

However, I’m always confident I can speed things up by scaling.

But why does scaling speed up the process, you may ask?

Well… it’s pretty straight forward:

• More content = more keywords covered faster
• More links = faster higher authority
• More monitoring = better / faster tweaking
• More programmers = faster site, more useful features, better UX, etc.

But all those above = more money.

Are you developing the content for 5 categories per month? Pump that to 10. Are you consolidating the site’s structure with 2 monthly blog posts? Up it to blog posts. Are you securing 1-2 links per month? Make that 5 and so on.

Many people get into SEO because they can use time instead of money to drive traffic to their websites and businesses.

However, time can’t scale things up. Only money can. If you want to rank faster, you’ll need to outsource some work.

7. You’re not focusing on Mobile

I know, I know, you’ve been hearing that Mobile SEO is very important and that most traffic is now coming from mobile devices.

The real thing here is that most professionals work from a desktop computer. So, the first contact with any issue, be it web development or SEO related, is on desktop, most of the times.

Often times I find myself fixing a quick issue on the desktop and completely forgetting to check how it looks on mobile devices.

And although I browse websites on mobile (as a user), when a client asks me something or signals an issue, I immediately check it on my computer (the phone is busy at my ear anyway).

In SEO, you always have to keep in mind that Google uses mobile first indexing.

If you’re mostly working from a desktop computer, like me, remember to always right-click in Chrome and hit inspect.

You can select multiple device types to stop any issues.

But sometimes, phones act differently than the desktop Chrome browser does (even when set on mobile view), so it’s always best to check on a physical phone itself.

And don’t forget to check on both Android and iOS.

Test if links work, test if scrolling works, test the entire checkout process, test, test, test.

Ask your friends to test, ask your mom to test ask your cat to test. If the cat can use it, you’re good to go.

In addition to that, consider that CSS hidden content also follows the mobile-first mentality.

Feel comfortable to combine desktop columns into sliders, or compress long paragraphs of text into dropdowns.

For example, on an eCommerce website, you might have a small description before your products, on the category page.

If on mobile devices the text pushes the products too far down, the users won’t be able to quickly see them when they load the page.

You can shorten the mobile description by using a ‘read more’ link which triggers a dropdown with the rest of the content.

8. You don’t analyze and you underestimate your competition

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” – Sun Tzu

Deep, isn’t it?

Google Analytics and Search Console are very good friends, but they only show you data for your own website.

Sometimes, it’s not enough to only do research about yourself. You have to analyze your competition! Not doing this, might end up in saying that SEO does not work for your website. 

That’s why having an SEO Tools Set like CognitiveSEO is a good idea. You can analyze and monitor your competitors to see how they perform and find gaps.

So, if you want to improve your SEO campaigns, make sure you always perform an SEO Competitor Analysis.

9. You’ve skipped keyword research

New clients often come to me because they are not satisfied with the results they got from their previous SEO partners.

Many times, after a quick analysis, I can spot that the title tags and meta descriptions have not been optimized at all!

That lets me know that keyword research hasn’t been performed.

I’ve seen many ‘SEO pack’ offers around, which are mostly PBNs or different link building tactics. 5 links per month…  10 links per month… and so on.

It baffles me and I don’t agree with it, but I guess it’s about money…

They’re easy to sell and can often offer quick results. But those results might only last a very short time and I can bet on who the contract you’ve signed covers (spoiler alert, it’s not you).

However, while those links might be helpful in certain situations, they probably won’t get you anywhere without the right keyword in the right places.

Make sure you do your keyword research!

10. You’re not prioritizing the right things

It might not be that you’re doing SEO wrong. It might just be that you’re doing the wrong type of SEO or at the wrong time.

Why put so much effort into getting that 100% PageSpeed score if your loading times are already between 1-3 seconds?

Why write more blog content when you haven’t finished optimizing your category pages?

• If you have a small website and no SEO has been performed, start with keyword research and title tags optimization.
• If you have a website with a lot of images, start by compressing your images.
• If you have a huge website with a lot of filters, make sure you prioritize crawlability and indexability by optimizing your faceted navigation.

Sometimes, it might be design (if your website is too outdated for your audience). Other times, it might be UX.

It’s different from website to website.

That’s why an SEO audit is crucial for your website’s success, especially if your website is huge.

But not just any SEO audit will do. You need an SEO Audit that actually looks in-depth at all your issues and then prioritizes them properly.

11. You’re ignoring structure, click depth & internal linking

A website’s structure defines how easily users and search engines will navigate and understand your content.

Make sure you structure your website accordingly.

You should always keep important pages maximum 3 clicks away from your homepage.

If you’re using pagination, make sure all your pages are linked to from the first archive/category page.

Moreover, if you’re not doubling down already on internal links, you should.

Use your blog to always link to important pages, such as product category pages, using relevant and keyword rich anchor texts.

There’s no penalty for using too many internal links. Well… just don’t make everything an internal link and you’ll be fine.

12. You’re ignoring backlinks

I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to help most of my clients rank high with very few links if any links at all.

But once in a while, there are projects that even the best SEOs can’t handle without actively pursuing backlinks.

I like to think of myself as being able to do everything without links, but I also what to be as efficient as possible.

Getting backlinks is not bad. They’re just used improperly.

In some cases, your website simply needs more authority. And the fastest way to build it is by having quality backlinks.

If the number of links your competitors have far outweighs yours, you’ll have a hard time outranking them.

Sometimes, it might just mean it takes longer to see results, considering you’re doing everything else right.

Other times, it’s just plain impossible.

Links can help you kickstart that initial progress to help you gain your client’s trust and secure a long-term deal.

The best thing you can do is to build relationships, through content marketing and shareable content, such as case studies or interviews with industry-leading experts.

Don’t just stop at link building. Try to be involved and build a small community. That’s what Google likes.

Sometimes, however… you can just buy the links.

Of course, you don’t want to buy and spammy links that might get your website penalized.

But it’s wise to understand that links are ads and ads are paid for. The internet works based on ads, so own it.

You can always nofollow your paid links (just like Google tells you to do).

Nofollow links can also improve rankings and I’ve seen this with my own eyes on my own clients.

13. You don’t understand your audience

The audience is much more important for SEO than you think. It can make or break your SEO strategies. You might be saying: neh, SEO is not working for me when the actual problem is the way you tackle your audience. 

You might have the best interest and the greatest information in your content marketing strategy. But if you don’t deliver it in the right format or tone of voice, you won’t be getting the best results.

Maybe your audience prefers video content. Then stop spending so much time writing articles. Just use your video scripts as repurposed content on your blog instead.

Make sure you understand your audience well and make decisions based on that.

14. You’ve externalized to the wrong SEO agency

I hate talking about this, but finding a good SEO company or digital marketing agency isn’t an easy task.

Even more… in the pandemic era of 2020-2021, people have rebranded as experts in digital marketing fields. Much to say… they’re not really experts.

So, be very picky when choosing who you work with. Here are some more things to look after when hiring an SEO company.

On the other hand, if you are an SEO company, here’s how to convince your clients to buy your SEO services.

15. You’re not monitoring your results

Correctly monitoring results is a very difficult task. Sometimes, is not that SEO does not work but monitoring results properly does not work. 

That’s because monitoring isn’t just about traffic and conversion rate optimization.

It’s about discovering new opportunities to do things better.

But even so, whether it’s a drop in traffic or a drop in conversions, the sooner you see it, the sooner you’ll be able to fix it.

There are many tricks, such as using Google Search Console to identify secondary keywords for articles that are already ranking pretty well.

Go to the Performance Section, select a page that’s already ranking well and then go back to the Queries section. Activate Positions and CTR and look for those phrases that have a good click through rate. 

You can then start adding that keyword to your content to rank better for it in the search engines. If you want even better results, try out the CognitiveSEO Content Optimization Tool.

Or, you can use a Secondary Dimension (Behaviour > Landing Page) on the Organic Traffic Channel in Google Analytics to figure out which pages converted the best. Then you can mix those with the Google Search Console query data to know (with approximation) which set of keywords bring the most conversions.

Tools such as Google Analytics have a lot of filters that can help you figure out what exactly happened on your website so make sure you use them for better SEO results.

I hope this list of 15 reasons why your SEO doesn’t work helps you figure out what you’ve been doing wrong or at least gives you a new perspective on your SEO campaigns.

Complex SEO strategies and tactics are awesome, but you always have to make sure you stick to the basics first.

Do you think there are other reasons why someone’s SEO strategy might not work? Share them with us in the comments section below.

The post Why SEO Does Not Work for You & Your Website appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Below you can find the most effective 40 digital marketing tactics and techniques for a kickass start in 2022:

I. Content Marketing

1. Re-optimize Your Content to Gain 70% SEO Visibility Increase
2. Boost traffic by 300% While Using Editorial Calendars
3. Use Content Syndication & Get a Constant Traffic of 250,000 Unique Visitors
4. Promote Your Business with SlideShare to Drive 20% More Organic Traffic
5. Sales Growth with 185% by Offering Highly Qualitative Case Studies

II. Search Marketing

6. Build a Network of Partner Websites to Get Influence on the SERP and Jump up to 30+ Positions
7. Rank Higher on Review Sites to Have an Average 18% Uplift in Sales
8. Be Part of the 90% of Marketers Who Saw a Significant Increase in ROI by Taking Advantage of Trends for Traffic Generation
9. Gain a Higher Advantage in Front of Your Competitors with AMP Receiving 40% Organic Traffic from the Whole Site Traffic
10. Write on Medium to Get Awarness Through 6.2 Million Pageviews

III. Social Media Marketing

11. Develop a Facebook Customized Page Tab and Engage 40% of Fans
12. Write Valuable Content on Linkedin Pulse and win up to 1,900 Social Shares in 30 Days
13. Use Reddit to Grow Your Business & Generate $6,188 in 3 Months
14. Target the Online Communities and Hit 10.000 Monthly Unique Visitors
15. Get Social Influence to Receive Higher Rankings by 15%

IV. Email Marketing

16. Design a Smart Automated Reactivation Campaign and Boost Sales by 164%
17. Get Personalized Emails to See an Average 19% Increase in Sales
18. Reduce Friction and Increase by 100% Your Email Sign-Up Rate
19. Use Segmentation to Increase Deliverability & Experience 141% Increase in Revenue per Campaign
20. Increase Your Email Open Rate by 33% with a Subject Line That Triggers Curiosity

V. PPC & Paid Advertising

21. Collaborate with Influencers to Write About Your Product to Generate Over $300.000 in 3 Months
22. Have an Integrated Approach about Paid Promotion on Social Media
23. Increase CTR with 64% in PPC Ads with Site-Links Extentions
24. Use Emotion Triggers in Headline Ads to Get 6x Above Average CTR
25. See a 32% Return on Investment for a Promoted Twitter Account

VI. Marketing Automation

26. Set up Automated Behavioral Triggered Emails to get 71% Higher Open Rates
27. Collect Customer Data Through a Transparent and Unique System to Gain Trust of  44% of Customers
28. Make use of retargeting & Experience a 400% Increase On ROI
29. Develop a Lead Scoring System to Generate 50% More Sales at Half of Costs
30. Get More Social Exposure Through the Social Media Automation

VII. Online PR

31. Encourage Brand Lovers to Support You Against Trolls
32. Built a Strong Customer Following & Get Free Endorsement
33. Gain Free Media to Get Everyone Talk About You on News and Get 5 Million Views on YouTube
34. Create Fascinating Video Content to Attract Native Customers & Increase the Conversion Rate by 80%
35. Use Webinars to Gain 16,394 new leads

VIII. Affiliate Marketing

36. Start Running an Affiliate Program to Monetize Your Website & Get Extra $4500 Monthly Profit
37. Generate Product Order Increase by 9.8% Through Voucher and Reward Sites
38. Map out the Affiliates’ Value to Increase the Long Haul Share by 19%
39. Reach Over 60% Social Engagement and Advocacy for the Brand with Respected Influencers Through an Affiliate Program
40. Implement a Publisher Strategy to See a Monthly Revenue Growth Rate of 177%

1. Re-optimize Your Content to Gain 70% SEO Visibility Increase

Top positions in Google, Bing or any search engine are a pinnacle of today’s online success. After a lot of research and content experiments, we discovered that there is a strong correlation between content performance and rankings. So a few time ago, we decided to evaluate our content and re-optimize it.

We analyzed the positions and engagement for each article and decided which content needs to be refreshed and re-optimized. We proceeded with the keyword research using the Keyword Tool and Content Optimizer for the whole process:

• Firstly, do keyword research: we looked at keyword recommendations, volume, type of query and other relevant keywords for double optimization the same piece.

• Secondly, we added the keywords into Rank Tracking before re-optimizing to have an accurate view of where we started and how it improves after the re-optimization.
• Third, we started adding the content into the Content optimizer to see the performance score and find out how much we’ll have to optimize. We added the keyword recommendations and check it at the end by clicking on Check Score.

• Fourthly, we searched for the page in Google Search Console to make sure it is indexed, do a live test just to be sure everything is ok. We kept tracking of the keyword’s evolution in search engines. 

After the keyword optimization was finished we saw a big increase overall for our whole website. Our rankings improved and our traffic increased by almost 70%. Below you can see a printscreen with our search visibility in Google from Site Explorer:

2. Boost traffic by 300% While Using Editorial Calendars

New content appears daily. You must bring something fresh every time. Investing in social media, sales funnel, conversion rate optimization, customer relationships, marketing budgets, web analytics; they are all keywords that pops in your head all the time. Yet, which are the most effective tactics one should use?

Scheduling your blog posts is mandatory, especially if you work with multiples copywriters. Make sure your marketing plan includes an editorial calendar for improving your results. Creating an editorial calendar is easier than you think. There are lots of apps that can help you with that. Meistertask is a task management app you could use to drag and drop tasks for each participant and create an editorial calendar easily. Below you can see a screenshot with an editorial calendar created in Meistertask:

Source: https://www.meistertask.com

Trello gives us another digital marketing technique example you could use to create editorial campaigns. CoSchedule has a Content Marketing Calendar component.

