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.

The same goes for the website (or more commonly websites) involved. You can set yourself up for success post-M&A by employing SEO best practices to create a modified site that represents the best of all the merging entities. 

Table of Contents

• M&A and Websites

• SEO for M&A

• Website Migration Services

• Paid Advertising for Mergers

• Key Takeaways: Post-M&A Website Optimization

M&A and Websites

You may have ended up here because you’re wondering what to do with websites after an acquisition. 

Rest assured you are in good hands. Direct Online Marketing has helped hundreds of companies with SEO after M&A, including full site migrations. 

What you’re aiming to do with websites after a merger is to create one place online that displays the strengths of the newly joined businesses. 

One of the biggest decisions after an acquisition or merger is deciding which site will absorb the others. After evaluating the legacy and new sites, it’s time to choose where the combined content will live. 

Several factors might affect this decision:
—historical search engine standing,
—the newer site’s alignment with the business’s future direction, or
—perhaps a more user-friendly content management system, like WordPress, on one of the sites.

Expect some trade-offs during this integration. 

However, a well-executed website migration can blend the best of both sites into a single, polished online experience. 

The next step? Defining goals for the new site. Whether you’re aiming for better traffic, engagement, or conversions, involve stakeholders across marketing, IT, and content teams to gather input. Set clear milestones and a timeline to keep things on track.

SEO for M&A

SEO takes priority in any website migration. Especially those conducted after a business merger or acquisition. 

The companies involved likely invested in optimizing their websites for search engines, so the challenge now is retaining and improving that work. 

Start by reducing duplicate content, as search engines penalize repeated material across a domain. Consolidate pages on similar topics into single, focused pages to avoid keyword competition and maximize ranking potential.

Implement 301 redirects from the outgoing site to the remaining site. This helps retain some of the ranking power of the old pages, guiding search engines and users to the right spot on the new site. 

Updating meta titles and headers to match the new site structure also signals search engines about the content’s purpose. Adjust internal links to boost visibility for newly merged pages—this is a straightforward way to strengthen SEO without major adjustments.

Website Migration Services

With a thoughtful approach, merging sites after an acquisition can be seamless and rewarding. Following a roadmap laid out by a trusted partner will smooth the way for a site that boosts user experience, preserves SEO value, and supports business goals. DOM has helped numerous companies through similar transitions and can guide every step—from SEO analysis to technical setup to user experience.

Check out our post-M&A website migration services. 

With every website migration, we employ these hard-won best practices:

• Content Review
  DOM identifies top-performing pieces, duplicated content, and any information gaps between the sites.
• Analytics Analysis
  DOM monitors user behavior and traffic sources to understand how visitors engage with each site.
• SEO Optimization
  DOM assesses existing keyword rankings, backlinks, and general health in terms of how well the overall site is optimized to rank highly on search engines.
• Functionality Testing
  DOM examines features that impact user experience, such as dropdown menus, navigation paths, and checkout flows.
• Design Consistency
  DOM looks at the various brand style and design elements to keep a cohesive look across sites where possible.

Not ready to engage site migration services? No problem. Assess your situation post-M&A with a free website audit. 

Paid Advertising for Mergers

All this website migration work means little if people aren’t pointed to the optimized site. 

Send an email to existing contacts from all the sites involved, announcing the combined website. It’s a good time to reconnect with clients and let them know that they’ll still find familiar products and services on an improved platform.

Consider a homepage announcement explaining the merger for a few months to ease the transition for returning visitors. 

Those efforts are often quite effective. And you can do them right now. You already have the contact info. You just need to set up the email campaign or make a few adjustments on the new site. 

However, to truly grow your audience, you may benefit from pay-per-click advertising to publicize the migrated site to the world. 

PPC advertising post-M&A lets you reach new people. And not just any new people, but a target group of people who fit the demographics most likely to engage with your business.  

Review our internet marketing company’s PPC service offerings. 

Direct Online Marketing offers comprehensive PPC and paid search advertising services, specializing in Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, YouTube, and Google Shopping. 

As a Google Premier Partner (top 3%), DOM provides campaign management, ad copywriting, audience targeting, and regular performance analysis to maximize ad spend and boost conversions. 

The service also includes free audits, personalized insights, and growth-focused strategies, helping clients improve revenue, lead quality, and reach across local and global markets.

Key Takeaways: Post-M&A Website Optimization

• When merging two websites post-acquisition or -merger, start by auditing each site’s content, design, functionality, SEO, and analytics to establish what each brings to the table. 
• Then, choose one site to keep as the flagship site and consolidate valuable content from the others into it, based on factors like historical SEO strength and the direction of the business. 
• From there, address SEO needs like reducing duplicate content, setting up 301 redirects, and adjusting internal links, while also working on technical aspects such as hosting, security, and a smooth user experience for the final combined site.

The post What To Do With a Website Post-M&A 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.

Holiday eCommerce Mistakes

The Holidays drive an absolutely absurd amount of traffic to major US retailers each year and with it, eCommerce purchases. But what happens if your retailer website has SEO and User Experience issues? What kinds of mistakes can a large company make that impact it’s ability to grow exponentially each Black Friday? Today, we will take a look at an eCommerce retail giant, Best Buy.

SEO Site Audit – BestBuy.Com

Best Buy is a multinational consumer electronics retailer headquartered in the United States. It offers a wide range of products, including electronics, appliances, and entertainment items, both online and through its brick-and-mortar stores. They also have an incredibly slow website…

Website Speed Issues

When I say slow, I mean like molasses. At least for the Crawler. Currently, they’re getting a 33 out of 100 for performance when using Google’s Page Speed Insights tool. This score, unacceptable in the eyes of Google, not only potentially impacts their ability to rank as well as they should but also their ability to get potential users to make purchases on their site. 

According to Google’s own internal testing data, for every second your site takes to load conversions can drop by 20%. Think about how much of an impact that could have on your sales.

But It Looks Like It Is Loading Fast…For Me?

Sometimes the Page Speed Insights tool will see websites load much slower than it seems to your own eyes. In this case, the crawler believes that the website takes ~9.3 seconds to load properly for a user. This is because so many files are loading in the background that piece together the entire site, that it causes the browser to go into overdrive trying to put it all together.

While a user may see it load faster, this slow speed for the crawler means it thinks the site probably gives the user a poor purchasing experience. This contextual understanding could negatively impact the ability for Best Buy to have the best possible rankings it could have, despite how big of an authority they are. 

So, What Causes This Slowdown?

