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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Auditing Templates

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

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

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

2. Best Practice Guides and Tutorials

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

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

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

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

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

3. Blogging As A Tactic For Promoting Training Courses

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

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

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

4. Case Studies To Promote Training Courses

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. Checklists and Worksheets

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

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

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

6. Competitor Awareness

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

Create pages of content on your site that either:

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

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

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

7. Digital Market Development Funds

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

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

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

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

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

8. Email Newsletter Sponsorship

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

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

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

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

9. Expert Roundups

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

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

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

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

10. Giveaways and Sweepstakes

Who doesn’t like getting something for free?!

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

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

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

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

11. Historical Optimization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

12. Influencer Marketing

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

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

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

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

13. Infographics To Promote Training Courses

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

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

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

14. LinkedIn Advertising

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

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

The results?

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

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

15. Microsite Development

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

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

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

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

16. Podcast Interviews To Promote Training Courses

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

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

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

17. Quora Promoted Answers

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

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

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

What changes in a Promoted Answer? Two things:

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

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

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

18. Research and Surveys

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

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

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

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

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

19. Retargeting To Promote Training Courses

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

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

Talk about creepy and awesome!

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

20. Webinars To Promote Training Courses

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

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

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

Key Takeaways on How to Market Training Courses Online

Develop Auditing Templates

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

Publish Best Practice Guides and Tutorials

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

Maintain an Active Blog

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

Create Detailed Case Studies

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

Host Webinars

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

Final Thoughts On Promoting Training Courses Online

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

• Introduction
• User Experience Matters
• Backlinks Build Authority
• Keywords Are the Compass of SEO
• Technical SEO is Your Site’s Foundation
• Quality Content is King
• Conclusion

Staying afloat in the organic search ocean is a challenge we’ve had to figure out since search engines began. As long as there has been an algorithm or machine logic behind Google’s SERPs, there have been different ways to get to the top of them. 

It’s natural to feel adrift like a castaway, but it doesn’t have to be that way. 

Certain principles remain as steadfast as bedrock. For CMOs and marketing professionals looking at all those SEO strategies and best practices, understanding these fundamental rules is a must. 

This post isn’t about chasing the latest SEO craze (like Google SGE, for example). It’s about grasping those fundamental concepts that have stood the test of time in the SEO universe. We’ve narrowed it down to five, but the last one is the most important. 

If you really need to TL;DR this blog post, then we’ll save you a scroll: your content still matters the most. 

5. User Experience Matters

Focusing on user experience is a cornerstone of SEO that consistently proves its worth. The experience users have on your site influences how they perceive your brand and, importantly, impacts how search engines rank your pages. 

User experience covers various aspects, from how quickly your site loads to how easily users can navigate your content.

Firstly, site speed is a critical factor. Slow-loading pages test users’ patience and often lead to higher bounce rates. Search engines, particularly Google, prioritize sites that load quickly, ensuring users find what they need without unnecessary delay.

Secondly, consider mobile responsiveness. With more people accessing the internet via smartphones, a site that performs well on mobile devices is no longer optional. It’s essential. 

Mobile-friendly sites rank higher in search results, as they cater to a large portion of internet users.

Lastly, clear navigation and ease of use keep users engaged. A well-structured site with intuitive navigation helps users find information effortlessly. This positive interaction signals search engines that your site is valuable, thereby improving your SEO ranking.

4. Backlinks Build Authority

Backlinks are a vital aspect of SEO, often considered a vote of confidence from one site to another. A strong backlink profile can significantly boost your website’s authority and search engine rankings. 

But it’s not just about quantity.; Tthe quality of backlinks matters immensely.

Building a natural, high-quality backlink profile is a strategic endeavor. It involves creating content that other reputable sites want to link to. This could be informative blog posts, original research, or any resource that offers value. 

Reaching out to industry influencers and participating in relevant online communities can also help in acquiring quality backlinks.