Source: coschedule.com

They used a process that helped them to increase traffic by 299%. Follow the next steps to achieve similar results:

• have a broad goal behind your calendar;
• set metrics to measure your goal;
• find your baseline performance of an average month for that metric;
• establish smart objectives for each blog post from your calendar;
• find out how many blog posts you’ll need to meet your aspirational goal;

3. Use Content Syndication & Get a Constant Traffic of 250,000 Unique Visitors

Content syndication is the process of publishing your content on third party sites. You need to find authoritative publications. The idea behind is to drive more engagement for your content. Outbrain and Taboola power your content on their marketing channel. Once you republish your article on a big site like those two, you are exposed to a new audience and could reach a higher traffic.

James Clear used this digital marketing tactic and built an email list of more than 100,000 with a  constant traffic of 250,000 unique visitors per month on the blog. He republished a blog post on Lifehacker and got almost 99k views as you can see in the next photo. Quick tip: If you have an account on Google Analytics you can easily track your performance and see how many unique visitors you have.

4. Promote Your Business with SlideShare to Drive 20% More Organic Traffic

Slideshare is the largest marketing platform for sharing presentations and it’s best suited for B2B companies. Didit Marketing, an advertising agency from New York, conducted a study showing that SlideShare gets 500% more traffic from business owners than Facebook, Twitter or Youtube.

An important fact you need to keep in mind is that SlideShare received billions of viewers every month and it’s a great way to connect with different specialists and find quality information in a friendly format.

Ana Hoffman, blogger at Traffic Generation Cafe, conducted a study showing how she received from 0 to 243,000 views in 30 days on Slideshare. The fun part is that you don’t need entirely new content to do a presentation, you can work through your old content displayed in a visual form to be easy to read.

20% of the SlideShare visitors come directly from Google. The rest come from social media and other SlideShare presentations. Always keep on eye on your metrics from Google Aalytics to see how are you performing in terms of organic traffic, paid traffic, visitors and so on.

5. Sales Growth with 185% by Offering Highly Qualitative Case Studies

Smart and effective digital tactics are a gold mine. Case studies as well. Not to mention the conversion optimization rates you can get with them.  Case studies have a huge potential to grow traffic, sales, and revenue if you offer quality results and show your product brings value. The Content Marketing Institute conducted a research where they saw that 63% of UK marketers believe that case studies are an effective digital marketing tactic. Case studies are the fifth most popular marketing tactic used out of 12, after social media, newsletters, blogs and blog posts.

Neil Patel, one of the top 10 marketers according to Forbes, conducted a study to see the influence of the use of case studies on his own site. He witnessed a growth in his revenue by 185%.  

6. Build a Network of Partner Websites to Get Influence on the SERP and Jump up to 30+ Positions

Brand mentions on well-known publications are important and hard to get. They could lift you up in ranking on the search engines for the right keyword phrases and you could improve your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts. Usually, startups collaborate with content marketing specialists or firms because some of them don’t have the budget for a full-time person. Building a network of partner websites for a short period of time is an effective digital marketing technique to bring awareness and traffic to your site. The profile of the website could include publications, edu websites, web directory, blogs, forums, e-commerce and so on.

OutreachMama employed a study to see the results after their partnership with publisher Companies like Forbes and Huffington Post. In only 2 months they received 350 total backlinks from over 100 domains. Besides that, they saw a natural increase in their backlink profile.  

www.outreachmama.com

In the second month of the partnership, they saw that they money keywords jumped up to 30 positions in the search engine result page.

7. Rank Higher on Review Sites to Have an Average 18% Uplift in Sales

9 out of 10 people look at online product reviews before they make a purchase decision. According to BrightLocal, 72% of Consumers say positive reviews make them trust a business more. Other 88% say they trust customer reviews as much as personal recommendations.

Source: http://searchengineland.com

Reevoo discovered through an in-house case study that online reviews bring an average 18% uplift in sales. In 2015, US  e-commerce sales were about $341.7 billion showing an increase of almost 15% over 2014.

Source: http://images.internetretailer.com

With a continuous growth in e-commerce sale, customer reviews (all reviews, not necessary the ones coming from some ideal customers) are a major factor, an efficient trigger and quite essential tools nowadays for e-commerce websites.

8. Be Part of the 90% of Marketers Who Saw a Significant Increase in ROI by Taking Advantage of Trends for Traffic Generation

Google Trends is a pocket of gold. You’ll find a lot of data to help you to generate content and see what’s trending to stay on top of your competitors. The particularity of this tool is that you’ll find real-time search data or help to gauge consumer search behaviors over time. Below you can see a screenshot from Google Trends with searches for 3 holidays: Halloween, Christmas and Thanksgiving.

You need to keep your eyes open for the marketing trends that will come. The marketing trends that will dominate 2022 include the Internet of Things, virtual and augmented reality, live streaming video, visual storytelling, native advertising, marketing automation, influencer marketing, mobile marketing.

Adopting multiple of these emerging trends is a smart move, and many digital marketers are syndicating content to make the most of the trends. For example, music photographer Matt Walter syndicates his photography podcast to audio platforms such as Apple Podcasts and Spotify, while also covering podcast content in different methods including dedicated live streams and through other visual mediums to maximise digital marketing effectiveness.

In 2016, video content was very popular and still is. Fire Brand proved that following trends can bring growth. The results showed that 90% of marketers have noticed significant increase in Return on Investment (ROI) through video content.

9. Gain a Higher Advantage in Front of Your Competitors with AMP Receiving 40% Organic Traffic from the Whole Site Traffic

AMP is a simpler and easier way to built light-weight web pages with static content that loads faster on mobile devices, due to its technology. The project is based on AMP HTML, new open framework built of existing web technologies.

The pages with an AMP version see a 2% higher CTR, which translates to more clicks, as you can see in the next screenshot.

Source: https://www.2dogsdesign.com

AMP version has 40% of all the traffic for a page. It is an utterly amazing improvement for many sites because the content renders faster. The project comes to the rescue for a  large number of publishers.

10. Write on Medium to Get Awareness Through 6.2 Million Pageviews

Medium is a network built out for people from people and offers a new kind of content – publishing, and social media synergy. Every day, there are newly published articles that could get you over 45,000 views.

Publishers can see 3 stats graphs on Medium for 30 days, minutes read, views and visitors. Ali Mese, startup marketer at GrowthSupply.com, created a report with the statistic for his best traffic-generator article. For an article of about 1,000-1,500 words, he received over 4 million pageviews and 144,920 followers on Medium as you can see in the next picture.

Source: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com

For a global audience, it’s best to publish your piece of content on Sunday at 0:00 GMT, because people look forward to reading something new as the week starts. To give it a kick, you should use an A/B emailing test sent at different hours to see which hour has the best open rate.

11. Develop a Facebook Customized Page Tab to Engage 40% of Fans

Investing in social media is a must. Yet, don’t know if you knew that a customized page tab gives you the advantage to offer exclusive information to fans. A personalized page tab can be used to promote registration for upcoming events, to bring fans to your website, to promote an app or a contest, create a content library, feature customers reviews or case studies and so on.

 Socially Stacked demonstrated that a customized page for a discount can influence the engagement for that page. In the end, 42% fans liked the page to get a coupon or discount. On the same side, a case study by Wildfire Interactive showed that a Facebook coupon-based page tab  received the highest engagement rates beside giveaways, sweepstakes, trivia Contests, Sweepstakes, Contest essays, photo contest, coupons, and video contest as you can see in the next graph.

12. Write Valuable Content on Linkedin Pulse and win up to 1,900 Social Shares in 30 Days

LinkedIn Pulse is a professional self-publishing platform. At first, everyone could write and publish content without any approval. Currently, it is composed of 500 selected experts.  According to Kapko, LinkedIn Pulse “lies somewhere between blog and social network”. Authors add a number of 50,000 articles on the platform every week.

Brian Lang, blogger at Small Business Ideas, conducted quite an interesting study on 300 posts featured on LinkedIn Pulse. Most articles from Pulse were about careers (42%), then about business (15%) and self improvement (9.33%) and other (33.67%) which includes technology, sales & marketing, current events, and productivity.

On average, the articles from Pulse got 1,843 social shares, and only 10% had less than 500 social shares, which leaves almost 90% with more than 500 social shares. If you are featured on LinkedIn Pulse, it can bring you a good amount of social exposure. From now on, writing on Linkedin Plan should be a part of your marketing plan.

13. Use Reddit to Grow Your Business & Generate $6,188 in 3 Months

Reddit is a community that has been growing since 2005. Here you can meet people with similar interests. It’s a place where you could follow news in a thread categorized in “hot”, ”new”, ”rising”, ”controversial”, ”top”, ”gilded”, ”wiki” and “promoted”. The nice part is you could follow lots of subreddits depending on the industry you’re interested. There were numerous cases when different stories from Reddit became famous and gained many upvotes.

 If you choose to post a link instead of a text you can link to your business and bring visitors to your website. Scott Keyes is an example of best practice in this case. He is a reporter for Think Progress and founder of Scott’s Cheap Flights. He turned an obsession with cheap plane tickets into a $1 million business in under 2 years. In 3 months he managed to make $6,188 only by posting on Reddit. According to what he said, his posting got him 1,000 free subscribers and 250+ premium subscribers.

14. Target the Online Communities and Hit 10.000 Monthly Unique Visitors

Online communities are a great way to grow your online presence and to catch insights. Being apart of an online community has its perks. Being around by people with similar interests and exchanging knowledge is a good way to develop yourself and the company you are working at.

 The best online marketing communities you need to join are LinkedIn, Reddit, Quora, Slack, GrowthHackers and, Inbound.org, ordered in chronological order. A good example of using the last two comes from Grow and Convert. The company was born when Devesh Khanal and Benji Hyam met a few years ago. Since they launched their site, they were active in online marketing communities, Devesh Khanal on GrowthHackers, on the one side, and Benji Hyam on Inbound.org, on the other side.

They set up a goal of bringing 40,000 monthly unique visitors in 30 days. As you can see in the next picture it is not quite like that, but they were able to bring more visitors from online communities than from organic searches. That is a good start!

15. Get Social Influence to Receive Higher Rankings by 15%

There is a lot of fuss around the subject about the importance of social signals in rankings. We already know that investing in social media is an effective digital tactic that can help out with the conversion rate optimization. Moz study says that Google doesn’t use social share counts directly in its algorithm. Neil Patel, on the other hand, claims that there might be a connection between social shares and rankings as you can see in the next screenshot from a Quick Sprout gifographic.

A huge lift of almost 15% in rankings was the result of an increase of 100 Google Plus followers for a business page. Facebook brought a 6,9% increase in ranking from 70 shares and 50 likes. Lastly, 50 Tweets lift rankings with only 2,88%.

16. Design a Smart Automated Reactivation Campaign and Boost Sales by 164%

Each business makes its own format for newsletters, but designing a segmentation for customers that interacted with the site is a guaranteed path to lift the reactivation of inactive subscribers. The ideal customer will open all emails and buy your products every time, but that will happen in a month of Sundays.  

The email marketing platform PostUp created an in-house case study for one of their clients to convert inactive subscribers. They built up an automated reactivation campaign and succeeded in boosting email-related sales by 164%. This is a great example of improving the conversion optimization of your inactive subscribers. 

Eventful created a new approach to automated reactivation campaign where emails included recommended news based on the previous behavior of the users. Below, you can see an example of an email from them:

Source: https://assets.econsultancy.com

This campaign was a success. The recommendation performer alert produces 15% median open rate, 3% median click rate and the spike was a 400% increase in reactivation rates.

17. Get Personalized Emails to See an Average of a 19% Increase in Sales

Over the years there have been numerous studies showing that email marketing is the most effective digital marketing tactic for lead nurturing in your digital strategy. Personalized emails are more efficient than non-personalized emails and can bring relevant results. Personalized emails are based on a more in-depth research and understanding of customer behavior and marketing trends. Most important of all, it requires you to know your buyer persona to deliver relevant information.

You can see a comparison between segmentation and personalization below:

Source: http://blog.revampcrm.com

Dropbox uses personalized emails. See an example of this kind below:

According to a study from CMO.com, marketers who use personalized email see an average 19% increase in sale. Personalized emails have a 600% conversion rate, but the sad part is that only 30% of brands can use them.

18. Reduce Friction and Increase by 100% Your Email Sign-Up Rate

In marketing, friction means everything that slows down the process of a user to convert. The ideal marketing planning is not to have friction at all, but since that’s almost impossible, it’s best to have less friction so you could convert your leads easily.

The news company Quartz leads a research by reducing friction in email sign-ups. The changes they made to the sign-up process was to simplify it by using only an email address for subscription and moving to double opt-in (the user had to click on a link in the first email they received to activate subscription) to opt-out. When visitors want to subscribe, they go to a new landing page.

The results were quite satisfying; the daily subscriber rate has doubled. You can see a screenshot of their growth below:

Source: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com

Besides that, Quartz increased the number of people who subscribed on the weekend, when the activity was very week.

19. Use Segmentation to Increase Deliverability & Experience 141% Increase in Revenue per Campaign

If you aren’t able to use segmentation to target your audience, you won’t succeed in writing relevant subject lines. You can use segmentation based on interests, location behavior consumption, mobile marketing, keyword phrases, lifestyle or other factors.

There’s plenty of email marketing software on the market to help you segment your database faster and easier by connecting an individual’s social media profiles with their email address. MailChimp is a well-known option, but you may also want to check out the most popular alternatives.

Lyrics discovered that 4 out of 10 marketers who used segmentation experienced a higher open rate, 3 out of 10 marketers saw a lower unsubscribe rate and 2 out of 10 experienced better deliverability and greater revenue. Below, you can see the graph with all the segmentation results from the research.

Source: http://www.emailonacid.com

Another research worth mentioning is the Johnny Cupcakes emailing campaign. within their digital marketing technique they used a segmentation for gender, customers interests, brand preferences and media habits and for the first time ran a product launch campaign with different emails for men and women. See below a screenshot of the email sent to women:

Source: http://content.marketingsherpa.com

After they analyzed the results, they saw an increase of 42% in CTR, of 123% in conversion rate and 141% in revenue per campaign. These are quite some results for such small improvement.  

Make sure you use segmentation in your digital marketing strategy.

20. Increase Your Email Open Rate by 33% with a Subject Line That Triggers Curiosity

Your subject lines are everything when you’re thinking about the email open rates. Everything comes from there. The call to action from the subject line must be relevant to your audience. Before you send the message to your list, think you’re sending the message to one person, someone you know. Keep in mind that your message shouldn’t be cold, no matter the industry you’re in.

