Does Internal Linking Help SEO?

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

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

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

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

Insights On Every Question You Have About SEO and Internal Links

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is the Impact of Internal Links?

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

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

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

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

How Do Internal Links Help SEO?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Many Internal Links On A Page Is Good?

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

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

Granted, these were loose guidelines.

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

How Many Internal Links Is Too Many For SEO?

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

There is no right answer.

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

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

If it’s useful, do it.

If it’s not useful, don’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SEO Internal Linking Hierarchy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where Should I Place Internal Links?

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

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

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

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

In layman’s terms, don’t spam links.

Link Juice: The Impact of Internal Links

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

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

Other Questions About Internal Links

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

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

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

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

SEO Internal Links are Important

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

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

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

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

Frequently Asked Questions About Internal Links

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

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.

Simply put: it’s not easy to be in charge of kickstarting growth for treatment facilities and rehabilitation centers.

Scammers and third-party lead generators have increased the difficulty for organizations to rank their websites to be found by the 23-million-plus Americans in need of treatment. 

But the biggest Google change challenging SEO efforts for treatment facilities and rehabs isn’t the scammers…

Instead, it’s the government. 

Learn how the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) has been impacting your ability to rank at the top of the search results. Then, get a glimpse into 12 of our top ideas to rise above SAMHSA in the search engines so you can get your growth plans off the ground.  

SAMHSA’s Impact on Digital Marketing for Addiction and Mental Health

Back in February 2018, Google rolled out a significant change to how it presents search results in the United States when users look for services and information related to substance abuse and mental health.

That change? The placement of the National Helpline page provided by SAMHSA as one of the top three search results for high volume keywords like:

• “anxiety symptoms” — 77,500 monthly searches*
• “drug addiction” — 22,200 monthly searches*
• “signs of alcoholism” — 18,100 monthly searches*

The rise in the ranking presence of this page was exponential. According to data from SEMrush, its presence in the top 10 of Google results increased by over 1,100% in just the first month.

But that was just the beginning. Today, many of those same searches continue to show the SAMHSA National Helpline, and the number continues to grow.

For instance, as of August 2020, you can now find it listed on the first page of Google for over 89,000 terms. As a result, traffic estimates to the site have also grown by enormous leaps and bounds.

If you are responsible for confidently growing admission applications at a substance abuse or mental health facility, this change has forced you to rethink a few of your tactics. The good news is that rehab facilities like yours can respond and succeed despite this.

Get started with the extensive list we’ve created for you below.

Below, you will find 12 alternative marketing tactics – three using PPC strategies, and 9 using SEO strategies – that you can leverage quickly to compensate for SAMHSA’s ownership over the most clicked-through keyword positions in the search engines.

Our 12 Top Addiction Treatment Marketing Tactics

PPC And Digital Advertising Tactics

1. Go ‘Legit’ to Run Search Ads
2. Advertise On The ‘No. 2 Search Engine’
3. Strategically Stay Top Of Mind On The ‘GDN’

SEO And Content Marketing Tactics

1. Get Listed in SAMHSA’s Locator
2. Create Content For Every SERP Feature
3. Market The Map With Local SEO
4. Explore New Markets With Hyperlocal Pages
5. Review Your Past (Optimize It For The Future)
6. Capitalize On Question-Based Searches
7. Expand Upon Your Program Features
8. Blog For Your Decision-Making Audience
9. Barnacle To Top Content Publishers

1. Go ‘Legit’ and Get Approved to Run Ads In Search Engines

For a long time, Google and Bing accepted search engine advertising from rehab and mental health facilities in the same way they accepted ads from other medical service and healthcare providers. But, as the opioid crisis in the United States continued to escalate, the rules for addiction treatment centers started to change. 

Why? Because scammers started taking advantage of those in need.

To help separate the scammers from the legitimate treatment facilities, Google partnered with LegitScript to setup an independent, third-party verification system. Since then, any in-person treatment facility, crisis hotline, or support group has been required to be LegitScript certified to advertise in Google. You can learn more about the LegitScript certification process from our friends at FHE Health, a healthcare institution that delivers quality, medically integrated personalized treatment for those suffering from behavioral health disorders located in Deerfield Beach, FL.

Why LegitScript Certification For Search Ads Became A Need

In case you missed it, here’s a timeline of how the bans and reinstatements of rehab facility advertising in search engines progressed:

• September 2017: Google began restricting ads from showing for searches related to addiction treatment after it noticed that some facilities running ads did not provide a high enough quality of care to help patients recover.
• January 2018: Google followed suit in the UK as well and eventually Google extended the ban globally.
• April 2018: Google announced its partnership with LegitScript. By July, LegitScript planned to verify about 30 facilities and Google would once again reopen advertising to in-person facilities, crisis hotlines, and support groups.
• February 2019: Bing announced it would also require LegitScript certification for all addiction treatment advertisers and would no longer accept third-party lead generators. 

To be fair, there’s no doubt that running PPC campaigns in substance abuse and mental health niches is a costly marketing strategy. In addition to your monthly PPC marketing budget and associated agency fees, LegitScript requires an application fee per facility and an annual fee for verification.

With that said, search engine advertising is likely to be an ROI-positive endeavor if managed correctly. It’s also the only 100% viable option for getting a top page position for a keyword currently occupied by SAMHSA.

Plus, LegitScript certification keeps a lot of the less ethical facilities and scammers from competing for clicks and driving the costs per click higher.

Similar to becoming a listed facility in the Behavioral Health Treatment Services Locator from SAMHSA (more on that below), getting your facility listed will take some time, but the process is pretty simple.

If you are a representative of a facility interested in starting a LegitScript application, you can click here to submit one.

2. Advertise On YouTube, The Internet’s ‘No. 2 Search Engine’ 

If you clicked here, you were expecting this to be all about advertising on Bing, weren’t you? Or maybe one of the search engines that’s popular in international markets, like Baidu or Yandex?

Well, it’s not. Instead, you need to take a moment and think about leveraging the search opportunities provided by advertising on YouTube. A site that generates more searches on its platform than Bing, Yahoo!, AOL, and Ask.com… COMBINED.

Added bonus: it’s also widely considered to be the no. 2 social network, making it a great place to boost your social media marketing.

While it’s not a traditional “search engine” in the way you might normally think about them, there are nearly 3 BILLION searches per month done on the site, according to data compiled by Mushroom Networks. 

That breaks down to over 1,100 searches per second. 