JavaScript is complicated. While scripts help sites look beautiful and appear seamless in their flow, they make crawling and loading pages harder for Google and browsers. It takes a lot of energy to crawl through and properly understand how to put the page together, and often times, large files are used to build a site – while only part of the actual data in the file is needed.

In the above image we can see many warnings and errors that BestBuy.Com is receiving from Google’s Page Speed Insights tool. Much of this clearly shows the problems causing the slowdown on the website and what could be reworked or tooled to increase the speed and give both the user – and the bots – a better experience.

Words Are Important

One of the biggest mistakes we see time and time again among retailers is their inability to create unique, informative content about a product that isn’t just the boilerplate language given to them by the vendors and manufacturers they work with. Much of the time this language is missing valuable SEO that could help drive even more visibility and traffic.

Example: RokuTV

When a user looks for Roku TV on Google, in many cases they do not get Best Buy at the top of the search results because the website uses the same content created by the manufacturer for much of their on-page content. Missing from much of this content is the actual phrase, Roku TV. Because the manufacturer has created the copy, it instead frequently refers to it by the branded name, RokuTV. This is not how users typically search. Additionally, because they are using the same content as other retailers, it is harder for Google to understand which one of these retailers should rank for these searches.

A quick Google search shows that Target and Walmart are both using the exact same copy to describe the television – but they have purposely optimized their sites by splitting RokuTV into Roku TV. A smart SEO move. The closer you can get your site optimized, verbatim, to the keyword you are targeting, the better.

The Difference In Potential Search Volume Between RokuTV vs Roku TV

Ok…Why Does This Matter?

These SEO and User Experience missteps underline how critical it is to focus on the finer details of eCommerce. Overlooking something as basic as page load times or how customers search for products can lead to lost sales and diminished visibility. Even industry giants must pay attention to these aspects because, in the competitive world of online retail, the smallest missteps can have major consequences.

Grow Your eCommerce Sales

If you’re ready to identify and fix SEO mistakes holding your website back, or if you need help driving more traffic, leads, and sales for your business, contact Direct Online Marketing today for help in SEO services and eCommerce website design. Take advantage of a free site audit to uncover opportunities for growth and ensure your website is working as hard as you are to achieve your goals. Learn more about why Direct Online Marketing is the best digital marketing agency for B2B businesses, and Contact Us to get a free audit of your website!

The post What Is Wrong With My Website? – Holiday Edition appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Table of Contents

• Good Website Content Serves the Reader and the Writer
• Good Website Copy Has a Clear Goal
• Start with a Specific Goal
  • Informational Ad Copy
  • Transactional Ad Copy
  • Information & Transactional Ad Copy
• Knowing the Audience Is Key to Writing Good Website Copy
• Write Website Copy That’s Simple (But Not Simplistic)
• Make Your Website Content Scannable
• Follow the Guidance from Google’s Helpful Content Update
• What Is Google’s Helpful Content Update
• Align Website Copy With Google’s Helpful Content Update
• Demonstrate Authority and Use AI Wisely in Website Content
  • AI-writing DON’Ts
  • AI-writing DOs
• Good Website Content Is Attainable
• Key Takeaways

Good Website Content Serves the Reader and the Writer

You know your brand. You believe you offer something of value to your clients. You need to get this message out there to share that value with others and to grow your business. 

Your website is a conduit to reaching thousands upon thousands of people every day. The copy on your website is crucial. These words are the appeal to website visitors to buy from you; they are also scrutinized by search engines like Google when the algorithm serves up search results. 

Fundamentally, you need to write pages that are useful to people. And immediately after that, you need to consider how those pages can be optimized for search engines because if your site is never seen, it’s not serving the reader, nor is it helping your business drive more sales.

Good Website Copy Has a Clear Goal

As we’re seeing, there are multiple priorities to manage with your website copy. You’ve got to keep in mind user interest, business objectives, and search engine visibility. 

The best way to satisfy these priorities is often to focus on a specific goal with each piece of content or page you create. With a variety of kinds of content across your website, you can meet the needs of visitors, business, and SEO in different ways in different places—rather than grinding to a halt trying to do all three at once. 

Broadly speaking, you can think of website copy as informational and transactional. Quality website copy answers questions and it compels purchases. And it does each of these things to a different extent depending upon the particular type of page that it will live on.

Start with a Specific Goal

Informational Ad Copy

An about us page is largely informational. This is a page where an organization lays out its reason for being and often communicates the broad strokes of the company’s history. An about us page usually sets for the unique value proposition of a company, but it does so plainly and briefly, without making a forceful, transactional push for a user to take action. 

Transactional Ad Copy

On the other end of the spectrum is, for instance, a checkout page. You’ve already got a person who’s highly interested in your product because they have clicked through to the checkout page. Now you need to get the sale over the finish line with compelling copy that presents an irresistible argument for why the person should complete their purchase. 

Information & Transactional Ad Copy

Most of the pages on a website live somewhere in the middle. A blog post (like this once) has a dual identity: it seeks to give expert information to interested users, and it seeks to subtly suggest to readers that they consider doing business with the company. 

Knowing the Audience Is Key to Writing Good Website Copy

Writing into the void isn’t much use. Writing to the whole world also isn’t likely to be effective. Good website content aims at an audience, a particular demographic of people that would be best served by your content. 

• What questions are people asking? 
• How old are they? 
• What concerns do they have? 
• Why do they care about the things they do? 
• What economic bracket do they reside in? 
• What challenges do they face day to day that your organization might help them with? 
• Where do they live? 
• How much do they already know about your company?
• Are there other solutions available besides the one you provide?

Ask yourself these questions within your business to get a sense for your audience. Then you’ll have a core set of concerns to write copy toward. You’ll have a feel for what life is like for your audience, so you can speak to them in familiar language that demonstrates your value to their individual circumstances. 

Write Website Copy That’s Simple (But Not Simplistic)

Have you ever found yourself in a conversation with someone who uses complex words just to sound smart? It doesn’t work—it confuses and alienates people. The same applies to writing for your website. 

It’s not that you need to dumb down, just keep it clear and to the point. Use short sentences and common words to make your ideas easy to grasp. Don’t use an abstruse twenty-dollar word when a hard-working one-dollar word is readily available and familiar to all. 

Make Your Website Content Scannable

People don’t read online—they scan. They skim. They skip around. They jump to the bottom and then jump back up. Rarely does text get read word-for-word on any website.  

So help people out. Break your content into digestible chunks, use subheadings, and highlight key points with bullets or numbered lists. Big blocks of text can feel like an insurmountable wall to scale. Instead, you want your readers to feel like they’re strolling through a garden, able to stop and admire any flower that catches their eye. 

