How To Do SEO For SearchGPT

Face it: AI isn’t leaving – no matter how much we hate it. So, what can we do now? Optimizing your website for ChatGPT is increasingly important these days if you want to stay competitive. With so many people using AI for quick answers, making sure your site is friendly for these tools can boost your visibility big time. By structuring your content clearly and including relevant keywords, you make it easier for ChatGPT to pull accurate information from your site. This means more accurate and helpful responses for users, leading to more traffic to your site. Plus, having well-organized, AI-optimized content can improve your overall search engine ranking. In a nutshell, a little effort in optimization goes a long way in staying ahead of the curve. Direct Online Marketing has even launched AI Marketing Services ourselves. Read on to learn about how you can optimize your content to appear more within AI Search Results.

How To Optimize Your Website For ChatGPT…. And How To Use ChatGPT To Optimize Your Website

As OpenAI preps to launch their own competitor to Google, the concept of optimizing your website for ChatGPT or the OpenAI search engine becomes even more important. Below is our detailed information on how to do SEO for ChatGPT, whether you are a novice or an advanced web user. The most important thing to remember through all of this is:

Why should YOUR website be considered an authority?

On that note, continue on to learn more about how you can optimize your website for ChatGPT and the OpenAI Search Engine competitor to Google.

How Can I Optimize My Website? A Quick Guide

First, The Basics: How To Optimize Your Website?

“But, how do I optimize my website?” you may be asking. If you haven’t even started SEOing your website the old fashioned way, you may be getting ahead of yourself trying to understand SEO for ChatGPT and the new OpenAI search/AI system they are calling 4o.

So, let’s quickly cover How To Optimize Your Website

How Do You Do SEO For Your Website?

Optimizing your website for Google search – and other search engines – involves several key strategies that enhance content and technical aspects through updates to your site’s code, content, and structure.

First, you need to make sure your content is high-quality, relevant, and keyword-optimized. This is key!

Conduct thorough keyword research to understand what terms your target audience is using and incorporate these naturally into your content.

Use compelling titles, meta descriptions, and headers to make your content more appealing to search engines and users.

Regularly updating your content to keep it fresh and relevant also plays a crucial role in maintaining and improving your search rankings.

“How Do I Optimize My Website For SEO?” – Technical Talk:

On the technical side of things, make sure that your website is mobile-friendly and loads quickly, as these factors significantly impact your search rankings. The slower the site – the worse your traffic will be, the worse your rankings will be, and the worse your conversions will be. Speed is essential.

Implementing clean, efficient code and using responsive design principles can improve user experience and search engine visibility.

Additionally, optimize your website’s structure with a clear hierarchy and internal linking, making it easier for search engines to crawl and index your pages.

Using tools like Google Search Console can help you monitor your site’s performance and identify any issues that need addressing.

So, now that you have the basics on how to optimize your website, lets ask the big question… How Do You Do SEO For ChatGPT?

How To Use ChatGPT For SEO?

Using ChatGPT for SEO opens up new ways to streamline content creation and keyword research.

ChatGPT can generate optimized content, such as blog posts, meta descriptions, and product descriptions, that integrate relevant keywords naturally. By inputting prompts with specific topics and target keywords, ChatGPT can deliver content that ranks well while maintaining readability. Additionally, it can assist in ideation by offering suggestions for new content topics based on trending keywords or gaps in existing content. This allows marketers to develop high-quality, SEO-friendly content quickly.

Another powerful way to use ChatGPT in SEO is through automating repetitive tasks like updating title tags or generating variations of content for A/B testing. ChatGPT can create multiple iterations of meta tags, titles, and headings, enabling easy testing to find what works best for SEO performance. It also supports competitive analysis by reviewing content from competitors and providing insights on how to improve your own site’s SEO strategy.

How To Optimize Your Website For ChatGPT

How To Do SEO For ChatGPT?

AI is finally here, and it is named ChatGPT. And it’s smart. Wicked smart.

Gone are the days of AOL Instant Messenger chatbots – today’s AI is intelligent, witty, and well-read. 

Coming up in AI responses to queries, especially those from ChatGPT, is increasingly becoming a focus for SEOs and digital marketers this year. But how do you optimize your website for ChatGPT and other AI bots?

In this article, we will go right to the artificial intelligence engine itself, as well as provide some general tips for search engine optimization that can help future-proof your website for the new advancements in AI that are around the corner.

Where Does ChatGPT Get Its Data?

Currently, ChatGPT does not scour the web on it’s own – it is fed data, and it uses that data to learn. While that data IS from the Internet and many websites, it is currently out of date (it is from 2021), but it is in the process of being updated soon with current 2023 data.

When this happens, it will take the information it was fed and update its answering capabilities, including references to websites within its search and query results. 

“The training data for ChatGPT was cut off in 2021, so it is up to two years outdated as of 2023. However, it still has a vast amount of information on a wide range of topics, and its training data includes text from diverse sources such as websites, books, and articles, which provides a broad base of general knowledge. But it is important to keep in mind that some information and events that have taken place since the training data was cut off might not be reflected in its responses.”

ChatGPT

The current understanding is that if you rank well for various queries in the new set of data and the continuous flow of data following, you will show up more frequently in the results ChatGPT gives to its users.

But how can you do that?

How To Do SEO for ChatGPT

According to the prompt I asked ChatGPT in the development of this article…

“As ChatGPT is an AI language model developed by OpenAI, it is not possible to optimize a website specifically for it. However, here are a few general tips for creating a website that is friendly for language models and search engines:

How To Optimize For ChatGPT

1. Again, just like we said above – use clear, concise, and well-structured content: This will help language models and search engines understand the content on your website and provide more accurate and relevant results.
2. Utilize headings and subheadings: This makes it easier for language models and search engines to understand the structure of your content.
3. Include relevant keywords: Use keywords relevant to your content in your headings, subheadings, and throughout your content to help search engines understand the topic of your website.
4. Provide high-quality, original content: Search engines and language models prefer websites with high-quality, original content over sites with low-quality or duplicate content.
5. Make sure your website is easily accessible: Ensure that your website is easily accessible to both users and search engines by avoiding broken links and fixing technical issues.

These tips can help ensure that your website is well-structured, easily understood, and provides a positive user experience, which can improve its overall visibility and ranking in search engine results.”

ChatGPT, 7/30/2024

Sure, we believe you.

To Optimize For AI, Optimize For Voice Search

One of the clearest understandings we have regarding the information given back by ChatGPT is how much it seems to prefer natural human language, and when questions are both Asked and Answered within the content. This presents strategies akin to how an SEO or webmaster may optimize their website for voice assistants, like Google Home and Amazon Alexa. 

“Optimizing your website for AI tools like ChatGPT is crucial in today’s digital landscape. By structuring content clearly and incorporating relevant keywords, businesses can enhance their online visibility, ensuring that AI-driven platforms accurately represent their information and connect them with the right audience.” – Billy Wright, Lead Digital Marketing Strategist at Direct Online Marketing.

How Do You Optimize Your Website For Voice Search?

Here are some tips on how to best optimize your website for voice search and voice assistants.

Use conversational language: Voice search queries tend to be more conversational and longer than text-based searches, so use language that is natural and easily understood.

Optimize for local search: Voice search is often used for local queries, so make sure your website is optimized for local search by including your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) on your website.

Utilize structured data: Use schema markup to help search engines understand the content on your website, including your business’s NAP and information about products and services.

Provide quick answers: Voice search is often used to find quick answers to questions, so make sure your website provides concise and accurate answers to common queries.

Make sure your website is mobile-friendly: Many voice searches are conducted on mobile devices, so it’s important to make sure your website is mobile-friendly and easily accessible on all devices.

By following these little tips, you can help improve your website’s visibility in voice search results and provide a better user experience for voice search users.

Get more tips from our team on how to optimize for voice search by checking out this resource, How to Optimize for Voice Search.

How Do You Use ChatGPT As A Search Engine? – The Future Of SearchGPT

Will ChatGPT replace Google in the future? It’s the question many webmasters, digital marketers, and SEOs keep asking – but no one really knows what’s in store. ChatGPT has its own canned response to questions about it’s future as a potential search engine, stating, 

“While OpenAI may choose to develop other models with web crawling capabilities in the future, ChatGPT itself is not designed to crawl the web.” 

ChatGPT

For an SEO like me? That’s doublespeak for Coming Soon.

UPDATE: It did come soon.

In fact, ChatGPT Search now exists and it delivers results very similar to Google, but not the same as Google.
And guess what? You can do SEO for it….

A Digital Marketing Agency That Does SEO For SearchGPT

For more information on how you can get your website optimized with AI Marketing Services, contact us today.

Note: This article was updated January 15, 2025 to include new information including a link to Direct Online Marketing’s AI Marketing Services page.

The post How To SEO Your Website For ChatGPT In 2025 appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Why Should You Link Your Google Ads Console to Google Search Console?

Um, because you’ll get more data. DUH!

By connecting Google Search Console (GSC) with Google Ads you get a snapshot glance of paid vs. organic keywords. You will get data at the Search Query and Keyword levels so you can see the incremental value of paid vs. organic terms.

This should be really great news for paid advertisers and organic search campaign leaders alike. Google’s spin is that you can see new, organic opportunities and new, paid search opportunities. Equally, you can see – in a really simple report – where you are performing well organically and make adjustments to drop paid search bids or pause keywords altogether if you’re on a limited budget. This is especially great news whether you’re doing both yourself or if you’re working in an agency that provides both PPC and SEO to the same client.

