You may have heard the old adage, “Those that can’t do, teach.” Well, if you have been challenged with the task of promoting training courses online, then you know that statement is almost totally false.

There are plenty of things to “do” when you are trying to support a training course with promotion online.

Organizations around the globe invest over $360 billion annually to level up their workforce in areas such as:

• Alignment
• Analytics and Measurement (click this link to learn more about our Google Analytics services)
• Automation and Robotics
• Compliance
• Content Development
• Employee Safety
• Engineering
• IT and Technical Training
• Leadership
• Performance Management
• Sales
• Strategic Planning

Developments in high-speed internet connectivity worldwide in recent years have also provided training companies with the ability to move their teachings online. Now, in addition to building a connection with people in real life, training courses can be consumed (and re-consumed) by students on demand.

Whether your company is creating a new training course or training is what you’ve done for decades, there has never been a better time to get involved in the knowledge sharing economy.

Below, I’ve compiled 20 digital marketing ideas that are both actionable and effective for you to start promoting training courses.

1. Auditing Templates

There are many ways a company might realize their need for your training solutions. Few of those ways are more effective than by giving them a template to conduct a self-audit. Creating auditing templates for prospective clients in Google Drive, Microsoft Office, or PDF format is an excellent way to:

• Help them discover their pain points
• Introduce your methodology to alleviating those pain points
• Provide natural conversation starters for your business development team

Bonus tip: For promoting training courses, you should be willing to provide these templates at no charge to potential clients. But at the same time, you should also gate these templates behind a registration form to aid your demand generation efforts.

2. Best Practice Guides and Tutorials

Employing content marketing—such as best practice guides or in-depth tutorials—allows you to showcase your organization as a thought leader.

Your potential clients likely have continuing education requirements or newly placed industry standards for which they need certification. A decision maker in HR or some other management role may not be up to speed on the new requirements.

The act of creating content serves as an educational opportunity for these people. To help them get the information they need to keep their people at the top of their craft.

Bonus tip: Embed a lot of share buttons on content like this so it can easily be bookmarked, emailed, exported, printed, or shared on enterprise communication platforms like Slack.

Are you launching a training course but also a provider of a software solution? Need more leads? We’ve got you covered with 14 more ideas just like the one above in this post… 15 Actionable Lead Generation Ideas For Software Companies

3. Blogging As A Tactic For Promoting Training Courses

Companies interested in growing their brand awareness through search engines should be creating at least one new piece of blog content per week. And yes, this applies to any company, regardless of industry.

Companies in the training industry are no different. In fact, regular blogging might be even more critical in the training industry. A higher amount of knowledge sharing should mean a more significant percentage of thought leadership.

Bonus tip: No matter your preferred communication medium, plan on creating a blog post that is at least 300 words in length once every five business days.

4. Case Studies To Promote Training Courses

Whether you provide training services to individuals or groups, what you do has an impact on the people you help level up. Let the results of your work speak for themselves by creating case studies to showcase your greatest successes.

In both personal and corporate training, people want to get the sense that you, specifically, can help them in their “unique situation.” Training companies should focus their case studies around the types of people and companies they want to attract to their business.

Are you a personal development company that wants more married businessmen as clients? Make a case study featuring one!

Do you have a leadership training course for the financial sector? Build a case study featuring employees from any of the “Big 5” accounting firms.

Bonus tip: Want to acquire visits from keyword searches to your case studies? Optimize the title tag, URL slug, and case study title in the following manner. Check out this example data set for this case study from OppenheimerFunds.

• Title: Oppenheimer Training Program: Custom Training To Identify Growth Companies
• URL: /case-studies/oppenheimerfunds/
• Case Study Title: OppenheimerFunds Improves Growth Company Identification By 80% After Training

5. Checklists and Worksheets

Checklists and worksheets are effective marketing assets to create. When they are optimized through SEO or supported through digital advertising, they can also be a high ROI item to drive sales leads into your pipeline.

One thing to remember about creating checklists and worksheets is that they can become outdated over time. This is especially true in industries where standards or regulations evolve over time. Training companies in education, government, healthcare, IT and legal will want to be mindful of this.

Bonus Tip: Create an interactive document that can be bookmarked in a browser and regularly revisited by your users. Is interactivity not possible? Host your checklist or worksheet as a branded Google Sheet for users to copy to their own Google Drive accounts.

6. Competitor Awareness

Whether you want to go toe-to-toe with an industry leader or you want to solidify your brand’s dominance, consider creating content about your competition. This is a high-value SEO and content marketing strategy for your brand if it classifies itself as a “challenger” in your industry.

Create pages of content on your site that either:

• Directly compare your training courses to the market leader and niche brands
• Identify a shortcoming of the services provided by your market leader/niche brands
• Offer an influencer the opportunity to compare you against your competitor as a guest post

Then proceed to highlight the strengths and unique value your training courses offer compared to your competition.

Bonus Tip: To promote training courses, pages like this allow your site to rank organically in keyword searches. You can also run digital advertising campaigns for keywords towards the end of the buyer’s journey like “Dale Carnegie alternatives” and “skillsoft vs mindgym.”

7. Digital Market Development Funds

“Integration and usage of technology in our day-to-day lives is at an all-time high, as we continue to shift to a ubiquitously digital world,” said Brian Fourman of Cooperate Marketing, a marketing agency in Chicago that solves complex problems for OEM’s and major service providers.

Some of the latest research by Nielsen, ComScore and other indicates that Americans spend close to 11 hours a day consuming media and nearly four hours of that consists of some form of digital across any number of platforms.

For marketers that have access to digital Market Development Funds (MDF’s), adopting a digital-first strategy can prove to be highly beneficial. Not only is a portion of your digital campaign already paid for with MDF’s, but when implemented correctly you can hyper-target your intended audience to convey the right message, at the right place, at the right time in a truly engaging and often personalized fashion. Plus, the cost of entry is significantly less than traditional media in which one is often forced to purchase the entire market (DMA).

Digital first strategy allows you to run any number of campaigns simultaneously to fulfill key marketing objectives at each level of the purchase funnel, whether to build brand awareness, familiarity, consideration, and/or to generate leads and convert them into sales. In addition, digital media allows for easy-to-implement message testing (A/B) that can be modified on the fly.

Copious amounts of readily available data further support your customized endeavor and provide quantifiable results that can easily be tracked. By knowing how to interpret and use this data, you can optimize current/future campaign creative to provide truly impactful results that guarantee the greatest ROI.”

8. Email Newsletter Sponsorship

Sponsoring email newsletters is a great way to infiltrate the inboxes of a significant number of highly targeted readers without the need to be CAN-SPAM compliant.

That doesn’t mean this tactic lacks strategic thinking. When you select an email newsletter to sponsor, here are three things to keep in mind:

1. Target professional organizations or networking groups of the industries you help train.
2. Have those organizations prove how engaged their readers are with data. You don’t want to just buy a list!
3. Create an exclusive offer to maximize engagement and conversions with your ad.

Bonus Tip: Support your exclusive offer or sponsorship of an email newsletter by creating a specific landing page for it. Extend the reach of your offer by applying SEO best practices and adding retargeting codes to the page for Bing, Google, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

9. Expert Roundups

You might be tired of reading “expert roundups”—but your target clients can’t get enough of them. Long list articles of helpful hacks, hints, tips, and tricks exist on nearly every business strategy out there.

Expert roundups—whether published on your site or elsewhere on the web—are a great way to improve the personal brand of your training team members. Additional benefits include:

• Increased thought leadership opportunities for your brand
• Increased visibility for your content on social networks
• Increased traffic and backlinks for expanding your SEO efforts

Bonus Tip: Need to find expert sources for your first roundup besides your own training team? Signup for a journalist/blogger account on Help A Reporter Out (HARO). HARO is a 3x per day newsletter sent to over 800K sources looking for opportunities to get media coverage.

10. Giveaways and Sweepstakes

Who doesn’t like getting something for free?!

When promoting training courses, letting potential students “try before they buy” can be an irresistible way to draw them in. Simply give them access to one session, program, or class at no cost.

Sweepstakes work in a similar fashion. However, instead of giving away your intellectual property, you will be packaging something together to entice future students to give you their contact information.

One disadvantage of this strategy is that you risk receiving a large number of registrants that may not result in quality sales opportunities.

Bonus Tip: Promote your giveaway or sweepstakes in a press release or by providing exclusive demos to bloggers and other online publishers. Don’t forget you can also shamelessly promote training courses in your outreach, too! You can tap into their follower counts and subscribers for leads while also earning high-quality backlinks to your domain.

11. Historical Optimization

Over the last few years, historical optimization has become an incredibly valuable SEO strategy for companies with a large archive of content.

To briefly summarize this tactic, find an old blog post (published six or more months ago) on your site that either:

• Generates a lot of traffic (good idea), or
• Converts (better idea)

Then refresh the content and re-publish it with a more recent date.

Establishing your trainers as thought leaders are critical to your success in promoting training courses. Historical optimization is a great way to get long term value out of content you published long ago.

Bonus tip: Have trainers who used to blog for your organization that are no longer there? Create a general author account on your blog using your company name, like “(Company Name) Team.” Change the author of a post if they are no longer a part of your team to that author.

Historical Optimization helped Corporate Visions improve their lead generation by 37% from SEO.
Learn more here.

12. Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing has had a ton of hype over the last year, as well as a lot of unwanted attention. Despite that surplus of hype floating around, a dedicated influencer campaign has a lot of potential.

If your company can partner with influencers on social media to increase awareness amongst a large fan base, the CPM can be very effective compared to traditional media buying. Just make sure that any influencer you invest in actually motivates their followers and fans to act.

Creating an exclusive offer for any influencer will be vital to seeing success with a campaign of this type.

Bonus Tip: Check out this comprehensive beginner’s guide to influencer marketing if you want to learn more about how to leverage this for your organization.

13. Infographics To Promote Training Courses

Infographics still have a place in the world of digital marketing, especially since most people still do not enjoy reading online.

If your company conducts its own original research or surveys, share your best statistic or a quotable statement in this visually appealing format. Engagement with your content and the likelihood that your target students remember what you wrote will undoubtedly improve.

Bonus Tip: Create a high-resolution copy of your infographic for companies that want your content as posters for their walls. You could sell them to take advantage of a non-traditional revenue stream or offer the high-res version as a piece of gated content.

14. LinkedIn Advertising

Don’t let LinkedIn Learning’s existence (formerly Lynda.com) scare you from the possibility of leveraging the most extensive professional social network to promote your training courses.

According to a case study from LinkedIn, e-learning solution provider, CrossKnowledge launched display ads, InMail, and sponsored updates for a campaign titled “Bye Bye Boss” in 2015.

The results?

“Benchmark-beating” click-through rates and over 50 leads generated on the campaign microsite.

Bonus Tip: No matter what platform you use for your landing pages, take advantage of LinkedIn AutoFill for your form fields. With the click of a button, visitors can become leads by populating your form with their LinkedIn profile information.

15. Microsite Development

“The use of microsites provides the perfect launchpad for new services,” says Denise DeSimone, Chairperson of C-Leveled, a full-service branding strategy and marketing agency.

Update: On April 21, 2022,
we announced our
acquisition of C-Leveled.

“Microsites are quick and easy to build, so they give you the ability to target particular audiences quickly. In some cases, microsites can be as much as five times more effective in generating leads than traditional campaigns.”