Make sure the key points and main themes of the page are represented in headings. Use your H1s, H2s, and H3s to create an outline for the page. The message of the page should be clear from reading just the headings.

Follow the Guidance from Google’s Helpful Content Update

The copy that you painstakingly write for your website can only do its work if people can actually find it online. Hopefully you’ve crafted messaging that answers questions and suggests why your company provides a worthwhile solution. It’s especially import that you do so if you want to be found on Google since the search giant rolled out its Helpful Content Update in September 2023.

What Is Google’s Helpful Content Update

In September 2023, Google changed its search algorithm to deliver more human-made content in the midst of the proliferation of AI-generated content. 

With the rise of AI writing abilities in platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, millions of webpages have been published that contain primarily AI-generated text. Many of these pages merely re-worded and re-organized text that was available from authoritative sources across the internet, which Google frowns on, and so Google has been downranking sites that feature such content. 

In extreme cases, Google has stopped showing offending websites in its search results altogether.

Align Website Copy With Google’s Helpful Content Update

To stay on Google’s good side and maintain healthy rankings, you merely have to employ what we’ve already been discussing here as good practice in your content writing. 

This takes hard work. But it doesn’t mean you have to revolutionize the way you create content. Ultimately the Google’s Helpful Content Update should prove a boon to reputable organizations—because with Google cracking down on unscrupulous sites that merely steal and re-package content, honest attempts to present valuable information will rise higher in the SERPs.  

Demonstrate Authority and Use AI Wisely in Website Content

The power of AI tools being what they are, no site owner is likely to write all their copy from scratch anymore. The amount of content and the frequency with which AI can help is astounding. 

AI tools are a good place to start in brainstorming topics for new content; they are a poor place to finish and merely publish exactly what is generated.   

The surest path to better and sustained search rankings is to follow the principles of E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. And AI can help you follow that path more quickly as a writing assistant. 

Implementing E-E-A-T means acting like the expert you are about your business. It means writing original, engaging content that details your history of success and clearly explains your value proposition to prospective clients. 

Following these AI-writing DOs and avoiding the DON’Ts will put you on the right track. You’ll be implementing best practices that satisfy the E-E-A-T principles that matter to human readers and to Google (especially after the Helpful Content update of September 2023).  

AI-writing DON’Ts

• Don’t post verbatim what an AI tool generates.
  • You may be putting out false information. The large language models behind AI tools are trained on text from all over the internet, not all of which is true. Plus, if you blindly post what AI gives you, you may be committing plagiarism. AI frequently provides factual information taken directly from authoritative sources, but it often does so without citing the source.
• Don’t keyword stuff.
  • You shouldn’t merely inject a particular word many times throughout your content in an attempt to get a page to rank for that word. Google’s algorithm is good at recognizing this tactic and will ding the page accordingly. 
• Don’t let AI flatten your voice.
  • You have a unique voice. Your content should reflect that. Merely posting what AI produces can lead to bland content that doesn’t entice people to take action. 

AI-writing DOs

• Polish each sentence with human input.
  • Revise, edit, rephrase, change punctuation—do something to change each sentence so that you don’t publish anything to your site that is just a regurgitation of an AI tool. 
• Regularly publish content.
  • Build a reputation in the mind of your clients (and in the view of Google’s search algorithm) that your site is an active, continual fountain of useful information. 
• Include an author bio.
  • Attribute content on your website to the person who wrote it and demonstrate their expertise. The goal is to get your people recognized by name in Google’s mind as experts. So avoid putting a byline of just contributor or company name.

Good Website Content Is Attainable

With some elbow grease and a bit of help from AI, generating quality copy for your website on a consistent basis is well within reach. 

Good content is content that people want to read. It’s content that is informative, engaging, and persuasive. It’s content that helps people solve problems, answer questions, or make decisions.

At Direct Online Marketing, we’ve helped hundreds of clients expand their footprint online with content marketing and SEO services. We’ve learned from the best (and the less than stellar) examples of web content.  

To get our thoughts on how to grow your marketing success in light of Google’s Helpful Content Update, contact DOM for a free strategic audit of your website content.

Key Takeaways

• Good website content serves both the reader’s needs and the business’s objectives, ensuring information is useful and persuasive.
• Writing with a specific goal in mind for each page helps balance user interest, business objectives, and search engine optimization.
• Understanding your audience allows you to tailor content that speaks directly to their questions, concerns, and circumstances.
• Clear, scannable, and simple website copy helps users quickly find the information they need while keeping them engaged.
• Aligning your content with Google’s Helpful Content Update by demonstrating expertise and using AI carefully ensures better search rankings and reader trust.

The post What Is Good Website Content? appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Acquiring a new company often comes with the exciting yet challenging task of integrating websites. This integration is crucial for maintaining brand consistency, user experience, and SEO value. Here’s a toolkit to guide you through a seamless website integration process post-acquisition.

Table of Contents

• Assessing the Existing Websites
• Creating a Unified Strategy for Website Migration
• SEO Considerations for a Post-Acquisition Site Migration
• Content Integration for a Post-Acquisition Site Migration
• Site Migration Design & User Experience
• Technical Aspects of a Post-Acquisition Site Migration
• Communication Plan for a Post-Acquisition Site Migration
• Experience the DOM Difference in Post-Acquisition Site Migration
• Key Takeaways for a Post-Acquisition Site Migration

Assessing the Existing Websites

Are you thinking, “I just acquired a company. What do I do with their website?” Start with a thorough audit of both websites. This audit will highlight strengths, weaknesses, and areas that require special attention. Key areas to examine include:

• Content: Identify high-performing content, redundant pieces, and gaps between the two sites.
• Design: Assess the visual appeal and consistency of design elements so that you can maintain continuity between the sites where desired.
• Functionality: Check for features that enhance user experience.
• SEO: Evaluate current rankings, backlinks, and keyword performance; there will likely be some drop off in rankings, but the more you prepare, the more you can mitigate the downturn.
• Analytics: Understand user behavior and traffic sources.

Tools like Google Analytics, Semrush, and Screaming Frog are great for assembling a detailed picture of how each site looks in these areas. This assessment lays the groundwork for a unified strategy.

If you’d like help getting a sense for where you are, DOM offers a free website audit.

Creating a Unified Strategy for Website Migration

The highest-level decision you have to make with a post-acquisition site migration is which site to migrate into which. 