How To Create a Google Search Console Linked Account in Google Ads

• Tools Needed: Google Search Console, Google Ads Console
• Time Required: 10 minutes
• Estimated Cost: $0

Similar to linking Google Ads to Analytics, click on the gear icon in the upper right corner, and select Linked Accounts. You’ll see an option for Search Console. Follow these steps:

1. 1. Access ‘Linked accounts.’ Click on the Tools button on the top navigation of your Google Ads dashboard. Clicking this will produce a dropdown of 20 different options. Click the link titled  “Linked Accounts” under the Settings section.
   2. Select ‘Search Console’ from your list of options. Since first releasing this feature in 2013, Google has added several other options under the “Linked Accounts” heading. Search Console is one of the last options in the list, located in the 9th position of available options – fifth row, right-hand side. Click the link for ‘DETAILS’.
      
   3. Click the link titled “LINK” to launch Search Console. Pretty self-explanatory, we think.
      
   4. Enter your website address, and click “CONTINUE”. Again, we also find this step to be pretty self-explanatory. One note of caution: make sure your domain names in each account are a match. For instance, if you use https:// and www in front of your domain name in Ads, make sure you select the Search Console account with the same naming convention. You are using https, right? Of course you are.
      
   5. Voila! Your Search Console account is now linked to your Ads account. Depending on whether or not this is successful for you, you might receive one of the following results from your attempt at linking these accounts.
      
      Here is what you should see if your Search Console account was successfully linked to Google Ads.

If you have already verified ownership of your site in Google Search Console – congratulations, you’re all set!

If you haven’t claimed your site, simply click the blue link for “Claim it at Search Console.” This will direct you to Google Search Console and provide the recommended methods for verifying your site.

Need more help? Check the Google Help article here or contact a friendly DOM digital advertising specialist (link below).

The Paid & Organic Report: The Mother Lode of Google Performance Data

The Paid & Organic Report can be found under the Predefined reports tab (formerly known as the Dimensions tab). By the way, if you’re not familiar with this section of Google Ads, take some time and play around. There are so many insightful reports here.

To get to the Paid & Organic report, navigate to Basic > Paid & Organic.

Check out the screenshots below. Although the search terms and other personal information has been blurred out, below is a synopsis of what you’ll see in the paid and organic report:

“This table shows how your paid and organic results performed for every search that triggered an ad or organic listing.”

The click details and other data updates once a day and we do not believe that you can see historical data, rather it starts accruing once you link the accounts. However, our Ads reps were not certain about this at the original time of publication. Over the last five years, we have confirmed that as such :).

Key Takeaways on Connecting Google Ads to Search Console

• Linking Google Search Console with Google Ads provides valuable organic search data that can improve paid search campaign performance.
• This integration allows you to identify keywords performing well organically and adjust your paid search bids accordingly for better budget management.
• By seeing both paid and organic data side-by-side, advertisers can make more informed budget allocation and keyword bidding decisions.
• The combined data helps you understand the incremental value of running paid ads alongside organic listings for the same search queries.
• This integrated reporting reveals instances where paid ads are essential to support weak organic rankings, and where organic visibility is strong enough to recommend lowering ad spend.

Conclusion

Google keeps giving us more and more reporting features from within the Google Ads interface. You can see competitive data, analytic data, funnel data, data…..data…..data! Now there’s even more! It’s almost like Google wants you to be successful.

Hell yeah, they do! We love that they’re tying all their properties together. Instead of being an outlet mall, Google Ads has evolved into being a one-stop-shop.

If you found this article helpful, you might want to check out one of these other posts on getting the most out of Google Search Console for your SEO efforts.

• How To Make the Google Knowledge Panel Work For You
• Set Your Course In Google Search Console With International Targeting
• What are Core Web Vitals and What Should I Do About Them?

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

This article was updated to add additional information on April 28th, 2025.

The post How To Link Google Ads To Google Search Console (Updated 2025) appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Can You Use Competitors’ Names In Google Ads? Can They Use Your Brand In Google Ads?

Branded search engine ranking positions (aka SERPs) can make or break your online presence within your market and your customers’ minds. But when you find a competitor using your brand name as part of their Google Ads or SEO campaigns, the stakes can get raised by a considerable margin.

When a user performs a search, visitors click on the first ads or organic results that seem most relevant to them.

The chances of winning that click are higher when you show up in top positions on relevant searches.

For many years brands have tried to undermine competitors’ names to rank higher and poach visitors through covert PPC and SEO tactics. When this happens, competitors getting search visibility on your brand name become a huge detriment to your sales by hijacking your brand’s reputation.

Leveraging competitor brand names via search engines is a common tactic and an issue that must be addressed to maintain both your rankings and your branding.

Savvy competitors — often with agencies behind them — combat these challenges and capitalize on the opportunity.

The Basics of Advertising and Doing SEO on Competitor Brand Names

Just to make sure we’re on the same page here, let’s take a brief second to fully define what we’re talking about.  When we talk about competitor brand names, there are a few different keyword types to pay attention to if you want a full picture of which competitors are trying to take over your brand. The three most common types are:

• Competitor’s actual business names (like Pepsico buying ads or optimizing for Coca-Cola keywords)
• Competitor’s branded products (Pepsi buying ads or optimizing pages on Sierra Mist’s site for Sprite keywords)
• Competitor’s executive names or prominent thought leader names (Walmart running ads on searches of Jeff Bezos promoting CEO Doug McMillon)

The process in search advertising works the same as bidding on any other search term.  You select the competitor term(s) you wish to bid on, set how much you’re willing to pay, and set up ads for that ad group. Voila, you can have your ad appear when someone searches for your competitors.  There’s no cost to you until and unless someone clicks on one of your ads.

In SEO, the process is also very similar. Publish a piece of content on the subject matter, optimize it for the search term, and then build backlinks to the page so that it ranks well.

Legal Questions – Is This Allowed?

It’s important to understand that leveraging a competitor’s brand name is quite common in digital marketing.

You may be thinking to yourself at the moment — is this even allowed?

Yes, yes it is.

For the most part, using such advertising tactics is OK provided you are not deceptive in your practices. This means that if you are intentionally trying to mislead searchers, you may find yourself in hot water.

You need to make sure you’re clean in your ads and other marketing materials by being upfront about who you are. And doing that well means representing specific reasons customers often prefer you over your competition. If your name, your competitor’s name, or other branded term isn’t trademarked, then there’s no issue at all as far as the search engines are concerned.

Where courts have generally upheld advertisers’ rights to advertise — non-deceptively — on competitor brand names, this is America. Anyone can sue anyone for any reason, so legal costs are a real consideration.

By the way, if you’re really into this sort of thing, check out Eric Goldman’s Technology & Law blog.  It’s the single best source on the Web for following these types of lawsuits regarding search engine marketing.

With that disclaimer and plug out of the way, let’s dive into how you can protect the reputation you’ve built against competitors trying to draft off of your brand.

Google Ads Options to Address Competitor Bidding

Campaigns explicitly created to target competitor brand searches are expensive and typically produce low numbers of conversions.

If this is happening to you, take solace in knowing that your competitor is spending some serious cash. But you still want to reclaim what is yours and reduce any adverse impacts on your brand.

When reacting to competitors running ads on your company’s or product’s name in Google Ads — and other search engines — you have some options.

Option 1: Protect Your Name by Running Ads on Your Own Name

Branded campaigns use your company’s brand name as a keyword. This play typically yields high conversions at a low cost per conversion – and the more your brand is known and trusted, the more impressive the results.

As you can see in the above example, Salesforce is running Google ads on its name, taking up the top ad position. Two competitors – Pipedrive and SugarCRM – also run on Salesforce keywords, positioning themselves as an alternative to this well-known CRM.

Searchers click on ads at the very top of a page more often than other positions. This is especially true on mobile because the visual real estate is so much smaller.  By running these ads, Salesforce ensures searchers will see its ads first before seeing alternatives.

When you run ads on your name, you have a much better chance of influencing how searchers interact with your brand in the SERPs. This way you have more control of your campaigns, and you’ll always be first in search results on your brand.

Note: Some companies don’t like to bid on their name as they think that it’s an unnecessary cost, taking away conversions from organic search – clicks they don’t have to pay for. They also feel that bidding on their name is wasting money that could go toward reaching new searchers who aren’t looking for them. But if your competition is running on your name, do you really want people looking for you to see the competition first?

Option 2: Petition Google Ads for Trademark Protection

We highly recommend trademarking your brand if you haven’t done so already. Be aware that it can take up to six months or more to receive a trademark even if you don’t face other companies with similar claims.

The significant benefit of having a valid trademark as that there’s a formal process to petition Google to disallow your competitors from using your name in their ads if you own a trademark.

They can still run on your name even if you have this trademark protection, but at least they won’t be able to use your name in the ad copy, except in very limited circumstances.

If you’d like to learn more, check out our step-by-step guide on how to protect your trademark in Google.

Want a Premier Google Partner’s
help filing your trademark complaint?
Call 800.979.3177 today.

Option 3: Fight Fire with Fire

If you’re interested in going on the offensive, you can try to beat your competition at their own game and run ads on their branded terms. Just keep in mind that this tactic is prone to have the same high costs and challenges as discussed earlier.  Here’s why.