A study from Informz shows how important a subject line is. 33% of email recipients open email are based on the subject line alone. So you can put your creativity to work or look for specialist advises making sure that your letter is well written, you are concise, you don’t use buzzwords and test.

Make sure you are concise, you don’t use buzzwords and test.

21. Collaborate with Influencers to Write About Your Product to Generate Over $300.000 in 3 Months

To create and maintain an online presence you must be one step ahead of the game and reach people.And influencer marketing can be of a real help in this situation. To create buzz in the online media, you should use influencers to help you to promote your business. A creative campaign with influencers was realized by Neil Patel, online marketing consultant. He spent $57,000 to models who posted a picture on Instagram with the message “Who is Neil Patel” and the hashtag #whoisneilpatel and earned $332,640 in three months.

This is just an example of a picture posted during the campaign:

Another example of influencers comes from people from your field of interest, specialists and experts in your industry. Another example of influencer marketing would be to use specialists from your field of interest, and experts in your industry.

22. Have an Integrated Approach about Paid Promotion on Social Media

Even though paid promotion is a digital marketing tactic used by numerous businesses, not everyone knows how to do it right. Having a large promotional budget is not a guarantee of success. The key is to address the right audience and engage with it.

In the 2016 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends report from Content Marketing Institute, you can see that 51% of B2B marketers say social ads are an effective paid advertising method.

47% of B2B marketers consider that promoted posts are also effective, as you can see in the picture above. The results show that more and more marketers consider paid promotion on social media a must. You should focus your attention on your paid social campaigns since those efforts could see high returns, as expressed in the example above. To keep up, digital specialists should look for new ways of investing in social platforms to reach new audiences.

To get yourself ahead of the game you could start taking an interest in mobility marketing if you’re using mobile advertising. Mobility is a way of fulfilling customer’s needs to get tasks done on the move. Let’s take Facebook as an example. Has it ever happened to you to visit a new city and receive notifications in the app with recommendations of places to visit and restaurants where you could eat near you? Connecting with the user on the go through an mobile app is a great way to push them down the funnel.

23. Increase CTR with 64% in PPC Ads with Site-Links Extentions

Site-links extensions are a path to lead visitors to specific pages from your website directly from a PPC ad. They look something like this:

Source: https://lseo.com

PPC Hero did an experiment to see the results after they added site links to their paid search ad. They saw an improvement; their CTR grew up from 1.16% to 1.9%. Only by adding site links, the CTR experiences an increase of 64%. Below, you can see the results before adding the site links and after adding them.

Source: http://www.ppchero.com

The case study also showed that there are situations where the site links have a lower CTR compared with the headline of the ad, but the CPA has a lower value. Even if the site links don’t get clicks near as much as the headlines, they do produce additional CTR and conversions.

24. Use Emotion Triggers in Headline Ads to Get 6x Above Average CTR

Either we are talking about a headline from a blog post, a newspaper, a book, a billboard, a PPC ad or a newsletter, headlines have a decisive impact whether the piece of content gets clicked or not.

Brainstorming for compelling headlines is mandatory. Copyblogger said that on average, 8 out of 10 people read the headline, and the rest 2 out of 10 read the rest.

Larry Kim, founder WordStream, saw that using negative emotional triggers in a PPC ad can score impressive results. By using the hero/villain persona to express anger/revenge, the next ad got 6x above average CTR.

Source: http://blog.ezanga.com

If you use fear, you could see a 125% increase in appointments booked, and 170% increase in call volumes. See the paid search ad used for this experiment below:

Source: http://blog.ezanga.com

Wordstream offers a free version of the tool Adwords Performance Grader to see how your ads are performing. You can use it to make a test before the changes you make in Google AdWords and after, based on the recommendations you receive.

25. See a 32% Return on Investment for a Promoted Twitter Account

Nowadays, everyone knows about Twitter. If you want to run an advertising campaign on Twitter, there are three ways to do it: promoted trends, promoted accounts and promoted tweets.

 Hubspot, inbound marketing pioneer, wanted to find a more effective way to:

• generate new leads;
• engage existing followers;
• grow the sales conversion rate;
• improve ROI.

The solution was to use the promoted accounts advertising type from Twitter to target B2B decision-marketing users that are interested in marketing subjects. To deliver better results, the campaign included promoted tweets with a specific call to action such as webinar invitations, free e-books. After the campaign had ended, it resulted in 150% increase sales, 46% lower cost-per-read and 32% ROI.   

Reaching new customers with Twitter promoted accounts is an effective digital marketing technique indeed.

26. Set Up Automated Behavioral Triggered Emails to Get 71% Higher Open Rates

For an email to be effective, marketers knew that emails see a better open rate if they follow the behavior of the users on the website.

According to Unbounce, automated behavioral emails are triggered by multiple events:

• a user abandoning the products from their cart;
• a subscriber becoming inactive;
• a subscriber purchasing a product that needs a replenishment.

See an example of this kind below:

Emails that use automated behavioral triggers have 71% higher open rates and 102% higher clicks than non-triggered emails.

This technique delivers value because it’s sent in the moment of utmost relevance and needs to your prospect. 39% of marketers say “automatically sending emails based on triggers” is the most effective technique for having a higher email engagement.

27. Collect Customer Data Through a Transparent and Unique System to Gain Trust of 44% of Customers

Along the years, studies reported a decrease in the visitors’ level of trust in brands and companies. Edelman Trust Barometer showed that 44% of customers express trust in business, which is almost a half of the audience.

When you can demonstrate how the data you gather is kept secure, you’ll see improvements. State of the Data Nation showed that a clear privacy policy (43%) earns consumer trust.

Informatica surveyed 2,000 UK adults and found out that almost 6 out of 10 people are concerned about the use of the personal information they shared with brands. Another interesting result from Informatica shows 7 out of 9 people admitted they were cautious with the information they share with brands.

Thread, U.K. online personal styling service for men and women, has a unique and transparent system of collecting customer data. Now it is available only for men. After you enter the site you select menswear:

They use this system to offer custom product to help your stylist find the best clothes for you, such as which trouser fits you like or how open are you to try more daring clothes or how much you usually spend on clothes and other specific questions.

In the end, you’ll be asked to leave your email address for further actions.

28. Make use of retargeting & Experience a 400% Increase On ROI

The retargeting method is used when you want to convert a user after entering the site. The process is quite easy; the user comes to your site, a cookie is set to their browsers. Afterward, you can track him to show him ads on the website he’s visiting. Based on the activity he had on your site you can deliver specific display ads. Below you can see the most effective types of retargeting:

Source: http://thumbnails-visually.netdna-ssl.com

Niche Hacks tried retargeting pixel to send visitors back to the email opt-in page. They converted 51,54% of all retargeted visitors into new subscribers, even though the ads were basic, landing page was basic, the stock images were simple. Basically, everything was average. In spite of all of this, they converted quite a large number of people.

American Apparel used Perfect Audience platform on Facebook retargeting and saw a 400% increase in ROI, converted new customers and increased the revenue.

29. Develop a Lead Scoring System to Generate 50% More Sales at Half of Costs

Lead Scoring is a system where every company can rank prospects according to a scale based on the value they represent for that company. Lead scoring can be implemented in numerous marketing automated platforms. For example, you can to assign a value to social media interactions or specific website behavior. Based on the results, you can see which lead must be pushed down the funnel or contacted directly by a sales representative.

By integrating your CRM system with a lead scoring system, you can create advanced sales analytics reports that reveal which channels produce the most lucrative leads, and which bring mostly useless ones. While setting up lead scoring can be a complicated process, it’s definitely worth your time and effort. Once you have lead scoring analytics in place, your sales team can stop wasting their time on prospects who are not likely to convert and focus instead on those who are more likely to buy now.

Studies revealed that companies with well-put lead nurturing system see 50% more sales at a 33% lower cost. Lead Generation Marketing Effectiveness Study showed that 68% of successful marketers say lead scoring is the most effective method to improve the revenue contribution from lead nurturing.

30. Get More Social Exposure Through the Social Media Automation

As the name says it, social media automation means using tools to automate the social marketing process by making your account stay active without manual posting and monitoring. On January 2016, We are Social said that 31% of world’s population (7.395 billion) were active social media users. With such a large audience you can’t stay up all night to make sure you post at the current local time when there is a peak of your audience. The automation appears at a time of need to make things easier.

A unique approach to the automation process on social media platforms happened in 2012 when Barack Obama’s social campaign used the Dashboard.

It was an online registration platform where volunteers could make an account to support Obama’s candidacy. Everybody with an email address could register and see news, political and election events. Through that platform, Obama’s team collected data about the activity of the volunteers such as phone calls, donations, and tasks. Afterward, it was very easy for the team to target only the volunteers that were interested. The results of the automation process were remarkable not to mention that in the end, Obama became president. Great digital marketing technique, isn’t it?

31. Encourage Brand Lovers to Support You Against Trolls

Brand lovers are those who play the role of brand advocates and define the term evangelism marketing. They are highly satisfied customers and identify themselves with the brand. They are an asset because they promote the brand waiting for nothing in return. McKinsey and Company say 70% of purchase experiences are based on how the customer feels. It is bloody important to provide value and customer fulfillment.

Besides the fact that brand lovers will make sure to tell everyone your product is the best, they will support you against trolls. Nowadays, people on social platforms are very critical, and a single wrong comment or tweet can ruin you. Some haters and trolls can make your life a living hell on the social media. But, thank God for brand advocates!

OldNavy, an American retailer, got socially trolled. The company tweeted an upcoming sale with an interracial couple image, and then a group of racist people started posting negative tweets about the brand with hashtags #whitegenocide and #miscegenation. Before the team from Old Navy began to respond, some advocates of the brand started supporting the company by posting their own pictures with interracial couples they have in the family. In times of crisis, it is best to have your brand lovers that can make a powerful statement.

32. Built a Strong Customer Following & Get Free Endorsement

Millennials are a socially conscious generation. Embracing a cause might be just the answer you’re looking for if your brand addresses the Y generations. If they believe in a cause, they are willing to pay more and even a premium price. Knowing they give something for a better cause makes them feel valuable.

The shoe brand TOMS created a campaign based on a cause that brought endorsement from celebrities and famous people. They created a new concept ‘One Day without shoes’, meaning that for each purchased pair of shoes, another pair goes to a child in need. People from all over the Globe started a word of mouth campaign and even walk without shoes the whole day.

Charlize Theron became a strong supporter of the cause, alongside a lot of other celebrities, such as Lenny Kravitz, Chaske Spence and Julia Jones from Twilight, Dawn Olivieri from the Vampire Diaries, plus Cheryl Tiegs, Gillian Zinser, Jason Mraz, Tara Mercurio and Lacey Chabert, Thomas Jane, Matisyahu, Living Things and Tory Burch.

33. Gain Free Media to Get Everyone Talk About You on News and Get 5 Million Views on YouTube

Earned media or free media is a term that describes all the publicity that is not paid but rather gained through promotional efforts. Earned media happens when you make people talk about your brand no matter where it appears. Earned media happens after you make smart and creative ads or involved in successful real marketing actions, created impactful events and so on.    

Avon used a digital marketing tactic that generated massive amounts of earned media. “Choose Beautiful” reached over 5 million of views on YouTube and the term <Dove ‘choose beautiful’> received more than a million entries on Google. Hundreds of media outlets covered the video; numerous news websites claimed that “proves beauty is a choice”.

Source: http://delamanoconvenezuela.com

The ad received a lot of free media. Ad Age named it the best advertising campaign of the 21st century. People started to talk about it on Buzzfeed saying “Not everyone is beautiful and that is perfectly okay”. Some of them were encouraging the message “I find it odd that people disapprove of an ad whose whole purpose was to get women to all realize that they were beautiful”.

The psychologist Nancy Etcoff and self-esteem expert Dr. Tara Cousineau, together with Dove, created a toolkit named “Mindful Me” designed to help women manage thoughts and feelings in order to offer them the confidence to feel beautiful.

Send a powerful message to your audience and then expect to gain free media.

34. Create Fascinating Video Content to Attract Native Customers & Increase the Conversion Rate by 80%

Video content started to gain a lot of attention in the past few years. Almost 1 billion  unique monthly visitors are on YouTube, 130 million on Vimeo, 100 million on Dailymotion, 45 million on LiveLeak and 42 million on Vine. That is a lot of viewers! Let’s not forget the social video part, 100 million hours of video are watched on Facebook, and 82% of Twitter users watch video content on Twitter. In 2013, Instagram introduced videos in addition to photos and more than 5 million videos were shared in the first 24 hours. Video consumption on Instagram has increased by 40% in 2016.

According to Hyperfine Media, 90% of users say that product videos are helping them in the decision process and almost 40% of online consumer trust video ads as you can see in next infographic.

Source: http://www.hyperfinemedia.co.uk

Most recent studies show that a video placed on the landing page can increase conversion rate by 80%. 96% of B2B companies use videos in their marketing campaign, and 73% say this improved their ROI.

35. Use Webinars to Gain 16,394 new leads

Organizing webinars can produce juicy content. They are great to deliver useful content to your readers and engage with them. Practically you can give a presentation to them and then discuss to see their main points. This is a great way to receive hot information, smart insights and see what topics you can debate on the blog in order to push the leads down the funnel.

Basically you need a microphone, a PC/laptop, and you’re set. Then use a service like AnyMeeting or GoToWebinar to connect with your viewers.

Webinars are such and effective digital marketing technique that could bring you 518,399 visitors and 16,394 leads from 77 webinars as KISSmetrics experienced. Neil Patel, founder at KISSmetrics, estimated that those webinars generated $1,638,000.

36. Start Running an Affiliate Program to Monetize Your Website & Get Extra $4500 Monthly Profit

There are upsides and downsides of an affiliate program in your digital strategy. The upside of this marketing technique is that it can generate high revenue and the downside is that it doesn’t work for all kinds of business.

For example, the popular web hosting service Bluehost gets new customers through its affiliates. Shopify uses an affiliate program that rewards its affiliates with $2,400 per sale.

A study from NichePie by Luqman Khan shows how you can generate a monthly profit of $4,500 in 4 months. See the statistics in the next screenshot.

Source: http://nichepie.com

He posted 8 articles and 1 infographic and received 14,206 unique visitors in 4 months.