Once you’ve reviewed the legacy site as well as the newly acquired site, it’s time to decide which site you’d like to migrate material to. There are various factors to consider in choosing between the two. For instance, the legacy site may be valuable for the historical record it has with search engines. A newly acquired site may have a URL that better reflects the future direction of the company and may have better search ranking potential. Perhaps one site is built in a more user-friendly content management system, like WordPress.  

Whatever you choose, you’re going to be compromising. That’s the nature of integrating websites. But that’s not a bad thing. A skillful website migration can deliver great elements of each site into one new online experience. 

Defining clear goals and objectives is the next step. What do you aim to achieve with the integrated website? Increased traffic, improved user engagement, or higher conversion rates? Involve key stakeholders from marketing, IT, and content teams to ensure all perspectives are considered. Develop a timeline with milestones to track progress and keep the project on schedule.

SEO Considerations for a Post-Acquisition Site Migration

SEO is a critical concern of any website migration. The owners of each of the extant sites have likely worked hard to optimize their site for search engines. Now you’re challenged with preserving and bettering that SEO work.

Minimize duplicate content when merging websites. Search engines like Google will penalize pages that have substantially the same content as others on the same domain (or elsewhere on the internet for that matter). So it’s important to bring pages together across the new site that talk about the same topic. Think about trying to have each page focus on one keyword. You don’t have to have multiple pages cover the same keyword in depth because those pages will then compete with each other for rankings, rather than that content ranking even more strongly when on a single page.

Implement 301 redirects from the sunsetting site to the site that will be continuing. A 301 redirect helps users and search engines find the new site. A redirect points from the old site to the new in a way that passes some of the ranking status of the old site over to the new. Plus when users ask a question that the old site used to answer well, search engines can direct them into the new site and still get their answer with the help of 301s.

Update meta tags and headers to reflect the new site structure. The meta title and heading 1 of each page are prime signals to search engines. These elements are where organizations tell sites like Google what they believe a page is about. Optimizing the meta title and headings can be a relatively quick way to show the intended structure of a migrated site. While fully updating the content of dozens of pages may take months, a little spreadsheet magic can get hundreds of meta tag in order quickly. 

Adjust internal links to increase the footprint of newly migrated pages. Google’s search engine can only crawl pages that it can find links to. Internal linking is a core activity to getting every corner of your site seen online. This is especially important to new pages that you will likely be creating during a post-acquisition site migration. Connect those pages to the rest of your site with internal links. It’s a technically simple step that can have a big impact on the visibility of new pages.

Content Integration for a Post-Acquisition Site Migration

Content is king. Integrating it effectively is crucial. Your initial assessment of each site should have revealed the highest-ranking pages. These are the ones you should focus on. Make sure that the content on those top-ranking pages is still represented on the newly integrated site, either by retaining that page whole cloth, or stitching together multiple old pages into one new page.

Create a content migration plan. This often takes the form of a spreadsheet that maps the location of valuable pages on each site to the new locations (the new URLs) where that content will be moved or combined on the new site.

When you combine pages, do give attention to the tone and style you want going forward. Likely the two extant sites won’t be in total sync. So make sure you clearly communicate the vision you have for the new site so that your content writers can edit and adjust any migrating content. 

Site Migration Design & User Experience

A post-acquisition site migration is a unique chance to make some optimizations to a website’s design and user experience. Outside of building a new site, there’s probably no better time to get buy-in from your team to make site-wide changes to branding and UX/UI design. 

When you have two sites that you now need to combine, you’ve essentially got two experiments that you can learn from. Your assessment of each site pre-migration will reveal what’s working and what’s not on each site. You’ll see what pages are driving traffic and which never convert. Just by diving into Google Analytics or Semrush, you’ll be able to make data-driven decisions. 

Branding — Unify the visual and text elements that will signal the new direction of the migrated site.

UX/UI — Take the learnings from each site and make the user experience of the new site better. 

Navigation — Make the site architecture clear and intuitive with clean, comprehensive menus. 

Technical Aspects of a Post-Acquisition Site Migration

Integrating the technical infrastructure of two websites post-acquisition is a critical phase that requires meticulous planning and execution. 

Hosting and Domains

Transferring hosting and consolidating domains are fundamental to a successful integration. Consider server performance, uptime reliability, and customer support. If the acquired company uses a different hosting provider, decide whether to migrate to one unified hosting service or maintain separate hosts. A unified approach often simplifies management and can reduce costs.

Schedule the hosting transfer during off-peak hours to reduce the impact on users. Tools like cPanel or Plesk can aid in a seamless migration, ensuring that all files, databases, and configurations are correctly transferred.

Domain consolidation is equally crucial. If the acquisition involves multiple domains, decide on a primary domain and set up 301 redirects for the others. This process helps preserve SEO value and ensures users can find the new site easily. Additionally, update DNS records to point to the new hosting environment. Make sure SSL certificates are correctly configured to maintain secure connections and user trust.

Back-End Systems

Integrating back-end systems is often the most complex part of the technical integration of multiple websites. This includes merging databases, integrating customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and ensuring compatibility of content management systems (CMS). Tools like SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) or Talend can facilitate the data migration process.

Security Measures

Implementing robust security protocols during and after the transition is vital to protect the integrated website from threats. Start with a security audit of both websites to identify vulnerabilities. During the integration, employ secure transfer methods, such as SFTP, to move files and data. Encrypt sensitive data to prevent unauthorized access. Set up firewalls and intrusion detection systems to monitor and block malicious activities.

Post-integration, ensure that the new site complies with security best practices. Regularly update software, including CMS platforms, plugins, and themes, to patch known vulnerabilities. Use strong, unique passwords for all administrative accounts and enable two-factor authentication (2FA) where possible.

By meticulously addressing these technical aspects, you ensure that the integrated website remains functional, secure, and efficient. A well-planned technical integration not only provides a solid foundation for the newly merged entity but also enhances user experience and trust in the brand.

Communication Plan for a Post-Acquisition Site Migration

You can dot all your i’s and cross all your t’s behind the scenes, but if you don’t clearly announce your new site some users may be confused. 

Sending out an email to any lists you’ve gathered from each site is one way to approach getting the word out about a site migration. This gives you a chance to reconnect with your clients and let them know that the great products, services, and experience that they are used to with the old site will still be available in an upgraded form on the new site. 

Consider putting an explanation on the homepage for a few months that calls out how this site is now the central home of once separate entities. This can help take old brand recognition and transfer it onto the new organization and the new website. 

An email blast is also a great way to stimulate traffic to the migrated site. You can announce the new site and invite users to check it out. It’s a way to refresh client relationships and to start getting user behavior data. 