Search advertising platforms allow you, in theory, to run on almost any keyword you want, including your competitors’ names.  But in all cases, they want to make sure your keywords are relevant to your business.  Otherwise, consumers will have a harder time finding information related to their searches and the whole PPC model starts crumbling.

And since you aren’t your competitor, Google will quickly give those keywords in your account a low Quality Score.

Keywords with a low Quality Score (caused by low clickthrough rates and other metrics) will end up costing you more than average on a per click basis. If your keywords are not relevant to your brand (i.e., because they aren’t your brand), then your search advertising platform will make you pay for it. In a best-case scenario, your quality score for competitor’s brand names may peak at a 3/10.

As we mentioned earlier, these kinds of campaigns come at a high cost and a lower chance of successful conversions. However, conversions don’t have to be the goal of this play.

Going on the offensive allows you to fight fire with fire if your competitors are already deploying these tactics. It will also draw some awareness to your brand for potential new customers who only knew about your competitor.

Note: It is possible to find a competitor’s ad come up when you search your own business name even if they don’t have you in their keyword crosshairs. If you see that, it’s probably one of two scenarios:

• Search retargeting (RLSAs): If you have been to the competitor’s website, their ads may be displaying based on your website habits.
• Similar audiences for search: The competitor may have a “similar to” retargeting audience and Google’s machine learning is considering your search habits similar to those of the competitor’s website visitors.

Either way, it’s the algorithm doing what it does best!

Other Pros and Cons of Bidding on Competitor’s Brand Names

Pros

• It can work.  A lot of times people are interested in that competitor for a specific reason that won’t help you at all: trying to get hired, a vendor looking up directions, etc.  But for the consumer doing research – or maybe a current, unsatisfied client looking up a phone number, the payoff could be handsome.
• It will jerk their chain.  Double edged sword here (see Cons), but after seeing your ad on their name, internally they may devote a lot of executive resources figuring out what can be done.  Plus, some people just really, really like ticking off their competitors.
• More competition should drive up their prices to bid on their name. While this means they’ll be spending more money they could be devoting elsewhere, their Quality Scores will likely be so much higher than yours, that the additional cost may not add up to much.  Unless they weren’t advertising on their name at all before and decided to start doing so because of your ads.

Cons

• Your time.  Your competitors may call you up and chew you out about this.  Trust me, I’ve seen this time-suck happen and had advertisers flip their feelings about bidding on competitor names 180 degrees.
• Money.  They may sue you or threaten to do so.  While you could just adhere to their cease-and-desist and potentially be done with it, most companies will at least consult their attorneys about this.  And if they don’t happen to be experts in search – and virtually none are, this can get really expensive.  (BTW, we have consulted with attorneys about this in the past.  If you’re an advertiser or lawyer needing help with this, give us a shout at 800.979.3177.  We can also advise on how to broker a fair peace accord without the courts).
• They may start advertising on your name, which could send up your costs somewhat and also decrease your click throughs.

Be Careful with Dynamic Keyword Insertion

Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) can be a great tool—until it serves up an ad with a competitor’s name who happens to spot the ad. That’s where it goes from clever automation to potential liability.

(See stats and insights from a test of keyword-insertion code in Google Ads that we conducted.)

DKI functions by automatically inserting the user’s search query into your ad text, provided that the search query matches one of your keywords and fits within character limits. This dynamic functionality can enhance ad relevance for generic terms; it becomes perilous when competitor brand names are among your keywords.

For instance, if your keyword is “Competitor Brand Alternatives” and a user searches for “Competitor Brand Product X,” your headline might read “Competitor Brand Product X,” directly featuring your competitor’s name in your ad.

Google explicitly absolves itself of responsibility for any policy violations arising from the use of DKI. (Even in cases where it was the applying a Google Recommendation that introduced DKI functionality into a campaign.) Their policy clearly states that advertisers are accountable for ensuring that their ads comply with all advertising guidelines after keywords are inserted.

The fix is simple: don’t use DKI with competitor keywords. Build static ads with deliberate messaging that highlights your differentiators.

How to Respond When Competitors Use SEO to Leverage Your Brand

Several SEO tactics can solidify your SERP positions against competitors who want to rank in organic search for your brand name, or for when potential customers seek alternatives to your brand.

Much like the Google Ads tactics listed above, you can either take a defensive route or get aggressive with your SEO keyword targeting.

Choose wisely, as this is the perfect time to heed Uncle Ben’s wisdom — because great responsibility is bestowed upon those who wield these great SEO powers.

Option 1: Ranking for “Brand Alternative” Keywords

To dampen your competitors’ efforts, consider creating a page to rank for brand alternative searches specific to your brand name. This page still aims to promote your brand as the better solution, but the idea is to optimize it with your name and “alternative” keywords to make sure it outranks your sneaky competition.

You can also supplement this tactic with content development and link building strategies targeting ‘brand alternative’ keyword phrases. Guest posts and other authored contributions optimized for brand “alternative” keywords can help take up valuable search positions. These opportunities also are good places to score a link back to the page you already created.

By leveraging these two tactics, you can fortify your brand against alternative searches that your competitor targets with their SEO efforts.

Option 2: Fighting Back with Your Own “Brand Alternative” SEO Strategies

When your competitors step up their efforts against your brand, it’s time to consider going on the offensive from an SEO perspective. Some examples include previously mentioned tactics:

• Your competitor running ads on your brand name
• Optimizing a page on their website to rank for your brand name
• Leveraging backlinks to improve their ranking for your brand name

Just like how competitors may create content on their site to rank for keywords related to your brand, you can do the same.

You can accomplish this one of two ways:

1. Optimize for “competitor” + “alternative(s)” — Here you create pages specifically designed to target search users looking for alternatives to your competitor by optimizing for their brand names and “alternative” (e.g. “picasa alternative,” “photoshop alternative,” etc.). This way, your brand will begin to show up when people go to search for their name.

Below is an example of how Lawn Doctor compares itself to several competitors.

1. Optimize for competitor weaknesses — In some cases, search users may be considering a competitor, but also seeking choices.

For example, say you are a project management software looking to position yourself against Trello, a highly recognized competitor. You could try creating content that aims to rank for keywords such as “trello issues.”

Be warned: snatching a top search engine ranking using this approach is highly unlikely without some investment in aggressive link building tactics. But, this approach will undercut your competitor in the following ways:

• They will lose long tail organic search traffic.
• Awareness of your product will increase within their customer and prospect base.
• You will convert new business opportunities from prospects who were not initially considering your brand as a solution.

Final Thoughts — Consult Your Legal Team

Please note: we recommend you consult your legal team to assess risk before trying the more aggressive tactics listed above. Keep in mind that there are times where using terms and phrases — specifically trademarked words, branded words — could have some legal implications.

What ends up happening in situations like this is that – whether mediated expensively through attorneys or done from President to President – a truce is called.  The downside is that it needs to be brokered with each competitor as it can’t be done through the search engines (other than if there’s a legitimate trademark complaint to be filed).

SERPs can make or break your brand so make sure you are taking the necessary measures toward protecting them. Starting with a great defense (owning real estate and top ads on your name) is the best offense.  Ultimately, though, it’s your brand, and only you can decide how to solidify your place in Google search.

Key Takeaways About Targeting Competitor Brand Names

• Using a competitor’s brand name is a common and permitted practice in digital marketing, barring misleading usages.
  
• Competitors using your brand name in their Google Ads or SEO campaigns can divert potential customers.
  
• Trademarking your brand name allows you to request that Google disallow competitors from using it in their ads.
  
• Optimizing content for brand alternative keywords can help prevent competitors from ranking high for your brand name.
  
• Running ads on your own name is one line of defense for your brand.
  

This article was updated to add additional information on April 7th, 2025.

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If you’re interested in learning how you can drive better results with search engine marketing and our paid search advertising services then please schedule a digital marketing consultation. Or, to get more information on this topic, contact us today for a free consultation or learn more about our status as a Google Partner Agency before you reach out.

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The post Catch A Competitor Bidding And Ranking For Your Brand? Here’s Your Options. (Updated 2025) appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

When your website loading speed is slow, your page load times can affect every metric that matters to you.

Gone are the days of dial-up Internet when the average load time for a page was eight seconds. That might not seem like a lot, but for visitors to your site, it can feel like an eternity.

Consider that in an age where our time and attention is limited, users are less likely to bounce from websites that load quickly. No matter what kind of content your website serves, — e-commerce, informational, SaaS, etc.— its success is affected by site speed.

In this article, we cover how to tell if your website is just too slow.

Why You Should Care About Website Loading Speed

Site speed matters because a faster website makes you more money.

As mobile technology and Internet connections continue to improve, the average person browsing the Internet has high expectations for load speed.

A Note About U.S. vs. Global Site Speeds

If the majority of your prospects and customers reside within the contiguous United States (excluding Hawaii and Alaska), load times will generally be consistent. However, a lot can impact someone’s load times, including their connection speed (cable, mobile data, fiber optics, etc.), distance from servers, the capacity of your hosting, and more. For smaller businesses, it is important to fully vet your hosting situation’s details, such as location. Here’s a list of hosting solutions for small businesses that might be helpful to begin your journey.

More importantly, your site speeds will vary across the world. If you’re in the U.S. and serve people all over the world, you need to assume that their load time, depending on location, is going to be much longer than you see at home.