37. Generate Product Order Increase by 9.8% Through Voucher and Reward Sites

In 2015, the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) released the Online Performance Marketing study showing that 57% of product orders were through voucher and reward sites. Thomas Cook, one of the world’s leading leisure travel, developed a campaign based on the use of voucher codes to encourage users to buy online tickets. They wanted to keep the cost-per-order (CPO) lower than £65. As a result, the orders increased by 9.8% while the CPO decreased, thus keeping it under £65.

38. Map out the Affiliates’ Value to Increase the Long Haul Share by 19%

Thomas Cook Airlines has a long activity in the affiliate marketing area, and this led the company to always improve their marketing strategy. They learned that knowing the values of their affiliates is highly important. One of their affiliate campaigns had the next objectives:

• minimize the average cost-per-sale (CPS);
• increase the number of long-haul bookings (meaning the bookings for travelers that last a long period of time);

A way to do that was to map out the affiliate’s value. For that, all the bookings from 2014 were analyzed to see the path to conversion for each affiliate. This helped the company to discover the CPS and the contribution brought by each affiliate. The results were quite impressive: they kept the average CPS below 2% of revenue and reduced the cost-per-click by 73% while increasing the long haul share by 19%. On top of that, they sold thousands of seats from routes that weren’t performing well at all.

39. Reach Over 60% Social Engagement and Advocacy for the Brand with Respected Influencers Through an Affiliate Program

The affiliate agency Schaaf-PartnerCentric conducted an in-house study based on REACH (Relations, Exposure, Advocacy, Connection, Hype) program that provides customized outreach and guarantees placement on influencer websites for a boutique fashion retailer. The client has proposed to increase the exposure and advocacy within a short period of time with the help of influencers.

The campaign raised 63% social engagement in the first week after the big launch. Instagram saw the highest engagement, with 92% of the social interactions. Pinterest increased up to 6% social interactions.

40. Implement a Publisher Strategy to See a Monthly Revenue Growth Rate of 177%

Cost Plus World Market is a furniture store that implemented a publisher campaign through an affiliate program. The online retailer has been in the furniture market for almost 30 years now and has had more than 100 brands and thousands of products. They implemented a publisher program with the help of Schaaf-PartnerCentric team. Only after 90 days, the company’s results were highly visible. The monthly traffic increased by 100.7%, the monthly sales increased by 257%, and the monthly revenue grew by 177%.

Conclusion

Creating engaging content with relevant data and juicy tips will always be effective. Let’s face it – we crave creativity. Creativity in all forms: for making your business better, for getting everyone to talk about you, for inspiring others, for earning free advertising, for becoming an asset in your industry. If you follow some of the digital marketing tactics and techniques from the list we’ve created, you should see improvements shortly.

Create a list of the most important digital marketing tactics for you. Chose those that are easy for you to implement, and then take action. Embrace the fact that you need to make changes to deliver higher CTR, higher open rate, revenue growth, higher conversion rate, more unique daily viewers, more leads and so on.

Good luck! Maybe you will be the next case study for an effective digital marketing technique.

The post 40 Most Effective Digital Marketing Tactics and Techniques in 2024 appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Well, as Head of Web SPAM at Google John Mueller said, “in general, no”. But the key words in that answer are “in general”. That’s the usual answer we get from John and, as much as we’d like to say we will dissect it, the truth is that we can only be speculating and interpreting things based on own knowledge and experience.

Let’s jump to it and find out whether web directories are still useful for SEO in 2022.

1. What Are Web Directories Really?
   1. Why Directories Were Created
   2. Why Directories Died
   3. The Web Directory Legacy
2. Do Web Directories Still Work for SEO in 2022?
   1. The Problem With Today’s Directories
   2. Local SEO & Directory Listings
   3. Directories That Are Still Good
   4. Why Do We Still Have Web Directories?
3. Should You Disavow Directory Links?

What Are Web Directories Really?

In order to better understand why directories work or not in 2022 we have to create a background for them. Like an introduction.

Most people probably think of directories as just sites that list other sites. While that’s true, the reality is that they’re much more.

Before modern search engines, such as Google, web directories were THE INTERNET.

Why Web Directories Were Created

In the very early days of the internet, only a few people had websites. Internet connections were uncommon and there wasn’t much profit to be made out of it. Still, different websites emerged, in different niches.

However, you had to actually remember the domain names in order to access those websites, as there was no Google.

But, as the internet grew, more websites started showing up. Soon enough, people couldn’t remember all those names. But some clever guys from Yahoo! had the brilliant idea to store the best website into something they called a web directory.

At first, only a few websites were listed, the most ‘popular’ ones or the ones that they thought were worthy of being listed. This way, you would only have to remember one website (Yahoo!) if you wanted to find all the other good sites.

At first, the sites were listed alphabetically but, as the number grew, they started getting listed under categories and subcategories. This way it was easier for users to find what they needed.

Web directories made money out of selling advertising space or boosting certain results in exchange for a fee.

Why Web Directories Died

Unfortunately, when the number of sites started getting way too high, people soon realized it wasn’t so convenient to browse through all those categories. It would take too much time and, ultimately, the best results were mixed up with the less good ones.

This is how search engines appeared. It was by far more convenient to type in a keyword and get a list of top results than to browse through categories trying to figure out which website is the best.

The search engines worked on algorithms, just as they do now (although not as complex). Depending on the keywords in the title and other factors, some sites would rank better than others.

Yahoo! had its own search engine. However, it is no secret that Google took the lead because of their improved algorithm, but this isn’t the only reason why Google eventually took the lead. Yahoo! was a giant back then, in the days of Yahoo! Mail, News, Answers and Messenger, but a number of bad decisions made them fade out.

The Web Directory Legacy

Even though web directories dropped dramatically in popularity, people still used them. But not for what they were supposed to used them.

As much as people say that web directories are still useful, the truth is that people have been using them merely for link building and online marketing for a long time.

I’m 25 now and I’ve been using a computer since I was 6. My first contact with the internet was in 2002 and I can’t recall ever browsing on a web directory. I remember Yahoo! and Google. I remember ODC ,DC++ and other popular hubs. I remember Floppy disks with drivers. But I don’t remember web directories.

In fact, my first contact with web directories was back in 2013, when I first started learning about SEO. I had probably ended up on similar websites before, but not solely for searching a specific website.

Although the truth was that web directories weren’t of interest to the general public, new web directories kept popping up.

There were of course, useful directories, such as business listings (Yellow Pages), which people visited if they wanted to search for a particular business (name, phone, address, legal details, etc.).

There were also niche directories, which only listed websites in a particular field. Those might have got some organic traffic and potential customers when people searched for things like “list of XYZ websites”.

But the truth is that, most of the time, web directories were only there because links brought better rankings. People found ways to get listed on as many directories as they could, therefore destroying the purpose of a directory. Even paid directories were full of SPAM.

Fees were usually low, ranging from $5 to $20 if you wanted to get a listing on the homepage. However, most of the time that wouldn’t bring much more traffic to your site, since most of the users visiting web directories were SEOs trying to build links.

I’m not afraid to say that I only visited web directories for link building purposes. Everybody was doing it and it worked. It was easy and convenient.

But the question is… do they still work now?

Do Web Directories Still Work for SEO in 2022?

In a local SEO social media group somebody tried to prove a point by showing us a #1 result for a keyword, claiming that he had only built 2 directory links to that page and it’s now #1.

He was trying to attack us “white hats” that always state web directories don’t work when, in fact, he had proof that they do. Only problem was the keyword he was ranking for had virtually 0 searches and the competition was basically inexistent.

Did the web directory links actually helped him to rank better in Google’s search results? Probably… Did he prove any points? Definitely not.

Web Directories probably still have a small impact on your rankings, just like any other site that links to you and passes Page Rank. However, because they’ve been abused as an SEO tactic over the years, Google penalizes people that use web directories. With the rise of Penguin 4.0, many of them are probably ignored.

Or, as John Mueller (the current Head of Web SPAM @ Google) said:

generally no.

— ? John ? (@JohnMu) February 25, 2017

Bu that answer can be interpreted in very many ways. Let’s see first why web directories got such a bad reputation in SEO.

Web Directories’ Main Issues for SEO

I’ve already discussed how web directories don’t really provide much value as users don’t really use them for anything other than SEO.

However, the story doesn’t end there:

Web directories got spammy & tricky: As people always want the quick way, they started automating processes. With more automation, more SPAM came along. These types of things are inconvenient for Google because they waste a lot of resources. Don’t you just hate spam comments? I know I do.

Google eventually figured out that the best way to deal with this was to penalize people that would use directories as a way of improving their rankings. So when important updates such as Penguin started to roll out, web directories had the perfect opportunity to make money.

Although some websites were listed for free, now that Google was penalizing websites for spammy link profiles, some web directories asked for removal fees.

Web directories are not managed anymore: Even if you do find a good web directory, chances are that nobody is going to answer you.

A couple of years ago, I was in the process of building links for someone. Advertorials were too expensive for his budget and all their competitors had the directory links. Without exception. They ranked well, so I thought I’d better try it at least.

After a few days of efforts, it was pretty clear that it won’t work. Not because Google penalized me or anything, but because the directory sites either had errors on their submission forms or nobody replied/approved my sites.

Since they don’t make as much money as they used to, people have stopped putting effort into managing them.

Web directories are not efficient: Even if you manage to get some business directory listings, they will probably have a very little impact, if not none at all.

Your time is better spent creating content and engaging with your audience. 1-2 links won’t help at all and scaling this is risky and can result in penalties.

Google penalizes you: Of course, the biggest issue with web directories these days is that your website can get penalized if it tries to trick the Google algorithms.

Building links in mass, be it through web directories, blog commenting, article submission, guest posting, you name it, is risky and can get your site in trouble.

Now I’m not saying that you’re going to be penalized if you submit your site to a directory. By all means, if you find an interesting site that also happens to have a list of other interesting sites, go for it!

But it’s a good idea to check their background a little bit. What’s their domain authority? Is their backlink profile spammy? Are they linking to quality websites or a bunch of phishing potholes full of malware?

In other words, does that website bring any value at all to the internet or for any users? Is it in any way relevant to your site? If the answer is no, then you should definitely stay away from it.

Local SEO & Directory Listings

When it comes to local, it’s probably the only field where people actually still visit renowned “directories” to find a good location.

For example, Google My Business is considered to be a web business directory. To some extent, it is. It lists businesses. However, it’s turning more and more into a search engine itself. The rankings are done based on algorithms.

Local Search Listings | Google My Business

People do browse and look for reviews, but most of them just stick with the top businesses (the ones that get listed first by Google My Business on local search and Google Maps) because they are, usually, the best results.

When it comes to local SEO, it does help if your NAP details (name, address, phone) are listed on multiple websites. However, title, distance from the user and reviews probably play a more important role.

The key thing with NAP is consistency. Google might have some issues if you keep having a mixture of different names, phones and addresses all over the place.

However, let’s all be honest that citations here and there aren’t the key to local search SEO success. It’s not that they don’t help (they do, you get brand visibility) but whenever you have a citation, you should accompany it with a backlink.

Local business directories are a great start. For example, you might find sites such as “yourcitynews.xyz” that have a section called “Great Locations in Our City”. If you can list your local business there, that’s great because the relevancy comes from the local orientation of the website itself. Most news will be about your city, which means your business should be there to rank better in that particular city.

If you can’t find a local business directory, you can also find these types of backlink opportunities with BrandMentions. This tool monitors when your name/brand is mentioned on the web. You can then engage with people and build relationships (and also ask for a backlink in case they haven’t made one).

Directories That Are Still Good

Now obviously you’re probably asking “Hey, where can I still find good web directories if all are bad?”

Well… there are some. This isn’t really the purpose of this article, but I’ll only list a few so that you get an idea how modern, useful web directories actually look like.

White Hat SEOs will probably jump and say “How can you recommend profile link building or any sort of web directory link?”

The key word here is RELEVANCY. If the listing is relevant to your site, it is going to help you. 

I don’t want you to take “web directories are bad” for granted and miss an opportunity that might actually be helpful to you.

Many search engine optimization experts react badly to blog commenting or forum posts, because they know it doesn’t work. However, blog comments are still the fuel of blogs. Forums are still popular in industries such as music, automotive, health and even fashion.

Matthew Woodward built an award winning blog and much of his direct and organic traffic was thanks to the posts he made in the BlackHat Forums. Just don’t spam. Be relevant. Be useful.

An example of good directories were the local sites that might have listings. I can’t really give a specific example, but I hope you get the point. If they have an active social media account, post from time to time and bring in some traffic, you can try to list your local business there.

It all comes down to relevancy. Is the listing relevant to your scope/niche? If yes, go for it!

Here I can give a specific example. SoundCloud is a directory for musicians, for example. If you’re a musician, you can get a profile backlink from your SoundCloud profile. Another similar example is last.fm.

Is this spammy? It could be if you just create a profile and leave it like that. But if you’re a musician, maybe it also makes sense to post on your SoundCloud account from time to time, build an audience there and actually send some traffic to your site through that link and maybe even get some potential customers.

Other good local listing sites are Yelp or maybe Yellow Pages. Although Google has heavily bashed them because they’re evil, it’s still a good place to list your business.

Why Do We Still Have Web Directories?

Most businesses, such as Moz or Yahoo, have closed their directories (Dmoz and Yahoo Directory).

The truth is probably that the web is still full of directories because of low maintenance costs (hosting and domain).

Many directories if not all lack moderators (which actually cost money), but still probably make some small amounts of revenue from advertising.

This whole article idea started from us observing these weird anchor texts such as “.2523765 yourdomain.com” in our tool for multiple clients. You might see these anchor texts in your cognitiveSEO dashboard as well.

They’re generated by The Globe network, a sort of directory that crawls and indexes websites by simply linking to them on pages which contain thousands of external links. The network is owned by Ascio Technologies Inc (a domain registrar). Luckily, I’ve looked at their backlink profile and they also have the spammy anchor texts, so at least it’s fair.

Their model is different. They want to sell the entire network of sites for millions of dollars. They present it as some sort of world wide web, the most visited site on the planet (which obviously, it isn’t). I’m not sure how old this thing is or how it started, but there’s a BlackHat Forum thread about the network where you can read more about this.

Should You Disavow Directory Links?

One thing that people rush in to do is disavow links that they think Google might consider spammy or that might get their websites penalized.