Bonus Tip: Optimize your main site and microsite for similar keywords, and support each site by targeting those keywords in a PPC campaign. Doing this allows presents an opportunity to occupy a minimum of 25% of a search engine results page.

16. Podcast Interviews To Promote Training Courses

Participating in podcast interviews is another opportunity for your talent and training staff to showcase their thought leadership.

But have you ever thought about hosting your own podcast? Podcasts have low production costs and listenership is rising. Plus, podcast listeners have over four times better brand recall on ads than traditional display campaigns.

Bonus Tip: If you host your own show, invite guests on your show who could be potential sales leads. In the training industry, consider hosting executives in HR or with specialization in companies you want as clients.

17. Quora Promoted Answers

Quora Promoted Answers are a relatively new advertising option on this quickly emerging platform.

You can reach a broad group of people on Quora who are researching questions and answers related to your area of expertise with a Promoted Answer.

For training companies who are already familiar with answering questions on Quora, you might not notice anything different in how you find places to share your insights.

What changes in a Promoted Answer? Two things:

1. The label next to the answer (Promoted By).
2. The name of the person and the business promoting the answer.

Bonus Tip: Has someone unaffiliated with your company answered a question on Quora that helps in promoting training courses offered by your company? Promote that answer instead of yours to get it shown to more people in any feed.

Interested in leveraging Quora for your SEO efforts? Find out if Quora can help your SEO efforts here.

18. Research and Surveys

If you want to make the case for your training solutions to potential clients, there may not be a better way to do that than by conducting research or surveys.

Do your clients have a common pain point they need addressing when they hire you? They probably are not alone.

Survey executives in your industry related to the common pain point your clients have. Then publish the results of your survey in a whitepaper or other type of report.

Then, do a press release about your research (and promoting training courses) and share it with the trade publication media in your industry for increased visibility.

Bonus Tip: Don’t forget to send the report you create to everyone who submits an answer to your survey.

19. Retargeting To Promote Training Courses

It doesn’t matter what you call this—remarketing, cyberstalking—it’s a crawesome (creepy + awesome) marketing tool.

Reach the 99% of visitors to your website that didn’t convert by retargeting them with display ads. You can use this strategy in search engines, display ads, social networks, and mobile apps.

Talk about creepy and awesome!

Bonus tip: If your training solutions require a long sales cycle, make sure you have your audience list set to as long a time period as possible prior to the start of promoting training courses.

20. Webinars To Promote Training Courses

If you are in the training business, then you likely have some comfort with public speaking. Leveraging live, web-based video conferences will be different than being in person with your clients, for sure. But it is a great way to connect with your target audience at scale, at any time they want to consume your training.

Best of all, if you host a webinar, your message can reach an audience of viewers and listeners from all over the world.

Bonus tip: It’s okay to put your webinars behind a gated form, but make sure the video content can be made available on demand. In today’s competitive business climate, you don’t want to make people wait to hear your training when there are others out there.

Key Takeaways on How to Market Training Courses Online

Develop Auditing Templates

Providing self-assessment tools helps potential clients identify their own paint points and training needs, which you are then in prime position to offer to address with your course.

Publish Best Practice Guides and Tutorials

Sharing in-depth content establishes your authority and educates your audience; this also makes them more likely to invest in your training programs.​

Maintain an Active Blog

Blogging regularly is critical in the training industry to improve search engine visibility and to keep your audience engaged with topics that you cover in your courses.​

Create Detailed Case Studies

Showcasing success stories from past clients demonstrates the tangible benefits of your training.

Host Webinars

Webinars enable you to reach people across the globe—plus, they give people a concrete sample of what your training is like.

Final Thoughts On Promoting Training Courses Online

Like many lucrative industries that are both knowledge and skills-based, promoting training courses effectively in today’s marketplace requires agility, consistency, and a little bit of luck.

This is true whether you are looking to go to market with a new training course, or you are part of an established training company looking to elevate your status.

Luckily, no matter what actionable digital marketing strategy you choose to promote your training course, they all can help you accomplish the following:

• Disrupt the market leader who is slow to take action
• Generate leads for your programs and direct sales
• Improve your company’s authority and thought leadership positions in your industry
• Increase awareness of your brand and programs through more web traffic
• Provide instant and long-term value to your most coveted buyers

You already know now is the time to increase your market share of the $360 billion training industry. If you need help from an online marketing agency to decide which strategy is the best to start snagging your share, just contact us.

This article was updated to add additional information on April 14th, 2025.

The post 20 Actionable Digital Marketing Ideas for Promoting Training Courses (Updated 2025) appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Does Internal Linking Help SEO?

Every business on the planet wants its website to rank number one for every keyword that relates to its business. Leveraging internal links for SEO is one of the easiest ways to increase your changes of locking in that number one ranking.

And why not? Billions of users turn to Google on a daily basis to answer their questions or find what they’re looking for.

A problem, however, lies in the simple fact that the internet is a huge place. Even Google only remains the top search engine worldwide because it quickly and consistently provides value to users. If Google didn’t efficiently serve users content highly relevant to their search queries, people just wouldn’t use it, and more than likely, another search engine would claim its dominant share in the market.

Though Google’s algorithm continues to be opaque, we know that clear, consistent web design matters more than ever. The foundation of your website is the content, but the connective tissue is the internal link. Internal linking for SEO is crucial to far more than just your rankings, as it improves user experience and demonstrates an understanding of why your users are there in the first place. Let’s break down the “how” and the “why” of every question you might have on SEO, internal links, and best practices for implementing them on your own website.

Insights On Every Question You Have About SEO and Internal Links

• What Is An Internal Link? What Are The 4 Types?
• Why Are Internal Links Important?
• Do Internal Links Help SEO?
• How Many Internal Links In A Page Is Best? How Many Is “Too Many”?
• What’s The Difference Between Outgoing And Incoming Internal Links?
• How Many Incoming Internal Links Should My Page Have?
• Hierarchy
• Internal Links
• Link Juice
• Internal Links Are Important

What Is An Internal Link? What Are The 4 Types?

An internal link is created when a link is added from one page on a website to another page on the same website. These are all internal links because they share the same root domain.

There are a variety of ways you could breakdown the different types of internal links. Here at DOM, we define them based on the general location of where the internal links are placed and their purpose for being placed there.

1. Navigational Links: these links are commonly found at the top of a webpage or in an HTML sitemap. They are used to help visitors move around your site to the most important or most trafficked destinations. More than likely, you’ll have navigational links to pages that show off your products, services, contact information, and other standard information that a visitor would expect.
2. Footer Links: these links serve a similar purpose to the navigational links. Many times, you will find a strong correlation between the links included in the navigation of a website and the links included in the footer. That said, you may also find footer links include important operational pages, too, like a Privacy Policy, Terms & Conditions, or a Refund Policy for Ecommerce sites. These pages may not command the same level of authority that you’d find in pages linked in the heading, but are still primarily made up of content that an average user may want to see. 
3. Sidebar Links: these links had their heyday in 1990’s and 2000’s when the majority of internet usage was tied to a desktop or laptop computer. With today’s modern web design being focused on a mobile-first, responsive experience on an iPhone or Android device, these links are less prevalent, though they can still be well-implemented if there is a focus on user-friendliness in both mobile and desktop environments. You will commonly find that sidebar links point users to areas of a website that are complementary to what they are viewing – like popular blog posts or related products to what a visitor is currently viewing. These links, in SEO terms, are less of a direct follow-up to the page in question, and more focused on content that may be of assistance to the same user.
4. Contextual Links: these links serve as a reference point to other related content around the web. Contextual links may be indicated by a “click here” call to action or a “read more” statement. Say you own a sporting goods ecommerce site that points you to the company blog. On that blog, there is a post compiling the top 10 basketball shoes. Since each shoe is available for purchase on the site, you post a direct link to each individual product page in an effort to turn readers into potential customers. These are of particular importance, as you can demonstrate through your content how two pages are connected, both in terms of site structure and the topic in question.

Basically, any link on a page that takes a user to a different page on the same website is considered an internal link. This includes subdomains, so if you’re in a scenario where you need to build a subdomain for your site, internal links to and from the subdomain can help Google to understand and categorize the subdomain in relation to your primary site.

What is the Impact of Internal Links?

Internal links are usually much easier to create and manage than external backlinks, which are created when another website links out from their domain to anywhere else on the web.

Because of their simplicity, they are often overlooked, but a solid internal linking strategy can have a huge impact on your site’s rankings and performance in organic search.

If you have a blog post that gets great traffic, but none of it seems to be pointed toward relevant service/product pages or the homepage, internal links may help to push some users toward those pages with a better likelihood of converting. 

On the flip side, if your product/services pages are doing well, but you’re not getting traffic to the content you create, it may be that Google hasn’t indexed your blog yet, which internal links may be able to remedy to some degree.

How Do Internal Links Help SEO?

Not only can a defined internal link structure contribute to a positive, intuitive user experience, but Google can also better understand the content on a site with clear, ordered internal links.

One of the biggest impacts of internal links is that once Google has a greater understanding of the relevance of the content on your site, it can rank your content higher. It’s no coincidence that Google Search Console has a report specifically dedicated to internal links.

The internet is gigantic and is growing every day. The service that Google provides is a simplified way to navigate this seemingly infinite space by providing pages that are relevant to user searches. Before search engines like Google, the best way to navigate the web was to use directory services that categorized websites by content type (think Yellow Pages). A few of these directories still exist, but they are mostly simply too large to be useful, and do not provide enough specificity to be of use in most scenarios.

How Many Internal Links On A Page Is Good? How Many Is “Too Many”?

If you clicked down to this question, hopefully you did so because you’ve just found a post that is getting some rankings or traffic. If your goal is to find out how many contextual internal links you should place in a page to benefit other priority pages on your site, this is the right place for you.

The impact of links in SEO can vary depending on a number of other factors, but while we’re staying focused on internal links, let’s talk about the best practices to follow so that your traffic will disseminate throughout the site as expected.

Side note: if you’re trying to determine how many internal links a page on your website should receive, this isn’t where you will find your answer. But keep scrolling, please, because we address that below.

How Many Internal Links On A Page Is Good?

Historically, conventional wisdom among the SEO community was that the optimum number follows this easy guide:

Every long form piece of content and all important pages should have around 3-4 internal links pointing out to other pages, with an additional link per 300 words or so.

Granted, these were loose guidelines.

Then, of course, there was also the equivalent of the “it depends” answer, too. Many SEOs would tell you that you have to add more or use fewer links depending on the actual content itself.

How Many Internal Links Is Too Many For SEO?

So, if you’re trying to determine the precise, accurate number of internal links you need to have pointing to your top pages, we hate to be the ones to break this to you…

There is no right answer.

Seriously, have you ever paid attention to a Wikipedia page before?

If you ever have a question about whether or not you should add an internal link from one page on your website to another, try asking yourself if placing that link improves the user experience.

If it’s useful, do it.

If it’s not useful, don’t.

If the internal links seem to clutter the page, it may be worth adding an important link as a button or something along those lines to make it stand out from the rest. The key takeaway here is that the link must be useful, otherwise it will be detrimental. 

What’s The Difference Between Outgoing And Incoming Internal Links?

Every link on a page that goes to a different page, no matter whether that page is internal or external, is called an “outgoing” link. If this sounds like every link on a given page, you’d be right! Every hypertext link we make is considered an “outgoing” link.

Using the page you’re reading for reference, every hyperlink we create, including this snazzy one pointing toward our SEO services page, is considered “outgoing” from this page. If another blog article is particularly relevant to this content, the link pointing to this page would be considered an “incoming” link. 