Although it was acquired by Google back in 2006, LegitScript certification is not required at this time to advertise on YouTube. Therefore, it can be a more attractive advertising solution for smaller facilities with cost barriers to traditional search marketing on Google and Bing.

4 YouTube Advertising Tips To Maximize The Performance Of Your Videos

While LegitScript certification isn’t required, you’re still going to need to have a commercial or video ad ready to go for a YouTube promotion. Once you have your creative completed, here are a few ideas on how to get the best performance from a YouTube campaign.

• Use the appropriate format. Here’s a quick list of which type of YouTube ad is best for your campaign, based on your goals.
  • Brand recognition: 6-second bumpers.
  • Clicks: 15-20 second pre-roll ads (bonus: they can’t be skipped).
  • Conversions: 15-20 second pre-roll ads
  • Re-purposing a TV commercial: 30-second In-Stream ads.
• Utilize closed captioning. Provide the best user experience for your viewers with accurate, verbatim transcriptions.
• Target smartly. Find your audience using the options for gender, parental status, interests, or target specific channels they are likely to watch.
• Deploy an end card. You’ve made some great content, now reinforce your brand and inspire the viewer to take their next action by directing your viewers to their next destination – a landing page, your website, or your YouTube channel page.

There are definitely some benefits YouTube can bring to your marketing efforts with a dedicated advertising budget.

In addition, leveraging YouTube can also bring benefits to your traffic and visibility through SEO and referral traffic. Interested in learning how it can help you in these areas? Check out one of these helpful links.

• How We Grew YouTube Traffic 6,800% For This Retailer
• Video Hosting: YouTube or Vimeo?
• 6 YouTube Tips To Improve Your Results

3. Strategically Stay Top Of Mind On Google’s Display Network

According to Google, its far-reaching Display Network reaches 90% of Internet users around the world. 

Websites. Blogs. News sites. Even Google-owned properties like Gmail and YouTube.

All of them have an advertising opportunity available to your facility through the Google Display Network.

Depending on the business goals you have for your campaign, Google can also manage the campaign for you on autopilot. Just set your budget, upload your ads, and off you go!

But just because it sounds easy, however, doesn’t mean it’s that simple. Sure, automated bidding is handy, but it’s only as useful as the strategy you put behind it. Similar to YouTube advertising and LegitScript approved PPC advertising, you’re going to want to pay a lot of attention to your targeting if you want a display campaign that will lead to conversions. 

Oh, and you’re going to want to keep your ads fresh. You ever get tired of seeing the same ads from leading brands over and over? If you answered yes, then you can assume your audiences will too. Don’t bore them to death with your creative.

With the Google Display Network, you can proceed with confidence. Just be aware that patience and persistence are going to be key in this channel if you want it to pay off. 

THIS TREATMENT CENTER
IMPROVED THEIR ADMITS BY 300%
USING DIGITAL ADS. LEARN HOW.

4. Getting Listed in SAMHSA’s Behavioral Health Treatment Services Locator

One of my favorite online marketing strategies comes from the adage, “…if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” From some of our research into how Google presents this SERP listing for SAMHSA, the link for the National Helpline will often include a site link to SAMHSA’s Behavioral Health Treatment Services Locator right underneath its meta description.

The fact is that Google favors displaying links from SAMHSA over other possible search results prominently, so getting your original content or sales-driven pages to rank above SAMHSA will be extremely difficult — almost near impossible.

However, SAMHSA has an online treatment finder, and rehab facilities can request to be added to that list of treatment providers.

How To Get Listed In The SAMHSA Behavioral Health Treatment Services Locator

Getting listed in the SAMHSA services locator is a great SEO tactic for your campaign. For starters, you’re gaining a backlink from a .gov domain — one of the highest-value links you can obtain.

Need a reason beyond that? The site generates an estimated 60,000+ visits per month in the United States from Google searches alone. The high volume and highly specific type of people visiting the site and then being referred to your facility create a great source of well-qualified traffic for your site.

If you represent a newer facility, or your facility is not currently listed in SAMHSA’s locator, getting listed will take some time. Overall, though, the process is pretty simple. Here’s how it works according to the FAQ on the locator’s website:

1. You request the addition of your facility by completing the I-BHS Facility Application Form.
2. The BHSIS Project Office verifies that your facility is eligible by contacting your local representatives or SAMHSA/CBHSQ. As an alternative, you can also contact your state mental health or substance abuse agency to help with verification.
3. You receive a survey in the mail from I-BHS, complete it, and return.
4. About a month passes, and pending final approval, your facility should be good to go. Just know that they typically add new facilities on a monthly basis.

To maintain your listing, you are required to respond annually to either:

• the National Survey of Substance Abuse Treatment Services (N-SSATS), or
• the National Mental Health Services Survey (N-MHSS)

These surveys go out every March, and your facility will be required to provide updated information each year after your facility was added to the list.

5. Create Content For Every SERP Feature

If you have spent time doing searches on Google and Bing for answers to almost any question, or for information on any general topic, then you have probably been served with a featured snippet result in the past.

What’s a featured snippet? According to Google, it’s that special box at the top of the search result before the standard listings. Featured snippets include:

• a quoted block of text from a webpage in paragraph, list, or table format
• a link to the webpage the text was originally quoted from

The content is also frequently read aloud by the Google Assistant if you do a voice search. 

While that is the general description of a featured snippet straight from Google, they are just one of many top-position-snatching Google features. Google search engine results page features (SERP features) can take many different forms and shapes. In fact, according to SEMrush, there are over 20 different SERP features to keep in mind if you are using SEO as a growth strategy for your facility. 

While some of the features SEMrush monitors will not have a direct impact on an addiction treatment or mental health campaign, many of them will.

12 Actionable Ideas You Can Use To Put SERP Features To Work

6 Ideas That Are Completely Within Your Control

• Local Pack: verify your GoogleMyBusiness listing and get citations on as many of the major local directories as possible (more on this in tip no. 6) 
• Site Links: add links to your top resources and services pages in the footer of your website.
• Top Stories: Have your blog added to Google News. 
• Knowledge Panel: if your facility has a Wikipedia page, or if one of your executives is a published author, one of these may be available for you to claim. 
• Reviews: deploy schema markup in your site header files with star ratings and review counts from sources like the National Rehabs Directory, the fix, ChooseHelp, or Rehab.com.
• Twitter: publish your most valuable blog content and resources in your Twitter feed using keyword-rich hashtags at the end of each tweet. 