It’s important to steer clear of outdated practices like buying links or participating in link farms. Such tactics can lead to penalties from search engines. Instead, focus on earning backlinks through genuine, valuable content and networking.

Monitoring your backlink profile is crucial. Tools like Ahrefs or Moz can help track your backlinks and identify any potentially harmful ones. Regular audits allow you to maintain a clean, effective backlink profile.

Backlinks should be nurtured through creating shareable content and engaging with the online community in your industry. This approach ensures a sustainable, long-term boost to your SEO efforts.

3. Keywords Are the Compass of SEO

Keywords play a fundamental role in SEO. They are the tools that connect what people are searching for with the content you provide. Effective use of keywords means understanding not just what your audience is searching for, but how they are searching for it.

The key is strategic placement, not overuse. Gone are the days when stuffing a webpage with keywords could boost your ranking. Now, it’s about placing them where they matter most – in your titles, headings, and throughout your content in a way that feels natural.

Keyword research is crucial. It involves identifying the terms your target audience uses when searching for products or services like yours. 

Tools like Google’s Keyword Planner can help you find the right keywords. But it’s not just about volume. It’s about relevance. Choose keywords that align with your content and overall marketing strategy.

Remember, keywords are not just for Google to understand your content -; they help real people find the solutions or information they seek. Your goal is to use keywords to guide users to your site and ensure they find what they are looking for once they arrive.

2. Technical SEO is Your Site’s Foundation

Technical SEO is the backbone of your website’s relationship with search engines. It includes everything from site structure to crawlability, ensuring search engines can easily navigate and index your content. 

This part of SEO might seem daunting, but it’s crucial for your website’s success.

Site structure matters a lot. A well-organized website helps search engines understand your content hierarchy and the relationship between different pages. A logical structure, with clear categories and internal linking, improves user navigation and search engine crawling.

Crawlability is another key aspect. It means making sure search engines can access and index your web pages. Use tools like Google Search Console to identify and fix crawl errors. Regular audits help spot issues like broken links or pages blocked by robots.txt files.

Load times play a significant role too. Fast-loading pages not only enhance user experience but also contribute to better search engine rankings. Optimize images, minimize code, and leverage browser caching to improve your site’s speed.

Remember, technical SEO is an ongoing process. Regularly monitoring and updating your website ensures it remains compatible with search engine algorithms. It’s not the most glamorous part of SEO, but it’s a crucial one. 

Think of it as laying a strong foundation for your house – without it, everything else might crumble.

1. Quality Content Is King

In the domain of SEO, the supremacy of quality content is undisputed. This rule is simple: content that offers value, insight, and relevance not only engages readers but also garners the attention of search engines. 

Picture a library filled with countless books. The ones that offer unique perspectives, compelling narratives, and accurate information are the ones people reach for time and again. 

Similarly, in the vast digital library of the internet, content that stands out is content that delivers quality.

But what exactly makes content ‘quality’? It’s not just about well-written prose. Quality content solves problems, answers questions, and provides useful information. It’s the type of content that readers bookmark, share, and reference. 

This kind of engagement sends positive signals to search engines, indicating that your content is valuable and deserves a higher ranking.

For a practical spin, consider a company blog post explaining a complex industry trend in simple, digestible terms. Such content not only establishes authority and expertise but also encourages backlinks from other reputable sites. 

These backlinks are like nods of approval from the web community, further boosting your site’s SEO standing.

Remember, search engines are getting smarter. They can differentiate between superficial keyword-stuffed articles and genuinely informative content. So, the focus should be on crafting content that resonates with the audience and adds value to their lives or businesses. 

In the realm of SEO, content isn’t just king- it’s the ace in your deck.

Get the DOM Difference For Your Business

Figuring out SEO can feel like a journey through a labyrinth, but these five bedrock principles provide a reliable map. From the enduring power of quality content to the influence of backlinks in building authority, these rules form the foundation of effective SEO strategies. 

They have withstood the test of time and the evolution of search engine algorithms.