An incoming internal link refers to links that come from elsewhere to a given page. Therefore, the subject of our next section is these “incoming” links.

How Many Internal Links Should I Place To A Page On My Site For SEO?

If you’ve read down this far, you know how to begin a strategy to add internal links pointing to your top website pages. For most websites, and for most pages on those websites, the optimum number of links that point back to your content should be around 20. As with everything else related to SEO, this number will get slightly smaller or larger depending on the size of your site. If you have a ton of pages on your site, it may be worth it to add more, whereas a smaller site would benefit from these links being optimally placed, rather than having a large quantity of them.

The tool we use on our travels through the valleys of SEO, SEMRush, has a bunch of resources we can use to see the entire link architecture of a website (some of which also include external links). You can get a succinct internal linking score that gives you an overall target to aim for, while also including a series of suggestions for how you can improve your website’s score. A high score equals a good link profile, and any SEO tool with its price will have something similar.

As you see in the above example screenshot, the example website has an internal linking score of 71% overall, with a whole bunch of major issues presented for us, the stewards of the web, to fix. And that’s not even the whole list!

Another tool we use is Yoast SEO‘s integration with WordPress. It’s a handy way to do a lot of different SEO operations, often allowing us to see the parts of our pages that have the most impact on our organic rankings. If you don’t believe us about how important internal links are, you can believe Yoast–you can see, at a glance, exactly how many outgoing and incoming internal links each of your blog posts currently has, like so:

Those two icons on the right? Those are internal links. You can even sort your pages by the information in those columns so you know which blogs have the most (or least) internal links flowing into them and flowing out. This can help you determine which pages need internal linking the most, allowing you to prioritize pages as you work through your website.

As you get to know what your link setup looks like, you will start to see a pattern emerge. This pattern of links is called the hierarchy.

Features like this are just one of the reasons Yoast SEO is included in our exclusive list of the best WordPress plugins for SEO.

SEO Internal Linking Hierarchy

The hierarchy of a website is important because it lets a user understand where they are on your site. Most websites are not single-page sites and therefore require some sort of directory-like structure for their content. Information is best understood when categorized into groups of similar pages.

For example, if you were selling vehicles, it would make sense to categorize them in a number of ways, with pages devoted to specific manufacturers, body styles, model years, etc. The key thing is to ensure that there’s a logical grouping of content in such a way that a user should intuitively understand it.

If your website does not have a logical grouping of content, Google’s site crawlers may not be able to properly discover and index all your web pages. More importantly, users will likely struggle to navigate your site and quickly bounce.

Websites tend to fall under one of two hierarchical content grouping formations: flat and deep hierarchies.

A flat hierarchy is a website that has a larger number of categories than sub-categories. This type of web site is said to be “wider than it is tall,” in terms of graphical link structure. This ensures a relatively small crawl depth, but it may be harder to navigate in terms of logical groupings.

A deep website hierarchy is a website that is organized into many sub-levels of information. Content is said to be more discoverable when it’s not hidden under multiple hierarchical layers. Deep hierarchy website structures are considered more difficult to use. This is likely due to how the human brain stores information and processes location.

Imagine your website as a sprawling, multi-level library, where each webpage is a book on a shelf. The entrance to this library is the homepage, the most accessible point for visitors, akin to search engine crawlers starting their journey.

Internal links serve as the library’s system of staircases and corridors, connecting various sections and floors. Crawl depth refers to how many staircases (clicks) it takes to reach the furthest book (webpage) from the entrance (homepage). A well-organized library ensures that no book is too many staircases away, making it easy for visitors (and crawlers) to explore the entire collection efficiently. 

Without sufficient and strategically placed staircases (internal links), some books might remain undiscovered or take too long to reach, mirroring webpages that are buried too deep for search engines to index effectively.

This means that neither a flat nor deep hierarchy is necessarily better than the other, as long as internal links are arranged in such a way to make it all easily accessible.

Both types of websites can utilize a home page, which acts as a high-level information hub. In a flat hierarchy, a larger portion of the website’s content is understood when examining links from the home page. This is not only because there are more links from the home page, but also because those links do not lead to multiple sub-levels of information. This is compared to a deep hierarchy structure where the index page links to high-level categories of information that then link to more high-level categories of information.

Where Should I Place Internal Links?

Your website’s internal links and anchor text are essential to search engine optimization (SEO). Especially when a website is newly developed, these links will be the only links to your website’s pages and are pivotal to Google’s understanding of your website content. Within the Google Search Console, there is even a tool that analyzes your internal links to show you which of your pages you link to the most.

In general, every page of a website has the same header menu, top menu, and sidebar if there is one, though sometimes the sidebar menu will be reserved for certain sections of the site, like the blog. Therefore, the number of links to each page of a website is typically approximately even. The hypertext that links from each menu to a category page should be descriptive of that category. Google uses this hypertext as an indication of what type of information is contained in the linked page (this is of course not the only method they use to determine page content, but it is a factor).

So spamming tons of internal links is the answer, right? Not exactly.

We recommend only linking pages when it seems natural. Performing historical SEO by going through old pages and blog posts and looking for internal link opportunities is highly recommended here. It is also important to try to diversify the hyperlink text leading to each page. As it pertains to link spam, in technical terms, Google is advanced enough to cross-check page relevancy by comparing the semantic distance between linked entities within the semantic web.

In layman’s terms, don’t spam links.

Link Juice: The Impact of Internal Links

Google ranks pages, not web sites. While it is important to remember that domain rank is a dated metric, its core ideology is still in use and highly relevant today. This is easy to prove. In our 15-plus years of experience helping companies grow confidently online through digital marketing services, we have never seen a website that ranks highly for a highly trafficked query and doesn’t rank for any other queries. Clearly domain authority has some effect here.

Although PageRank often cannot fully explain a website’s keyword rankings, it is a very good indication of where a website has the potential to rank.  Since the original PageRank algorithm was largely released to the public by Google, it is possible to determine a numerical approximation for the potential of each domain and page to appear in search results. The most popular tool for determining page rank today is the Mozbar and is one of many important tools in our SEO arsenal. Other commonly used web browser extensions for determining domain rank or domain authority include Ubersuggest, SEOquake, and the Ahrefs SEO toolbar.

Other Questions About Internal Links

Let’s sum up some of what we covered, and maybe address some other concerns that don’t fit neatly into the above categories.

If we weren’t clear about this before, let us address it more directly here: yes! Internal links help SEO in a big way.

To get more information on this topic, contact us today for a free consultation or learn more about our status as Google Partners before you reach out.

This video provides an overview of why expertise, authority, and trustworthiness matter for SEO. Plus, Justin provides actionable tips to handle the contact info your site and the author info on your blog.

SEO Internal Links are Important

Google organizes the web in an automated fashion. To do this, it must use factors pulled directly from your website, internal links being one of the more important of those factors. If you are seeing a large drop-off of site visitors, a high percent exit on certain pages, or low goal completion rates, you should consider re-evaluating and optimizing your approach to strategically placing internal links.

It’s good for your users. It’s also good to help you achieve your SEO goals.

Interested in discovering more ways to improve the search optimization of your site? Contact us for an SEO audit or check out any of these helpful resources written by our team below:

• Readability Analysis Tips To Improve Your Writing and SEO
• Image SEO: Does Alt Text Still Matter?
• How To Crush Your Unminified JS And CSS Issues
• These Landing Page Optimization Tips Dramatically Boost Conversions
• How to Tell if Your Website Load Times Are Hurting Your Business

Frequently Asked Questions About Internal Links

The post How Much Do Internal Links Affect SEO? (Updated 2025) appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Well, if historical optimization is magic, then we are the magicians. And now we’re going to reveal to you the secrets behind the trick.

It all starts with the power of the informative blog.

A Blog Log

Blogs are great, right? They drive traffic to your site and they deliver value through informative content.

A good blog is a win-win for both the site and the visitor.

Heck, if it wasn’t for the wealth of blog content out there, we’re not sure we would understand much about anything. For instance, we certainly wouldn’t know that ducks can occasionally lay two eggs in one day. Amazing!

The problem with blog content, from the perspective of site traffic at least, is that it will eventually lose its luster and end up on a back shelf somewhere collecting dust instead of readers. Maybe other sources are putting out newer blogs that rank for the same keywords, or maybe the information in your blog is just growing outdated.

We don’t know about you, but it really chafes us to think of that wonderful blog content we’ve written not being put to good use. So what do we do? Well, we dust it off, optimize it, and put it back to work.

What is Historical Optimization?

Putting it into the simplest language as possible, historical optimization is the process of optimizing blog posts that are “old.” For publishers who freshen up their old content and bring it up-to-date, historical optimization and has the ability to generate more traffic and conversions than it the blog post has done, well, historically.

Let’s say we wrote a blog about frogs in 2019. It did pretty well for us, but hasn’t been drawing any notable traffic for a year now. Instead of writing a whole new blog and just discarding all that work we put into the frog piece, we can go back and historically optimize the amphibious content to get it ranking in Google again.

So how do we optimize? One of the primary methods of historical optimization is to enrich a piece with more content. By adding value to an old blog, we refresh it in the eyes of search engines and breathe new life into its rankings.

For instance, in the blog that’s about frogs (we’re strictly refusing to say ‘frog blog’ here because we don’t want to lessen the importance of the subject matter), we could add some paragraphs about the newly discovered species of harlequin frog discovered in the eastern slopes of the Peruvian Andes in 2020.

Suddenly, our blog is even more informative than it was. Plus, it’s showing up as a bright new shiny thing that will attract a whole batch of new readers with a refreshed presence in search engine rankings. Not only are we delivering improved content, but we’re being rewarded for it!

Other optimization techniques include, but aren’t limited to:

• Modernizing content by changing dates
• Replacing outdated information
• Adding things to listicles

For instance, changing an old Top-5-Times-a-Bear-Scared-Us list into a Top-*15*-Times-a Bear-Scared-Us list is a great way to optimize it.

It’s Not just Blogs

At DOM, we frequently historically optimize our clients’ landing pages as well as their blogs.

We’ll enter their URLs into a tool like Semrush (here’s a link to their list of free SEO tools, btw) to find out if they’re ranking for any keywords in a significant way. If they’re not, we’ll research keywords that they could or should be ranking for compared to their competitors. Then we’ll optimize their landing pages to rank for those keywords using the techniques above, even changing the URLs if we have to.

Speaking of URLs, it’s usually a good idea to retain URLs of content that has ranked well in the past.

That way, you’re keeping any equity that the link has built up when you put it back to work for you. Changing the URL is only ever recommended when the content wasn’t doing anything for you in the first place.

For example, let’s say you are running a petting zoo that features geese, and you have a landing page with a URL like /we-think-you-will-really-like-our-geese-because-we-sure-do/. That’s not going to do any favors for anybody and definitely isn’t building equity. During the historical optimization process, we might change it to something shorter and more relevant like /come-pet-our-geese/.

What are the Benefits of Historical Optimization?

Of all the SEO services we provide our clients here at DOM, historical optimization tends to have some of the fastest and most notable results in terms of boosting traffic. Why? Because we’re leveraging content that already exists and which has already worked to entice views in the past, and we’re just making it work again.

Here are the facts in listicle form:

The Top 2 Benefits of Historical Optimization

1. It’s relatively easy because it’s just refreshing content that already exists.
2. It quickly drives more organic traffic to your site.