6 Ideas You Can Influence (But Google Controls)

• Featured Snippets: if you have a page that ranks in the top 5 of a search term with a featured snippet at the top, create a subheading that includes the keyword, then publish content that matches the featured snippet type, using the keyword phrase 2-3 times in your text. 
• People Also Ask and FAQ: answer the questions Google showcases in the People Also Ask box in an FAQ section on a top traffic page. 
• Image Pack and Image: optimize the file size and dimensions of your image files and utilize up to 100 characters of your alt tag for keyword-rich descriptions. 
• Featured Videos, Video Carousel, and Video: embed your YouTube videos on pages of your site that also rank well for terms with video carousels. 
• Instant Answer: provide calculations and short, simple to answer questions on your top-performing webpages. 
• Jobs: deploy schema markup in your site header files for the pages featuring any of your open job listings. Note that this only applies if you are hosting your job openings on your site. Platforms like Glassdoor and Indeed already do this for you.

6. Leverage Local SEO To Rank Where SAMHSA Can’t Be Featured

While SAMHSA will continue to dominate organic search results, they technically only have one physical location in Rockville, Maryland. As far as Google is concerned, SAMHSA can’t be featured in local SEO search results because they are not considered to be a provider of local treatment services. SAMHSA will always be your biggest competitor for traffic in the search engines, but one area Google is leaving open for you to own continues to be local SEO.

On desktop searches, a map listing with three facilities is included with nearly every top searched keyword phrase related to substance abuse and mental health services.

On mobile devices, the map takes over all of the SERP real estate above the fold. At a bare minimum, if you have not taken over ownership of your Google My Business listing, or verified your business with the following top local directories, opportunity is leaving you behind:

• Apple Maps
• Bing Local
• SAMHSA
• Yelp

If you already have your business confirmed on all five of the platforms listed above, you are off to a great start with maximizing your online presence in your local area. But you’ll want to take it further with local SEO as there are still as many as 22 other local directories we deem to have a “high” or “very high” citation value.

Because of the presence of the SAMHSA listing at the top of the search results, the fact that you want to reach your target audience on a local or national level will not matter – you’re going to want to leverage every ounce of opportunity local SEO has to offer. Don’t get left behind — local SEO needs to be a critical part of your drug rehab SEO strategy.

7. Go Hyperlocal

There are a lot of well-established websites in the substance abuse and mental health niche that have leveraged hyperlocal keyword searches very effectively over the years for their own addiction treatment marketing.

In fact, many of the most highly trafficked sites in this niche leverage creating a directory of treatment facilities and drug rehab centers as one of their main marketing tools to drive referrals to advertisers. Sites like SoberNation and Rehabs.com have done this for years and become so successful with this as a marketing strategy that they can now get you to pay them for traffic.

Because of how well sites like this perform in the SERPs, these types of directories can be a good source of both relevant referral traffic as well as qualified admissions leads. It can be tough to justify paying to be listed in a directory, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore these opportunities entirely.

Think of it this way — if you can justify paying to be part of your local chamber of commerce, you could probably justify paying to be listed in a directory that can help grow your admissions. Outside of becoming listed in rehab focused directories, you can also apply a hyperlocal approach to your website. If you know zip codes, names of popular suburban areas, or names of specific cities and towns within a dedicated drive radius of your facility, then you can leverage localized content to rank for some highly targeted long-tail keyword searches.

Want to go into more depth on hyperlocal digital marketing? Here’s a few blog posts worth your click. 

• What is Hyperlocal SEO and Why Should I Be Doing it Right Now?
• How You Can Use Hyperlocal Ad Campaigns

8. Revise Your Past (Then Optimize It For Your Future) In Addiction Treatment Marketing

Historical optimization is the practice of updating old content on your site and improving its SEO value for the present and future. Over the past few years, this tactic has become an incredibly valuable SEO play for facilities with a large archive of content.

To briefly summarize this tactic, find a blog post or article on your site that was published at least six months ago. Prioritize pages on your site that either:

1. Generate a lot of traffic, or
2. Convert into admission inquiries

Then refresh the content, improve the on-page SEO, add an author bio, and re-publish it with a more recent “updated” date.

Search engines reward webpages they can rely on being “there” when the crawl the internet. This tactic presents your facility with the opportunity to avoid writing about the same topics over and over again. Instead, it helps your website establish cornerstone pieces of content that will reliably provide your site with traffic from search engines. 

As an added bonus, historical optimization can help you establish your administrators and clinicians as thought leaders in the addiction and behavioral health industry.

Historical optimization in your addiction treatment marketing is a great way to get long term value out of content you published long ago.

9. Take Advantage of Question-Based Queries In Your Addiction Treatment Marketing

According to research compiled by Jumpshot and analyzed by Moz in March 2017, roughly 8% of Google searches are phrased as questions. With voice search only continuing to rise in popularity, the percentage of question-based searches are sure to grow accordingly.

Do you have an FAQ page on your facility’s website?

When you publish blog content, are you writing titles and subheadings in your posts in the form of a question? Take the time to answer both common and uncommon questions. Try to compile questions you may often get from admission prospects and their families about your treatment approaches, facilities, or warning signs that a loved one needs to know. There are two major benefits to taking this approach with your addiction treatment marketing strategy:

1. You will be building trust and helping inform people who need help but are not ready to call.
2. Your site will benefit from a larger number of entry points from keyword searches, lessening the impact that SAMHSA’s top positioning will take away from search traffic to your facility.

What questions are your admissions team, or your clinical staffers, uniquely qualified to answer? Give them a laptop and have them start writing!

10. Don’t Forget About Your Program Features In Your Addiction Treatment Marketing

Of the over 89,000+ keyword phrases where Google displays the SAMHSA National Helpline link in the top three results, above you will see just a small sample of the monetary worth of some of the terms, sorted by top monthly search volume estimates.* That’s a very small sampling of the data SEMrush has on rankings for the National Helpline page, but with a pretty quick glance, you will notice some trends across the keywords that Google is using to trigger this result.

• Different forms of addiction
• Someone researching reactions to substance abuse (withdrawal, side effects, etc.)
• Someone is looking to find/get help (AA, NA, rehab, etc.)

Now, in contrast to that, you may have noticed that keywords related to general program features were not in the above example. These days, no substance abuse or mental health facility is the same. Dig in to communicate what makes the approach of your recovery centers unique from other facilities.

3 Questions You Should Think About Answering In Your Content Marketing Plan For Your Rehabilitation Center

• Does your program take a mindfulness approach to relapse prevention?
• Do you leverage the outdoors as a therapy method?
• Does your staff have multiple advanced certifications or education credentials?