Experience the DOM Difference in Post-Acquisition Site Migration

Integrating websites post-acquisition is a complex but rewarding process when done right. By following this toolkit, you can ensure a smooth transition that enhances user experience, maintains SEO value, and supports business goals.

For expert assistance with website migration and integration, consider the website migration services offered by Direct Online Marketing. We have the experience and expertise to guide you through every step of the process.

These are best practices we carry out with each website migration:

• Review your site for keywords in the top 100 positions on Google
• Compare your site to competitors for keyword gaps
• Analyze traffic volume and project volume post-migration
• Note technical issues that limit the reach of old and new sites

Your website is where you showcase your goods and services. Launching a new site is always a bit nerve-wracking. You know you only get one chance to make a first impression. 

Careful planning can ease your site launch tensions. 

At DOM, hundreds of companies have trusted us to guide them through launching new sites. We are well-acquainted with the meticulous prep work that makes for a successful launch. And we’ve helped sites recover rankings after shaky website redesigns. 

If you need help transitioning your site, consider our Website Migration Services. 

Key Takeaways for a Post-Acquisition Site Migration

• Conduct a thorough audit of both websites to identify strengths, weaknesses, and key areas that need attention, such as content, design, functionality, SEO, and analytics.
• Use tools like Google Analytics, Semrush, and Screaming Frog to gather detailed insights and establish a foundation for a unified strategy.
• Decide which site to migrate into the other by considering factors like historical SEO value, future company direction, and the usability of the content management system.
• Minimize duplicate content, implement 301 redirects, update meta tags and headers, and adjust internal links to preserve and enhance SEO during the integration.
• Integrate valuable content from both sites, create a content migration plan, and ensure consistency in tone and style for the newly integrated website.

The post Your Post-Acquisition Website Integration Toolkit appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Local SEO is a potent way to drive people to your physical business location. It also helps ensure that your business appears real, legitimate, and authoritative within the Google search results of nearby potential customers.

Consider these 5 things when optimizing your website for Local SEO in 2022:

Local SEO Thing #1: Optimize For Voice Search

No one thinks that customers always and only search for things with their voice (although 41% of users now search using their voice once per day). However, we strongly suspect that the way your customers search for your product or services is closer to the way they speak; people tend to search with natural language (phrases or meaningful sentence fragments) more so than with the keyword-only searches typical in the past.

When someone is out on the town and feeling hungry for pizza, they do not typically Google “Pizza.”

Instead, they will look for ‘Pizza Near Me’ or ‘Best Pizza In [CITY NAME].’

Optimizing your site and content for the way people actually look for things online will help you rank better for these localized searches. It will also futureproof your site for the continual growth of voice assistants.

For more talk on voice search, check out How to Optimize for Voice Search.

Local SEO Thing #2: Be Consistently Consistent

The little details matter when it comes to Local SEO. Presenting your business information consistently—especially the physical address—is crucial because Google assesses your legitimacy through such consistency.

It may sound like nitpicking, but if your business is located at 123 North Christmas Ave, then you should always refer to it as such—and never 123 N. Christmas Ave. Be consistent with your location information because it helps reduce issues with local listings, and it shows the bots you care about your local business data.

Local SEO Thing #3: Actually, this is Hyperlocal SEO

You don’t just live in your city, you live in a neighborhood. So do your customers.

When optimizing your content for hyperlocal SEO, make sure you include the neighborhood you are located in and also the locations your customers may live, work, or shop in. This helps drive local searches including those specific keywords, as the algorithms will understand the local nature of your content and deliver it to local searchers.

If you have a business in Bushwick, Brooklyn, your business is located THERE—not just the more general New York City. Optimizing for all three—Bushwick, Brooklyn, and New York City—will net you the best possible ranking potential.

Thing #4: Own Your Listing

Your Google Business Profile listing is one of the most important tools in driving local traffic online. Make full use of it.

If you haven’t already claimed your listing, do so. If you have, then optimize! Here are five easy to complete areas you can use to improve your Google Business Profile listing.

1. Flesh out your business description to include language that will drive a user to want to engage with your business.
2. Showcase your products directly within your listing.
3. Add photos. Photos help boost engagement on your local listings.
4. Use the Posts functionality of Google Business Profile; it’s like a micro-blog for your local listing page that gives information to users directly within the search results and allows you to promote sales and products to local searchers.
5. When it comes to your Primary Category within GMB make sure you choose wisely. If you are a pizza place, make sure you choose the category Pizza Restaurant and not just Restaurant. This attention to detail is necessary for Google to understand when to show your business over another location.

The more you put care into your business information online, the better it will likely perform in search.

Thing #5: Show Authority

It’s not enough just to rank locally. If potential customers have doubts that you are a reputable business, they are not likely to spend their money on your goods or services. To satisfy the need for credibility, you need a local review strategy.

Encourage your customers to leave 5-star reviews when they are satisfied with your business. Whether this is via a card you hand out to a customer or through a follow-up email, reviews are a major factor in convincing a local customer to make a purchase. They will have a big impact on your local performance.

Once you have reviews, show them off. Use plugins to feature the reviews on your website, and share every good review you get on social media. Respond to the reviews you get from customers on Google and Facebook. It is this attention to detail and care that may sway another customer to your side. And it shows local searchers that you are to be trusted.

When it comes to local SEO, no one of these tactics alone will bring your business success within the search engines; rather, a finely optimized and cultivated combination of the 5 areas above can help drive traffic with higher buyer intent.

At DOM, we’re local SEO wizards and more than ready to get you optimized for local traffic. Feel free to reach out today and let’s put together a plan that works for your SEO needs.

The post How to Do Local SEO in 2024 appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Table of Contents

• Crawlers Struggle to See JavaScript Elements on Websites
• JavaScript Interferes with SEO
• Slow Page Load Times Due to JavaScript
• Poor Mobile Experience Due to JavaScript
• Optimize Your Site to Handle JavaScript for Better SEO
• Pre-render HTML to Avoid JavaScript Issues
• Code Basic Content in HTML, Not JavaScript
• Set Pages to Defer Loading JavaScript
• Test for JavaScript Problems with these Approaches
• Get a Google-eye View of Your Website
• Site Performance Tools to Reveal JavaScript
• Schedule Continual JavaScript Maintenance
• Experience the DOM Difference
• Key Takeaways

Crawlers Struggle to See JavaScript Elements on Websites

Imagine you’ve built a stunning site. It’s got captivating visuals, smooth animations, and interactive elements that make it a joy to use. There’s a potential hitch, though. All that fancy JavaScript might be hiding your website’s true value from search engines.