Most often, think of  Africa and many parts of Asia. Internet is slower in many of these places and a large number of users are accessing the web via their mobile devices. If you have ever spent extended periods in an area with less than ideal data coverage, you’ve probably noticed that download speeds are far from consistent.

And if you’re in China, the Great Firewall can put a major damper on speed.

How a Slow Website Impacts Your Bottom Line

In one study, over a quarter of participants stated they would abandon a webpage that takes four or more seconds to load. Additionally, a one-second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.

To get a better sense of how that one-second delay impacts your bottom line, let’s suppose you have an e-commerce store that, on average, pulls in $100,000 a day. With a 7% reduction in conversions, this translates to a $2.5 million loss in sales per year.

Ouch.

How Does Pagespeed Impact Conversions?

If that’s not enough of a reason for you to think site speed is important, consider the following:

1. 20% — The percentage of shoppers that will abandon their shopping cart if they perceive the pages as being too slow. (Source)
2. $1.6 Billion — The revenue lost per year, per second of site speed decline according to Amazon’s internal testing. (Source)
3. Eight million — The number of searches that Google has calculated it would lose per day if search results were to load just 0.4 seconds slower. (Source)
4. 15.4% — The decrease in downloads reported by Firefox when average load time increases by 2.2 seconds. (Source)

Website Load Test: How To Measure Website Speed

There are multiple ways to perform a website load test:

1. Use one (or more) free online tool(s) to measure the speed of a single page – like Google PageSpeed Insights or Pingdom, for instance
2. Use a tool to measure the speed of every page (or a group of pages) on a website

But first and foremost, there is an even easier way to measure your site’s speed based on its performance: user and employee feedback.

Regularly requesting feedback is one of the best methods for understanding if your site is loading so slowly that you must take action. If your website is slow, customers and employees should be encouraged to speak up if they experience long load times.

It might not be a bad idea to use a service like Google Surveys to gain insights into your customers’ true feelings about your website. This tool can be invaluable when seeking market research to drive business decisions.  Tons of other choices for survey software exist if you’re looking for more advanced features.

How to Measure Page Speed

Many free tools across the internet can give you a good idea of how your website loading speed performs. The downfall of these tools is almost always the same — although they are accurate, they do not allow you to test more than one URL at a time.

However, these types of tools are helpful if you already know what pages frequently have long load times or if you want to benchmark performance before applying site-wide optimizations.

Many of these tools also give very helpful readouts that may help diagnose the cause of page load issues and some even go as far as to recommend actions you can take

Here is a list of the tools that we recommend for testing a single page’s speed:

1. Google’s PageSpeed Insights
2. Google’s Lighthouse
3. Pingdom Website Speed Test
4. GTmetrix
5. WebPage Test

How to Measure Website Loading Speed

After using one or more of the tools above, you should now have data that indicates just how slow certain pages are loading.

But what if you don’t have a list of frequent offenders for slow load times. How do you figure out what those pages are, and to what extent does their page speed impact your site?

To answer these questions, we would recommend utilizing tools that bulk analyze the pages on your site. Here are two and how to use them:

1. Batch Speed

Batch speed is a bulk page speed checker that relies on Google’s Page Speed API. To get the most out of this tool, we recommend using an XML sitemap generator to generate a sitemap for your website (if you don’t already have one on your website) or using a tool like Screaming Frog to generate a list of your website’s URLs.

You can use a sitemap or URL list as input to the bulk page speed checker. Here are the results of a batch speed test for our own site:

The details section of each page can be expanded to see how each detected issue contributes to the page’s load time.

2. Google Analytics

Google Analytics (GA) has a site speed section that can be helpful if you know what you are doing. You can find this section by logging into GA and navigating to Behavior > Site Speed > Page Timings. Here you will find a chart like the one below:

At first glance, this is very valuable information, but if you compare any of the timings found in GA with those found in any one of the five tools for measuring individual page speeds, you will more often find that these timings won’t match up.

By default, GA only collects timing data from a fraction of your site visitors – 1% to be exact. The value of the data in this report is questionable, or even non-existent if your website traffic is relatively low.

The same can be said for sites that have a great deal of traffic as GA also limits timing data to 10,000 hits per day.

There is, however, a solution that allows you to increase your GA page speed hit limit — and we highly suggest it. If you want to know how to do it, shoot over an email to info@directom.com, and we’ll share some of our favorite resources.

Benchmarking to Fix Website Loading Speed

With any issue, you need to understand all the factors thoroughly to identify a plan of action. Here are a few simple steps to begin benchmarking page speeds:

1. Use bulk page speed tools like GA and Batch Speed to compile a list of slow loading pages in a spreadsheet.
2. For each individual page, run that list of common offenders through website load test tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights or Pingdom.
3. Record page timings and routinely update new data.
4. Identify high priority pages based on extremely high load times or pages with valuable content (home page, product / sales / service pages, contact pages, etc.).

Simply put, if your website is running slow, money is being left on the table. You must take action, or you risk losing out on new business and Google rankings.

Contact us for an SEO audit or check out any of these helpful resources written by our team below. Or, 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.

• Internal Links: How Much Do They Affect 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
• Readability Analysis: Tips to Improve Your Writing and SEO

The post How To Tell If Your Website Load Times Are Hurting Your Business (2024 Edition) appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Looking for information regarding subdomain tracking for monitoring users across your entire platform in Google Analytics 4 (GA4)?

Updated: 4/18/2024

“GA4 is set-up to handle subdomains automatically if the same GA4 measurement ID is shared across all subdomains of the same root domain.“

Dana Schumacher, Senior Digital Analyst at DOM

How much longer are you going to rely on Universal Google Analytics? You are at risk of losing any of your historical performance data in 2023 if you don’t set up and properly configure Google Analytics 4. Learn how the two platforms compare to each other in this blog post – Google Analytics 4 vs Universal Analytics.

Subdomains are a standard way to segment content on a website. Subdomains can be created at any time with no limit and with out a registrar. A common reason to create subdomains would be to differentiate a sector of your business such as “info.yoursite.com” or “tools.yoursite.com.”

From a developer’s perspective, subdomains are integral to utilizing multiple CMS platforms.  For this reason, they have become common across the web.

While subdomains have little benefit from an SEO viewpoint, many websites have plenty of justifications to leverage them.

How To Set Up Subdomain Tracking In Google Analytics

Configuring Google Analytics subdomain tracking can be somewhat aggravating and extremely cumbersome. If you are still using Universal Analytics and also have the need to setup tracking for subdomains – we strongly suggest setting up GA4 so you can avoid many of the remaining steps.

Despite being the market leader in web analytics, Google has been somewhat ambiguous on how to properly configure Google Analytics to track traffic between subdomains and root domains in an aggregate report (aka cross-subdomain tracking).

If this is your first time attempting to achieve correct cross-subdomain tracking, you’re in luck because this guide has made it simple for you.

Cross-Subdomain vs. Cross-Domain — What’s the Difference?

Understanding how cross-domain and cross-subdomain tracking differ from each other is crucial. The methods for implementation across each are entirely different.

What’s The Difference Between A Root Domain And A Subdomain

To be clear, here is the difference between a (root) domain and a subdomain:

• directom.com (root domain): Domains consist of various letter / number combinations followed by their domain extension (.com, .org, .gov, .edu, etc.)
• cctld.directom.com (subdomain): Similar to root domains, except with a series of letters / numbers at the beginning, separated by a period (.)

Use cross-domain tracking when you want a single report that displays user behavior across two domains as if they were on a single domain. Without cross-domain tracking, GA will record a new session every time a user navigates between two or more domain properties.

How To Set Up Cross Domain Tracking In GA4

Trying to set up GA4 cross domain tracking?
We’ve got you covered in this blog post:
4 Steps To Set Up GA4 Cross Domain Tracking

You would need to implement cross-domain tracking if, for example, you wanted to track users across the following:

• https://example.com
• https://examplesite.com
• https://www.othersite.com

Cross-subdomain tracking tracks users and sessions across different subsections of a single domain. We get requests to implement this type of tracking much more frequently than cross-domain tracking.

Some of the most common uses for subdomains include:

• Foreign language versions of a website
  • de.example.com (<— German version)
• Third-party marketing solutions/software (such as Marketo, Salesforce, Unbounce)
  • marketo.example.com
• Blog hosting (typically when blog functionality is cost-prohibitive with current CMS)
  • blog.example.com
• E-commerce checkout pages (typically third-party shopping cart solutions)
  • checkout.example.com

Please note — in the above examples, the root domain never changed. If you’re trying to track sessions across two root domains, we recommend following a different process.

For website owners with multiple subdomains, you need to implement cross-subdomain tracking if you want to track users across the following:

• www.cctld.directom.com
• www.es.directom.com
• www.directom.com

Technical Side Note

Domain owners can create and manage as many subdomains as they want. Proper DNS configuration of subdomains is vital for tracking users across them.

If you make your way through this guide and are still not seeing proper site traffic across subdomains, it might be a good idea to get a second set of eyes to help identify the issue.

Before you continue, we cannot stress enough how getting the following items properly configured will give you a higher chance of success:

1. Root domain & subdomain DNS settings
2. GA account structure
3. Implementation of the same GA code across all subdomains and the primary root domain

Assuming all of the above is good to go, you are ready to configure cross-subdomain analytics correctly.

“If you’re dealing with a website with multiple subdomains, in most cases, you’ll want to configure the same Google Analytics 4 measurement ID/data stream across all subdomains.“

Dana Schumacher, Senior Digital Analyst at DOM

Why Track Cross-Subdomain Traffic in Google Analytics as a Single Session?