Whatever makes your facility stand out from the rest of the facilities out there, now is the time to capitalize on it. Make sure your site has dedicated pages related to those treatment programs and features and support those dedicated pages with press releases or blog post content. Optimize the dedicated pages for maximum search visibility by applying on-page SEO best practices and leverage link building strategies from the supporting content to heighten the importance of the dedicated pages to search engines.

With this addiction treatment marketing tactic, every page on your website can be an entry point to put you in touch with those in need of help.

11. Addiction Treatment Marketing Should Cater Content to Your Audience

In response to these developments in Google search results, a lot of digital marketing agencies are going to suggest you try to leverage content marketing strategies only with the intention of generating interest from top-tier publishers. The idea here is that getting coverage in front of a national audience should generate backlinks and a lot of impressions. The concept can also be referred to as viral marketing — because “going viral” is super easy, right?

To us, this feels like an expensive fool’s errand; unless, of course, the idea of a campaign with a large expense and little to no attributable ROI sounds like something your facility wants to try out.

Addiction treatment marketing shouldn’t be about more awareness of your facility. Instead, it should be about connecting with people who love and care for those who need your help.

5 Content Ideas To Help Establish A Better Connection With Those Who Need Your Help

Going with a “10X content” approach that will have an impact on the attention your brand receives and little else, the more sensible approach is to cater your content directly to your audience. Here are several alternatives to making “viral” content that could be better suited to get your facility highly-relevant traffic:

• Answering questions for the family members of potential admits
• Recapping research conducted in the industry that validates your approach to healing
• Sharing video testimonials from alumni who have dramatically improved their lives after release
• Providing helpful guides on niche topics related to attending a treatment facility, such as a legal term glossary
• Reviewing national and international news topics and explaining how they are directly impacting addiction and mental health treatment

For all types of people, it’s tough dealing with substance abuse and mental health. If you seek to be a resource for people by providing useful information at the right time, they will reach out when they need you the most. Don’t rely on occasional brand mentions in big publications with the hopes that people will remember you when the time is right.

12. Barnacle Your Brand To Top Ranking Content Publishers

Barnacle SEO is not a new strategy, but it can be a highly successful approach when situations like this occur. The term was coined by Will Scott of Search Influence about a decade ago and there was a must-watch Whiteboard Friday about it several years ago, too.

The idea behind Barnacle SEO for rehab centers as an addiction treatment marketing tactic is pretty straightforward – leverage the top rankings of other sites for your gain. Ever since April 2018, ranking for the top keywords in the substance abuse and mental health space became exponentially harder due to the update of SAMHSA’s National Helpline. Now, in addition to competing with other facilities and online publishers for top keyword rankings, getting them is almost impossible because of the injection of SAMHSA.

What can you do? Create content specifically on other sites that rank for your targeted keywords. Five of our favorite target domains to leverage for this strategy include:

• Medium
• Pinterest
• Quora
• Wikipedia
• YouTube

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 ranks on the first page of Google results is high. While getting a Wikipedia page about your facility may be difficult, creating a profile and submitting content to all of these platforms should become a high priority online marketing strategy this year.

Closing Thoughts On Addiction Treatment Marketing Strategies

Many people are turning to Google to find answers to their troubles. With locations in Wheeling, WV, and Pittsburgh, PA, the team at DOM is well aware of the US’s opioid crisis. We are also sensitive to the fact that there is no “one size fits all” fix.

We think it’s a good thing that Google is trying to get people help when they need it from a neutral source. This is also not unfamiliar territory for Google. Back in November 2016, they made a similar change to the top of results for searches related to suicide.

But this change over the last two years does force substance abuse and mental health treatment facilities to shift. They can still use search engine marketing strategies to create opportunities for themselves. 

They just need to get more creative in order to provide care to the nearly 23 million Americans in need.

The top 12 ways we suggest facilities shift their addiction treatment marketing strategies are:

1. Become a LegitScript certified advertiser so your facility can run Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising
2. Extend the reach of your commercials and video content with YouTube advertising
3. Strategically tap into the near-limitless advertising opportunities in the Google Display Network 
4. Get listed in the SAMHSA Behavioral Health Treatment Services Locator
5. Find keywords you already rank well for and structure your content for Featured Snippets
6. Maximize visibility in local SEO by completing and verifying any available citations
7. Create content on your site dedicated to hyperlocal communities that are in need of your services
8. Keep top-performing pages up to date by adding more text and updating visual content every three to six months 
9. Invest time in creating a comprehensive FAQ or writing blog posts to answer common questions
10. Optimize pages on your site for rankings around the unique features of your programs
11. Create content tailored to the families and individuals struggling with these issues
12. “Barnacle” content published by your facility to top publishing platforms for better exposure

Want to check out more of our actionable ideas from our Pittsburgh marketing firm to grow confidently online in the medical and health industry? Check out some of these blog posts below.

• Google Medic: How to SEO Proof Your Site in the Trust Authority Era
• How Do People Find Answers To Health Related Questions?
• How To Optimize Your Hospital for Local Search
• Healthcare Marketing Research & Survey Results

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

The post 12 Marketing Plans For Your Rehab Center To Kickstart Its Growth (Updated March 2022) appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

But does Quora help with SEO?

The answer to this question is a hearty “yes, Quora helps with SEO.” But if you’ve been living under an internet rock, here are several reasons why Quora should matter to you as a digital marketer, regardless of whether or not it helps with SEO:

• Alexa rates it as the 81st most trafficked website on the internet
• Quora claims to have a global audience of over 300 million users
• SEMrush says it has averaged over 5.8 million top 10 keyword rankings in Google in the last year (screenshot below)

Is a site with tons of traffic, a large group of monthly active users, and great keyword rankings of interest to you and your SEO strategies?

We thought so.

At DOM, we’ve already made our case as to why you should take advantage of Quora’s advertising platform. We even have an in-depth guide to help you make the most of your ad dollars on Quora.

We have not covered how we leverage it for SEO—until now.

It’s time we share just how valuable Quora can be to your SEO efforts; this post will touch on multiple strategies you can use yourself.

How to Leverage Quora For SEO Keyword Ideas

At the original time of writing this, Quora has over 19.8 million pages of content indexed by Google.

And those 19.8 million were on the English language domain (www) only. Content on Quora is also available at any time in 16 other languages!

Are you struggling to find the inspiration to create content for your blog? What about expanding the amount of text on your service or product pages with an FAQ section? Are you trying to figure out what people are researching before buying in your industry?