What’s the matter? Search engines rely on crawlers that scan your website’s code to understand and index its content. If those crawlers can’t see past the layers of JavaScript, your website’s hidden gem—the informative blog posts, detailed product descriptions, or compelling calls to action—might be invisible to the very audience you’re trying to reach.

Make Sure Your Site Is Visible

The core of the issue is this: JavaScript is great at making websites dynamic and engaging. It can also render content dynamically, meaning it’s built on the fly rather than existing as static text on the page. This dynamic approach can create a roadblock for search engine crawlers, essentially locking them out of the valuable content behind the JavaScript code. The result? Lower search engine rankings, reduced website traffic, and missed opportunities to connect with potential customers.

JavaScript Interferes with SEO

JavaScript has become a cornerstone of modern web design, allowing developers to create interactive, dynamic websites that engage users. However, as essential as JavaScript is for enhancing user experience, it can also pose significant challenges for search engine optimization (SEO). 

If not managed properly, JavaScript can hide your best content from search engines, preventing it from being indexed and hurting your search rankings. You need to balance the benefits of JavaScript with effective SEO practices to ensure your content remains visible and accessible.

Slow Page Load Times Due to JavaScript

Consider an eCommerce site loaded with pictures, interactive carousels, and various scripts that make the shopping experience delightful. However, these same scripts can significantly slow down the page load times. Slow pages frustrate users and are penalized by search engines, which prefer fast-loading sites. 

Excessive JavaScript can bog down your site, harming both user experience and search rankings. You should especially keep in mind Google’s Core Web Vitals. These are elements of page performance that Google cares about because they want users to have good experiences when using Google to navigate the internet.

The health metrics that Google tracks include Largest Contentful Paint, which is a measure of how long it takes for the largest elements on a page to load. This is often an image or video. It’s a way to gauge how long it takes for a webpage to be enticing and user-friendly. And seconds are crucial. Think about it. When was the last time you waited around for 10 seconds for a webpage to load. You probably moved on. Potential customers will do the same.  

Poor Mobile Experience Due to JavaScript

Mobile users expect fast and smooth performance. A mobile user visiting your site may encounter sluggish performance due to heavy JavaScript. Slow load times and unresponsive pages can drive away users and hurt your SEO, as search engines prioritize mobile-friendly websites. Ensuring your site performs well on mobile devices is crucial for maintaining good search engine rankings.

Google is moving more and more toward prizing the mobile experience of a website over the desktop experience. In fact, here at DOM, we’ve been hearing that sites with a sufficiently poor mobile experience may not be indexed by Google at all. If the search giant doesn’t think your site will provide an industry-standard user experience—in terms of navigability and load speed on mobile—you may be shut out.

Get a Mobile Experience Consultation

Optimize Your Site to Handle JavaScript for Better SEO

If you think you might be losing out on search visibility due to JavaScript, you don’t have to chuck out your whole site and start over. There are changes you can make to get search engines to see you. 

Pre-render HTML to Avoid JavaScript Issues

One effective way to ensure search engines index your content is through server-side rendering (SSR). SSR involves pre-rendering HTML on the server side before sending it to the browser, ensuring that search engines see a fully loaded page. This approach can significantly improve the visibility of your content. Implementing SSR for key content areas ensures that important information is always accessible to search engines.

Think of SSR as a translator for crawlers. It essentially pre-renders the content with JavaScript on the server, creating a static version that search engines can easily understand and index.

Code Basic Content in HTML, Not JavaScript

Progressive enhancement is a strategy where the basic content and functionality of a website are built using HTML, ensuring that it’s accessible to all users, regardless of their browser capabilities. JavaScript is then layered on top to enhance the experience. This ensures that your core content remains visible and usable even if JavaScript fails to load. 

By building your site with a solid HTML foundation, you make sure that essential content is always accessible to search engines.

Set Pages to Defer Loading JavaScript

Lazy loading is a technique that defers the loading of non-essential JavaScript and media until they are needed. This can significantly improve page load times, making your site faster and more responsive. For instance, images and scripts can be loaded as the user scrolls down the page, rather than all at once. Implementing lazy loading can help improve user experience and SEO by reducing initial load times.

Again, search engines process HTML much more efficiently than JavaScript. So delaying when the JavaScript of a page loads means that the HTML will be first in the queue to show up to crawlers, and thus the central content of a page will be communicated quickly to the crawler and you’ll have a better chance of ranking well.

Get My No-obligation Consultation

Test for JavaScript Problems with these Approaches

You don’t have to be a developer to get a grasp on whether your site is being impacted by JavaScript. The tools and methods here let the non-coding among us look under the hood and understand what’s going on. 

Get a Google-eye View of Your Website

Google Search Console offers a suite of tools to help you understand how Google views your site. The URL Inspection tool, for example, allows you to see how Googlebot renders your pages. Regularly using this tool to monitor and test your important pages can help you identify and fix visibility issues caused by JavaScript.

Site Performance Tools to Reveal JavaScript

Tools like Google Lighthouse provide insights into your site’s performance, including page speed and other SEO factors. These tools can help you evaluate how JavaScript impacts your site’s load times and overall performance. By optimizing JavaScript and other resources, you can improve both user experience and search engine rankings.

Schedule Continual JavaScript Maintenance 

Balancing the use of JavaScript with effective SEO practices is crucial for ensuring that your best content remains visible and accessible to both users and search engines. Regularly auditing your site for potential JavaScript SEO issues and implementing best practices can help maintain a dynamic user experience without compromising search engine visibility.

Remember, a well-optimized website is like a well-lit shop window – it showcases your best products and entices potential customers to step inside. By ensuring search engines can see the true value of your content, you’re opening the door to a wider audience and boosting your website’s overall success.

Experience the DOM Difference

Ready to make sure your website’s content is easy for search engines to process?  Consider a consultation with the experts at Direct Online Marketing. 

We can help you choose the right approach and ensure that your website is making a good impression with your customers. DOM provides assistance in optimizing your site for search engines while maintaining a dynamic user experience. Our team can help you navigate the complexities of JavaScript and SEO.

Key Takeaways

• Search engines struggle to index content hidden behind JavaScript, potentially reducing your site’s visibility and search rankings.
• Heavy use of JavaScript can slow page load times, negatively impacting user experience and SEO performance.
• Poor mobile performance due to excessive JavaScript can harm your site’s search engine rankings, as mobile-friendly websites are prioritized.
• Implementing server-side rendering (SSR) and progressive enhancement can help ensure essential content is accessible to search engines.
• Tools like Google Search Console and Google Lighthouse can help identify and address JavaScript-related SEO issues.