This is an entire topic to discuss and I really recommend that you read my article about disavowing links.

However, just to give you a short answer, in general, it’s a good idea not to play with the disavow tool unless you’re sure your site has been penalized and you have isolated the reason to be the link profile, after you’ve checked and excluded everything else.

For example, most of The Globe network, the site I’ve mentioned above, isn’t even indexed in Google, so it doesn’t really make any sense disavowing those links, since Google already doesn’t count those links in any way.

Conclusion

Generally, you should avoid them, but sometimes web directory submissions might be useful, especially when it comes to local businesses and local SEO. Before you submit your links, make sure that the online directory is relevant to your niche and has a good link profile.

What do you think about web directory submissions? Have you ever used them? Do you still use them? Do they still work? Let us know in the comments section (but be careful with the links if you’re a WhiteHat SEO as you might get penalized!)

The post Are Web Directories Still Relevant for SEO in 2024? appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

But how does this PageSpeed Insights Tool from Google actually work? And, more importantly, does page speed affect SEO? You’ll find everything you need to know in this article.

The PageSpeed Insights Tool didn’t use to be very good in the past. Most of the information there could be found relatively easy elsewhere and it didn’t quite indicate speed itself. However, Google has recently updated the tool and it’s a lot better. Unfortunately, it’s also a lot harder to understand.

However, this tool has became popular among SEOs through PageSpeed Insights, which is, in fact, powered by Lighthouse, but provides the information in an easy to follow format, on a web page.

1. What Is Google PageSpeed Insights?
   1. Mobile vs. Desktop
   2. What is page speed actually?
2. Does PageSpeed Insights Affect SEO? Is 100/100 Score Essential?
3. PageSpeed Insights Metrics
   1. Field & Lab Data (Performance Metrics)
   2. Opportunities & Diagnostics
4. How Is the PageSpeed Insights Score Calculated?
5. Key Points in Improving the PageSpeed Insights Score
   1. Server response time
   2. Image compression
   3. HTML & CSS Structure
   4. Minification & Script Compression
   5. Cache Policy
   6. Lightweight Theme & Plugins
6. How to Bulk Check the PageSpeed Insights Score
7. Other Tools for Measuring & Improving Site Speed
   1. Pingdom
   2. GT-Metrix
   3. mod_pagespeed
   4. Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)

What Is Google PageSpeed Insights?

PageSpeed Insights is an online tool provided by Google which is used to identify web performance issues on sites. Although mostly related to technical SEO issues, the tools also analyze the site from a User Experience and accessibility point of view.

You can access PageSpeed Insights by visiting https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/.

You can enter the URL there and after a few seconds the tool will return a page with some results regarding your website’s performance. At the top, there will be a general score, which is an average of multiple factors. Below you will see detailed information about what actually affects your speed.

However, it isn’t the only PageSpeed tool provided by Google. There also is mod_pagespeed, a server module used to solve these speed issues, and the full fledged Lighthouse (the site analysis tool that powers everything), available in Chrome itself. There are also a number of Chrome Extensions related to Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

We will discuss briefly about all of them throughout this article, but we will focus mainly on PageSpeed Insights as it seems to be the handiest tool most SEOs use when checking a website.

Mobile vs. Desktop

When you insert a page to test it, Google will give two scores: one for the mobile version and one for the desktop version.

Initially, the PageSpeed Tool only gave one score, for the Desktop version. But recently, mobile usage has became more and more popular. As of 2018, more than 50% of search engine users search on mobile devices. As Google moved to a mobile first index, it also made sense for them to test mobile versions for speed first.

However, if you have a responsive design, you might think that these versions are mostly identical.

If so, why do they have different scores?

Mobile: When you use the PageSpeed Insights tool, the first result you’ll get is for mobile speed. This means that your website has been tested on a mobile connection, probably with a 4G connection, as it seems to be the most common speed around the US at least.

https://www.uscellular.com/coverage-map/voice-and-data-maps.html

However, keep in mind that many mobile users around the world still get only 3G signal and, although they have a slower connection speed, they still expect the website to load really fast.

And here’s the problem. It’s not always about your site, it’s more about the connection’s speed. It might seem like your site is slow when, in reality, the connection speed is slow.

Desktop: On desktop, the score is higher because the connection speed is higher. That’s just the thing with light and fiber optics. Unless you live in the UK, of course, and still have cups and string internet.

So the website goes through the same testing, but it’s mostly the connection speed that differs.

That’s why mobile comes first, as mobile devices usually have slower connections. Things might change with 5G but, until then, make sure you focus on improving your site speed for mobile devices.

What exactly is Page Speed?

OK, so we know what the tool does: it gives a score based on how fast it thinks your site is. But what exactly is page speed?

Page Speed is the speed at which an individual page loads on your website. Different pages can have different speeds due to factors such as images and scripts.

But speed is relative. It depends on so many factors such as the website’s performance, the server’s performance, the particular web page you’re on, the connection type, the user’s internet service provider, the internet package, the device’s processing power, the Browser, what the user is doing at that point, how many apps are running and so on.

However, we can only work with what we can work, which is our website and our server. We don’t really have control over the rest.

Just to get things straight, page speed isn’t a score, like PageSpeed Insights presents. It’s a web page’s loading time and it is measured in seconds. That’s what matters.

That’s why Google PageSpeed Insights wasn’t so good in the past. It didn’t quite give you information about how fast your website is actually loading. Just scores.

And that’s why this new version is just so good. It tells you everything you need to know about actual loading speed while also keeping the good stuff from the old version.

There are, of course, different points of interest in the loading time. For example, you may want to run some scripts towards the end because they don’t need to be used initially.

They might take a lot to finish loading, so the total loading time could be higher. But if the site is usable until then, it isn’t such a big problem.

For example, let’s say you want to run an exit intent pop-up script. That script takes a hypothetical 5-10 seconds to load. However, you want to show it to the user only after about 20-30 seconds.

If you start running your script immediately, you might postpone loading other important elements, such as the first thing the user should see: the above the fold content. This would be very bad, especially since you’re not going to use that script until about 20-30 seconds in the future.

So you can postpone loading the script after everything else that is vital loads in order to give the user a better experience.

However, if you have a script that makes the menu work or something vital to the usability of the website, you might not want to load it towards the end. This would ruin the experience as the user would not be able to access that function before everything else is loaded.

Does Page Speed Affect SEO? Is 100/100 Insights Score Essential?

The simple answer is that page speed does affect SEO. Page speed is a direct ranking factor, a fact known even better since Google’s Algorithm Speed Update. However, speed can also affect rankings indirectly, by increasing the bounce rate and reducing dwell time. 

At Google, users come first. Studies by Google show that average 3G loading speed is very slow. They also show that users leave the site after about 3 seconds. This means that their experience is bad and Google doesn’t like ranking sites which provide bad user experience.

What you must remember is that speed is measured in seconds, not in points from 0 to 100. While PageSpeed Insights is a tool that helps you improve speed, the score there doesn’t necessarily mean anything in the real world.

Even so, it is important to improve the Page Speed Score.

Why?

Because with Google we don’t know for sure whether the score there is or is not used as a ranking factor. Does Google use seconds? Does it use the score? Who knows…

However, I’ve seen sites with perfect pagespeed score ranking poorly and websites with a score lower than 50 that rank very well (#youtube).

However, you have to take into account how Google makes these tests. We don’t know where the tests are performed from. Is your server from Romania and Google tests it with a 3G connection in the US? Well then, you can obviously expect low speeds.

But just for the user’s sake, put the loading time first. And don’t use only PageSpeed Insights to test that. Stick to the end and I’ll show you a couple of tools which you can use to test the speed at which your website loads from different locations.

Sometimes, Google contradicts itself!

For example, Google PageSpeed Insights considers the Google Analytics script render blocking, which means you should load it later, in the footer. However, Google Analytics specifies it pretty clearly that the script must be placed in the <head> section of your website, otherwise it won’t work properly and won’t initially be accepted as a valid install.

So you get a small score hit in PageSpeed Insights… by doing what Google says… just to be told that you shouldn’t do it like that… by Google. You get the point.

Also, you can’t cache the script properly unless you store the analytics.js file on your server. That’s obviously something Google Analytics doesn’t recommend. It’s also a hell for maintenance, as every time Google Analytics JavaScript file gets an update, you would have to update it on your site as well.

This, of course, doesn’t happen only with Google tools and scripts but with any 3rd party script you don’t have control over.

In our defense, even YouTube, which is owned by Google and should theoretically set an example, has a pretty slow PageSpeed Insights score, at least at the time of writing this article.

But that doesn’t mean that the site loads slow. You can see that the field data (for which there is plenty of, as it’s YouTube) says the site loads in pretty much 4 seconds, which isn’t actually bad, considering that recently YouTube provides video previews in the thumbnails.

You can also test your site with https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en-gb/feature/testmysite/ to get a more simple explanation of how fast your site loads!

Our other business’s website, BrandMentions loads in under 2 seconds on a 4G connection, as you can see above. We would see it as pretty good. Sure, there’s always room for improvement. By Google standards… it’s average.

However, Google seems to consider cognitiveSEO’s website speed slow, even though it loads in a little over 3 seconds, which is still pretty fast considering the amount of 3rd party tools we’re using.

Note that you’ll have to go under 1 second to be considered fast! To do so, you’ll probably need a very simple site with no 3rd party plugins or fancy pop-ups. Not easy if you actually want to do some digital marketing.

So yes, loading speed is important for SEO, but a perfect PageSpeed Insights score is not. As long as your website loads in around 3 seconds, you should be fine with most users.

PageSpeed Insights Metrics

Since so many things can affect site speed, Google breaks everything up in different categories in the PageSpeed Insights Tool, for a better understanding of the issues.

This is helpful as Google also provides some sort of prioritization, showing you what exactly affects speed the most.

Field & Lab Data

These are the new metrics that are actually useful. They are split into two categories: field and lab data.

Field data is what’s important in the real world, as it’s the data extracted by Google from real users, either through Chrome or other data providers.

Sure, it’s an average and if Google doesn’t yet have enough data it will let you know.

Origin Summary shows an average of the site’s speed as a whole. This way you can have an idea on how your page compares to the site and how the site compares to other sites in the Chrome User Experience Report.

Lab data, although still useful, could be considered less important as it is collected from a controlled environment. This means that it’s tested through a single connection and it doesn’t aggregate data from multiple users.

The lab data is what actually generates the Google page speed score.

Due to the fact that Google doesn’t always have field data, it uses the lab data which is performed on the spot to analyze your site.

First Contentful Paint represents the moment when the users sees something on your web page for the first time. If you look at the series of images you can actually spot how it looks:

As you can see, the page has not fully rendered, something has displayed there.

First Meaningful Paint is the second step, let’s say, if we take the results above as an example. It represents the point at which the user can actually understand the first piece of content. For example, some readable text or an image displays, instead of just colors and backgrounds.

Speed Index is a more complex metric. It measures how quickly elements on your website are visibly populated. The faster they start to appear, the better. You’re looking for a lower score here, as it’s also measured in seconds.

First CPU Idle represents the point at which the site has loaded enough of the information for it to be able to handle a user’s first input. For example, if the site has not loaded enough relevant information, the user might tap elements or scroll down but nothing will happen.

Time to Interactive is the next level, the one at which the website is fully interactive. This means that everything has loaded in the device’s memory and is now ready to be used.

Max Potential First Input Delay is the delay a user experiences from the point at which they interact with the browsers to the point at which the browser responds. This is the only performance metric which doesn’t affect the page speed score.

Opportunities & Diagnostics

The opportunities section provides information on what you can improve on your site. It also tells you an estimate of how much each issue affects your load time and how you should prioritize your tasks.

Going through each and everyone of them would be overkill. However, under each metric you’ll have a small arrow which you can use to expand the section.

There you will find information about each and every recommendation and how to fix the issue to improve your site’s speed. You will notice that the elements which cause the biggest issues are, in general, images and 3rd party scripts.

The Passed Audits section is the list of things that you already do well on your web page. Basically, it will show elements from both the Opportunities and Diagnostics sections that fit within Google’s parameters.

The more you have in this list, the better!

How Is the PageSpeed Insights Score Calculated?

Although you might see so many things in the PageSpeed Insights Tool, the score is actually calculated using only the seconds in the Lab Data section. If you read closely, you’ll actually be able to see the message “These metrics don’t directly affect the Performance score.” under Opportunities & Diagnostics.

The metrics in the Lab Data are called performance metrics. There are 6 of them and we’ve presented them above. Each metric gets a score from 0 to 100. Each metric has a different weight in calculating the score.

3 – First contentful paint
1 – First meaningful paint
2 – First cpu idle
5 – Time to interactive
4 – Speed index
0 – Estimated input latency

By order of importance, they are listed as such: Time to Interactive, Speed Index, First Contentful Paint, First CPU Idle, First Meaningful Paint and Estimated Input Latency, which actually has no effect on the score.

The scores are based on Log-normal distribution algorithms so let’s not get too deep down the rabbit hole. If you want to learn more you can read this page.

Google has also put a Sheet file which you can use to see how the score is actually generated. If you know Excel functions, you can reverse engineer how everything works. You can download this file here, but you have to make your own copy (File -> Make your own copy) before you can edit it. There’s also a version for Lighthouse v5.

To put it in simple terms, the First Contentful Paint impacts the score more than the First Meaningful Paint, and so on.

Why? Well, probably because if nothing displays on the screen, the user is more likely to leave your website. If you display… something, you’ll win some time to get the rest of the thing delivered.

The scores are ultimately divided into 3 categories, Slow (0-49), Average (50-89) and Good (90-100). Then an average is generated as a final score for your website.

Generally, if you’re under 50, you do have some issues that need fixing! But again, don’t sweat it if your site loads in about 3 seconds.

Key Points in Improving the PageSpeed Insights Score

Everything up there might be a little big hard to digest. We get it. Most probably, you won’t be able to solve everything! We’ve ruled out that it’s not important to get a 100% score. However, here are the key elements that will noticeably make your site load faster.

Warning: perform a backup of both your files and your database before engaging in these improvements. They can mess up your website and you have to make sure you can return to a previous version!

Server response time

The server is something you can’t really improve yourself. You either have a good one or a bad one. To improve it, you would either have to reduce load on it significantly, or improve its hardware, both of which you don’t have control over, unless you own the physical machine.