As the #1 Q&A site on the internet, Quora is sure to have a question (or 19.79 million) to lead you to the answers you seek.

Keyword ideas are everywhere in Quora.

Get started by typing your main keyword phrase into the search box. You can do a sitewide search on the phrase you’re looking for:

Or navigate directly to a topic page about your search query curated by Quora admins.

Either way, you will find a ton of questions related to your target keyword phrase.

Want an easy way to determine the most popular questions on your topic? Pay close attention to the question’s follower count. The higher the number of followers a question on Quora has, the more interest and repeat traffic new answer contributions receive.

Does Quora Help SEO In Terms Of Link Building?

One of the most common ways SEO professionals leverage Quora is to include it as part of a comprehensive link building strategy. But does Quora help SEO campaigns build more effective links? Below are several of the ways we use it, along with some inspiration for your campaign.

(Think of a strategy we missed? Let us know, and we’ll add it to the list.)

Create A Blog Subdomain

Creating a blog subdomain attached to your Quora account (like the one found here: https://wordsthatshouldexistinenglish.quora.com/) isn’t a new strategy for building links.

In 2019, it also isn’t a very effective strategy when the links created are all going to be “nofollow.”

Alternatively, consider building a blog subdomain on Quora to expose your content to the thousands of users who want your expert answers to their questions.

Find Influencers From The Most Viewed Writers

Want to run an influencer campaign in a B2B niche? Or is the target promoter of your product a highly educated person?

Quora may be a better source of contacts to partner with than Twitter or Instagram.

Why?

A few reasons:

1. The content lives on the page it was added to permanently
2. Posts by content creators have significant potential to be seen by more users than just their own followers
3. Question pages create links search engines actually index

The process is pretty simple for finding top influencers of a given topic on Quora.

1. Navigate to a content topic page like this one: https://www.quora.com/topic/SEO-Tools
2. Click the link under the topic heading titled “Most Viewed Writers”

On that page, you will find a top 10 list of the contributors with the most answer views in the last 30 days. In addition to that, you will also see a list of the top 40 “Up and Coming” contributors.

For more on influencers and how you can find the right ones for your company, check out our complete beginner’s guide to influencer marketing.

Network With Podcasters

Looking to leverage the world of podcasting to promote your expertise or product? Podcast hosts will frequently tap into the power of Quora as a part of their outreach strategy for their own episodes.

The potential for massive referral traffic is available through Quora. These influencers have made a living out of knowing how to maximize attention arbitrage online.

For the best links for an SEO campaign, you will want to acquire links to your products or services in the show notes of any episode you sponsor or interview you provide.

That said, think of Quora as a great place to make first your first contact!

Get A Wide Variety Of Nofollow Links

Nearly every external link generated on the Quora domain by its users will have a nofollow attribute. Below is a list of the types of links you can create on Quora that include this attribute:

• Answer submissions (both in the content body and as footnotes)
• Answer Wiki’s (requires admin approval)
• Self-published blog posts
• Submitting a link to Spaces (requires admin approval)
• User profiles

But that doesn’t mean nofollow links are bad. In fact, SEO experts (and DOM) regularly recommend acquiring nofollow links as a way to diversify your link profile.

Also, you control the pages that you can link to in your Quora answers. This means that you can build links to pages that are tough to acquire through outreach. Think service pages, product pages or gated content resources—the types of content bloggers and other publishers look down upon.

How To Leverage Quora For Barnacle SEO

“Barnacle SEO” is not a new strategy, but it is the most effective way to leverage Quora for SEO. So, if you continue to wonder if Quora does help SEO, this strategy should be the answer you are seeking.

As the name implies, this approach leverages the authority of Quora by creating content specifically on their question pages that rank for your targeted keywords.

Because the links are nofollow, the value to help boost your search rankings is debatable. However, you can score a good bit of referral traffic from any of these question pages.

As we mentioned before, Google sends a ton of traffic to the site due to Quora’s visibility in the SERPs.

Using SEMrush’s Keyword Gap Analysis tool, here’s how to find the best pages to barnacle your answers to in Quora.

1. Open the Keyword Gap tool under the dropdown for Gap Analysis.
2. Input your domain and Quora.com into the domains list
3. Click ‘Go’ and get your keyword list

Once the list populates, there are a handful of ways we suggest filtering the results to make them as useful as possible.

You can do one or all of the following to narrow down the keywords that will matter the most for your barnacle strategy.

1. Limit the list to only include keywords with Quora.com organic positions less than 11
2. Limit the list to only include keywords with your domain in organic positions less than 11
3. Sort the list by the most expensive CPC estimates to find the most in-demand keywords for advertisers
4. Sort the list by monthly volume in ascending order to find the most searched phrases
5. Sort the list by keyword difficulty in ascending order to find the most competitive phrases

Once you find the list of keywords that are most effective for you, provide your opinionated answer to the question on the page. As a bonus, make sure you link to a relevant page on your site that supplements or adds value to your answer.

So How Do We Do All Of This Stuff “Right”?

So does quora help SEO campaigns become more successful? With time and patience, isn’t anything possible?

Like everything in our industry, there is a lot of trial and error that goes into a great Quora SEO strategy.

We’ve seen campaigns with only a handful of answered questions lead to conversions and a weekly stream of referral traffic.

On the flip side, we’ve also answered dozens of questions in campaigns and seen little to no impact made against our goals.

To do Quora “right” as part of your SEO campaign, there are a few must do’s you need to add to your strategy:

• Evaluate its vast database of questions to determine high-interest keyword ideas
• Use its referral traffic potential as a way to syndicate content, find influencers, and build links
• “Barnacle” to Quora’s content with top rankings in Google by answering them and linking to your site

Whether you decide to take advantage of it or not, millions of users are visiting Quora every day to ask their questions. Millions more are there to provide or read insightful answers.

We’ve shown you how. Now get over to Quora and leverage this opportunity to reach millions of people looking for your product or service before it’s too late.

The post The Unbelievable Truth Behind Using Quora For SEO (And How to Do it Right) [Updated 2020] appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Why do they turn away? For a couple of reasons:

1. The pipeline has a long buying cycle and extended time is needed to propose, close, and fulfill new sales
2. The direction of their time is shifted away from lead generation to oversight of new product development or service implementation
3. The interest in building up a second lead generation channel from the ground up, in an effort to diversify sources

While many of the reasons listed above may sound like a great problem for your company to have, each reason can cause you to turn away from lead generation. This can quickly result in a dried up pipeline, the archnemesis of a marketing manager for a growing software company.