At DOM, historical optimization is just one of the services we provide. If you think you might have older content laying around that should be doing more, get in touch and we’ll put it back to work for you right away.

The post What is Historical Optimization, and Why Should I Do It? appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

The company’s own website features a list of notable Big Names who use it, from The New York Times to UPS to eBay. Heck, even Lollapalooza is on that list.

We love WordPress because it’s easy to use, adaptable, has built-in blog functionality, and sites made with WordPress generally rank pretty highly, relatively speaking.

However, the reason we really, really love it is because WordPress features the ability to use plugins. More specifically, SEO plugins. And SEO is what we live and breathe over here at DOM.

So, while this whole thing could just be a love letter to WordPress, we thought it would be beneficial if we, the CEOs of SEO, shared our favorite SEO plugins for our favorite site-building tool.

The Best WordPress Plugins
For SEO In 2022

This list is in no particular order. Simply saying that one of these plugins is more crucial than another could lead to bedlam amongst SEO experts (and within the DOM office).

• Best for Content Optimization: Semrush SEO Writing Assistant
• Best for On-page SEO: Yoast SEO
• Best Comprehensive Plugin: AIOSEO
• Best for Internal Linking: Internal Link Juicer
• Best for Image Alt Tagging: BIALTY
• Best for Google Analytics Installation: MonsterInsights
• Best for Google Monitoring: Search Console
• Best for Site Caching: WP Rocket
• Best for Image Compression: Smush
• Best for Structured Data: SchemaApp
• Best for Redirects: Quick Page/Post Redirect
• Best for Mobile Page Speed: AMP
• Best for Securing URLs: Really Simple SSL
• Best for Content Delivery: Cloudflare APO
• Best for Increased Product Review Counts: wployalty

More details (plus some free alternative options) are listed below.

Best Plugin For Content Optimization:
SEMRush SEO Writing Assistant

One of the most popular tools with SEO professionals, SEMRUSH is filled to the brim with useful features that are all designed to aid you in your quest to reach the top of the search engine rankings.

The Writing Assistant plugin takes many of those features and brings them over to your WordPress to provide on-page SEO assistance with features like an overall SEO score, readability score, link-checking, target and recommended keywords, and more.

The plugin will even check your content for plagiarism to avoid any snafus down the road.

To get it to work, you’ll have to have an existing Semrush account to connect with the plugin. After that, it’s all gravy.

• Plugin URL: Semrush Writing Assistant
• Developer: Semrush
• Free Alternative Option: Got one? Read below to learn how to contact us and have it listed here.

Did you know that we’re also a Semrush Certified Agency Partner? Learn more about our ability to help your team take a shortcut to better marketing results by checking out The DOM Difference.

Best WordPress Plugin For On-Page SEO:
Yoast SEO Plugin

A venerable name in the SEO game, Yoast has been a part of SEO for a very long time. The plugin takes all that experience and expertise and puts it right there in the WordPress ecosystem for your convenience.

The magic of Yoast is how it balances content optimization to please both human audiences and search engine crawlers. Features like a content and SEO analysis that scans your pages and posts for readability ensure that your site is as engaging to real people as it is to Google’s algorithm.

Yoast also features a redirection tool for 301 redirects, internal link tracking, Google Search Console integration, automatically generated XML sitemaps, and much, much more.

• Plugin URL: Yoast SEO
• Developer: Team Yoast
• Free Alternative Option: SEO Ultimate, The SEO Framework

Does your website content struggle with the use of passive voice? Learn how that can affect your SEO (and how Yoast can help you get rid of it) here.

Best Comprehensive WordPress Plugin For SEO:
AIOSEO

Perhaps the most popular of the overall WordPress plugins for SEO, AIOSEO really tries to live up to its name by packing in a nearly exhaustive list of features that covers rich snippets schema, built-in social media integration, robots.txt file editing, an SEO health checker, and most of the features contained in the two entries above.

However, some may argue that it doesn’t do some things as well as Yoast or SEMRush in terms of SEO analysis, but that’s a subjective thing for another time.

AIOSEO even allows for user roles for varying levels of content access and WooCommerce SEO tools for eCommerce sites and online stores.

There’s a pretty robust free version available on their site.

• Plugin URL: All In One SEO Pack
• Developer: All in One SEO Team
• Free Alternative Option: SEO Ultimate, The SEO Framework, Rank Math

Best WordPress Plugin For Internal Linking: Internal Link Juicer

There’s a lot of debate about the “best way” to do internal linking SEO on WordPress websites. Plenty of traditionalists that have been using the platform to build sites for years will tell you that manually adding links is the best way to get it done “right” and avoid issues with over optimization.

On the contrary, a lot of progress and updates have been made over the years to internal linking plugins. If you manage the settings correctly, these plugins can save you a lot of time while also boosting your page rankings. Also, if you ever make significant changes to your site architecture, using a tool like this to overwrite potential broken links is a smart suggestion.

Internal Link Juicer builds internal links within post content by using a “per-post configuration” method. There are both free and paid versions of this plugin, with the Pro version including custom targets, keyword import, and silo structure building.

• Plugin URL: Internal Link Juicer
• Developer: Internal Link Juicer
• Alternative Option: Internal Links Manager

Best WordPress Plugin For Image Alt Tag Optimization: BIALTY

If you run a WordPress website that leverages a massive directory of content (yes even larger than a 200+ word glossary) or sell products online using WooCommerce, then you likely have a high volume of image files on your site.

To help you save a whole lot of time, effort, and calloused fingertips, the team at PAGUP have created BIALTY (an acronym for Bulk Image Alt Texts with Yoast). BIALTY pulls content from the titles of your posts, pages, and products and then combines those with focus keywords assigned in Yoast.

Prefer to do manual image alt tag optimization based on some other form of keyword research? Not a problem, BIALTY comes with a Post Meta Box that gets added to the edit area for each individual page.

• Plugin URL: BIALTY
• Developer: PAGUP
• Alternative Option: Got one? Read below to learn how to contact us and have it listed here.

Best WordPress Plugin For Analytics Integration: MonsterInsights

If this blog were about the best Google Analytics plugins for WordPress, MonsterInsights would definitely be at the top of the list, and that list would be in a particular order (unlike this one, please don’t fight).

However, not only does MonsterInsights completely rule the Google Analytics game, but it’s also a powerful SEO tool in its own right that can keep you on top of what’s happening on your site from the convenience of your WordPress dashboard.

The plugin shows you your top-performing content, where your users are coming from, where they visit most on your site, and much more. It also gives you easy access to your eCommerce SEO performance by showing how all your products are performing on an individual basis.

• Plugin URL: MonsterInsights
• Developer: MonsterInsights
• Free Alternative Option: Google Site Kit
• More Reading on Google Analytics:
  • How to Track Blog Posts by Author in Google Analytics
  • Track ANY Form in Google Analytics in Under 5 Minutes
  • How Google Analytics Empowers Content Marketing Strategy
  • Why Your Direct Traffic in Google Analytics Is So High
  • Bounce Rate In Google Analytics (Everything You Should Know)
  • A Guide to Button Tracking Using Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics
  • What is Google Analytics 360?

Prefer to add Google Analytics directly to your website by copying and pasting the code into your theme? Check out this tutorial.

Got a complex Analytics project you’d rather have a team of experts work on with you and your team? Learn about our Google Analytics services.

Best Plugin For Google Monitoring:
Search Console

It’s no secret that Google is the largest and most popular search engine on the planet. So when they offer a plugin for WordPress, you can bet everybody’s ears perk up. Better yet? It’s totally free.

Google Search Console is an essential tool for tracking your content’s performance across the mega giant’s titular search engine. It allows users to submit sitemaps and new content for indexing, find and fix malware and spam issues, discover what your page is ranking for, check inbound links, and even helps with brainstorming new blog ideas.

When integrated with MonsterInsights, Google Search Console lets you see your site’s average position on SERPs, along with clicks, impressions, and click-through rates.

Like we said before, Google Search Console is completely 100% free, so there’s no reason you shouldn’t already be on the page and downloading it.

• Plugin URL: Search Console
• Developer: Tropicalista
• Free Alternative Option: Google Site Kit
• More Reading on Google Search Console:
  • How To Link Google Ads To Google Search Console
  • Set Your Course In Google Search Console With International Targeting
  • Get To Know Google Search Analytics Report

Best WordPress Plugin For Site Caching:
WP Rocket

This is our preferred plugin solution for addressing issues related to optimizing for Core Web Vitals areas like Largest Contentful Paint and Total Byte Time.

WP Rocket also simultaneously takes care of many of the high volume warnings found in SEMRush Site Audits related to uncached, uncompressed, and unminified JavaScript and CSS files. If your goal is to find a solution to optimize your site for delivery on all device types, this is it.

• Plugin URL: WP Rocket.me
• Developers: Jonathan Buttigieg and Jean-Baptiste Marchand-Arvier
• Free Alternative Options: Autoptimize, Hummingbird, WP Optimize
• More Reading on WP Rocket: How To Crush Your Unminified JavaScript And CSS Issues In Site Audits

Best WordPress Plugin For Image Compression:
Smush

An awesome plugin for image file compression from the team at WPMU Dev.

Smush works retroactively on media files that already exist on your site, but can also be set up to work proactively on media files as you continue to create content to scale your website.

There’s a premium version of this plugin that automates some things. If you are going to use the free version, be prepared to watch and wait for it as you do your initial file compressions. It will only compress 50 files at a time in the free version.

• Plugin URL: Smush
• Developer: WPMU DEV
• Free Alternative Option: Imagify

Best WordPress Plugin For Structured Data: Schema App

We currently use this on our own website for schema markups. While we have the experience and expertise with schema markup to deploy it manually, part of the reason we use Schema App so much is because Schema App allows someone who doesn’t code for a living to deploy accurate schema with ease.

Why do something the hard way if you don’t have to?

• Plugin URL: Schema App
• Developer: Mark and Martha van Berkel
• Free Alternative Option: All In One Schema Rich Snippets, Schema & Structured Data for WP & AMP

Best WordPress Plugin For Redirection:
Quick Page/Post Redirect

There are a ton of redirect plugins for WordPress, and they all perform the exact same function. So why do we work with Quick Page/Post? Well, it’s simple. We don’t mean that the reason why we use the plugin is simple, we mean that the plugin itself is simple.

For quick redirects, you don’t even have to have an existing page or post to add a redirect. You simply enter the Request URL and the Destination URL and QuickPage/Post does the rest. There is also the option to perform individual redirects for existing pages and content.

The feature list is huge, especially considering how easy the plugin itself is to use.

• Plugin URL: Quick Page/Post Redirect
• Developer: anadnet
• Free Alternative Option: Redirection

Best WordPress Plugin For Mobile Page Speed: AMP

Your potential customers are using mobile devices to research their issues and educate themselves on the topics you blog about on your WordPress site.

AMP markup is a must-have for any business using WordPress as their blogging platform to generate a high volume of traffic from mobile searches.

While there are a few alternative plugin options for AMP, this one is available for free and is developed specifically for WordPress by the collective that started AMP development in the first place.

When in doubt, go to the original source!

• Plugin URL: AMP for WordPress
• Developer: AMP Project
• Free Alternative Option: AMP for WP

Best WordPress Plugin For Securing URLs:
Really Simple SSL

While we usually prefer that websites have their SSL setup with their domain name provider or their hosting provider, Really Simple SSL is a great alternative option.