Remember, SEO is ever-changing. Staying informed and adaptable is key. Yet, grounding your strategy in these five principles will keep your SEO efforts focused and effective. Embrace these guidelines as you refine your approach to SEO, and watch your website’s performance improve.

For those seeking expert guidance in crafting and executing top-notch SEO strategies, consider Direct Online Marketing. Our team tailors SEO solutions to meet your unique business needs and goals. 

Want to transform your SEO efforts into tangible business results? Contact us to get started.

Key Takeaways

• User Experience is Fundamental: A seamless user experience, characterized by fast site speed, mobile responsiveness, and clear navigation, is essential. These elements not only enhance user satisfaction but also boost SEO rankings.
• Backlinks Build Authority: Quality backlinks are crucial for establishing your website’s authority. Focus on earning these through valuable content and authentic networking, rather than resorting to outdated tactics like link buying.
• Strategic Keyword Use: Keywords are more than just search terms -; they’re the bridge between user intent and your content. Proper research and strategic placement are key, moving away from overuse towards relevance and natural integration.
• Technical SEO as a Foundation: Pay close attention to technical SEO, including site structure, crawlability, and load times. Regular audits and updates ensure your site remains accessible and appealing to search engines.
• Quality Content Reigns Supreme: High-quality, informative, and engaging content is the top priority. Content that genuinely adds value attracts readers, encourages sharing, and earns the favor of search engines.

The post The 5 Bedrock SEO Rules That Will Always (Probably) Be True 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.

No matter how many pieces pick up and try to put together, they can just never fit quite right.

If your B2B company is struggling to get the results it deserves from SEO initiatives, investing in specialized services could be the key to success. You need a plan tailored for your objectives, and experienced professionals with real-world experience working with other businesses just like yours.

In this blog post, we’ll outline what effective SEO services look like and why they are important for any B2B company looking to make an impact online. Keep reading as we take on this complex topic!

Why Do B2Bs Need SEO?

B2B SEO services are essential to attracting website visitors and boosting your business growth. Being as straight forward in our explanation as possible, B2Bs need SEO so that search engines can display their content as a result on their pages. This way, users who are searching for your offerings will be more likely to visit your website.

Common tactics B2B SEO campaigns often start with are keyword research and analysis of your existing campaigns. This way, the words and phrases people use when they’re looking for your products and services are clear and determined by data – not internal jargon or other human-centric decisions. By optimizing your content with those keywords, you can make sure that it shows up in the search engine results pages for those searches.

B2B SEO is an important part of making sure potential customers are finding your site and learning about what you offer. With the right plan in place, you’ll be well on your way to success!

There are three primary reasons why a B2B organization should prioritize doing SEO.

Improving Your Website’s Visibility and Rankings

If you’re a B2B company, improving your website’s visibility and rankings can be the difference between success and failure.

Luckily, by leveraging SEO techniques such as link building, keyword research, meta descriptions, and image alt tags, it’s possible to move the needle in a significant way.

For example, link building increases your credibility with search engines like Google, which can ultimately result in higher rankings and more traffic to your site. Taking these steps could make a major impact on how well your website performs online.

B2B SEO Services Can Improve The Quality Of Your Content

Making your website more engaging and efficient for your site visitors is critical in today’s competitive B2B business landscape.

For B2B businesses, having quality content on your website is essential for drawing in leads and improving SEO.

Taking the time to write compelling copy and creating helpful articles can be a great way to start. However, there are a few steps you can take to further improve the quality of your content.

1. Make sure all written pieces are well-researched and full of carefully crafted details to ensure that your audience has an engaging reading experience.
2. Be aware of who your target audience is going to be. This will also help you focus on topics that matter most to them.
3. Use visuals within your content that will appeal to different types of readers and make it easier to capture the attention of those who prefer visual messages over text.

Attract More Visitors To Your Website

To attract more B2B buyers to your website visitors, there’s no question that SEO should be one of your main focuses as a campaign strategy.