The post Don’t Let All That Nice JavaScript Hide Your Best Content appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

As highly capable digital marketers, we have an unprecedented number of tools to help us do our jobs. Last time we checked (a few minutes ago), the most popular marketing automation software, coming in with around 20% of the market share, was Adobe’s Marketo platform. If you have anything whatsoever to do with digital marketing, you know how prevalent Marketo is. Most implementations are centered around their handy landing pages. So most of our Marketo SEO tips are most relevant for the landing page templates, though you can use that platform for other things, too.

Just like anything else you want your customer to find via a search engine, your Marketo pages need to be optimized for SEO. Here are our top tips to get the most out of your SEO for Marketo.

Marketo SEO Tip 1: Just do the SEO thing.

You know the thing we’re talking about: optimize that page for search engines! If you want to know more about how to do that, we have a whole bunch of resources to help you. Trust us, we’re experts. In fact, below is a list of blog posts we’ve written over the years to help you out with some of the SEO basics.

• Image SEO: Does Alt Text Still Matter?
• Internal Links: How Much Do They Affect SEO?
• Why SEO Titles and Meta Descriptions Are Still Important
• Does Duplicate Content Affect SEO?

That said, if you’re up to speed already on the SEO basics, this post is for more advanced users who really want to squeeze the most value they can out of their Marketo assets.

Marketo SEO Tip 2: Learn how to edit html.

We’re not trying to be glib (well, maybe a little), but you will get a lot of mileage out of the simple small step of popping open a copy of HTML Programming for Stupid People, or whatever those books are called, and teaching yourself some basic coding. It’s not difficult—html is definitely one of the easier programming languages to learn—and you’ll enable yourself to do stuff like these sub-tips.

Need a reason to learn to code HTML? Here’s why you should learn to code HTML in case you want some reasons why.

Marketo SEO Sub-Tip A: Add canonical links to your header tags.

Don’t be alarmed, it’s easier than it sounds. You can freely edit the HTML of the Marketo headers (everything between the <head> tags on a webpage). One of the most useful ones is the canonical link. We use canonical links all the time as a way of telling search engines that potentially duplicate content is intentional and need not be indexed. Google famously dislikes duplicate content, and we all know what happens to content Google doesn’t like.

It gets ranked lower. That’s all.

You won’t lose your listing, but your organic searches will suffer. This is especially true for Marketo pages because they tend to multiply based on the SKUs, products, or services being marketed, and similar page content can trigger false duplicate flags to Google’s crawlers. That’s the opposite of what we want.

Marketo SEO Sub-Tip B: Add Google Analytics code and various pixels to the header tag manually.

While you’re editing the header, you might as well take this step while you’re there. By “manually” we mean “by hand,” as in “you have to code it yourself” because Marketo doesn’t let you do it as easily as other web design interfaces (like WordPress, for example). You can get the embed codes from the websites you use to track whatever it is you’re tracking, and your little bit of coding knowledge will come in very handy.

Marketo SEO Tip 3: Make sure your gated content is protected by noindex tags.

One of the most useful techniques for a digital marketer is to put valuable content behind a conversion link, like a newsletter signup. This lets us get something valuable in exchange for something valuable, which your gated content most definitely should be. But if that valuable content is visible to Google, then simple searches can bypass your gate and your hard work goes unrewarded.

Make sure to add the noindex tag in the headers of the pages that host your content, not the landing page itself. That’s a great way to make sure Google loses track of your page, which, again, is the opposite of what we want. Don’t take our word for it—check out Google’s own knowledge base about noindex tags.

Want to get more in-depth on our tips for gated content besides making sure search engines can’t crawl it? Check out our definitive guide to gated content.

Marketo SEO Tip 4: Link to your landing pages on your website.

This could probably be included in Tip 1, technically, but we see it so often that it merits its own mention. The tendency is to pretend like your landing pages aren’t part of your website’s ecology, but that’s not doing your SEO any favors. We’ve already seen how much Google likes links, so don’t be afraid to link it in your site navigation, in blog posts, wherever your favorite links live.

Marketo SEO Tip 5: Make sure you’re secure.

You have to make certain you’re using the https prefix with Marketo, especially when you’re linking to it from your website. Not only does Google prefer secure pages, but a link from a secure site to an insecure one might raise a flag on your customer’s browser. And flags are bad.

Marketo SEO Services

Those might be our most important MarketoSEO tips, but we could go on. If you’re using Marketo then SEO is extremely important for driving leads and sales to your website. Luckily, we’re experienced in optimizing Marketo sites and helping drive growth for your Marketo stores with our SEO services. Schedule a free consultation today and maybe we’ll share them with you.

The post SEO For Marketo: 5 Advanced Tips For Marketo Success In 2024 appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Table of Contents

• What is Website Indexing?
• Checking Whether a Page is Indexed
• Create Engaging Pages that Are Worth Indexing
• Guidelines for Compelling Pages that Rank High
• Write for your (human) audience
• Write Original Material
• Be Comprehensive
• Use Headings to Provide a Roadmap
• Demonstrate Expertise
• How to Make It Easier For Your Site to Get Indexed
• Organize Your Site with Internal Links
• Keep Important Information in Search Engine-Friendly Elements
• Create a Sitemap
• Set Up Redirects After a Migration
• Check for NoIndex Tags
• Experience the DOM Difference
• Key Takeaways

Getting your site indexed by search engines is a crucial step in reaching people and compelling them to take action. 

What Is Website Indexing On Google?

Website indexing refers to getting the pages of a website acknowledged by a search engine. Once a search engine acknowledges or indexes a site, the search engine can direct people to that site when they type in a relevant search term.

Indexing is kind of like getting your bicycle shop listed in the phone book (if anyone still remembers those yellow and white tomes). 

• You rent space in a building to display your mountain bikes and road bikes—this is like renting space on a server to host your website. 
• Then you raise a flag to let the yellow pages know that you’d like to add the phone number of your bike shop to their rolls—this is equivalent to signaling to search engines that they should index your site. 
• Finally the phone book adds your business under the sports & recreation section, and calls start coming in. Similarly, when a search engine crawls your site and indexes your pages, people will then start being directed to your site when they search for what you do.  

Indexing, put another way, is making your website public. It’s putting out the word that you are open for business. It’s inviting people to come check out what you’ve got going on. 

Getting pages indexed is also the start of having them ranked. That is, when a search engine indexes a page, it is making that page available to searches, and the search engine is also ranking how relevant this new page is in comparison to the library of pages that have already been indexed by that search engine. 