By default, Google Analytics is not set up with cross-subdomain tracking. As a result, website owners will not have an accurate picture of how a user moved across subdomains and the root domain.

Here’s what happens normally: Every time a user comes to a website, GA tracking notes that visit as a session and begins tracking how that person interacts with a site.

Without cross-subdomain tracking, GA will count a new session every time a user goes from a subdomain to a domain (and vice versa). This means that total sessions are being miscalculated and referral data gets lost.

Translation — there’s no way to tell where a user came from and sessions become inflated.

Let’s say that an organic search user lands on a company’s blog from Google and the blog post lives on blog.example.com. After reading the post, the user wants to learn more about the company and fills out a contact form that lives on the root domain. Without proper subdomain tracking in GA, the conversion data will credit the subdomain as the referral source when really the user first came to the site from organic search.

Without correct referral source attribution, websites can’t tell which channels are the most effective for their goals.

Most sites want to track user navigation between subdomains that share a root domain and the corresponding root domain as a single session. After tracking is set up, traffic sources, user actions and behavior completed on any subdomain can be attributed to the same user session.

For example, you might have a promotional landing page set up at info.example.com that directs users to purchase products at buy.example.com. With cross-subdomain tracking properly implemented, GA will count users landing on one subdomain and converting on another subdomain as a single session.

Heads Up, You Have Been (Un)Warned

Pulling up Google’s developer documentation for cross-domain tracking will prominently display a fun warning at the very top:

If the owner of the world’s most ubiquitous analytics platform suggests that something is complex, they’re probably right.

Our advice — do not let Google psyche you out.

It is true that the code behind this configuration is complex.

However, we’ve pulled off quite a few Google Analytics implementations. We made this subdomain tracking resource easy to understand.

So, have no fear – this guide will walk you through a step-by-step process to follow that will help assure success.

Getting Started — The Typical Google Analytics Account Structure

The account structure hierarchy in Google Analytics is:

Analytics Account > Properties & Apps > Views

The image below represents how many analytics accounts are set up. This implementation structure consists of the following levels:

Note that in the implementation above, all the items in the “Properties & Apps” row have unique tracking IDs. Having an implementation set up in this manner is pretty typical.

On the positive side, this setup makes accessing traffic and behavior across a single subdomain within an account a breeze.

Since every property has a unique tracking ID, the data associated with each domain or subdomain automatically populates as its default view and can be accessed without any further configuration.

On the other hand, this configuration makes it practically impossible to track cross-subdomain traffic.

How to Setup Subdomain Tracking In Google Analytics 4

• Tools needed: Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Google Tag Assistant
• Time required: 20 min
• Estimated cost: $0

Figure out how Google Analytics tracking is implemented on your site. This guide will touch on how to set up cross-subdomain tracking for both hard coded Universal Analytics and Google Tag Manager configurations.

Before jumping into implementation, please note that this process will only work if your site is using the Universal Analytics version. For older websites with “Classic Analytics,” it is highly recommended to upgrade to the latest version.

In Google Analytics 4, users can be tracked cross-subdomains without the need for additional code. It should generally be handled using the same measurement ID and leveraging reporting, comparisons, and segments to address different subdomain data views.

If you are unsure which method you have implemented on your site, we suggest downloading the Tag Assistant (by Google) Chrome plugin or consulting your developer.

Part 1 – Set the cookieDomain

A cookie is a piece of code on a website that stores information about a session on a user’s computer.

To attribute the name of the domain in the information contained in a cookie, you will need to set the cookieDomain.

If Universal GA is hard coded on your site:

Congrats! The cookieDomain is set to auto by default, and you can skip right to part 2.

If Universal GA code fires through Google Tag Manager (GTM):

1. Navigate to and select the container you wish to edit.

1. Click “Tags” on the left-hand menu.

1. Click on your Google Analytics Tag (In this example, our tag was named “Universal Analytics.” If you are unsure which of your tags is being used to send data to Google Analytics, look for the label “Google Analytics – Universal Analytics” in the “Type” column of the tags table.

1. Click to edit the tag then proceed to “More Settings” > “Fields to Set.”
2. Click “+ ADD FIELD.”
3. Set the Field Name to “cookieDomain” and the Value to “auto.”

Part 2 – Update the Referral Exclusion List In GA4

This part is the same for both GTM and hard coded Universal Analytics implementations.

Note: In Universal Analytics, setting referral exclusions does not remove that data entirely. Instead, it just gets removed from the referrals are and gets populated as direct traffic.

In addition to that, there is a possibility that this step is already set up correctly in your account, but it is necessary for analytics to display accurate numbers. It is worth the two minutes it will take to double check. 

1) Log in to Google Analytics and select any view from the account that you wish to implement cross-subdomain tracking.

2) Access the admin panel by clicking the gear icon in the bottom left of the screen.

3) Under the property column, navigate to Tracking Info > Referral Exclusion List.

4) Your root domain may already be in this table. If it is not, click the “+ ADD REFERRAL EXCLUSION” button and submit your root domain (yoursite.com).

In Google Analytics 4, referral exclusions can be easily set with the tag settings area of the data stream settings in GA4. Once you’ve configured those, GA4 identifies those unwanted referrals by leveraging the parameter “ignore_referrer.”

To review and make changes to your list of unwanted referrals in GA4, navigate to Data streams > Configure TA settings > Show all > List unwanted referrals.

Pro-Tip: Seeing Hostnames in Google Analytics 4

In Google Analytics, reporting will strip the hostname when examining exact URLs. If you’ve gone to the trouble of setting up cross-subdomain tracking, seeing whether someone landed on a subdomain or primary domain is essential context when analyzing performance data.

To see this information, navigate to a report where the primary dimension is a pageview (such as Site Content > All Pages/Landing Pages). Select the secondary dimension dropdown > Behavior > Hostname.

Keep in mind that when adding together.

It’s worth noting here that when you implement GA4, the hostname dimension is populated automatically. This is just one of the many ways GA4 is a less manual and easier to set up than it’s predecessor.

While these considerations are high-level best practice when configuring GA4 for multiple subdomains, we recommend that you also refer to Google’s documentation for more details on this subject.

Dana Schumacher, Senior Digital Analyst at DOM

Conclusion

Implementing cross-subdomain tracking has a reputation for being quite difficult, but it doesn’t have to be that way.  If you followed the steps in the guide above, you should have your implementation correctly set up in no time.

Just remember the two main parts:

1. 1. Set the cookieDomain.
   2. Update the referral exclusion list.

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

The post How to Track Users Across Subdomains In Google Analytics 4 (GA4) – November 2024 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.

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.

The earth is no longer round… but that doesn’t mean your international SEO (or overseas SEO) strategies should be linear.

After marinating for twenty-odd years in a technological chrysalis, the world as we perceive it has emerged with four corners and a screen and fits comfortably in most pockets/purses.

With the swipe of a finger, a person can now score a date, watch a movie, and impulse-buy whatever products their heart desires.

With the world quite literally at our fingertips, we can search for, find, and purchase exactly what we’re looking for, no matter where in the world it is located. Purchasing power lays completely in the hands of the consumer… and the search results. To assist you in winning over the hearts of both, we have rounded up some pretty incredible international search engine marketing consultants to guide you in your quest for making your international market expansion search engine (and user) friendly.

29 Top SEO Consultants Share Fundamental Strategies To Help Improve Your Website Rankings Around The Globe!

International SEO Tip #1: Do Your Homework!

Katrina Reger, Digital Marketing Strategist, Blue Compass Interactive

Plan ahead!! From choosing your URL structure (ccTLD, gTLD, subdomains, subdirectories – there are lots of decisions to be made on URL structure alone,) to hreflang tags which help with local search on a global scale, and canonical tags to help with duplicate content; there are countless factors worthy of your consideration. When scaling your site internationally the worst thing you can do is expand blind. Google will rank your site higher if you do the legwork upfront rather than attempting to fix errors after Google has come “crawling.”

Sam Binks, Digital Marketing Manager, Cool Gifts for Dads

Time differences are important – don’t set up meetings when it’s too early/late for the client. Get some training for your team in how to respect cultures and customs. For instance, if international clients are coming to your office, is it appropriate to eat certain foods at certain times of the year? Show you’re invested in making them happy and you have some idea about where they’re from.

Damon Burton, President, SEO National

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to engaging a variety of international demographics. Businesses should start by writing unique value propositions, blogs, and press specifically to the target country or location. It is crucial that whatever info is generated is specific to the target dialect. Something interesting in one country may not be as equally interesting in another. There may also be different uses of jargon. Sounding natural in your engagement is key.

Stephanie Mahnken, Sr. Digital Marketing Specialist, Direct Online Marketing

It’s very important to really dive in and learn how your customers in foreign markets are using and/or looking for your product or services. To do this effectively, you need to dedicate hours of time to keyword research and competitive analysis. We also recommend having your website translated into other relevant languages to target a specific country, along with country and language meta tags.

Marcus Miller, Owner, and Head of Search Marketing, Bowler Hat

Success with international SEO is not easy. There is much to consider before we even think about the SEO elements. We must consider the regionalization of content, the content is provided in a location’s primary language, currencies, locations that need content in multiple languages and local time zones (for starters). If your business is in the UK and you are selling into the US you could be going home just as the US traffic starts so you will need to consider how you handle customer service from an international perspective. And of course, international shipping can impact your ability to be competitive and various taxes all come into effect.