So it’s important to have a good server in the first place. But how do you choose a good server?

Well, any hosting company that ranks well on Google should provide decent services. However, it’s up to you to test. Best advice? If you’re mostly focused on local SEO, choose a local server. For example, if most of your audience lives in Italy, choose a server with the datacenter in Italy.

If the datacenter is all the way in the US, the information will have to travel a big distance before reaching your target audience.

You can always test the hosting provider’s own website with PageSpeed Insights and look for their TTFB (Time To First Byte) or Server Response Time. If it’s in the Passed Audits section, you know you have yourself a good hosting provider.

However, it’s better if you know someone that is an actual client of the hosting provider so you can test the speed there.

Realistically, the host’s own website will probably be on a dedicated server, while your site will be on a shared hosting package. This means that you will share the computer’s CPU and internet bandwidth with other websites.

If you can test a real site from a client, that’s great. You might be able to look through the reviews and find clients or ask the support team to provide one.

Image compression

In general, images are the biggest problem with websites. They are big and take up a lot to download. 

There are two types of issues with the images. The first one is the screen size vs. the actual image size in pixels and the second one is the disk size.

Disk Size: The more physical space an image takes on a hard disk or SSD, the more it will take to download. 100 KB will download a lot faster than 1000 KB (1MB). If you have 10 images like that on your blog post, expect your site to load very slow.

You can use WP Smush to optimize your images. It’s a plugin that will compress the images without losing any quality. This means that you can shrink a 1000×1000 pixels image from 200 KB to 150 KB without noticing the difference in quality, therefore making it load 25% faster.

Screen Size: Screen size is the size at which an image is displayed. For example, the image below is being displayed at 300×300 pixels.

To make images load faster, you first have to make sure you’re not using an image bigger than it’s going to be displayed. For example, if you have an HTML section that styled with CSS at 300×300 pixels, but you load an 1000×1000 pixels image in the source, you’re losing load time for that 700×700 pixels.

That’s because the Browser has to download the 1000×1000 pixels image and then shrink it to 300×300 pixels. This takes more time for both the download and the shrinking process. You can fix this by uploading your images with the same width and height that they will be displayed at.

WordPress does this automatically by creating multiple instances of the image when you upload it. That’s why you’ll see that 300×300 or 150×150 suffix at the end of an image file path. That’s why you can choose sizes (Large, Medium, Thumbnail). Although it’s not perfect, especially if you manually resize the image with click and drag, and it takes up more space on your server on the long run, it does help with load speed.

Deferring the images is another thing that you can do to improve the load time. This means that you can download them later as the user scrolls down on the web page. There will be a brief moment when the images won’t be visible but they will eventually show up, one after another.

This helps the Browsers focus on the important part, the one which the users is viewing at that point.

There are a multitude of plugins that can help you do that. However, many have bugs or only defer images in certain situations, for example if they are created by WordPress or WooCommerce, but not when created or inserted by less popular plugins.

There are certainly plugins for other CMS, such as Joomla or Magento. Just perform a Google search for them. If you’re not on a popular CMS, such as WordPress, deferring images can be done with jQuery, but you’ll most certainly need a developer for it, if you’re not one yourself.

Next gen image formats are recommended by Google. They are very useful, especially when loading a website from a mobile device. However, there’s a reason not many people use them yet.

Next gen image formats are not yet supported by all major browsers. This means that you’ll need to dynamically serve different formats for different browsers.

If you can use a plugin on your CMS that might be easy, but if you’re on a custom platform, you’ll need to develop everything from scratch, which costs a lot. Here’s a list of which browsers support the WebP format.

If you size and optimize your images properly, the savings you’ll get by also converting them to next gen image formats such as JPEG2000 or WebP might not be worth the cost in time and money.

However, if you have the time and budget, by all means, go do it. You can use this tool to check if the browsers your users spend most time on are supported. Search for either WebP or JPEG2000.

HTML & CSS Structure

The HTML structure of your web page dictates the way it loads. Browsers read a page from the top to the bottom and they load the elements the same way. This means that if you want something to load first, you have to put it higher in your page.

Generally, the issues are not with HTML but with CSS. If you write your CSS chaotically, it will result in a slower loading time and a bad user experience.

Let’s take an example. Most websites, if not all, follow this HTML structure: head > body > footer.

If my CSS file styles the footer first, then the footer will receive the styling, although it is before the fold. Meanwhile, the header and body might remain plain.

It’s also a good idea to add your mobile styling first, as mobile devices are the slowest ones. You might need at least a basic CSS training to get the idea of this hierarchy and be able to identify problems with code on your own

The same goes with renderblocking JavaScript. Postpone scripts that are not vital. Add them to the footer so that they will be loaded last.

However, if you have important scripts such as Analytics which should run as soon as possible, then by all means keep them in the header and make sure they fire and run properly, even though this might result in a lower PageSpeed score.

Minification & Script Compression

Minification is a process of making a file smaller by removing unnecessary information from it.

For example, when writing JavaScript and CSS, most, if not all coders, like to use spaces in order to keep their code clean and easy to read. However, those extra spaces add up, especially if you have a long piece of code.

cssminifier.com

Another way of minifying code would be by combining similar elements.

For example, if my head and footer sections were identical, instead of writing them like this:

body {
font-size: 16px;
}
footer {
font-size: 16px;
}

I could write:

body, footer {
font-size: 16px;
}

Compression is the process of shrinking files by replacing recurring sequences of information with a single reference to that particular sequence.

So, for example, if I have the following code: 123 4 123 123 123 4 123 123, I could replace 123 with a 1 and get a compressed version like this one: 1 4 1 1 1 4 1 1. Of course, it’s far more complex than what I’ve presented.

This generally happens on the server side and the most common one is called Gzip compression. The server sends a compressed version. After the browser receives the compressed file, it decompresses it by reversing the process, to read its actual contents.

This works pretty much like WinRAR; we probably all know it, because we’ve been using it for free since forever!

If you’re on a popular CMS, you will definitely find a plugin for both compression and minification. For example, the W3 Total Cache plugin does a lot of things including both of these, if you set it up properly.

Remember that compression is dependent on server setup. If your server does not support Gzip, you won’t be able to compress files. If you have an Apache server, make sure you have mod_deflate installed.

You can ask your server provider if your hosting supports it. 99.9% of the time they will say yes. If it’s not already installed, they should do it free of charge, as it’s something pretty basic.

If you’re not on a popular CMS you can also enable Gzip compression via the .htaccess file (Apache servers) by adding the following code, as long as mod_deflate is installed.

<span class="token operator">&lt;</span>IfModule mod_deflate<span class="token punctuation">.</span>c<span class="token operator">&gt;</span>
  <span class="token shell-comment comment"># Compress HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Text, XML and fonts</span>
  AddOutputFilterByType <span class="token constant">DEFLATE</span> application<span class="token operator">/</span>javascript
  AddOutputFilterByType <span class="token constant">DEFLATE</span> application<span class="token operator">/</span>rss<span class="token operator">+</span>xml
  AddOutputFilterByType <span class="token constant">DEFLATE</span> application<span class="token operator">/</span>vnd<span class="token punctuation">.</span>ms<span class="token operator">-</span>fontobject
  AddOutputFilterByType <span class="token constant">DEFLATE</span> application<span class="token operator">/</span>x<span class="token operator">-</span>font
  AddOutputFilterByType <span class="token constant">DEFLATE</span> application<span class="token operator">/</span>x<span class="token operator">-</span>font<span class="token operator">-</span>opentype
  AddOutputFilterByType <span class="token constant">DEFLATE</span> application<span class="token operator">/</span>x<span class="token operator">-</span>font<span class="token operator">-</span>otf
  AddOutputFilterByType <span class="token constant">DEFLATE</span> application<span class="token operator">/</span>x<span class="token operator">-</span>font<span class="token operator">-</span>truetype
  AddOutputFilterByType <span class="token constant">DEFLATE</span> application<span class="token operator">/</span>x<span class="token operator">-</span>font<span class="token operator">-</span>ttf
  AddOutputFilterByType <span class="token constant">DEFLATE</span> application<span class="token operator">/</span>x<span class="token operator">-</span>javascript
  AddOutputFilterByType <span class="token constant">DEFLATE</span> application<span class="token operator">/</span>xhtml<span class="token operator">+</span>xml
  AddOutputFilterByType <span class="token constant">DEFLATE</span> application<span class="token operator">/</span>xml
  AddOutputFilterByType <span class="token constant">DEFLATE</span> font<span class="token operator">/</span>opentype
  AddOutputFilterByType <span class="token constant">DEFLATE</span> font<span class="token operator">/</span>otf
  AddOutputFilterByType <span class="token constant">DEFLATE</span> font<span class="token operator">/</span>ttf
  AddOutputFilterByType <span class="token constant">DEFLATE</span> image<span class="token operator">/</span>svg<span class="token operator">+</span>xml
  AddOutputFilterByType <span class="token constant">DEFLATE</span> image<span class="token operator">/</span>x<span class="token operator">-</span>icon
  AddOutputFilterByType <span class="token constant">DEFLATE</span> text<span class="token operator">/</span>css
  AddOutputFilterByType <span class="token constant">DEFLATE</span> text<span class="token operator">/</span>html
  AddOutputFilterByType <span class="token constant">DEFLATE</span> text<span class="token operator">/</span>javascript
  AddOutputFilterByType <span class="token constant">DEFLATE</span> text<span class="token operator">/</span>plain
  AddOutputFilterByType <span class="token constant">DEFLATE</span> text<span class="token operator">/</span>xml

  <span class="token shell-comment comment"># Remove browser bugs (only needed for really old browsers)</span>
  BrowserMatch <span class="token operator">^</span>Mozilla<span class="token operator">/</span><span class="token number">4</span> gzip<span class="token operator">-</span>only<span class="token operator">-</span>text<span class="token operator">/</span>html
  BrowserMatch <span class="token operator">^</span>Mozilla<span class="token operator">/</span><span class="token number">4</span>\<span class="token punctuation">.</span><span class="token number">0</span><span class="token punctuation">[</span><span class="token number">678</span><span class="token punctuation">]</span> no<span class="token operator">-</span>gzip
  BrowserMatch \<span class="token package">bMSIE</span> <span class="token operator">!</span>no<span class="token operator">-</span>gzip <span class="token operator">!</span>gzip<span class="token operator">-</span>only<span class="token operator">-</span>text<span class="token operator">/</span>html
  Header append Vary User<span class="token operator">-</span>Agent
<span class="token operator">&lt;</span><span class="token operator">/</span>IfModule<span class="token operator">&gt;</span>

Sometimes, you can also combine the scripts. There are plugins that do this, such as Autoptimize, which I’ve presented before. Combining scripts is exactly what it says. Instead of having two files, you combine them into one. This way there’s only one request made to the server, instead of multiple ones.

However, combining scripts can many times causes bugs, so make sure you back up everything before.

Cache Policy

Caching is the process of storing files in a client’s browser in order to be able to quickly access them at a later time.

For example, if a user comes to your website for the first time, your logo will have to be downloaded. However, if you have an effective caching policy, that file will be stored in the user’s browser. When the user accesses your site a second time, it won’t have to download that file again as it will be instantly loaded from their computer.

Dynamic Elements (short cache policy): Dynamic elements are elements on your website that change frequently. For example, you might keep adding new posts in a slider on the Homepage.

In this case, the HTML is the dynamic element, so set a short caching policy if this fits you. 30 minutes might be enough, just in case the user returns to that page in the same session.

In some cases, you might not want to cache those elements at all, if promptitude is what matters for your users, such as on news websites.

Static Resources (long cache policy): Static resources are files that rarely change. These are usually images and CSS or JS files, but they can also be audio files, video files, etc.

You can set a longer cache time for images and CSS files since you know you will not be changing them very frequently. You can even go up to one year, but 3 months is usually enough.

Third Party Tools: You don’t really have control over 3rd party tools, so if you feel like a tool that is hosted elsewhere makes your website run very slow, better find an alternative or give up on it.

A solution would be to host the files on your own server and cache them. However, this might not be very productive and it’s not recommended, as you’ll have to constantly update those files as soon as new versions come out, otherwise the tool or app won’t work properly.

Cache Plugins: There are a lot of plugins that will properly handle the cache protocols required for a good user experience. If you’re on WordPress, one of these plugins is W3 Total Cache. However, if you want to go for a better option, WP Rocket is also pretty popular, but it will set you back a couple hundred bucks.

Just search for cache plugin / extension / module + your platform on Google to find what you need. Look at the reviews to pick the best one.

.htaccess file cache: You can also set a cache control header from your .htaccess file on an Apache server, if you don’t run your website on a popular CMS.

There are multiple ways:

## EXPIRES CACHING ##
<IfModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/png "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType text/css "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/html "access 1 hour"
ExpiresByType application/pdf "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/x-javascript "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access 1 year"
ExpiresDefault "access 1 month"
</IfModule>
## EXPIRES CACHING ##

Or you can also use this code:

# One year for image files
<filesMatch ".(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|ico)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=31536000, public"
</filesMatch>

# One month for css and js
<filesMatch ".(css|js)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=2628000, public"
</filesMatch>

The numbers in the max-age attribute are in seconds, so 3600 would mean one hour, 86400 one day and so on.

Resetting the cache: When you make modifications to a web page, you want to reset the cache if an older version has been cached previously. However, you can only reset the cache on your server.

This means that users who have downloaded a previous version of a certain file will still load that old version from their computer when they access the website again. The file will be refreshed after the set amount of time in your caching policy or if the user manually resets their browser cache.

If you have a critical error in your web design or code, you can change the filename of your file. This way you can be sure that the cache for that particular file will be reset.

Sometimes, Chrome’s cache can be difficult to reset. Sometimes, routers and datacenters between the client and the server might also cache files so, if you don’t see the modifications, give it a couple of hours.

Lightweight Theme & Plugins

The more you load your website with plugins, the heavier it gets and the slower it runs.

A website’s theme is the biggest ‘plugin’ the site has. Most themes out there come with heavy 3rd party builders and huge libraries of plugins which all make the site run slower.

For example, slider plugins generally add the slider JS code to all pages, although it will probably be used only on the homepage or a landing page. That’s some heavy code to be loading on every page! Not to mention that nobody likes them and they lower the conversion rate.