Getting your bike shop in the phone book is necessary to selling bikes. However, you’ve got to make your shop stand out above the competition to get people to consider your bikes rather than theirs.  

Checking Whether a Page Is Indexed On Google

Now that you know a bit more about indexing, you may want to see how much of your website is indexed by a particular search engine.  

In Google you can use site search syntax in the search bar to check. For example, enter this text  “site:directom.com” into a Google search bar and you’ll see dozens and dozens of pages on the website of Direct Online Marketing.

That gives you the overview of your site’s indexing. To see whether a specific page is indexed, you’ll need to do something different. 

To see whether a particular page has been indexed by Google, you need to set up a Google Search Console account and then use the URL inspection tool to check the page in question. 

Setting up Google Search Console is worth the time. It helps you understand numerous things about the health of your pages and their prominence in search rankings. Indexing is just one bit of information that Google Search Console provides. 

Create Engaging Pages that Are Worth Indexing On Google

Indexing isn’t to be feared. It’s part of what it means to be visible online. 

But merely getting your pages indexed is no guarantee that anyone will ever see them. 

You must create content that people actually want to read if you want your pages to rank well in search engine results pages. 

Search engines rank pages based on how users interact with them. More time spent on a page usually correlates to better rankings, for instance. More links from a page to other authoritative pages about the same topic typically makes for better rankings. More words on a page often leads to it ranking higher than a sparse page on a similar subject. 

These quantitative measures are attempts to capture quality. 

• Why are there more words on one page than another?
  • Because that page covers the topic in detail. 
• Why would a page have links to other pages?
  • Because that page cites sources and data that support its claims. 
• Why would someone spend more time on a page?
  • Because that page answers a question clearly and fully.  

Write substantive content. That’s how to make the most of indexing. 

Think of it from the search engine’s perspective. Google wants people to have a good experience when they search on Google. That is, the search engine wants to deliver pages that people engage with. If people get what they’re looking for in just a few clicks, they’re likely to continue using Google. If the search experience is arduous, users may move on to a different search engine to get their answers. 

How To Get Your Website Indexed On Google

Consider these guidelines to create pages that engage users and rank well in search engines.

Write for your (human) audience. 

• Don’t try to meet abstract criteria that are supposedly favored by search engines. This means crafting sentences in a straight-forward, conversational style. Explain any jargon you need to introduce in a way that any reasonably educated person would understand. And don’t artificially stuff your content with keywords. If your writing becomes awkward and bloated with unnecessary repetitions of the same term, people and search engines will take notice.  

Write original material. 

• Search engines downrank newly indexed pages that merely parrot what other established pages already say. Even when your topic isn’t novel, you can still provide a unique perspective from your personal experience. 

Be comprehensive. 

• Create meaty pages. Describe the topic at hand in detail. Use examples to illustrate what you’re trying to say and to give the uninitiated a way in to understanding the topic. Come at the topic from multiple angles. Anticipate questions and answer them. Think about making your page a one-stop-shop for getting answers.

Use headings to provide a roadmap. 

• Include headings in your content that read like a map of where the article is going. Descriptive headings help break up robust content into digestible chunks. They can help the reader understand how a particular paragraph relates to the overall message of the whole page. Aim to make your headings a good summary of the page, if someone were to read only them and no body text. 

Demonstrate expertise. 

• Highlight why people should trust you or take the action you advise. This might mean displaying industry-specific knowledge. It might mean providing a compelling interpretation of a well-known phenomenon. It might mean providing a transparent analysis of your product’s strengths and weaknesses when compared with a competitor’s.

Make the most of your indexed pages by crafting pages that engage people. 

How To Make It Easier for Your Site To Get Indexed On Google

Once you have authoritative content laid out on your pages, there are more technical areas to focus on that can help those pages get indexed. 

Organize your site with internal links. 

Make sure your site’s navigation is intuitive. The main navigation menu, specifically, should cover the primary topics on your site. It will probably be best to incorporate links to common menu pages like About Us and Contact Us. Savvy users will expect to be able to navigate to these pages quickly. Furthermore, you should connect relevant parts of your site with internal links. For example, a page about repairing bicycle brakes might contain links to a page about repairing bike tires.   

Keep important information in search engine-friendly elements. 

Navigation menus should be coded in HTML, not JavaScript. JavaScript may make for intriguing animated experiences, but search engines don’t see JavaScript for the most part. You should also avoid putting important text within GIFs, videos, or images. And when you do use these elements, be sure to apply alt text to make it clear to search engines what they are.

Create a sitemap. 

A sitemap is a description of the organization of a website’s pages. Whether you do it yourself or you hire SEO services, you can put a sitemap in something called the robots.txt file on your site. Then, you can proactively submit that sitemap to a search engine; this helps the search engine crawl your site and find pages to index because it now has a map of the paths and roads around your site. 

Set up redirects after a migration. 

A site that’s been moved to a new domain can sometimes struggle to get as much traffic as it used to. This can be because a search engine crawled the URLs on the old domain and found that those pages were temporarily unavailable, which is often the case in the midst of a site migration. A 301 redirect is a signal to search engines to examine the page on the new domain, rather than the old. 

Check for “noindex” tags.

When you’ve written good content and worked through the suggestions above but a page still isn’t being indexed, a noindex tag may be the culprit. A noindex tag is an instruction for search engines not to include a page in their library of searchable pages. Check your content management system; there’s often a button you can toggle to remove noindex from pages that you intend to be public-facing. 

Experience the DOM Difference

Has your site been crawled and indexed? Have pages gone before the public in a less-than-ideal state? Not sure what’s visible and what’s not online?

At DOM, we have the knowledge to advise you on your website needs and the skills to implement technical optimizations. Get in touch for a no-obligation assessment of opportunities to grow your web presence. 

Key Takeaways About Google Indexing

• Definition of Indexing: Website indexing is the process of search engines taking note of a site’s pages, allowing them to be displayed in search results.
• Quality Content Is King: High-quality, comprehensive, and original content that engages readers improves a page’s ranking and visibility in search engine results.
• Technical Optimization: Creating sitemaps, internal links, and search engine-friendly navigation enhances the chances of proper indexing.
• Google Search Console: Setting up Google Search Console provides valuable insights into page health, indexing, and search ranking.
• User-Centric Writing: Writing for your audience with straightforward language, structured headings, and clear expertise makes content more engaging and improves search rankings.

The post Oops! My Site’s Indexed! Now What? appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.