Because of this situation, you need to stay focused on lead generation and find several consistent sources for marketing and sales-qualified leads. Below, I’ve compiled 15 lead generation ideas that are both actionable and effective.

1. Best Practice Guides & Problem-Solving Tutorials

This is a very commonly used tactic by nearly every B2B solution provider on the Internet – whether they are a software company or not.

Your potential customers have to upgrade their legacy systems to stay competitive or get in line with newly placed industry standards. They may not know what they need to do, or they may only know what problems they experience with their existing solutions. You need to create content that serves as an educational opportunity for them and their team members.

Added bonus: Include buttons on this page that makes your guide easy to bookmark, print, PDF, email, or share on an office messaging platform like Slack or Yammer.  

2. Chatbots

There once was a time I installed a chat plugin on a website and generated a lead for a tech company the very first night! While this can definitely work to generate more leads for your business, consider having an established policy for how to handle support requests that come in through online chat.

When it comes to utilizing chatbots, there are a ton of options and things to consider. For instance, if you already have a customer support platform, there are multiple integration options for Zendesk chatbots and the like. If you don’t want to muddy the waters between your sales team and support team, then limit the use of your chat application on certain pages that existing customers are less likely to visit.

There’s a lot of content out there on the different types of chatbots and the many benefits they can bring to your company. Before making a decision on the best chatbot solution for your company, we suggest you check out some of the following resources:

• Creating Chatbots and Virtual Assistants That Really Work
• What’s The Difference Between Conversational Chatbots and AI?

Added bonus: Some chat apps can even force popup on pages that you specify, like service landing pages, FAQ, or pricing pages. While this may turn away some visitors, interesting prospects are likely to engage you if they are that far along in their process. 

3. Software Marketing Ideas Including Checklists, Worksheets, and Templates

Resources like this are comparable to best practice guides and tutorials, with the difference that they should be living, breathing resources that a prospective lead can interact with to chart their progress or repurpose in their daily work routines. If interactivity is not an option on your website, at least make this resource downloadable as a spreadsheet or text file.

Added bonus: If an interactive document is not possible on your own website, consider hosting a spreadsheet in Google Drive for users to copy to their own Drive folders. If you allow this, however, try to find a way to brand the file to avoid having another company re-brand a resource you created.

4. Software Marketing Ideas Including Co-marketing

This is a commonly used tactic with channel program providers in both the computer hardware and software marketing verticals. In most cases, your company can probably use this as a tactic online and offline and generate a variety of leads with limited out of pocket costs. In many cases, the partner will assist in helping you cover the marketing costs and also aide in cross-promotion of the event to their marketing list.

Added bonus: As long as your lead generation idea will also result in sales opportunities for the co-marketing partner, don’t shy away from requesting their support for a solution where you only white label their product. For instance, if a campaign you want to run results in sales that will require you to increase server space, API calls, or application installations of the partner solutions, tell them that when you apply for the marketing funds.

5. Custom Option Contact Us For Software Marketing Ideas

If you target customers are medium-sized businesses or larger, then your software is likely going to be implemented within the framework of a legacy system. If your software isn’t going to be implemented as a solution, it will still likely require some amount of customization in order to be a viable solution. Make sure you give potential customers like these the opportunity to contact you directly with an RFP or fill out a quick form to discuss their needs. Otherwise, you may miss out on a game-changing opportunity.

Added bonus: Businesses of all sizes will review your pricing pages. Make sure you give clients that don’t fit one of your primary pricing models the opportunity to contact you with a clear call-to-action for custom projects on these pages.

6. Email Courses

While this strategy takes a lot of work to set up on the front end, it can be very effective for generating leads when software marketing ideas require a high amount of education and supporting documentation to create a sales opportunity. Email marketing empowers companies to cash in on leads.

Added bonus: Nearly all major email marketing solutions have drip campaign functionality included in them. The cost to utilize this strategy has decreased dramatically in recent years.

7. Gated Content

Yes, it is 2019… and yes, gated content still absolutely works if your company needs software marketing ideas that need to improve the quality of your lead generation!

I know gating content is generally considered to be a no-no – especially in the tech world. But no matter what Spiceworks tells you in their reports, my own lead generation testing (and success) indicates that tech professionals will not only provide you the information in exchange for gated content – they will even do so for your own sales literature!

The process is pretty simple – do a survey of something, develop a whitepaper or case study, create an infographic that relates to the challenges of your target customers… and then put it behind a form in exchange for a newsletter signup or basic contact information.

This strategy works well because providing content as a download in exchange for contact information can be leveraged on multiple advertising platforms. In addition to generating organic traffic from search and social media, putting a few dollars behind these pieces of content on AdWords, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter can help turn those platforms into lead generation opportunities, also.

Added bonus: The less “valuable” the information you are providing to your target customer, the fewer form fields you should require them to fill out to receive the information. For an ebook or whitepaper, asking them to fill out detailed company information should be okay. For your sales brochure? Limit it to no more than first name and email.

8. Giveaway Your Product For Great Software Marketing Ideas

Of course, this should work to generate more leads for your company… after all, who doesn’t like getting something for free?! One disadvantage to this strategy, however, is that you risk receiving a quantity of leads that may not result in quality sales opportunities.

To help combat the quantity over the quality challenge, make sure you require the downloader or person requesting your giveaway to provide some type of personally identifiable information about themselves in exchange. You can also consider requiring them to signup for your newsletter or share your link on a social network in exchange.

Added bonus: To use your free download offer as a benefit to your SEO efforts, send an exclusive free trial to bloggers and other social media influencers to review prior to public launch. Not only can you tap into their follower counts and subscribers for potential leads, but you are also likely to earn some high-quality links back to your domain in the process.

9. Helpful Videos

I know, I know… your software is already industry-leading in terms of user-friendliness, and you provide industry-leading, AI powered customer service.

But guess what? You haven’t tapped into 100% of your market, so there are still people out there who don’t know how great your software can be for their business. Instead of focusing on creating customer supporting videos, create helpful video content for the percentage of your customers that use other software solutions. Highlight the benefits of your software over your competitor’s and show them how it will make their lives/jobs easier.

Added bonus: Share your video clips on YouTube and optimize the titles and descriptions of each clip for product comparison keyword phrases, like “Firefox vs. Chrome” or “Mac vs. PC”.