So when you’re looking for a theme, try to find one without too much animations, sliders, functions and so on. If you look at the big websites you’ll see that, in general, they’re pretty simple.

A good theme which I recommend is GeneratePress. It’s lightweight and will load very fast. You can enable or disable elements to keep your site as clean as possible.

Combining it with an optimization plugin such as WP Rocket (paid) or a combo of free plugins such as Autoptimize + Fastest Cache will make it blazing fast! You can also use W3 Total Cache, a plugin which does almost everything listed above pretty well.

When you install new plugins, think about how important they are to your website. After you install them, test your score and loading speed. Does the plugin make your site run slower? If yes, is it critical to keep the plugin? Maybe look for a better alternative or remove it completely.

How to Bulk Check the PageSpeed Insights Score

The annoying part about PageSpeed Insights is that it checks only one web page at a time. It would take an eternity to check all the pages on your website, depending on its size.

However, there’s a way of bulk checking the PageSpeed Insights Score. Have you guessed it yet?

It’s the CognitiveSEO Tool Site Audit. Once you set up the technical SEO analysis with the Site Audit, go to your Campaign -> Site Audit -> Performance -> PageSpeed.

Of course, you can do a lot more with the tool, from improving your technical SEO and content to monitoring your rankings and link building efforts.

There’s also a somewhat free alternative which is a Chrome Extension. However, what it will actually do is ask for a list of URLs and then just open them as new tabs in the online PageSpeed Insights tool.

This means that the process is OK for about 10-20 tabs, if you have a medium to high end computer CPU. Anymore than that and the browser could crash or you’ll grow old waiting. It’s still pretty inconvenient.

Other SEO Tools for Measuring & Improving Site Speed

Of course, Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool isn’t the only tool to check and improve page speed. For once, we don’t really know where the tests are being performed from. If your site is hosted on a server in Europe and Google performs its tests from the US, it’s natural that the site will be slower.

However, there are tools which specify where the test is being performed from.

Pingdom

Pingdom Speed Test is a great tool which measures the speed at which your web page loads. Once the test is done, you’ll get some results which are similar to the ones on Google’s tool, at least visually.

What’s interesting about it is that you can select where the test is going to be performed from. Sure, the options are limited, but it’s still better than not even knowing it.

If you focus on local SEO, choose the location closest to your server. If you don’t know where it’s actually hosted, ask your hosting provider and you’ll find out.

It’s also a good idea to make multiple tests from different locations, just in case you have an international audience.

You can find more similar tools to Pingdom.

GT-Metrix

GT Metrix has been one of my favorite speed testing tools out there. Although it tests only from Vancouver, Canada, the insights it gives are very useful.

Quick tip: If you create a free account with them, you won’t have to wait so much for the test to be performed. To reduce load on their servers, they add you in a queue when there are too many requests. However, registered users have priority.

mod_pagespeed

The mod_pagespeed is a server addon from Google. Its purpose is to fix any page speed related issues at a core level, directly on the server side. This means that even if you add unoptimized images, mod_pagespeed will automatically compress, optimize and convert them to next gen image formats.

However, installing mod_pagespeed is definitely more technical than just dealing with everything in WordPress.

If your server already has it or you know what you’re doing go ahead and install it. However, it’s always a better idea to have a fast site in the first place instead of trying to cover things up.

Any way, this mod will increase load on your server as every time you upload an unoptimized image, it will have to use processing power to convert it.

Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)

If you want your site to be really fast on mobile searches, you can always implement Google AMP.

Google AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages is a special type of HTML, stripped of heavy, slower loading elements.

More than that, AMP pages will preload in Chrome mobile browser as the user scrolls through the search results, resulting in an instant load of the page when the user taps the title.

There are also disadvantages, of course. You’re limited from every direction, although things are getting better and better every day. Also, your site’s design has to suffer and will pretty much look like any other site that uses AMP. Bummer.

The URL isn’t yours either, because Google loads a cached version of your site, on their URLs. However, Google developers have promised to bring native URLs into AMP.

On WordPress and other CMS, you can add AMP to your website through a plugin. For custom websites, you’ll need to get in touch with your developer and give them this link.

Conclusion

Improving your site speed is important for better search rankings. PageSpeed Insights provides a set of best practices and possible improvements, prioritized by their impact on your site’s speed.

While the score itself shouldn’t concern you too much, it’s a good idea to try and get it at least over 50. However, focus on load time, which is measured in seconds. A good website should load in about 3 seconds. A really, really fast one should load in about 1.

Having a good server, compressing images and keeping things clean and simple in your code will benefit you the most when it comes to website speed. While smaller sites will benefit most from a shared server, if you are a larger business, hosting your site on a custom tower servers would be a recommended choice. Allowing the businesses to edit and maintain their site, a private server would offer flexibility and reliability when they need it most.  

What’s your PageSpeed Insights Score? Have you seen better rankings after improving the loading speed of your website? Share your experience with us in the comments section below!

The post How Page Speed Affects SEO & Google Rankings | The 2024 Page Speed Guide appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

As we are often being asked about many misconceptions from the SEO world, we’ve decided to gather and share with you the most important SEO myths that tend to keep you from improving your ranks and traffic. And of course, clarify them once and for all.

SEO can make you or break you, depending on how you’re using it. Here’s an idea of what you should stay away off, the SEO myths. Read them, breath them and live without them:

1. Using Tabbed Content Can Penalize Your Site
2. Syndicate Content Does Hurt Your SEO
3. It’s Better to Have More Links Than More Content
4. The Disavow Tool Is Useless After Penguin 4.0
5. Links in Comments and Forums Will Attract Google Penalties
6. Social Signals Don’t Impact SEO
7. All Backlinks Are Created Equally
8. Keyword Optimization Matters Most in SEO
9. Artificial Social Shares Will Boost Your Rankings
10. Keyword Density Should Be at Least 2% to Increase Your Rankings
11. A High Number of Links Is All You Need to Rank on the Top
12. You Don’t Need an SEO Specialist, Anyone Can Do It
13. SEO Is All About Rankings

The evolution of SEO is faster than our ability to perceive it. Over the years, it appeared so many speculations regarding SEO that you would think you were at a stock market.

The long list of SEO myths continues to be more and more voluminous. Some of these myths appeared from the need of the so-called experts who wanted to find out Google’s next move. It is sad to see these people living and dying by Google’s quotes and PR statements.

Let’s move past the “SEO is dead” phrase and start focusing on certain facts pertaining more to bad documentation rather than to real myths. SEO is not dead and we’ll be long gone when and IF that will really happen. It is very much alive and, we might add, omnipresent.

SEO is not about shenanigans. SEO is not something you can easily use to bring your newly created website on top of results like some magic fairy dust. Rather, it is a continuously evolving industry. There is no one-time recipe for SEO algorithms that change every day. You have to adjust your strategies accordingly and act naturally. Otherwise, you might look suspicious.

We’ve seen a lot of stressed and frustrated people blaming it on tools and agencies when they don’t see the SEO efforts equating to payoffs instantaneously. Even the creation of the world took more than one day. Good results don’t come easily.

Digital marketers understand that SEO is not a magic pill that will skyrocket your rankings in one day.
	Vishal Ray Malik
	Founder of ConversionLink / @vishalraymalik

1. Using Tabbed Content Can Penalize Your Site

Tabbed content started as a solution for keeping your site clean and to the point, without overcrowding the reader. They could show or hide the content by a click. What started as a good thing for the user ended badly for the search engine crawlers.

The hidden text using expandable sections was bad for SEO because bots could not read the text and therefore the website couldn’t get indexed or ranked.

Google discarded the websites that used the “click-to-expand” type of content because it thought they were hiding it from the user, exactly the opposite of its intention. But as you all know, there might have been a grain of truth in Google’s position towards tabbed content because there are all sorts of people trying to trick Google.

John Mueller stated that Google may not rank the page for the tabbed content because it knows users do not see the content by default.

From our point of view, it’s always a tricky problem when we send a user to a page where we know this content is actually hidden. Because the user will see perhaps the content in the snippet, they’ll click through the page, and say, well, I don’t see where this information is on this page. I feel kind of almost misled to click on this to actually get in there.
	John Mueller
	Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google /  @JohnMu

You can listen to his answer in the next video:

Nonetheless, we must understand that Google penalizes those websites that deceptively use hidden text.

Matt Cutts explained in the video below that using JavaScript for collapsing content is an accepted and a common practice by lots of ecommerce websites that want to make their site more welcoming.

Using JavaScript for tabbed content that includes hidden text is an accepted example within Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Not all hidden text is considered deceptive. For example, if your site includes technologies that search engines have difficulty accessing, like JavaScript, images, or Flash files, using descriptive text for these items can improve the accessibility of your site.
	Google’s Webmaster Guidelines

Let’s take Wikipedia, for example, the online encyclopedia that uses on-click expandable content on the mobile version.

If you look at the picture above you can see that the collapse sections complement the content. There is a lot of information on the page and you can easily go and read only what you’re interested in, and not the whole article.

Using tabbed content is not bad for SEO and Google won’t penalize your site if it is implemented in a non-spammy way. The hidden text or links is considered spammy if it there solely for search engines rather than visitors.

2. Syndicate Content Does Hurt Your SEO

First, let’s start by saying duplicate content is neither syndicate content nor article spinning.

We all know about duplicate content and the long talk over the year, when it has been said that duplicate content will penalize your website. Things have changed and we learnt that the duplicate content penalty was a myth. Matt Cutts and Andrey Lipattsev said repeatedly that duplicate content doesn’t get you penalized, while copied content does.

As for article spinning, the penalization is applied. It is a technique used in SEO by rewriting articles and replacing specific words, phrases, sentences trying to provide a different version by each spin.

However, syndicated content refers to a situation when a third party publishes an article taken from a source while mentioning it and doesn’t take credit for the article. Syndicated content doesn’t violate Private Label Rights (PLR) either because the original author keeps the ownership of the article and offers a Creative Commons license for reposting.  

If all these steps are followed, then syndicate content won’t damage your site or your SEO; it won’t be deemed copied content and get you penalized. So the myth of syndicate content must be broken. Syndication is not a form of plagiarism as long as there is a source cited.

The truth is that only copied content and article spinning will penalize your website.

Here’s what John Mueller says in Search Console Help, regarding content that is automatically generated, doesn’t comply with the copyright infringement and the Webmaster Guidelines.

Our algorithms prefer unique, compelling and high-quality content. Content that is rewritten, “spun,” automatically translated or otherwise modified in an attempt to make it appear unique would go against our Webmaster Guidelines and can result in action being taken against sites that rely on such content.
	John mueller
	Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google /  @JohnMu

Syndication can really help you if done correctly. If you use it as an amplification technique, you get the chance to rich a broader audience.

There are a lot of trustworthy websites that publish syndicate content and have a large number of people that are subscribed to the newsletter and RSS feed through a dedicated service like Feedly.

3. It’s Better to Have More Links Than More Content

There was a time when it was better to have more links than content to rank higher in Google. Back then, links had more value. Building links on specific anchor texts was essential for SEO industries and to boost your search rankings. And since it began to have such a huge effect on rankings, all kinds of webmasters and SEO pros started to do link building just to create chunks of links, thinking only about quantity and not at all about quality. Google realized that people abused this technique and flooded the SERP with irrelevant and bad sites getting triggered there only by having bad inbound links with no value for the user.

The solution Google found was the Webspam Update, named Penguin afterward. This big change happened on April 24, 2012, when Penguin was released for the first time. Back then, it addressed problems such as keyword stuffing and link schemes. Later on, they took the problem into their own hands and penalized sites with unnatural, manipulative inbound link profiles.

Both Matt Cutts and Andrey Lipattsev confirmed that content, links and RankBrain are the first 3 rankings factors. All of them are equally important. None of them is more important than the other (according to Google). 

But here is just one of the myths you should leave behind: links value more than content. Put your ideas into action and start creating an abundance of new pieces of content or improve the ones you already have. Information is in your pocket.  

A natural link profile and good content can bring you high rankings. And the best way to do it comes from the SEO masters and people that went through all Google dances and managed to dance all the way up to the present.

Bill Sebald, from Greenlane, managed to improve the rank from #5 to #2 for the period of time they optimized the content with the help of Content Assistant. And he’s not the only one. The knowledge and tools are here; you just have to create the strategy and take some time to do it.

Within 24 hours, we saw our rank improve from #5 for the term we were optimizing for to #2. This fluctuated over the next few days but then we settled into the #2 spot and have remained there since. Read the full case study.
	BILL SEBALD
	Founder Greenlane / @billsebald ‏

4. The Disavow Tool Is Useless After Penguin 4.0

To disavow or not to disavow? That is the question.

We get tons of emails and questions from people saying they know disavow tools are useless and Google knows which links they built and which they didn’t.

Let’s take the example above that can prove our point:

I saw that I have some links marked as unnatural, but I have never built those links. Google says if you never built the link then don’t worry about it. I only built the link to a single post which is 100 photoshop tutorials post so that is why I am shocked to see that all of my links are marked unnatural by your tool.

The 100 photoshop tutorials post is unnatural itself. Google might ignore it, but it might not. Google doesn’t know if you built those links. They are pointing to your site and that’s it. Maybe someone did a negative SEO attack on your website. Google could see that as something you did and penalize you. What Matt Cutts and John Mueller say is different from what the algorithm does.

When Google Penguin 4.0 went live, Gary Illyes said:

Traditionally, webspam algorithms demoted whole sites. With this one, we managed to devalue spam instead of demoting AND it’s also more granular AND it’s real time. Once the rollout is complete, I strongly believe many people will be happier, and that makes me happy.
	Gary Illyes
	Google spokesperson / @methode

People still asked if the disavow tool was still necessary, along with this update:

5. Links in Comments and Forums Will Attract Google Penalties

SEO myth busting again; here’s the urban legend that has been brought to life: all community engagement is toxic, such as links in comments and forums.

Don’t confuse blog commenting and forums with directories. The latter are more suspicious, but for sure in that case, also, there are white-hat directories. One of the clearest differences to emerge is that a forum is a discussion panel and a directory is an online list or catalog of websites.

The mirror has two faces. If we’re to take forums in general and links in comments (even nofollow links) we would say that they have low-quality, because there are a lot of spammers. Along the years, lots of forums were bombarded by constant spam messages from marketers trying to cash in on a captive audience and build lots and lots of spammy links. It was a time when forums were popular, that’s why the bad guys focused their attention on them.