In addition to the increase of traffic you are going to receive from the search engines themselves, utilizing techniques like link building to ensure longer term higher rankings can also encourage visitors to hit your website.

After you take steps to improve the quality of your content, your website’s visibility, and your search engine rankings – users who are searching for your offerings will be more likely to visit your website.

How Much Should A Budget Be For B2Bs SEO Services? What Should You Expect To Get In Return?

Investing appropriately in SEO is so important for B2B companies.

Any business that wants to be successful needs to have a solid SEO strategy in place. But for B2Bs, figuring out how much to budget for SEO can be tricky. There are a lot of factors to consider, and it’s important to get it right in order to see a good return on investment.

Unfortunately, most companies will find they have a really hard time getting a direct answer to this question from agencies like ours.

Why? Because there are a lot of variables to take into consideration, including:

1. The goals of your campaign
2. The internal resources you have to support your campaign
3. The quality of the sites you are going to compete with for top Google results

If you are actively looking for an agency to help you grow confidently using SEO, you will come across companies that charge as little as $100 a month for their services. On the other side of the spectrum, you will also find companies that propose $100,000 a month for a wide-reaching project scope.

Campaigns that tend to be above that average when they need:

• A higher commitment of technical and content specialists
• Multiple websites that need attention
• International marketing goals in non-English speaking regions of the world
• Multi-location businesses that need to be managed

Of course, results will vary depending on the size of the business and the competitive landscape. But as long as you’re realistic about what you can expect to achieve, you should be happy with the ROI from your SEO efforts.

Don’t Forget To Track Your Traffic

B2B businesses should never overlook the importance of tracking their traffic.

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) has now become a must-deploy tool that offers B2B companies in-depth insights into their website performance. If you are preparing to invest in an SEO campaign, pairing it with Google’s leading analytics platform is hard to argue against. Accurately measure campaign effectiveness and gain valuable SEO insights to make informed, data-driven decisions about the future of your campaigns with a quality tracking platform.

Regular tracking benefits companies like yours and can help you build an better online presence. In the event that you are advertising on marketplaces like Clutch or ThomasNet, analytics tools can also make for more profitable digital advertising campaigns!

Don’t forget to track your website traffic. With tools like GA4, B2B businesses can modernize their approach to marketing campaigns, measure success results, and reap the rewards of improved ROI for their SEO campaigns.

B2B SEO Services Can Mean Results For Your Company

By utilizing SEO strategies, B2Bs can increase their:

• Visibility and website rankings in the SERPs
• Improve the quality of their content
• Create more engagement
• Attract more visitors to their site
• Convert more leads into sales

However, it is important that B2Bs invest responsibly by planning a budget and keeping track of their traffic data. As they begin seeing growth in website visitors and overall revenue stream as a result of their SEO efforts, they will gain further insight into how much to spend on SEO and what kind of returns to expect with each investment.

With proper planning and tracking, B2Bs can be sure that the money put towards SEO actually delivers the desired results.

Click here to learn more about our SEO services and how our agency can help your business grow confidently online.

The post What Can B2B SEO Services Do For Growing Companies? appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

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

It all starts with the power of the informative blog.

A Blog Log

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

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

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

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

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

What is Historical Optimization?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s Not just Blogs

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

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

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

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

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

What are the Benefits of Historical Optimization?

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

Here are the facts in listicle form:

The Top 2 Benefits of Historical Optimization

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

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

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

Machine Learning and AI have changed everything about The Internet. The new Helpful Content algorithm update from Google is another example of this.

Google has created this new so-called Helpful update using Machine Learning and Artificial intelligence to better understand the content on a page similar to the way a human would. As a result, it can tell if the content on a website is actually helpful to a human user or if it was written solely to pull in search engine rankings and traffic.

What Was The 2023 Helpful Content Update Like?