10. Newsjacking Major Industry Events

Even if it doesn’t directly affect you – good news and bad news happens in your industry on a regular basis.

Market leaders host conventions. Startups in your niche raise capital. Major platform providers get breached, hacked, or experience significant downtime. Competitors make customer service gaffes that impact a large percentage of their customer base.

Are you prepared to take advantage of the opportunities these events can provide to your business?

If you have a blog, the answer is most definitely yes! Create content around these events, and provide your own unique insights into each event, and how it relates to your target customers.

Added bonus: Depending on how aggressive you want to be with generating leads around this tactic, running AdWords campaigns on relevant keywords for these events (like “dreamforce 2017”, “bluehost hosting outage”, or “snap IPO”), can have a major positive impact on your lead tallies.

11. Pricing Pages

There are a lot of software companies – particularly SaaS companies that sell monthly package plans – that include pricing pages as part of their site structure. But on the other side of the fence, many B2B software sellers still often oppose publishing their pricing online.

Why? Because they want as many visitors as possible to request further information, schedule a demo, or take some other action… and fear they will lose sales opportunities if they are transparent with their pricing.

Well, those companies are right about one thing – they will likely lose leads by including pricing on their websites. However, my experience can also confirm that pricing pages eliminate a large percentage of leads that shop only with price as a deciding factor. Show your pricing, and save your sales team some time dealing with leads that “just want to know the price”.

Added bonus: if your software has variable pricing, list all of your rates as “Starting At” prices, include all of your available options, and use a “Submit RFQ” as your CTA at the bottom of the form instead of “Add To Cart” or “Sign Up Now”.

12. Product Comparison Vs. Top Competitors

Product comparison content is a great way to show how your software is different (and in most cases, better!) than your competition. Depending on how you choose to present your product comparison content, this can be done in a way that potential customers should easily be able to evaluate. If SEO strategies are a top driver of leads for your company, then product comparisons should be an essential part of your digital marketing plan if you are looking to expand your opportunities.

Has a company in your niche leveraged this strategy against your brand? Take action with this post breaking down PPC and SEO ideas to use when you find a competitor using your company name as a keyword.

Added bonus: Having pages like this built on your site will also allow you to rank and run advertising campaigns for keywords centered around alternatives to your competitor (like “Hotjar alternatives” and “alternatives to Salesforce”) and take top positions for searches that include the word “versus” in their query (like “apache vs cloudera” or “WooCommerce vs Magento”).

13. Quizzes

Think about how many of your potential customers spend their spare time on Facebook trying to figure out which Kardashian they most closely resemble, and guess what quotes were said by either a presidential candidate or Larry The Cable Guy.

If they are willing to invest time into quizzing and educating themselves about these frivolous questions, do you think they would be interested in investing a few minutes discovering if their department or company are fully prepared to handle the challenges your software can solve? For the sake of humanity, I sure hope the answer is yes!

Added bonus: Instead of asking these quiz takers for their contact information before they get started, or after they see the results, suggest some of your gated content as further reading once they complete the quiz!

14. Resource Guides and Expert Roundups

There’s a lot of content that can be bundled under this category – everything from a roundup of industry experts offering tips on a topic, to listicles that rank, rate, or review the best/worst of anything that is important to your audience.

You might be tired of reading “expert roundups”—but your target clients can’t get enough of them. Long list articles like what we are suggesting here exist on nearly every business strategy out there.

Whether you decide to publish these blog posts on your site or elsewhere on the web — they are a great way to improve the brand reputation of your company, as well as the personal brands of your 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

Added bonus: We do this very well on our own site. Please check out our online marketing terms glossary or our International SEO Tips blog post with over 20 industry experts for examples of this marketing strategy at work. You can also signup for a journalist/blogger account on Help A Reporter Out (HARO) to find expert sources to contribute to your roundup. HARO is a 3x per day newsletter sent to over 800K sources looking for opportunities to get media coverage.

15. Test Something With Your Software

Are you making a bold claim in your sales and marketing material, like that your software is successful in its tasks 100% of the time? Is it the only solution on the market that performs a certain task? Does it respond consistently under extreme conditions? Prove it by putting your software to the test with the help of an unbiased third party, and share the results publicly.

Just make sure to inform your marketing reps and copywriters beforehand, because after you publish the results they may need to adjust some verbiage depending on the outcome of the tests.

Added bonus: Make sure whoever you trust to do the tests don’t break your only demo version of your software. I’m not saying, I’m just sayin…

16. Site Retargeting On Top Of The Funnel Informational Content

In today’s world of search engine optimization services, comprehensive content is the king of ranking at the top of the results pages for short tail/high search volume keyword phrases.

So often times, you will find blog or article content on websites that answer questions you suspect everyone researching a company would already know, like “what is VOIP?” or “what is training data?”

Why do other software companies do this? We can think of a few reasons:

1. For the brand awareness and exposure of ranking on the first page for a keyword potential leads search for at the very beginning of their information gathering process.
2. To have content considered linkworthy to nearly any website owner around the web.
3. So that they can leverage site retargeting strategies through the entire buyer’s journey of a potential lead

Option 3 is the key strategy for publishing top of the funnel content for lead generation – you get the added bonus of adding retargeting to the page and building a list of visitors at the beginning of their search for a solution provider.

It doesn’t matter what you call this 1-2 lead generation punch, it’s going to have crawesome (creepy + awesome) results.

Stalk the 99% of visitors to your website that read an informational article they found from keyword search, but are no where near ready to become a lead, by retargeting them with display ads. You can use this strategy in search engines, display ads, social networks, and mobile apps.

Bonus tip: If your software solution requires a long sales cycle, make sure you have your audience list set in retargeting to the longest time period possible.

Final Thoughts On How To Generate Leads With Your Software Marketing Ideas

As documented above, there are a lot of ways your software company can generate leads online. No matter what tactics you choose, each strategy requires testing, a varying degree of manpower to get implemented, and a few tweaks or customizations to fit the needs of your customers and help you achieve your goals.

No matter what tactics you try to help your pipeline grow, always be testing and regularly evaluate the results to maximize performance.

If you’re interested in learning how you can drive better results with search engine marketing, schedule a digital marketing consultation.

The post 16 Actionable Lead Generation Ideas For Software Companies (Updated November 2019) appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

SEO site migration plans must have a strategy to address crucial technical issues like (in order of importance) getting redirects in place, making sure all analytics and reporting software are in line and taking care of any outstanding duplicate content.

While those technical issues have the highest priority, there’s one more thing you need to keep in mind: how does the migration affect your backlink profile?