Streamlined minimal options keep things light and breezy, and the plugin does a spectacular job of doing what it says: Enabling simple SSL.

• Plugin URL: Really Simple SSL
• Developer: Really Simple Plugins
• Free Alternative Option: WP Force SSL & HTTPS SSL Redirect

Best WordPress Plugin For Content Delivery:
Cloudflare APO

According to the plugin’s directory listing, Cloudflare APO can “speed up your WordPress site by up to 300%.” If your website has a global reach, tapping into Cloudflare’s 250+ data centers makes sure your content is deployed quickly and consistently with no lag.

In order to use this plugin, you will need a Cloudflare account. If you are currently a free user of Cloudflare, that’s fine – but you will need to invest a small annual fee to cover for the APO features, which includes free DNS, free automated SSL certificates, free DDoS mitigation, and more.

• Plugin URL: Cloudflare
• Developer: Cloudflare
• Free Alternative Option: Sucuri

Best WordPress Plugin For Increased Product Review Counts:
wployalty

According to the plugin’s website, wployalty is a WooCommerce plugin for WordPress that builds loyalty for your online store by rewarding your customers. This plugin is trusted by over 1,000 brands all over the world, so no matter where your target customers are located, we are confident it can help you drive better engagement from your target customers.

Speaking from an SEO perspective, if you are properly leveraging schema markup on your site for product pages, this plugin can help you increase the trust and social proof of your products by increasing the amount of reviews left after each purchase. The value of encouraging user reviews can go even higher if you offer the ability to leave video reviews or reviews with product photography.

• Plugin URL: wployalty
• Developer: Cartrabbit
• Free Alternative Option: giftbit

But Wait, There’s More WordPress Plugins For SEO!

The above list is certainly not exhaustive, and there are plenty of other WordPress plugins for SEO, hundreds even, that businesses and site-owners use on a daily basis.

Some have a lot of overlapping features with the keyword-focused tools we mentioned above. For instance, Ahrefs is an incredibly popular SEO tool, especially amongst small businesses, that deserves to be looked at.

Countless other SEO plugins can be found at the official plugin directory on the WordPress website, so feel free to browse for yourself and find some that fit your particular needs.

Of course, having the best WordPress plugins for SEO is just a small part of SEO. You also need to know how, when, where, and why to use them as part of your overall strategy. That’s where we come in.

At DOM, we’ve made it our mission to use smart, efficient, and well-studied SEO strategy to create ROI for our clients. If you or your company are looking for help with optimizing your site and your content for maximum results, be sure to contact us for a free consultation to find out how we can be of help.

Have you made (or do you use) one of the best WordPress plugins for SEO that we haven’t listed? Does it serve a benefit we haven’t included? Contact Jonathan Bentz, Sr. Digital Marketing Strategist, by email or LinkedIn DM with your request for inclusion. 

To get more information on this topic, contact us today for a free consultation or learn more about our status as a Google Partner Agency before you reach out.

The post What Are the Best WordPress Plugins for SEO? (Updated 2022) appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Don’t worry, we’re going to do our best to answer those questions for you. So whether you’re just starting out with SEO or you’re looking to refine your current strategy, read on for some valuable tips.

First, What is a Keyword Target List? How Do You Build It?

If you’ve worked with SEO people before, you’ve probably heard them reference the keyword target list fairly often. That’s because targeting keywords is, well, the key to SEO.

When you target the right keywords, your content has a better chance of ranking in search engines and getting seen by potential customers. But how do you determine which keywords are right for your business? And how do you make sure you’re targeting the right ones each quarter?

There are a few factors to consider when determining which keywords to target. First, think about what type of keyword would be most beneficial for your business. There are three main types of keywords:

• Commercial: These are keywords that get used when somebody knows what they want, but they’re looking to investigate companies or brands that offer those products or services. For example, “business cybersecurity tools” or “accounting software.”
• Transactional: These are keywords that indicate someone is ready to buy and they’re pretty much already aware of where they’re going to buy from. For instance, “affordable office chairs” or “create an online store”
• Navigational: These are keyword phrases that people use when they already know what they want and they’re looking for a specific brand or business. For example, “Comcast business account login” or “Restream support.”
• Informational: These are keyword phrases that people use when they’re looking for information about a topic. For example, “How to find the right recruiting agency” or “What is SEO?”

Second, consider your goals for the quarter. What do you want to achieve with your SEO efforts? Are you looking to increase traffic to your website? Or are you hoping to generate more leads? Once you know what your goals are, you can start brainstorming keyword ideas that will help you achieve them.

Third, take a look at your competition. What keywords are they targeting? What type of content are they ranking for? You can use tools like Google AdWords Keyword Planner and Semrush to research your competition and get keyword ideas.

Finally, make sure you’re considering the search intent of the keyword. In other words, what do people want when they type that keyword into a search engine? Are they looking to buy something? Or are they just looking for information? You can use keyword research tools to help you determine the search intent of a keyword.

The Best Keyword List Length For a Quarter

Now that you know how to build a keyword target list, you’re probably still wondering how many keywords you should be targeting each quarter. And the answer is: it depends.

It really depends on your business goals, your competition, and the search intent of the keyword. If you’re just starting out with SEO, we recommend targeting between 50-100 keywords per quarter. As you get more experience and start to see results, you can increase that number.

Of course, you probably won’t get anywhere trying to prioritize all of those keywords over the course of a 3-month quarter. Instead, you’ll want to narrow down your list to some priority keywords to focus on a few to really target and go after while still monitoring the other words on your list.

So, if you are targeting 50-100 terms per quarter to make progress against, it’s probably best to place a top priority on 25% or less of that group. Those top priority terms should be given the majority of your effort, and ideally also support rankings growth for the 75% you are targeting without priority.

Unlike PPC, targeting keywords in SEO doesn’t cost money. That is, you’re not paying to post content that optimizes for your targets.

But regardless of how many keywords you’re targeting each quarter, it’s important to focus on quality over quantity. Make sure you’re choosing keyword phrases that are relevant to your business and have a high search volume. And don’t forget to consider the competition! If there are already a lot of businesses ranking for a keyword, it’s going to be harder for you to break into the top spot.

How to Prioritize Long-Tail Keywords in Your List

One way to increase your chances of ranking for a keyword is to focus on long-tail keywords.

Long-tail keywords are keyword phrases that are more specific and usually have a lower search volume than short-tail keywords. For example, “durable padded office chairs” is a long-tail keyword, while “office chairs” is a short-tail keyword.

Long-tail keywords tend to be less competitive because they’re more specific. And since they’re more specific, they usually indicate that the person searching for that keyword is further along in the buying cycle. That means if you can rank for long-tail keywords, you’re more likely to generate leads and sales from your SEO efforts.

The goals of your campaign will determine whether or not you should place a higher priority on long tail keywords. While far from an exact science:

• Long tail keywords should be prioritized higher in your keyword target list if your SEO goals are tied to sales leads or transactions.
• Short tail keywords should be prioritized higher if your SEO goals are tied to brand awareness, visibility and thought leadership.

Avoid Keyword Cannibalization

One final word of advice: avoid keyword cannibalization. This is when you have multiple pages on your website that are targeting the same keyword.

For example, let’s say you have a page on your website that’s ranking for the keyword “affordable HR services.” But then you create a new page and accidentally use the keyword “affordable HR services” throughout that page as well. Now you’ve got two pages that are trying to rank for “affordable HR services,” whether that was your intent or not.

Keyword cannibalization can hurt your SEO efforts because it confuses search engines and makes it difficult for them to determine which page is most relevant for that keyword. As a result, both pages may end up ranking lower in search engine results pages (SERPs).

To avoid keyword cannibalization, make sure you’re using unique keywords on each page of your website. And if you do have multiple pages that are targeting the same keyword, make sure each page is offering something different. For example, one page could be a product page and the other could be a blog post about that product.

When determining the length of your keyword target list in any given quarter, keep cannibalization in mind. You want enough targets on your list to create unique targeted content that won’t compete with your website’s other pages.

Need Help Building Better Targeted Keyword Lists?

At DOM, keyword targeting is one of our specialties. We’re experts when it comes to finding the best keywords to go after and strategizing when and how to go after them.

By putting your SEO strategy into our experienced team’s capable hands, you’ll never have to worry about things like keyword list length or cannibalization. You can sit back and watch your business move up in the rankings.

If you or your business are looking for help in SEO strategy, contact us today for a free audit and find out how we can help you hit page one.

The post How Big Should Your Keyword Target List Be Each Quarter? appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

That magical time of the year has come around again. Yes, it is time to make your new year’s resolutions.

To help you get started, the talented team at DOM has put together our favorites for digital marketing.

Below, we’ve compiled 14 resolutions from our team of digital marketing professionals to help you improve your campaigns in the coming year.

New Year’s Resolutions 2022: The Digital Marketing Edition

1. Spend Less $

Check Your PPC Campaigns for Broad Keywords Today

From Nikki Powley, Director of Operations

Reviewing an account for broad match keywords is one of the first things I do when completing a Google Ads account audit. They are one of the biggest offenders in the wasted spend category.

There are three keyword match types: exact, phrase, and broad. Straight broad match keywords allow ads to show for your keyword and any variation of the keyword that Google believes could be similar.

For example, you add the keyword “shoes”. Your ad could display for searches of women’s shoes, tennis shoes, or even horseshoes.

If you want to reach a larger audience, but not horse owners, utilize the fourth match type (I know I said three, but stick with me). Modified broad keywords are created by adding a + before words. This requires a user’s search phrase to include a synonym of each word in the modified broad keyword. For example, +womens +shoes allows ads to trigger for variations of women’s shoes like ladies’ shoes, but ads will not show for unrelated terms like kid’s shoes or horseshoes.

Check out 8 more of my cost-saving PPC tips!

2. Save More $

Leverage SEO For Your Top Converting Search Queries In Google Ads

From Jonathan Bentz, Senior Digital Marketing Strategist

If you have been running a Google Ads campaign or any other paid search campaigns, then you can review your list of top search queries in the account and use that information to customize a results-oriented SEO strategy.

Here’s an actionable step by step process:

1. Download your list of top converting search queries from your advertising campaigns
2. Sort the list by the search queries with the highest volume of conversions
3. Improve your keyword rankings in organic search for the top converting queries by optimizing
   • Page title
   • Meta description
   • Content on the page
   • Image alt tagging
4. Search the other pages of your site with an “intext” search operator in Google to uncover keyword rich link opportunities.
   • Here’s a sample search query – site:directom.com intext:”Google Ads”.
     • This search will uncover mentions of your top converting queries inside the body of content across your entire domain.
   • Adding these internal links will improve the relevance of your page for the converting keyword, and reduce the likelihood that Google will consider another page on your site to be a better result.

Historically, studies have indicated a potential lift in clicks of as much as 53% when a brand appears in the top positions of paid and organic search. While those numbers may have changed some with Google’s current layout, the opportunity is still there for the taking to improve your conversions and traffic from organic search in 2020.

Launching a new online learning course as one of your new year’s resolutions? Here’s 20 ideas I’ve curated for how to promote a training program.

3. Lose Weight

Let Go Of Keywords You Love If They Aren’t Getting You Conversions

From Leland Reed, Senior Digital Advertising Strategist

Losing weight can be tough. Letting go of bad habits that are impeding your progress is one of the hardest steps to committing to weight loss. The same can be said about making changes to your PPC account.