Ultimately the best tip is to be sure that this is something you want to do and that the returns will be worthy of the effort. With international SEO this is no easy win and a careful hand is needed from a human and technical perspective. Do it right and you can open up a much larger marketplace.

Dana Schumacher, Digital Analyst at Direct Online Marketing

It is incredibly important to understand the linguistics and language dialect of your audience. Many cities/regions have their own different characteristics and dialects and you want to make sure that’s top of mind when creating and optimizing content for international SEO. With that being said, it’s always a good idea to get input from someone who is familiar with the language and dialects. It plays a major role in making sure your content marketing and SEO work is relevant to your audience.

International SEO Takeaway: CYA: Cover Your Ass(ets). Research the people, the culture, see if there’s a demand for what you’re supplying, before diving headfirst into international waters. Overlooking the fine details could cost you dearly.

International SEO Tip #2: To ccTLD Or Not To ccTLD?

Aleyda Solis, International SEO Consultant & Founder at Orainti

Make sure the ccTLD, hreflang, and flag choice are cohesive. If someone connects to a site from Spain, but the flag on the site is Mexican, that user will feel like the site is not relevant to them, and they will likely leave…If your site has a Spanish version “.es”, and want to target the British, they enable an English version in their .es ccLTD. But because this site is already geo-located to Spain, it will most likely never rank in the UK or another country.

It’s very important that you think about what other countries you want to target, how you are going to expand in the future, and if it makes sense to start with a ccTLD in the beginning. You will likely need the ccTLD’s in these countries, or you can enable a generic domain where you can play country subdirectories, that way your site will be scalable, and won’t suffer from issues so that you are able to profit from what you have built.

Jonathan Bentz, Sr. Digital Marketing Strategist, Direct Online Marketing

Help Google understand your ccTLD belongs to your main .com by verifying both sites with the same Google Search Console account. When I provided internet marketing services and SEO for a company with 4 different ccTLDs in addition to their main .com, I registered every single domain in webmaster tools under one account.

When I did that and set country-specific locations for each domain, the international domains started ranking for the same short tail, high search volume keywords that the main site ranked for – with no additional link building required.

By going through and properly verifying each site in one Search Console account, then setting unique country locations for each domain, Google will quickly learn to identify your ccTLD’s for their appropriate location… and trust them just as much as your main site.

International SEO Tip:

Want to set this up for your international domains? Check out this guide for setting up international targeting in Google Search Console.

Steffen Ploeger, SEO specialist, 9thco

It’s not good practice to have duplicate websites on different country code top-level domains (ccTLD). Geo-targeting will be outweighed by the domain authority of the .com and as a result, the .com will outrank other ccTLDs even in their geographic target country. Instead of using duplicate websites on different ccTLDs you should use subfolders to indicate country or language. Don’t use proxy localized content. Google and Bing have clearly said to keep one language in one URL. Proxied content, content served by a cookie and side-by-side translations all make it very hard for search engines to index a page in one language. 1 URL = 1Language

International SEO Takeaway: There’s such a thing as too much of a good thing. ccTLD definitely helps with geo-targeting and SERP rankings, but if you have multiple countries contributing to profitability, having a ccTLD in each can confuse search engines and ‘cannibalize’ results (eek!). Strategize what country you’ll benefit most from, ccTLD that bad boy, and subdomain the rest.

Overseas SEO Tip #3: Talk The Talk With Hreflang

Brett Bastello, SEO manager, Inseev Interactive

If you’re headed into international SEO is to make sure you’re properly using the hreflang= tag.

What this tag does is serves a version of your web page in their local language, based on the visitor’s IP address.

This tag can be placed in either the sitemap, within the on-page markup, or in the HTTP header, but it’s important to only choose one. By having this markup listed in multiple locations you leave yourself open to inconsistencies and/or input errors, which will confuse the crawlers.

As your website expands into additional/moves out of certain countries, it is much easier and faster to update one set of hreflang inputs, as opposed to three, especially when there is a team of multiple people spearheading these on-site changes.

Andrew Akesson, Head of Digital, Venn Digital

Another aspect we often see that is wrong is when a company wants to expand into foreign language websites. They do this without giving the user any thought sometimes, so we may get a job/recruitment website that has translated all of their landing pages, but because all of their staff/recruiters are English, all the job descriptions on that page are English.

So for example, the hreflang sitemap states that the page is targeting German users in Germany (de-de), then Google will look to serve that page to German users in Germany. However, when those German users get to the page, they see that all the job descriptions are in English, which is a language they don’t speak and they bounce back to Google. This sends the wrong signals to Google and they demote the page in the rankings. So the recruiter has not only annoyed the user through bad UX, but they have also annoyed Google because the user is having to try a different result from the SERP.

There are a couple of things that should be done. The first is to ensure that the language on the page is the same as that of the hreflang. If your hreflang is de-de, then your page needs to be in German as this is the target language/users you are specifically targeting. Having half the page in one language and the other half in another language means the target user can only understand half the page, meaning they will be less likely to connect with your brand.

Another option to prove how your users are behaving is to use heat mapping software on-site. Any good heat mapping service will give you some information on what country your user is accessing your site from. In this instance, if your main messaging on page (the first thing they are like to see) is in English and the target users are from Germany, then you don’t have to do too much calculating to see that it’s the language you are using that is making people bounce back off the page, as they won’t be scrolling any further down the page to get to the German.

International SEO Takeaway: This tool is a beaut. When used properly, it can really take your international SEO to the next level. But always err on the side of caution, and see if you can find a native speaker to look over the content for any nuances particular to the region.

International SEO Tip #4: Content & Context

Siobhan O’Rorke, Marketing and Communications Manager at Lookeen

Make sure the keywords you’re optimizing your site for are making sense in the context of the languages you’re translating to. Find a native speaker to perform detailed keyword analysis in each language, and to test them (preferably in the target country).

Jitesh Keswani, Co-Founder, E-Intelligence

Get closer to your target native search audience. As the culture and language of your visitors vary from country to country, the basic online search pattern also differs. You want to ensure, as a marketer, that your website speaks to them in the tone that they are comfortable with. And this is not just limited to text – also consider the media and colors used on your web properties.

For example, if your website is full of images that relate more to the western world, then you may not get much out of your presence in the online search space in Japan. Accuracy and professionalism are the keys to pleasing your local search audience. For your international SEO to be a successful venture, it’s important for you to win their trust.

Jimmy Rodriguez, COO, 3dcart

The one thing that is universal across the globe is good content. If you want to rank globally, pump out high-quality content that is useful to an audience worldwide. Try to keep your topics general rather than culture or location-specific. For the most part, the same burning questions that people have in the US, they will have in Canada or Australia. The psychology of humans is universal which is why pumping out content based on global keyword research is one of the best SEO strategies. This of course, given that all on-site aspects are optimized for global search.

Colt Foutz, Director of Digital Content Optimization, TransPerfect

Localized content – preferably written by a native speaker familiar with your industry vertical – is, by its nature, unique content. It won’t count against you as duplicate, and you don’t need to flag the original language page as canonical – which could work against you in getting the new language page to rank. But for every unique market with different cultural norms, consider experimenting with a different design. The right graphics and spatial organization of your site can make a difference in user experience and getting customers to convert.

Oh- and don’t forget to translate image ALT-tags.

International SEO Takeaway: Content and context may just be the new peanut butter and jelly. You can have one without the other, but damn they really are better together.

Overseas SEO Tip #5: Build Links

Nenad Cuk, Marketing Manager, Thoughtlab

Start building links from websites that are optimized for the target country. If all of the links are coming in from a .ru website, and you are trying to rank for .ag, you won’t get as much of a push as if you got other .ag sites or even sites from Latin America that have the same language in their content. Just as one wouldn’t expect to get a rank boost to US sites by pulling in links from irrelevant sites outside of the market, a company shouldn’t expect to get a rank boost by using irrelevant countries in their citation building.

Matthew Mercuri, Digital Marketing Manager, Dupray

Interact with people who you have already done business with. When your clients and customers get a follow on Twitter, they’re significantly more likely to follow you back. Moreover, you need to narrow down and eliminate the people most likely to ignore you on Social Media. Ashton Kutcher will not be your friend online, nor will Kim Kardashian. BUT, the local bakery owner will. Your sister, best friend, and family will. So will your German clients. You need to do whatever it takes to get a base. This base will allow you to successfully publish content while tapping into the networks of that base.

Jason Ohsie, Digital Marketing (SEO) Department Manager, Direct Online Marketing

The importance of building quality links cannot be understated for SEO today and, most likely, into the future. Link building for international SEO, in particular, can be challenging to navigate because of inherent cultural differences and language barriers to non-native speakers. To get the most out of outreach efforts, you have to be systematic in your approach. Using your favorite link-building analytical tool – there are several good ones you can use – start by identifying and prioritizing link opportunities that genuinely represent the best fits for your content or business objectives.

For the top candidate backlinks with high-quality domain authority or trust flow, spend time doing your homework by engaging in deep research about their brand. Ask yourself: who might be their target demographic and psychographic audience? What pain points are the brand looking to solve? Are there local initiatives they are looking to promote?