Forums have some advantages:

• Have niched users;
• They bring topical relevancy;
• Have loyal users, that help increase website traffic through repeated visits;
• Easily create a connection and build a relationship because you no longer have to search them and capture their attention;
• Easier to gain trust.

So you can understand why spammers were attracted by building links there through comments. But with time, just like Google, proper forums that delivered relevant information started to have more restrictions on user-generated content (UGC).

The next wave of the Web is going to be user-generated content.
	John Doerr
	General partner KPCB / @johndoerr

You can find lots of trustworthy forums and social communities built on user-generated content that provide valuable information from experts and pros. Reddit, WebmasterWorld, Moz Forum, Quora, Campus Society, Stumble Upon, Tumblr are just a few examples of communities built on user-generated content, each of them focusing on a specific audience.  

Did you know that millennials spend 30% of their media consumption time with content that is created by their peers (UGC) and consider it to be more memorable than other media? But that’s not all, user-generated content is trusted more than traditional media (59%) according to a research made by Ipsos MediaCT/Crowdtap.

Millennials are also committed to engaging with social media on a daily basis above all other media types.

Let’s debunk this myth together. Community engagement is not toxic if it observes Google’s quality guidelines and comment links from forums and user-generated communities are naturally placed there.

6. Social Signals Don’t Impact SEO

Come into the mythical place named Narnia, where everything is possible and social activity has no value for SEO. Well, let’s see why it is a myth and which is the truth behind it.

I hear lots of people saying things like:

“Is it true that likes on Facebook, Twitter, and so on, do not count towards Google rankings? Well, why bother improving my social activity?”

Or even asking:

What would be the SEO benefit of linking to Instagram/Facebook/Twitter posts?

But the real question should be “Is your site providing added-value for your users?” rather than thinking of the “SEO benefits”.

Let’s get one thing straight: it is true that a “like” on a social account doesn’t influence Google rankings, but they have a positive influence among shares, engagement. John Mueller states that there is no direct ranking signal in Google’s ranking algorithm. Google treats Facebook and Twitter posts like any other web pages for search, but NOT as a ranking factor. But this doesn’t mean social signal has no value for SEO. It indirectly influences website rankings.  

Social signals have a lot of value in this manner. You build your brand and drive traffic to your website, therefore influencing your rank on Google.  

Source: blindfiveyearold.com

We conducted a study on this topic and the numbers were clear: a strong presence on social networks is correlated with better rankings. This means that, in general, the higher the ranking of the website, the higher the chances that the average presence on social network is larger.

Another interesting discovery was the fact that Facebook post engagement has a strong connection with organic search CTR. Larry Kim saw that Facebook posts with extraordinarily high engagement rates tended to have above expected organic search CTR.

Source: wordstream.com

In the end, it is about how engaging your content is.

If you have a successful activity on your social accounts and create engagement, you have the possibility to attract a larger audience and send it to your site. On top of that, that audience can share the information and amplify it, organically. Influencers come to your site and in no time you can increase the number of links, which boosts your SEO efforts.

Links are the confound in the correlation between social shares and rankings.
	AJ Kohn
	Owner, Blind Five Year Old / @ajkohn

Remember that social engagement sends positive signals to Google. Long story short, social signals have an indirect impact on SEO and a powerful impact on search rankings. The result of the social activity is more valuable than the action per se. That’s the one that counts.

7. All Backlinks Are Created Equally

Oh boy! Oh boy! They never stop coming. I’ll boil this down to the bare facts.

You know and I know that there are bad and good links. Getting at this point, we can see that backlinks are not created equal. But let’s not stop here.

Let’s go on with the good links and say that they are created equally. At this point, I have to ask you: is a link on Forbes equal with bananaroots.wordpress. com? The first domain is an American business magazine and the second one is a blog about bananas. Firstly, the two domains are different by the industry, secondly by the domain influence/authority and page influence/authority.

There are so many aspects to take into consideration when we talk about backlinks that this could take an entire post and lots of coffee to bare all the SEO myths that are out there and debunk them. But, I’ll save your energy and go with the one that interests us today, at this moment.

To figure out this backlink equality issue, let me present you two situations. If you search for “brown recluse” you’ll see search engine results from EmedicineHealth and LiveScience. The first page  has a well-covered topic with lots of on-topic content as you can see in the next screenshot:

The second page was a short article, poorly-covered with a lot of general information about a lot of things.

And then we checked the number of links. If we were to compare the two sites, the LiveScience has lots of links, it is a big site.

If I had to choose, a link on EmedicineHealth would be more valuable than LiveScience.

Equality is not always the answer. Equity is.

Source: culturalorganizing.org

Link equity (formerly named link juice) is an important part of off-page SEO since it passes value and authority from one page to another.

Let’s accept and embrace the fact that backlinks are not created equal and focus on those which are more “juicy” or equitable.

Some links are more equal than others.

8. Keyword Optimization Matters Most in SEO

Targeted keywords optimization is one step in all the SEO process that happens on-site. The first would have to be keyword research. You can do that through multiple alternatives. Keyword Planner from Google Adwords has been one of the most popular options for a long period of time, but since SEO evolved, lots of agencies have proposed lots of other tools.

Some other opportunities that we can find in Google are the autocomplete suggestions we can see when we start typing in the search bar for a specific query (as represented in the next screenshot). Or, review the list of searches related to autocomplete suggestions that we can find at the bottom of the first page.

There is also the Keyword tool and Content Assistant which is a complete option that includes the keyword research, competitor spying for that keyword, keyword and content optimization.

All the keyword phrases we use in a content create a vocabulary and therefore give a context to the topic we’ve written about. Due to that, Google uses Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) to understand if your content is related to a search query. In case you need guidance using keywords suggestions that take this algorithm into consideration, Content Assistance can give it to you in seconds. The tool uses the same algorithm for extracting keyword recommendation you could use in your content.

But keywords do not represent everything, context does. It just started to have a major impact on search results. And let’s not forget RankBrain, which helps Google process its search results through artificial intelligence. So Google will start to offer more personalized results based on each individual behavior. It goes through billions of pages and selects only the most relevant for particular queries.

Nowadays, as we mentioned several times, Google’s trying to optimize the page for the user. So if you’re trying to use specific words over and over again just to optimize for the search engines, it will only weaken your website. In the end, you might get penalized and suffer a great loss.  

Taking into consideration the SEO process we talked about, keyword optimization is not the crucial SEO element or the most important one, but it is the first one. It is a dwarf among giants. There are arguably even more relevant aspects. At the moment, we can not point to a specific SEO element that is the most important one, but rather there is a handful of steps and aspects that create a synergy.

9. Artificial Social Shares Will Boost Your Rankings

We’ll start by saying that artificial or fake social shares are considered to be black hat social media techniques.

We talked before about social signals and you know by now that they are emerging as ranking factors as search engines try to understand our social interaction and behavior. In this manner, a page with lots of shares and links has the advantage to rank higher. But just like any abuse of guidelines, these tricks that fool the system are penalized.

That being the case, Facebook says that buying fake likes, shares will only hurt you; it might get harder for those who want to advertise, too. Not once did it happen for Facebook to suspend advertising accounts. And it’s not so easy to reactivate such an account.

Pages with artificially inflated like counts are harming themselves, making it harder and more expensive to reach the people they care about most.
	Facebook

Facebook adds that they value real connection and support strong relationships created through the platform.

We have a strong incentive to aggressively go after the bad actors behind fake likes because businesses and people who use our platform want real connections and results.
	Facebook

Experts value the power of social signals but only used for the right reasons, not for inflating with artificial shares and likes that pollute the social platform.  

Social media is a set of modern communications channels that can be used to transmit “content” and communications to an audience. As such, it can be used, in this context, to publicize “content” and news so that more people hear about you and then link to you. And those links can help your rankings.
	Samuel Scott
	Marketing speaker and tech contrarian / @samueljscott

The bottom line is artificial social shares don’t help in keyword ranking. In the best case scenario, you should call yourself lucky if your account isn’t suspended. Facebook is using AI to penalize spammy websites in its News Feed.

10. Keyword Density Should Be at Least 2% to Increase Your Rankings

Keywords, in all its forms for SEO, seems to be a hotly contested topic.

At this point, I barely have strength left to argue. It starts to get funnier or is it rather me feeling nervous-funny.

The never-ending talk about keyword density that should be 10%, 4,5% or 7 %. We’re starting to ask ourselves if is so hard to be natural these days?!

It’s ironic, you’re asking “What would the algorithm think about this?” and the algorithm is asking, “What would a real human think about this?”

During a Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangout, last year, John Mueller said that the focus should be on the readability and not on the keyword density.

We expect content to be written naturally, so focusing on keyword density is not a good use of your time. Focusing too much on keyword density makes it look like your content is unnatural.
	John Mueller
	Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google /  @JohnMu

Keyword density might lead to keyword stuffing if you try and program everything like it is a machine.

A lot of people think there’s one recipe and you can follow it like baking cookies. And if you follow it to the letter, you’ll rank number one. That’s not the way it works.
	Matt Cutts
	Former head of the webspam team at Google / @mattcutts

That’s not how the search engines work. Google will recognize the pattern.

The sad part is that we are in 2018 and we’re still hearing questions such as “what is the ideal keyword density percentage to improve rankings in Google in 2018?” (*facepalm* and *heavy breathing*).

Then you go back to quality, the naturalness of things. So no, you should not focus on maintaining your keyword density a specific percentage to rank higher. There is no IDEAL % for keyword density. Rather have a vocabulary, semantics, a long copy to avoid keyword stuffing. In the end, be very careful not to have too much of one keyword.

11. A High Number of Links Is All You Need to Rank on the Top

The myth goes something like this: once you have so many links, you don’t really need anymore. And it should be enough for helping you rank higher. No numbers are thrown out (apparently it might differ from one industry to another), but it is really such a thing of having too many links that it doesn’t matter in terms of ranking if you get more? 

In the ante-Penguin Era, a high number of links might be enough for ranking on top if you wanted to believe that.

Obviously, there is no such thing as too many links. Maybe for unnatural links, though. Because if you have too many unnatural links you might get penalized. But here we are talking about good links as ranking signals. Smart marketers and webmasters wouldn’t pursue this, because they know (spoiler alert: debunking a myth right now) links is not the only ranking factor and neither is the number of those links. The focus should be on content marketing, social activities, natural links, since we talked so much about them.

12. You Don’t Need an SEO Specialist; Anyone Can Do It

Whoever said SEO is something any IT guy can do, fooled you.

There is, indeed, technical SEO, which as the name says, requires some technical expertise. It is an SEO component, entirely something else. If you hear technical it doesn’t necessarily have to be IT. The job of an SEO expert is different from an IT expert; it requires wider knowledge on content, user behaviour, equity, semantics and context, and a lot more.  

Think of SEO this way: If a customer-focused content marketing program is the sandwich, then SEO is the mayonnaise. It touches nearly everything and enhances the overall flavor of the sandwich, but on its own, it’s not very appetizing.
	Lee Odden
	CEO at TopRank Marketing / @leeodden

Of course, you need the knowledge of an IT person that can handle some things better than an SEO pro. You can not give or expect from somebody experienced in IT to do the SEO duties and expect best practices and great results. Some things go hand in hand.

An IT professional can help you with issues such as website crawling (errors, XML sitemap, URL parameters, indexing errors), redirects, website audit (for internal links), loading page speed, some local SEO issues, and many more.

In the end, SEO isn’t something you can handle to an IT person, in case you want to rank and have a site and visitors.

13. SEO Is All About Rankings

Search engine optimization is the process for naturally placing the website in search results by the search engines. If we think from the on-site perspective, then the keywords used in context, the meta descriptions, the images selected for the content, the title are significant among all the on-site SEO elements.

Getting this straight, we need to understand that SEO, at this level, must answer to the user need and intent. That is the future: the user-intent-based content. Google’s moving the attention on user intent for more accurate and personalized results.

Relevant and well-optimized (not over-optimized) content remains a top ranking factor. Think of that this way: you are on the first page of Google and rank for a keyword you optimized your content for. You want the users to enter your website or not? If the answer is yes and they will do so it means you optimized correctly your content, you have relevant meta description, title, URL. If on the contrary, the user doesn’t enter your website it means it’s not relevant, you optimized the content for the search engines, and that won’t last for long.

My rule of thumb is: build a site for a user, not a spider.
	Dave Naylor
	Head of Search Marketing and Speaker at Bronco / @DaveNaylor

Lost are the days when over-optimization was doing all the job for ranking your content higher and higher ‘till it reached the sky, because sky is the limit. But no more!

Over-optimization for the sole purpose of ranking isn’t a technique approved by Google according to the Quality Guidelines.

Google only loves you when everyone else loves you first.
	Wendy Piersall
	Blogger & author at wendypiersall.com / @emom

But for some other reason, if you have over-optimized content, you have a chance to clear your past and deoptimize it. At this stage, you have to evaluate your content and see if there is anything you can adjust, redirect or rewrite and re-optimize to fulfill the actual requirements for quality.

If you got it until here, I must congratulate you and ask you to debunk another SEO myth, and tell the truth, that SEO is not all about rankings, but rather quality, natural language, context and earning links (named just a few, because we could keep it like this all night).

Conclusion

13 is an unlucky number, not to mention when it is placed near SEO myths. The internet is full of them, and people follow them blindfoldedly. You decide what is best for your business and what SEO strategies to apply or not. Yet, we wanted to share and debunk with you the most common SEO myths, the ones that we are constantly asked about.   

In the online marketing world, there will always be tons of detours, easy fixes, or “a complete guide to SEO and conversion rate optimization” that will increase your search engine rankings on the spot. We’ve tried to cover some of the biggest SEO myths; yet, we know that there other highly debatable topics in the industry worth tackled, like voice search or guest blogging. Whenever we’ll feel the need, we’ll update this list and we hope we’ll get updates from your side as well. 

We are always trying to provide you with valuable content and information in the SEO world, with facts that can be applied and aspects you should stay away from and never challenge Google or other search engines. These SEO myths are in the last category and we hope that this article was a helping hand. If you have some other SEO myths you want to share or discuss with us, feel free to write about them at the comments section below. 

The post 13 SEO Myths That Will Probably Kill Your Ranks in 2024 appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.