You thought for sure that the keyword was going to work, right? You just needed to find the perfect combination of ad text and bidding. As the days and weeks go by, the keyword is getting plenty of impressions but no clicks. You know with a little more TLC, you can make it work.

If this sounds like you, maybe it is time to let go of that keyword and start fresh. Don’t be afraid to get rid of anything in your campaigns that are not working. By cutting out poor performing keywords, you can save money and time which will allow you to try new, exciting things in your account.

Is revitalizing your Google Shopping campaigns one of your marketing new year’s resolutions? Here’s 5 ways for you to do that!

4. Travel More

Take Advantage Of Every Feature In Your Google My Business Listing

From Stephanie Mahnken, Senior Client Success Manager

Throughout the last few years, Google My Business (GMB) has really ramped up the game for local businesses, making it easier than ever for you to get in front of local customers. This is a good thing as roughly 46% of all Google searches are seeking local information! Not to mention that “near me” or “close by” searches have grown by over 900% in the last two years.

And the best part? GMB is free!

Here’s a list of just a few of the new features added to GMB in the last few years:

• Google My Business Shortnames
  • An easy to remember URL that brings users directly to your business profile
    • Makes review solicitation much easier for small business owners
• Online Ordering Now Available for Restaurants
  • Google now owns the transaction
  • Multiple food delivery partners
• Google My Business Product Editor Expands to Most Categories
  • The Product Editor is for small- and medium-sized individual businesses
  • Don’t pass up this opportunity for free Google real estate! Get Creative!
• GMB Welcome Offers
  • A great way to thank new customers for following you on Google!
• Google My Business Messaging Feature: “Request a Quote” 
  • A sure-fire attention grabber in bright blue
  • Appears on mobile and desktop SERPs

• Service Area Business Updates
  • Limit of 20 service areas
    • Can include cities, counties, states, zip codes or metropolitan areas
  • SABs using a service area radius were automatically updated to the closest named areas above
• Google My Business Marketing Kit 
  • • Create images from existing customer reviews
    • Free posters & window clings for brick & mortar businesses

While it can be time-consuming, completing and updating your listing consistently is absolutely worth the effort.

Bonus tip: Google wants to show the best possible results to its users so remember to be thorough, honest, and don’t try to add a target keyword or geographical keyword phrase to your business name if they are not part of how customers would identify you!

Want to generate more visibility locally as part of your marketing new year’s resolutions? Here are 5 more local SEO tips you can learn from the pizza industry giant Papa John’s.

5. Grow Professionally

Look At Core Metrics Less And Focus On Long-Term Growth

From Dana Schumacher, Senior Digital Analyst

When you focus on increasing long-term growth rates, you are looking at the rate of change of core metrics over an extended period of time. Growth does not always mean an increase in total revenues, as that growth in revenue also depends on the size of your industry and the interest of your search queries over time.

Short-term clients should expect to see an increase in linear growth, while long-term clients can expect to see an increase in logarithmic growth.

Need to improve goal tracking on your own website as one of your marketing new year’s resolutions? Here’s a simple step-by-step guide I created for Tracking Buttons Using Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics so you can better monitor your progress this year.

6. Keep Your Resolutions

Tidy Up Your Ads

From Ryan Norman, Digital Advertising Account Manager

Get Ready for the Sunset of ETAs in Summer 2022

Take the leap and embrace Responsive Search Ads because the old standard—Expanded Text Ads—are going away.

Google has announced that you will no longer be able to create or edit Expanded Text Ads within standard search campaigns after June 30, 2022.

Any Expanded Text Ads that you currently have running (or create before the deadline) will continue to serve after June 30, 2022. You will also maintain the ability to pause and resume Expanded Text Ads.

Responsive Search Ads will, therefore, become the primary ad type available to advertisers in search campaigns.

If you don’t have the time, inclination, or people to run your own A/B tests of ad messaging, then RSAs are a boon. You can give Google some headlines and descriptions, and then sit back and relax while the algorithm tries to sort out what’s the best-performing ad copy.

Read our blog to understand why RSAs matter more than ever.

7. Learn Something New

Try Coding!

From Jim Foreman, Senior Content Specialist

The web is still where we do most of our activity on the ol’ internet, and as long as we digital marketers have to make content for it, we’re going to be doing it with our old friend HTML. It might be on version 5 now, but it’s not going anywhere. You’ll be surprised how a little snippet of code can save your day. If that’s not enough to convince you to learn HTML, check out my whole dang blog post about it.

Coding HTML is one of the easiest entry-level coding languages you can learn, and you’ll be able to see the results instantly in your browser. Who knows, it might even make you so excited about coding that you’ll start looking into other languages, like CSS or Javascript.

8. Be Creative

Create Videos To Show Off Your Business Or Brand

From Carl Zappa, Digital Advertising Account Coordinator

It’s never too late to start being creative. Make 2022 the year your business stands out with a short video that shows who you are.

Why don’t you make more than one? Show what you sell and why your product is different from the others!

Then, test TrueView videos as a part of your PPC strategy. With video advertising, you choose the audience that (might be/is) interested in your product and you decide how much you want to pay. You can run different video formats and lengths. Your video will appear on YouTube and throughout the Google Display Network.

Doing more online video advertising as one of your marketing new year’s resolutions? Let us help you settle the great debate between YouTube and Vimeo for your video hosting needs.

9. Enjoy Life To The Fullest

Get The Most Out Of Your PPC Campaigns With Some CRO

From Mike Criswell, Digital Advertising Strategist

This year, ensure that you are getting the most out of your PPC campaigns by doing a bit of conversion rate optimization.

A great start would be to run A/B or multivariate tests on your PPC landing pages. Test your current landing pages against as many variants as you can to ensure that your landing pages are top-notch and getting you as many conversions as possible.

Also, don’t forget that just because you get improvements with one variant does not mean that there is no better option. Always keep testing!

Just getting started with CRO but want to make this one of your marketing new year’s resolutions? Check out my beginner’s guide here.

10. Become More Engaged With Clients

Gain More Best Friends

From Robbie Netz, Senior Client Success Manager

During this past year, I’ve learned it’s more important to develop meaningful relationships with people. I love the friendships we’ve built with clients, but I want to continue to help them grow. Here are some important takeaways I’ve learned:

1. Treat your client as a friend. I love getting to know what everyone does on the weekend, how their pets are, etc. It allows us to connect on a deeper level so everyone looks forward to our calls vs. “ugh, I have to go speak to that agency again.”
2. Brainstorm out-of-the-box ideas together. It’s always fun to chat about ways to meet their goals on campaigns, but even better to discuss new ideas….like TikTok!
3. Work together as if you’re in the same building. Even though we’re sometimes halfway across the globe, it’s great to use tools to work together as a team. Some of the best projects have been when we communicate via Slack or message one another back & forth in Asana.

Is improving the response of your consumers to your brand one of your marketing new year’s resolutions? Click here for a comprehensive list of email marketing strategies.

11. Spread Your Wings

New Year, New Advertising Platform.

From Adriana Parra González, Digital Advertising Account Manager
If you are looking for a new tool to advertise this year, LinkedIn Advertising could be for you.

This platform works well when you are looking for other businesses to buy your service or product from you. It lets you target by job titles, company size, job function, industry, and more.

Do you have content pieces and don’t know what to do with them? What if you use that content in exchange for the lead information?

LinkedIn Advertising is growing over time and it could be a great way to capture the leads for your business in 2021.

12. Keep Your Eyes On the Prize

Conversions Matter Most

From Carla Waters, Digital Marketing Coordinator

While optimizing landing pages or blog posts for keyword targets, I often focus on the keyword by creating a new title, meta description, headers, internal links, adding semantic terms to the copy, adding FAQs throughout, and CTAs. But does this page I’m working on convert? I need to continue to ask myself this question.

This year, I want to focus on the user, their navigation path, and if I have accomplished clear next steps to create a conversion while improving the on-page SEO.

13. Trust Your Instincts, But Confirm With Data

Lose That Gut!

From Jason Ohsie, Strategy and Analysis Department Manager

The days where gut-feeling marketing dominated the competitive landscape have long since passed by the wayside. No matter your niche, if your company is relying solely on the direction of your company’s HiPPO (highest paid person’s opinion) without regard to a strategic, data-driven approach then your company is running at a significant disadvantage versus the top players in your respective industry.

Much like diet and exercise, a commitment to this approach requires discipline in the following ways:

• Commit to properly tracking and measuring your marketing efforts
• Understand what KPIs matter for your business
• Focus on the mission-critical aspects of your marketing efforts that drive the most impact
• Listen to both your existing customers and your biggest haters
• Be open-minded about what the data tells you

A failure to do this often manifests itself in the following ways:

1. A website redesign that looks aesthetically pleasing but has resulted in markedly lower conversion rates.
2. A sudden drop in organic traffic to your website without an understanding of why this change occurred and how much this has impacted sales.
3. Wasting ad spend on PPC campaigns that just won’t convert properly.
4. Stagnant growth or loss of market share despite an investment into marketing.
5. B2B marketing efforts that have resulted in poor lead quality.
6. Top-of-Funnel marketing efforts like blogs and webinars that fail to gain traction or engagement.
7. Poor ROI overall in digital marketing channels.

Sound familiar? A strategic approach to digital marketing that is not rooted in data can result in failure for even experienced marketing professionals. Proper benchmarking and conversion tracking, clearly defining the KPIs that actually matter for your business, rigorous testing, and the proper mentality should provide the framework for your marketing efforts.

14. Make Sure You’re Looking Your Best

Short Animations Are Excellent Attention-Grabbing Tools

From Matt Merlino, Graphic Designer

If we’ve learned anything throughout the course of the ongoing pandemic it’s that it is perfectly acceptable to sit around and do nothing in our free time. While there’s not necessarily anything wrong with staying still, we should at least try to get up and move after that streaming service continues to prod if we are “still watching.” The same can be said for your next set of creative pieces!

When creating your next set of ads, consider testing some animated HTML5 assets against some of those static ads. A subtle bit of motion is a great attention-grabbing technique to drive more clicks.

Just make sure not to go too crazy or all of that sudden movement could be painful. You’ll want to keep basic design principles in mind to refrain from cluttering your ads and hurting your conversion rates.

• Refrain from Hard-to-Read Fonts
• Construct a Strong CTA that Directly Relates to Your Imagery
• Keep Brand Colors Prominent and Consistent
• Use White (Blank) Space to Your Advantage

It may seem daunting, but you can do it! Push the text in, make the button pulse, or have some fun with the imagery. Whatever you choose to do, add that extra movement to captivate your viewers and take your next campaign to new heights.

Now Go Get Started!

This list doesn’t only include tactics you can use as a New Year’s resolution, almost all of them can be implemented today and included in your digital marketing strategy at any time of the year! You can also check out the rest of our blog for more tips and tricks. To get more information on this topic, contact us today for a free consultation or learn more about our status as a Google Premier Partner before you reach out.

From the entire DOM team, Happy New Year and best wishes for a successful 2022!

The post New Year’s Resolutions: Digital Marketing Edition (Updated For 2022) appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Why Do People Think SEO Titles and Meta Descriptions Don’t Matter?

If you’re surprised to hear this little bit of news, we must be reading different forums. The SEO community is far from a consensus on the subject, as much as they have a consensus on anything. With Google’s continual algorithm updates and their hidden implications and mysterious ramifications, the ground beneath an SEOs foot sometimes feels like a waterbed.