While it may seem like a lot of work on the front end, there is tremendous lasting value in high-quality backlinks that will more than reward the significant investment in time. For the rest of your list, craft a short, personal message with a strong call-to-action. Provide value to the person receiving each email. Be clear and direct about your objective. Think about being the person receiving the email and what would compel you to take action on behalf of that person

Jessica Carmona, Marketing and Business Growth Manager, Guarana Technologies

If you’re expanding your business to other countries, local SEO should be one of your top priorities. It’s important to make sure your NAP (Number, Address, Phone) is consistent all across platforms such as Google Business, Bing, Yelp, Foursquare, and any other directories you might find relevant. Since you might not have an actual address and local phone number yet, a great strategy to solve that issue is to use services such as Virtual Business Addresses (which many coworking spaces provide) and software such as CallRail.com to get a local address and phone number and start on your International SEO as soon as possible. Additionally, you can add schema markups to your pages to help search engines understand where you’re located.

Ronald D’souza, Digital Marketing Manager, Angel Jackets

Link building plays a vital role in how you rank on a SERP. On the other hand, it provides you with the opportunity to reach more people who could relate to your brand or service.

A good link building technique involves building relationships with bloggers and influencers of your niche industry and providing value to them. You should be able to communicate what value your story could provide and why their audience would be interested in it. One great tip to get potential backlinks is by searching #journorequest on twitter advanced search and selecting your target country. You will find a lot of people looking for your expert opinion or input.

Vukasin Vukosavljevic, Head of Growth, lemlist

A big push with SEO is always the backlinks you’re able to get to rank high. But, in order to find those links without burning through your budget, you have to invest significant time into your email outreach and the way you approach people. The reality of the situation is that backlink outreach is extremely competitive and it’s hard to get a breakthrough in a busy inbox. The best way to grab the attention is to personalize your cold emails and focus on biz dev rather than direct asks.

Michael Dello Russo, Digital Marketing Coordinator, Direct Online Marketing

Backlinks are important, but don’t overlook the value of internal links, or links to other areas of your site. When dealing with content that appears in multiple languages, I create separate URLs for each translation. This makes internal linking a breeze.

Also, if a page has any other language translations, I link it at least once in the copy. This helps build links throughout each of the articles, gives the reader language options, and helps them easily navigate to their preferred language in the event they are automatically redirected to a page in the wrong language.

International SEO Takeaway: Ah links, the social butterfly of SEO. And like a butterfly, they are delicate, finicky creatures that will beautify your site (for rankings that is). Handle with care.

International SEO Tip #6: Think Beyond Google

Val Kaplan, Marketing Director, Sampi Marketing

China is one of a handful of countries where Google is completely irrelevant. It’s market share is currently less than 1% and the access is also blocked from the Mainland. The largest search engine in China is Baidu (about 60% market share) and SEO must focus on optimizing for that service rather than Google. Also, websites that are hosted outside of China load considerably slower than those hosted on servers within the country.

The difference is mainly due to China’s Great Firewall that filters and slows down the traffic coming from the outside. The slow loading, in turn, hurts Baidu ranking. Unfortunately, in order to host in China, a website must first apply for ICP (internet content provider) license issued by the government which can only be obtained by locally registered businesses. Solution: if a company is serious about getting in the Chinese market they should open a company here first.

Dimitri Semenikhin, Founder, Yacht Harbour

An important factor in international SEO is to remember that Google is not the only game you need to play. Russia, for example, is predominantly dominated by Yandex. Its rules and metrics are different and optimization strategies can actually differ or even cancel out in terms of SEO for Google or Yandex. Make sure you weigh the potential benefits of branching out to different regions before investing in SEO as you could cannibalize existing traffic.

Steven Macdonald, Digital Marketing Manager, SuperOffice

I believe the key to any successful international SEO campaign is to start by looking at the visits by a country report in Google Analytics (found under Audience > Geo > Location). It’s much easier to succeed with international SEO if an audience in that country already exists.

To reach 50,000 visits, we first looked at visitor data in Google Analytics and found at least 11% of visits came from Russia. We then set up a small,  basic 4-page website in Russian that covered product and contact information. We implemented hreflang to make sure Google displayed the Russian website on google.ru, and added the website to Yandex’s Webmaster Tools. Finally, we sent out an email to partners and asked that they link to our new Russian website, which led to a handful of high-quality links.

Within 12 months, this activity, which cost us $0 led to $54,000 in online sales.

International SEO Takeaway: Sadly, in some countries, our beloved Google (transparency: we are a Premier Google Partner)is the red-headed stepchild (my apologies to any red-headed stepchildren reading this post, no offense is meant). While researching what your target market is searching for, make note of what they’re searching on.

Overseas SEO Tip #7: Doing B2B In New Countries

Maxim Shomov, Digital Marketing Leader, Fair Point GmbH

From my experience, B2B SEO doesn‘t differ from regular search engine optimization. You still have to deal with the Google algorithm to rank high. However, other marketers often tend to forget that even in B2B marketing, you interact with real people, be it business owners or other decision-makers. The key to a successful campaign is to tap into their emotions. This is what makes B2B marketing harder than B2C – these people are used to marketers trying to sell them products and services.

Jignesh Gohel, Founder and Marketing Head, Olbuz

The best tip to acquire international clients is deciding what industry or brand you are planning to pitch and start studying their competitors, business opportunities and missing dots on their website/brand / or in marketing strategies. Pitch with useful information: what they are missing and how you can improve with all your research and data. Here the key part is to reach the right person of the brand you are pitching and you won half battle. I have seen most of the agencies used to sends thousands of emails with the same format has no personalized touch and will hardly attract the other party.

Chad Remp, Operations Manager, Wheeling Truck
I would state the most important thing is for international visitors to your website to know that you accept international orders. Many (I mean a lot) of websites/companies will not sell internationally, and they even state this on their website. We want to make sure our international customers understand we want their business. We have “International Orders” listed at the top of our page so foreign visitors know we want their business.

Adam Stetzer, CEO, HubShout

It is important to NOT overthink International SEO. In fact, many of the factors are identical. That being said, for international businesses, there are several considerations. There are subtle language differences, even among English speaking countries. In addition to different spellings, reference points and norms can be very different. And slang is certainly different. Be sensitive to this fact. As meetings are set up, obviously time-zone problems will present themselves. As for pricing and commerce, exchange rates can be significant – and change. If you write a 12-month contract from the US for a client in the EU, be prepared to specify what currency you will be paid in.

International SEO Takeaway: Businesses are people, too! Well, not really, but they sure do have people working there, and it’s important to remember that. Treating people like, well, people, can have an astounding effect on your B2B efforts.

What Have We Learned Today From These International SEO Consultants?

Search engine optimization is constantly evolving. What works today may not be as effective tomorrow. This is especially true in international SEO: what works in one country may not work in another.

So, before you head off to implement an international SEO services strategy,  please consider the following your new checklist:

• Do your homework on the country, culture, and dialects
• Contemplate if a ccTLD would be most beneficial or if going the subdomain route would be best for your company and campaign.
• Use your hreflang tags, but still have a native speaker make sure that the content (and your context!) is appealing and accurate – not jumbled or offensive.
• Build links! This leads to building relationships with trusted members of your international target market.
• Make sure to comply with local search engine protocol – Google does not reign supreme in all countries and failing to recognize that could come back to bite you.
• Just because you’re in B2B does not mean that customer service has left the building- adding a personal touch to communications with another business can be what seals the deal. Read up on the customs of business dealings in new territories, and comply to the best of your ability.

That is all for now, my digital darlings. Want to learn more about international SEO and international search engine marketing? Check out any one of these helpful resources written by our team below:

• How Online Marketing Helps Global Exporters Grow
• Our General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance Checklist
• Australian AO Says SEO Horror Stories by Dodgy Practitioners Need Regulation

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

Updated July 3, 2024

The post International SEO Tips – Updated 2024 appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

When it comes to video hosting sites:

Should I Use YouTube Or Vimeo?

• YouTube is tops for sheer reach
• Vimeo provides a better venue for gated content
• Do both if you can

If the decision was that easy, you wouldn’t need to research it, would you?

Below, we will use the long story approach to tell the short story about which platform you should choose for video hosting.

• Why Should You Choose YouTube
• Why Should You Choose Vimeo
• How Video Hosting Can Impact Your SEO Strategy

Trust us when we say there is more to this decision than what our introduction suggests.

First Things First… Why You Need Video Hosting

Suppose you are a dog trainer (named something perhaps like Mesar Cillan) and are looking to grow your business with video.

You’ve already got a website. You’ve already created engaging videos that show your training prowess. Now how do you get these videos onto your site and in front of dog owners interested in obedience classes for their fur babies?

Video Hosting On YouTube Or Vimeo Is Often A Necessity

Putting videos directly on your site is one option. However, unless there’s some exceptional horsepower under your site’s hood, you probably want to host your videos elsewhere and embed links to them on your site.

Videos are generally large files. They require a great deal of storage space and bandwidth to function properly, a luxury few site owners have on their own. That’s why most videos on the web are hosted at sites specializing in video hosting. You create a channel on the video-hosting site and then embed links to the hosted videos on your business site.

YouTube Isn’t the Only Fish in the Sea

YouTube and Vimeo may be the first video hosting platforms that come to mind. They aren’t the only players in this space, though. There is a pack of video hosting sites out there: Brightcove, Dailymotion, JW Player, SproutVideo, Vidyard, Vzaar, Wistia…

Even Facebook can function as a hosting site!