The Google September 2023 Helpful Content Update significantly impacted the SEO community, showcasing less volatility compared to previous updates. Despite reduced volatility indicated by various tracking tools, the SEO industry observed notable ranking changes. This update seemed to affect more heavily SEO-optimized sites rather than average websites. Different industries experienced varied effects, displaying a spectrum of winners and losers. This update appeared to have more of a substantial impact on the SEO industry compared to the general website owner landscape.

How Does The Google Helpful Content Update Work?

As the algorithm processes websites, it uses a large number of unpublished criteria to determine the following specific items about the website it is reviewing:

1. Is the content written to answer a real question or guide an actual human to a factually correct result?
2. Is the content unique to the website it is on and not just aggregated from a number of sources?
3. Is the website hosting this content an authority – or – is it reputable?
4. Is the content low in quality or simply written to gather search engine rankings?

Content that is not written to directly answer a question or guide a user to the actual information they are seeking may receive a negative impact within Google search results.

Who Does The Helpful Content Update Impact?

While the Helpful Content Update may impact all websites across the web, the most likely candidates to be negatively impacted by the Helpful Content Update are the following types of websites:

• Aggregate Review sites for Products or Places: Sites that have minimal unique content and are simply a gathering of information will likely not fare well following the Helpful Content update in 2023.
• Websites That Simply Exist For Search Traffic: If someone has created a website simply to answer questions on the web and therefore gain a large number of search engine rankings so they can promote advertising, they are likely to get their rankings impacted by the algorithm update.
• Film/Media Sites That Provide Content For Searches They Cannot Answer: Large video game news sites, movie rumor sites, and more that frequently post articles without knowing the answer or actually providing the answer will likely be negatively impacted by the Helpful Content algorithm update.

What Will The Helpful Content Update Do To Websites?

Quite simply, the Helpful Content Update will likely negatively impact the rankings of the websites it reviews and finds not to be trustworthy or as helpful to answering a search query.

And that is also where the Helpful Content Update is unique compared to previous content updates on Google that penalize individual pages of content, as opposed to an entire website. Because of that domain level impact, penalties suffered as a result of the Helpful Content Update are going to more closely resemble other famously named updates like Panda or Medic.

Will the Helpful Content Update Hurt My Entire Website Or Just A Page?

While previous Google algorithm updates frequently only targeted specific pieces of content or pages within a site, it appears the Helpful Content Update will impact the ENTIRE website if it finds content on the domain to be unhelpful.

To combat this potentially devastating scenario, webmasters need to begin creating content on their websites that is unique, has authority, and is something they know well enough to be considered an expert.

I Have Done SEO – Will The Helpful Content Update Hurt My Website?

If you have followed proper SEO best practices, have built up your site’s authority within Google by offering unique, technically and factually sound information, and have properly stated who you are and why you are an expert on your subject – it is unlikely you will be impacted as much as websites that simply have pushed out spammy content with no real authority.

To learn more about how to build authority on your website, check out this clip below from our agency President, Justin Seibert.

What Do I Need To Do To Rank After The 2023 Helpful Content Update?

If you have been hit by the Helpful Content Update there is likely only one solution to regain your traffic and rankings you had prior to the algorithm update:

Build Authority.

The best way to rank your website and avoid all future algorithm updates is to become an expert in the eyes of Google. Below are three ways to future-proof your content from algorithm updates like this.

1. Begin writing content that answers search engine queries from users that is factually and technically sound and comes with an interesting viewpoint.
2. Your content needs to be 100% unique and not just a rehash of someone else’s material.
3. Your content also needs to explicitly state why you are considered a reliable source, including information on:
   1. who wrote the content on the site
   2. whether it has been peer-reviewed or approved in any way, and
   3. the credentials of the people who work on the website

Have You Been Hit By This Algorithm Update?

If your website has been hit by the Helpful Content Update and you have followed these steps – we would love to hear from you and understand your experience.

Please reach out so we can help diagnose your situation.

The post What Is The Google Helpful Content Update? appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.