The argument goes like this: Google doesn’t use your meta descriptions anyway—instead of using the info you embed in your <meta> tags, search engines will just generate their own based on the user’s search query. A similar argument is lodged against the SEO title because Google and others generate their own versions of titles.

While there are compelling reasons to follow that logic, we haven’t stopped using either of them. You shouldn’t stop using them, either.

Don’t forget one of the first lessons you learn about SEO: you don’t need to stop doing something until Google tells you to. If something is working for you, it will continue working until Google tells us otherwise. A lot of those things that Google doesn’t like are things you shouldn’t be doing anyway, like keyword stuffing. Google is not opaque about these things at all—check out the guidelines on their own documentation for a handy list of everything you don’t want to do.

One Is For Clicking, One Is For Reading

When you look at your analytics, you can see that Google doesn’t just measure how often somebody clicks on your website—it also measures how often they see that link using a metric called “impressions.” If you see a lot of impressions but not a lot of clicks, then your job is only partly done. After all, it doesn’t help your bottom line very much if all those clicks go to somebody else in those SERPs.

An SEO title is meant to make people want to click it, while the page title (which we also call the “title tag”) is the one at the top of your page that describes what the user is about to read. Those are two different tasks, so it’s a good idea to craft two different titles.

The meta description works the same way but in a longer form. Google likes to use meta descriptions to teach it more about the link it’s showing in SERPs. If it’s not entirely sure what information is available on a page, it can use the meta description to figure it out. There aren’t many ways to directly influence what Google shows its searchers, but the meta tags offer one. But don’t take our word for it: Google themselves will tell you the exact same thing.

It’s true that Google might ignore these in favor of its own, but it’s hard to predict when, say, Google will swap out your title for something it found somewhere else. Even if Google doesn’t use the SEO title and meta description you write for your web page, it will still use those to learn about the content you’ve made for them.

We asked two of our resident SEO wizards for their takes, too:

“Your Page Title tells Google why they should show your page—by using optimizations towards your target keyword and content topic. Your Meta Description tells the User why they should click on your page—by using copy optimized to encourage clicks and interaction. Think of your Page Title as a way to win over the algorithm and the Meta Description as your chance to win over the consumer.”

—Billy Wright, Senior Digital Marketing Strategist

“Your title should include your target keyword, but beyond that, treat it like a headline or title of a book. The goal of the title isn’t just to rank for a specific keyword, but also to get someone to click on it and read the first sentence of your page.

Meta descriptions are like mini-elevator pitches for why someone might be interested in clicking on a page in a SERP. Always ask yourself, ‘If I were a potential website visitor interested in this topic, is the description compelling enough to get me to click?'”

—Jason Ohsie, SEO Department Manager

The good news for digital marketers is that while search engine algorithms might sift the sands a little here and there, the same big, bedrock rules of SEO are still as stable as ever. If you’re ever feeling like you don’t know what to do, write some good content, keep your core web vitals in good shape, and let your work speak for itself. After all, Google still loves to give people answers to their questions, and good content will do exactly that.

You can get in touch with us today if you’d like some expert attention on your SEO, or you can read these related blogs:

• What is the Best Website Builder for SEO?
• How to Do Local SEO in 2021
• How Can Website Design Affect SEO?

To get more information on this topic, contact us today for a free consultation or learn more about our status as a Google Premier Partner before you reach out.

The post Why SEO Titles and Meta Descriptions Are Still Important appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

As the old sayings go, nothing in our world is free, the only two guarantees are death and taxes, and you can’t have a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy without a plan. Well, that last one isn’t old, but it’s just as true as the other two!

This particular blog post you’re reading began as part of what we like to call a “content plan.” We do them all the time because we’re experts at content marketing. We like sharing what we know with the world, and writing is its own reward. Plus this stuff is fun to write about. But let’s be honest here: we’re doing this for a reason, and it’s not just because we like the sound of our fingers on the keyboard (but many of us at DOM have mechanical keyboards so it does sound pretty cool).

Are You Really Going to Ask Why People Should Plan Things?

It sounds like a ridiculous premise, but you might be surprised how much stuff gets done in marketing exactly when it’s due—and not a moment sooner. Timelines are flexible and unreliable, even on the best days, and you can’t always guarantee that the work that needs to be done and the work you want to do are the same. If you can’t always do what you want, then at least you can know what you should be doing. If you ever have the question: what should I, an SEO professional, be doing right now? You can simply check the plan.

[checks plan]

Okay, so today we’re writing a blog post about SEO strategy! Writing the post isn’t even the last thing that happens to a piece of content, and there’s a whole lot that has to happen first.

Identify Your Timeline

This is the easiest place to start. You’ll find that a solid timeline can inform the rest of what you do with this plan. Since we focus a lot of our efforts on business-to-business, it’s easier to follow what the business world already uses: the quarter. It’s a nice, bite-sized chunk of time, and you shouldn’t have any problems filling out 90 days worth of work. You might not know exactly what you’re doing ahead of time, or how long you’ll have to do it, but a content plan that covers the entire quarter makes sense for most applications.

You’ll Also Want to Know How Long Things Take

A good SEO plan takes into consideration how much time an average SEO executor spends on a particular task. If it’s going to take somebody all day to write a blog post (and when you’re writing posts over a thousand words long, sometimes they do take a whole day), then you’re not going to schedule for a blog to be written, edited, optimized, designed, posted, and shared on social media all in the same day. That’s not good for anybody’s mood, especially if the same person is doing all of those things.

For instance, here at DOM, we have an actual spreadsheet for how long it takes people to do stuff. If a project manager or, really, anybody, needs to see how long it might take somebody to do something, all they have to do is open the shared document and plan accordingly. Does somebody on your team do something faster than somebody else? If you’re looking at a fast turnover from idea to implementation (it happens), you might need to deploy the faster person. It’s not personal, it’s data!

Identify Your Audience

Yes, we tend to think of audiences as something the PPC side of the house has to worry about, but audiences matter to SEO, too. After all, you have to know who you’re writing to. If you sell tomatoes and you have a blog, you might be interested in talking to other people who sell tomatoes, kind of like what we’re doing with this post about SEO content. But you probably also want to write for that person’s boss, like the head of a ketchup company. An obvious target for your content is going to be your ideal customer, and that’s where the funnel comes in.

Get To Know Your Conversion Funnel

Get cozy with your sales team, because you’re going to need their help when you define your content plan. They can give you some insight on what past and future customers are interested in reading, watching or listening to because the sales team are the ones who talk to potential customers.

The concept of a conversion (or sales) funnel started in the 19th century with a guy named E. St. Elmo Louis (he’s in the Advertising Hall of Fame, so you know he’s legit). The basic idea of the funnel is that a customer starts at the top and ends up “converting” or buying whatever you’re selling at the bottom (or reading whatever you’re giving, or however you like to define a conversion).

The journey of a customer from finding out about your product to buying starts with a big population that narrows as they get closer and closer to converting. The number of people who know about Coca-Cola and the number of people who are actually going to buy a Coca-Cola is vastly different—Coke has enormous brand awareness, which means there’s a lot of people at the top of their conversion funnel.

Your SEO strategy needs to take into consideration everybody at every stage of that funnel. The common wisdom is that the higher in the funnel a customer is, the more broad your keyword choices should be. If you want more people to fill the top of your sales funnel, then “tomatoes” is probably a keyword that makes sense to you.

The further they get down the funnel, the more narrowly you can focus your keywords, which usually means long ones, too. For example, people closer to the bottom of the conversion funnel for your tomato business aren’t just looking to learn about tomatoes, so broader keywords don’t make as much sense as narrow ones. Somebody at the bottom of the funnel already knows about tomatoes, has a use for tomatoes, knows what they need, and is looking for a business like yours in order to buy tomatoes. If your sales folks say they’ve had a lot of luck from, say, pizza companies, then a good bottom-funnel keyword could be “tomatoes for sale for pizza sauce.”

Every stage of your SEO strategy should have one or more keywords associated with it. Keywords are not just good for getting an idea of search intent, but they can also make sure everybody on your SEO team is working toward the same goal.

Stick To The Plan Until You Shouldn’t

Don’t forget why you’re doing SEO in the first place: to improve the quality and volume of organic search results. We all drink from the same trough that says “GOOGLE” on it, and we look to them for guidance. Google has told us that the best way to get higher on their search results pages is to answer a question or fulfill a need.

Your content, and your larger SEO strategy, should focus on the acquisition of organic traffic. Creating a robust plan early on will help you chart your course. Having said that, sometimes you have to pivot. Your plan needs to be flexible. Your plan will change, and you have to be able to change your strategy along with it. Technical SEO, page SEO, keyword research, meta tags—all of these are important and will inform different stages of your SEO strategy. But, like everything else in digital marketing, changes are happening all the time, both in how the search engines work and how we interface with them.

You may not be able to control the wind, but you can always change your sails.

If you want to know more about how we do SEO here at DOM, check out these posts:

• How to Do Local SEO in 2021
• How Can Website Design Affect SEO?
• What is Hyperlocal SEO and Why Should I Be Doing It Right Now?

The post How to Make a Plan For Your SEO Strategy appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

I won’t bother going into why you need to be blogging in 2020. Any good digital marketer can tell you that. If you’ve seen success in content marketing– that’s great! Most of our clients and yours truly have, and do, as well. As your blog grows, inevitably so will the number of contributors. With multiple authors, multiple posts per author, and multiple sources/mediums per post, author analytics data can be quite confusing to trudge through.

Luckily for you, I have found myself manually tabulating blog post performance by authorship too many times. Without further ado, here is how to group blog metrics by authorship using a custom dimension in Google Analytics.

Create a new custom dimension in Google Analytics

• Analytics -> Admin -> Property -> Custom Dimensions -> New Custom Dimension
• 1. 1. Name: Author
     2. Scope: Hit
     3. Active: Yes
     4. Click Create

Get the JS selector for author name on your website

• Visit a blog post on your website using a Chrome browser and locate the author’s name within that blog post. Right-click on the author’s name and select Inspect.
• The chrome developer console will appear at the bottom of your screen. Locate the author name within the code, right-click on it and select Copy -> Copy JS path
• You should now have something like this in your clipboard:

document.querySelector(“#content > div > div > div.blog-main > div.meta > em > span.author > a”)

To verify that this code will fetch your blog post author names, navigate to a blog post on your website, open the Google Chrome Developer Console (CTRL + Shift + J) and navigate to the Console tab. Paste your code in the console and press enter. You should see something like the following:

• Turn your JavaScript path into a custom JS function by copying the below code and replacing PASTE_YOUR_JS_PATH_HERE with the path you copied in the above step.

function () {

return PASTE_YOUR_JS_PATH_HERE.textContent;

}

• You should end up with something like the following – save this for later (don’t worry about spacing or line breaks):

function () {

return document.querySelector(“#content > div > div > div.blog-main > div.meta > em > span.author > a”).textContent;

}

Configure GTM to send Blog Post Author Analytics Data to GA

• Import my preconfigured GTM container
  1. If you are unsure how importing works, please see the “How to import a container” section in this post.
• Update Google Analytics Settings variable
  1. Navigate to Variables -> User Defined Variables -> UA-00000-0 -> Variable Configuration
• Change the default Tracking ID to your Google Analytics property UA code. To locate your UA code, visit Google Analytics > Admin > Property > Tracking Info > Tracking Code.
  1. Note: If you already have a pageview tag setup in your GTM account, my preconfigured container will overwrite it. If you have a standard pageview install, this will not cause any other issues; just make sure to update the new pageview tag with your previous tag’s settings.
• Update Blog Post Author variable
  1. Navigate to Variables -> Blog Post Author
  2. You will see the following:

• Replace the code under Custom JavaScript with the code you generated in the above step.
• Publish the workspace.