YouTube Is the Best-Known Video Hosting Fish, Though

Why is YouTube the first name in video hosting in most people’s minds? Well, it’s free and Popular. (It’s popularity really does warrant that capital P.)

The two main benefits for using YouTube as your video hosting platform are:

• Free: in that users don’t pay anything to have their videos uploaded to the video-sharing network.
• Popular: in that YouTube is often colloquially and statistically the web’s No. 2 search engine. (Google being No. 1 of course.)

Video Hosting On Vimeo Allows For Greater Control

So why look anywhere else for video hosting? Why, for instance, go with Vimeo, which isn’t nearly as free nor as popular?

For greater control, that’s why.

Vimeo provides tools to keep content gated and privacy protected that YouTube doesn’t.

Another advantage of opting to shell out a few dollars for video hosting on Vimeo is that your video won’t be surrounded by ads. By comparison, this will always be the case on YouTube. The premium service and ad-less presentation of your content might make paid hosting sites like Vimeo the best venue for your videos.

Now, regardless of whether you are looking to put your content on the web as quickly as possible for free, or whether you want a more exclusive, curated platform for your videos— hosting on YouTube and Vimeo both have SEO benefits to your digital marketing strategy.

SEO For Video: YouTube Vs Vimeo

Landing pages on YouTube and Vimeo are indexed just like any other webpage. That means they present SEO opportunities.

Video titles, video descriptions, tag selections — all of these fields are available on all major video hosting sites in one guise or another.

And optimizing these fields for SEO can help the individual landing pages for each one of your videos rank in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and

1. Increase the number of referring domains linking to your domain
2. Increase the visibility of your video content in Google SERPs
3. Increase the number of people clicking through to your website from third-party publishers

How We Used YouTube Video Hosting To Become The Cream Of The Crop

For example, check out what happens when you Google “digital marketing for exporters.” The fancy footwork of DOM’s SEO team placed one of Justin’s blog posts in the top organic result ranking position. In addition to that, a video of Justin’s hosted on our YouTube channel is the 3rd video displayed in a YouTube video carousel, placed two spots below our top SERP ranking position.

Depending on your preference for buzzwords, you might call this universal search optimization. You might also call it “Barnacle SEO.” Around our offices, we prefer the latter to the former.

Barnacle SEO And Your Video Content

The idea behind Barnacle SEO for as a content publication strategy for your video is pretty straightforward – leverage the top rankings of other sites for increased exposure and views.

As Google strives to become more of a provider of knowledge and information in the organic search results – and less of a provider of sales pages – the degree of difficulty for ranking transactional webpages is only going to increase.

Today, in addition to competing with other service providers around the globe for your top keywords, you also have to compete against online content publishers.

Want to get a behind the scenes look at how we pulled off this barnacle SEO strategy using a blog post and a video hosted on YouTube?

YouTube SEO Strategy

• First, we performed on-page SEO best practices on the video Justin uploaded to the DOM YouTube channel back in 2013.
• Second, we embedded the video into the blog post that we updated earlier in 2019 (screenshot below).

• Finally, we also placed a call to action link inside the YouTube video description to read more about the topic at the blog post.

In most cases, this same series of video SEO steps can be recreated on YouTube alternative video hosting sites like Vimeo.

When you present your videos like this on multiple platforms, you’re going to start building more and more barnacles between your video and your website.

Reposting your video content on other video sharing domains that rank in the top 100 of Google for your targeted keyword phrases is not a required SEO strategy, but for the amount of time and money you invested in creating your video, it only makes sense to create as many opportunities as possible for people to view it, whether you’re launching it yourself or using SEO services to push it up in popularity.

Free Video Hosting Alternatives To YouTube And Vimeo

The list below is far from comprehensive, but here are five of our favorite free video hosting alternatives to YouTube and Vimeo to post your video content to as part of a barnacle SEO strategy:

Sites That Are Like YouTube

• Dailymotion
• Flickr
• Photobucket
• The Internet Archive
• The Open Video Project

The value of links from these domains to help boost your search rankings is debatable. However, the referral traffic opportunity from all of them is great, and the frequency with which content on these sites gets indexed and ranked in Google results is high.

Expand Your Reach For Better Video SEO

Plus, presenting your video on multiple platforms is a great way to build more and more connections—barnacles—between the video, your site content, and your brand in the process.

THINK HOSTING VIDEOS ON MULTIPLE SITES
CAN’T HELP YOUR BUSINESS?
SEE HOW WE GREW THIS eTAILER’S
YOUTUBE TRAFFIC 6,800%.

So YouTube Or Vimeo… Where Are You Going To Share Your Content?

To acknowledge the pachyderm in the place (ahem) Google loves ranking content it can trust. Google owns YouTube. And Google trusts itself.

YouTube & Vimeo SEO Tips

Therefore . . . well, you get it. Google is more likely to crawl and index YouTube content more quickly and thoroughly than other sites. If no cost and maximum visibility are the goals you have for your videos – YouTube is the hands-down best choice for your video hosting needs.

If you are aiming to keep your content gated, you prefer an ad-free experience, or you want to avoid Google-owned properties – you’re better off hosting on Vimeo. Other paid video hosting platforms like Wistia have their own merits and give you the same control over how your videos appear.

If you want to maximize the benefits of your video creation to your SEO campaigns – we strongly recommend using both YouTube and Vimeo for video hosting. Also, you should repost your videos on as many hosting platforms as possible to populate the search results with your content and increase the chances of viewers engaging with your brand.

If you can devote time to optimize the SEO opportunities provided to you by each platform you host the video on, you can start to grow your own healthy community of barnacle SEO properties.

More Info On YouTube SEO & Vimeo

Want more insights on how your existing social media accounts can support your SEO strategy? Check out these posts analyzing how social media and SEO work together to grow your business online with confidence.

• Does Social Media Influence SEO? Decoding Matt Cutts’ 2014 Response
• How Important Are Social Media Profiles to SEO Anyway?
• Top 3 Social Media Lessons From Yum! Brands

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

The post Video Hosting: YouTube or Vimeo? appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

How Can I Grow My YouTube Channel?

Back in 2006, Google bought a little website by the name of YouTube for the bargain price of $1.65 billion. Since then, YouTube has become, in effect, the internet’s second most popular search engine. Now was YouTube already on a path to web prominence? Or was its acquisition by Google key to YouTube’s success? The world may never know. (Much like how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop.) No matter how it happened, YouTube’s rise is clearly our new reality. Ignore YouTube at your peril. Embrace it and bask in its glory. Here’s how to get the most out of YouTube’s video marketing.

Make Great Content To Grow Your YouTube Views

This seems like a no-brainer, but most YouTube videos tend to be, generally speaking, less than broadcast quality. Whether you’re showing off the new fishing rod you just bought or teaching college students how to unclog an apartment shower drain, the jump from “barely good enough” to “great” is smaller than ever. In other words, you can easily improve your game just by following some simple guidelines. A cheap clip-on microphone, compatible with every phone on the market, will immediately elevate your videos’ quality and help you grow your YouTube views.

Utilize Closed Captioning For Your YouTube Videos

YouTube offers automatic captioning, but you should upload a verbatim transcript whenever you can. This will provide a better user experience for anyone who relies on closed captions. Heck, even people who don’t rely on closed captions often use them, especially if they’re using YouTube to learn something. Captions allow users to get the information without turning up the volume on their phones or computers.

Not only is providing captions the friendly, neighborly thing to do, but it can also help your SEO, too. YouTube indexes all of the words contained in your uploaded transcript, which is like getting the milk and the cow for free.

Use the Appropriate Ad Format On YouTube

The variety of ads you can implement on YouTube include 6-Second Bumpers, Pre-Roll Ads, and In-Stream. Are you looking for awareness and brand recognition? Deploy some 6-Second Bumpers. Do you want clicks and conversions? Then you’re probably in the market for Pre-Roll ads. They can’t be skipped and run 15-20 seconds in length. Do you have a 30-second commercial that you want to repurpose? Think about using that for an In-Stream ad. If you want to see all of these in action, just open YouTube and search for something. You’ll see it all.

Target Precisely When Using YouTube Ads

While it’s a bit tongue in cheek to describe YouTube as the second biggest search engine,  it does still have the world’s biggest search engine powering it. They inform each other, too, so what’s good for one is often good for the other. You should leverage that enormous YouTube/Google data network through targeting. Target and find your desired audience using the options for gender, parental status, and personal interests. Narrow down your video placements by searching for specific channels that would be of interest to your ideal viewers. If you find that one type of audience is responding better to your message than another, you can always re-target. That’s the beauty of digital marketing.

Use an End Screen To Grow YouTube Engagement

You’ve made some great content, added closed captions, and targeted the appropriate viewers. Now you should reinforce your brand and inspire your viewers to take their next action. Use the end card as a digital signpost, directing your viewers to their next destination–a landing page with more info and a form to fill, or a product listing or external website, or even a link to your YouTube channel with more videos.

Support Your YouTube Growth Efforts

YouTube is great for extending your brand and driving conversions. However, a multi-faceted strategy embracing many platforms is going to open the door to more success. Use multiple ad types on YouTube, and experiment with your targeting options. Consider running companion campaigns in Microsoft Bing and Google Ads while leveraging your common keywords and targeting wins across every platform you use, whether you use YouTube advertising services or you use SEO services.

If you want even more help upping your YouTube game, get in touch with us today.

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