Verify Correct Implementation

Verify in Google Analytics

Please note that you may have to wait some time before you can verify that the data is being correctly pulled into Google Analytics as a custom dimension. This may be foreign to even advanced GTM users who are used pushing custom events and almost instantaneously seeing them populate in the GA Real-time reports. Here, since we are pushing custom dimensions, the data is limited to standard processing latency of 24-48 hours.

If you are feeling impatient, skip to the next section to verify as best as you can for now.

Once you have waited for the data to populate into GA, navigate to Google Analytics -> Acquisition -> All Traffic -> Channels and change secondary dimension to Author

The above report is segmented by the Default channel grouping, so each author will appear in the chart multiple times due to having multiple referral sources. I prefer to do the following to group solely by the author: Navigate to Google Analytics -> Audience -> Custom -> User Defined and set Secondary Dimension to Author as below.

This is the best way I have found in GA to quickly aggregate by a custom dimension. For a more official-looking report (that doesn’t include a not set user-defined value), I would consider using a custom GA report dashboard or Google Data Studio.

Verify in Google Tag Manager Preview

Once again, with this non-standard implementation, the data verification is, well, non-standard. Luckily, that doesn’t mean it is difficult. Launch GTM preview mode as you normally would and open one of your blog posts in Google Chrome. In the preview window, navigate to Page View (or Window Loaded) -> Variables. If you have correctly implemented, you should see Blog Post Author populating as seen below:

Conclusion On Implementing Author Analytics Tracking In GA

Given the importance of content generation to SEO and website marketing efforts, tracking posts by blog authors can be crucial. As always, I hope I made this implementation as easy as possible. If you have any questions, please feel free to message me on LinkedIn or submit our contact us form.

To get more information on this topic, contact us today for a free consultation or learn more about our status as a Google Partner Agency before you reach out.

The post How to Track Blog Posts by Author in Google Analytics (Updated November 2020) appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Taking guidance from these checks and editing your writing makes your content more forceful and can even improve that content’s search engine rankings.

Yoast’s Readability Analysis

I’m talking about this panel:

It comes complete with happy- and sad-face warnings . . .

In total, Yoast evaluates 7 aspects of writing:

• Consecutive Sentences
• Transition Words
• Sentence Length
• Paragraph Length
• Subheading Distribution
• Passive Voice
• Flesch Reading Ease

You may be thinking, “That’s great and all that Yoast can tell you all that, but my content doesn’t need to be Hemingway-level prose. I need to write an informative, compelling copy for my company and clients. I’m under the gun as it is, so unless the extra effort to improve readability scores is really going to help me, what’s the point?”

Improving Readability Improves SEO Rankings

Engineers are working continuously to get search algorithms to read the text more like the way people do. Gone are the days when you could just sprinkle keyword phrases into every nook and cranny of your site. The big players—like Google—want to serve content that users will actually read. That means writing in complete, comprehensible sentences on your site.

Marieke van de Rakt—Ph.D. in Social Sciences and CEO of Yoast—put it this way: “All the things humans do while reading text are things Google will do. That means that the structure of your text, the way you write your paragraphs, will become increasingly important.”

So if your website is littered with awkward syntax and meandering paragraphs, it is falling short of its SEO potential. Yes, you must cover all your technical SEO bases to succeed as well. But don’t let poor readability negate all that hard work.

7 Readability Checks & How to Approach Them

Let’s take a look at Yoast’s readability metrics in action.

Below, I’ll be using examples from a post on our digital marketing blog called How To Crush Your Uniminified JavaScript and CSS Warnings. In that post, Jonathan Bentz, Senior Digital Marketing Strategist, shows you how to increase site speed and improve user experience by minifying your code.

1. Consecutive Sentences

—

—

Check

Do sentences start with the same words as those right before or after them?

Yoast advises that starting too many sentences too close together with the same words can feel repetitive to a reader.

In the screenshots above, we see that Yoast raised a red alert for just 8 sentences falling into this definition in a piece of 1,800+ words. And the uses of repetition there are intentional.

Advice

Strive to vary how you start sentences.

But don’t go to DEFCON 1 just because Yoast assigns you a scarlet circle. There are perfectly grammatical and stylistic reasons to begin a few sentences with the same word here and there.

2. Transition Words

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Check

Do sentences contain words or phrases that signal a change in thought or topic?

Yoast suggests that transition words highlight the relationship between “between phrases, sentences or even paragraphs. Transition words make it easier for your readers to understand how thoughts and ideas are connected. They also prepare your reader for what’s coming.”

And Yoast uses these examples of transition words:

• therefore
• in other words
• however
• for instance
• above all
• in addition
• after that
• similarly
• in conclusion

In the screenshot, we see that Yoast flags the first sentence as containing transition words (“As a result,” I’m assuming), while the second sentence does not contain any. I concur with Yoast’s analysis here.

Advice

Use transitional language when it helps to emphasize your point or connect a string of ideas.

But don’t slavishly add transition words to every sentence; that can leave your text sounding elementary.

In our screenshot here, the second sentence flows on so clearly from the first that no extra effort is needed to connect it to the first.

3. Sentence Length

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Check

Do sentences run for more than 20 words?

Yoast cautions that longer sentences are harder to understand because readers have to keep more information in mind longer. Mr. Hemingway would be on board with this. He’s a modern champion of the short, declarative utterance.

Note in our first screenshot, though, that a semicolon throws off Yoast’s word count. That sentence contains 30 words—14 before the semicolon and 16 after.

Advice

Express thoughts concisely.

That’s what I’ll say more full-throated than keeping sentences short.

Some thoughts are just so complex that you will need more than 20 words. Use more when you need more.

But the overall advice from Yoast here is good. In light of which, let’s see how we might edit the second screenshot:

Original

And if you have successfully used the Uglify apps, let us know in a chat how they worked out for you so we can share your experience with others.

Revised

And if you have successfully used the Uglify apps, let us know. Tell us in a chat how they worked out. Then, we can share your experience with others.

We’ve gone from 1 sentence of 29 words to 3 sentences of 12, 9, and 8 words. Plus, we worked in a transition word: “Then.”

Also, instead of measuring the number of sentences that are over 20 words, you might take a look at the average sentence length. This approach will give you a better sense of how long your sentences are across the board, rather than just a tally of how many times you tripped the 20-word sensor (whether by one word or twelve).

4. Paragraph Length

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Check

Do your paragraphs contain more than 150 words?

Writing in long paragraphs “makes your text look daunting as it becomes just one big blob of text,” Yoast states.

Advice

Keep paragraphs to fewer than 9 lines as displayed. (That means drastically shorter paragraphs for mobile than desktop, mind you.)

The screenshot shows the longest paragraph in the blog post:

• 427 characters
• 73 words
• 3 sentences

And I’m kind of surprised how lenient Yoast is here.

People read online differently than they do a novel or letter. They skim. And should you present them with a wall of text (a.k.a. a bloated paragraph), you’ll be lucky to get them to read the first few words or the last few.

I’ve seen sites even provide a line break after each sentence.

That is, every sentence is treated as its own paragraph.

Think about it.

What kind of experience are your users looking for?

5. Subheading Distribution

Check

Do you go more than 300 words between subheadings?

Even if you shorten your sentences and shorten your paragraphs, your text is still just one undifferentiated blob if you don’t add organization with subheadings. Subheadings provide pleasant pauses too.

Yoast flagged our example with an orange for the opening section, which is all the text up to the first subheading “What Is ‘Unminified JavaScript And CSS’?”

The text preceding that heading contains:

• 1,949 characters
• 343 words
• ~18 sentences

Advice

Write subheadings that outline your piece.

And insert them frequently, even if that means repeating information that is in the main text.

Readers should be able to get the gist of your idea from just the subheadings.

Again, with the way people read online, subheadings may be all that surfers read of your article. Or at least, they may read those first. And then decide whether you’ve enticed them to get down into the nitty-gritty and actually read the paragraphs themselves.

6. Passive Voice

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Check

Do sentences contain verbs in the passive voice, be-verbs, and/or do sentences begin with subordinate clauses?

There is much to say about passive voice and Yoast’s evaluation of this persnickety grammatical phenomenon. It’s anything but straightforward.

Check out the post by Ryan Norman, Digital Advertising Coordinator, on how to Eliminate Passive Voice to Improve Readability and SEO with the Yoast WordPress Plugin.

There, you’ll find his analysis of Yoast’s passive voice flags in the blog post we’ve been examining. Overall, Yoast raised 15 flags for passive voice; Ryan found only 1 of those to be a textbook case (shown in the screenshot).

That sentence could be recast to put it in the active voice like this:

Original

Depending on your budget and level of technical expertise, both of our recommended plugins can be configured to produce great results for your site. 

Revised

Depending on your budget and level of technical expertise, you can configure both of our recommended plugins to produce great results for your site. 

Advice

Write in the active voice.

Passive voice is best reserved for situations where the actor is unknown or unimportant.

7. Flesch Reading Ease

Check

Do you write short sentences? Do you use short words?

That’s what the reading ease formula—developed by library scientist Rudolf Flesch—boils down to in English.

Here’s Yoast’s take: “Flesch reading ease measures how complex a text is. The lower the score, the more difficult the text is to read. The Flesch readability score uses the average length of your sentences (measured by the number of words) and the average number of syllables per word in an equation to calculate the reading ease. Text with a very high Flesch reading ease score (about 100) is straightforward and easy to read, with short sentences and no words of more than two syllables. Usually, a reading ease score of 60-70 is considered acceptable/normal for web copy.”

Advice

Err on the side of writing simply.

Go for the common word, rather than the highfalutin. Go for the short sentence. And be willing to continue your thought in another.

But don’t make hitting a 60-70 Flesch score a mandate. You know your product. You know your audience. If you need to use a polysyllabic technical term, use it. If you need to write a sentence with multiple clauses to express a complex idea, do it.

Don’t focus on Flesch scores, in fact. Focus on the 6 other readability factors we’ve just reviewed. Get those ducks in a row and your Flesch score will likely follow suit.

Improving Readability Improves SEO Rankings

Attending to the 7 areas analyzed by Yoast’s readability checks will make your writing more readable to people and higher-ranking to search engines.

Yoast’s checks aren’t perfect – but they are a big reason why Yoast SEO is one of our 12 best WordPress plugins for SEO. They do, however, provide reminders about core concerns of writing for the web.

7 Tips to Improve Readability and SEO

1. vary how you start sentences.
2. Use transitional language when it helps to emphasize your point or connect a string of ideas.
3. Express thoughts concisely.
4. Keep paragraphs to fewer than 9 lines as displayed.
5. Write subheadings that outline your piece.
6. Write in the active voice.
7. Err on the side of writing simply.

Interested in discovering more ways to improve the search optimization of your site? Contact us for an SEO audit or check out any of these helpful resources written by our team below:

• Internal Links: How Much Do They Affect SEO?
• Image SEO: Does Alt Text Still Matter?
• These Landing Page Optimization Tips Dramatically Boost Conversions
• How to Tell if Your Website Load Times Are Hurting Your Business

The post Readability Analysis in the Yoast WordPress Plugin: Tips to Improve Your Writing and SEO (Updated September 2020) appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.