SEO Migration Plans And The Impact On Existing Backlinks

There’s really no such thing as a “typical” site migration since most websites are unique. If a backlink points to a link on a site that does not exist or does not have a proper redirect to the new URL, there is a lot of value lost from that backlink. Simply put, if a page’s URL changes during a site migration for any reason, any backlinks pointing to that original URL have reduced in value.

There are three common kinds of migration, each with possible impacts on existing backlinks:

Migration Type 1: Moving To A New CMS

Some websites that are quite old may have been created in an older framework or with an older programming language. If these sites move to a new CMS that does not support the older URL extension (e.g., .html), the URLs will have to be changed, even if none of the content itself does.

For example:

• Example.com/home.cfm was originally built in Adobe ColdFusion
• The site owners want to transition to a WordPress install
• Because WordPress doesn’t support the.cfm code, the URL will be changed to Example.com/home or simply the root

This switch will affect your URL or site structure after the migration, which will hurt your organic traffic and keyword rankings if not handled correctly. This is the most tedious type of SEO migration plan to prepare before starting on the project.

Migration Type 2: Moving To A New Domain Name

Sites that want to rebrand and take on their brand identity with a new domain name face the largest risk of adverse effects on their overall SEO. Not only will they have lost most branded search traffic, but all backlinks pointing to the previous domain have also significantly dropped in value since every URL will have changed. Even though 301 redirects still pass on “link juice” to the new URLs, the value is far less than a backlink pointing directly to the new URL.

This is comparable to moving from one office location to another in real life. The search engines need to know where your new site lives. To make sure your site maintains all of its search engine visibility, you will also need to update as many of your backlinks as possible.

One piece of good news to keep in mind: if a site moves to a new hosting provider but does not change URLs or the URL structure, there is no impact to the backlink profile.

However, if the site owners decide to change the URL structure or retitle URLs to fit with a rebranding, then there is a loss of value from existing backlinks.

Migration Type 3: Moving To A Secure Site From An Unsecured Site

Probably the most common type of site migration we find in today’s modern Internet is the migration from an unsecured site (one which the URL starts in HTTP) to a secure site (one that starts in https).

This update should be a boost to your SEO efforts but doesn’t come without risks. When you go secure, everything on your site needs to be made secure, too. Linking to unsecured sites from a secure site will negatively impact your rankings and traffic, so only link from https to https pages.

So it’s clear that in most cases a site migration means that backlinks will pass on considerably less link juice after everything’s said and done. Luckily, taking advantage of link reclamation is a sure-fire way to regain what may have been lost during the site migration, but this is just one tactic to consider.

Link reclamation should not be the focus forever, so here’s how to plan out a long-term link building strategy for any site facing an imminent site migration.

Prioritizing Link Building As You Create Your SEO Migration Plan

One of the first things to take on before completing your SEO migration plan is to pull any data from your site’s backlink profile. Using tools like Google Search Console, Moz Explorer, or Majestic SEO, having a complete list of all relevant backlink data will provide an idea of where to go once the new site has launched.

The next step is to rope in whoever is in charge of the site’s public relations and make sure they are included before the migration.

Having a properly optimized press release will go a long way to maximizing any benefits both from brand awareness and SEO perspective. This should be prepared well in advance as well as a highly targeted list of publisher contacts to ensure the press release is delivered to the appropriate sites and other media outlets.

Once PR efforts are taken care of, make sure to update all social profile links if the domain/brand name is changing following the new site launch. 

Prioritizing Link Building During Your SEO Site Migration

For this stage, the site is either within several days or immediately after the new site has launched and users can now visit the site. During this time, the main link building tactic to focus on is performing manual outreach for link reclamation.

This can be a daunting task if a site has an extremely large backlink profile, so here’s where data pulled before the site launch will come in handy. Using factors such as Moz’s Domain Authority or Alexa Rank, sort the list of backlinks and try to identify websites with high value to qualify them for link reclamation.

Site owners could potentially perform link reclamation for months on end to regain the link juice lost from a site migration. But over time, this tactic will provide less SEO value compared to other link building tactics.

Depending on the diversity of a site’s previous backlink profile, try to sort external backlinks by domain authority and eliminate any sites below a certain score.

The types of sites worth targeting during this reclamation phase will focus on the following by priority:

1. .edu, .gov domains
2. High domain authority publishers
3. Relevant industry directories

Outreach to these sites will generally be easier than other link building tactics since the link already exists. As always, remain polite and courteous, and you’ll rarely encounter negative feedback from your link update request.

Avoid the Rabbit Hole, Alice

Having laid out which sites to target during this reclamation phase, there are a few caveats to keep in mind. Even if a link is from a high authority site, this doesn’t mean it’s worth the time reaching out to get it updated as you journey into your SEO site migration.

For example, a lot of backlinks may be from news stories or press releases dating several years back. It will be extremely difficult to get a publisher to update a news story from 2011 just because your site has changed domain names.

Another example is if a backlink is from a site that is in no way related to your industry. Topical relevance is very important in regards to the quality of a backlink profile, so there will be times where link reclamation to irrelevant websites may not be the best use of time. 

Feeling Overwhelmed By Your Site Change?
Handle This Project With Confidence.
Download Our 7-Step SEO Site Migration Checklist.

Prioritizing Link Building After You Complete Your SEO Migration Plan

Link reclamation, when done correctly, will take several weeks, if not months, following a site migration. But as mentioned earlier, there will come a point where reclamation will provide fewer returns relative to time and resources invested.

This will ultimately fall on personal analysis, but once outreach has been completed on the targeted list of qualified sites for link reclamation, it’s time to consider moving on to a more comprehensive link building strategy. This is the time to refocus on building up internal pages on the site relative to a site’s keyword focus.

Link reclamation shouldn’t necessarily be abandoned completely long-term, but it’s important to weigh the value of time invested and the overall returns when diving into the multitude of link building tactics. If acquiring new links begins to slow down, link reclamation is worth revisiting so that some link building activity can continue.

Site migrations will always have some degree of negative impact on the site’s SEO. Provided that all technical concerns are squared away, link building should still be part of a site migration plan to help reduce these negative effects.

Still, don’t feel fully prepared for your upcoming site migration? Click above to download our site migration checklist, contact us for a no-obligation consultation, or check out one of these helpful blog posts:

• The Complete Beginner’s Guide To SEO Website Migrations
• Craft CMS vs. WordPress: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide
• Sr. SEO Strategist Bentz Talks Site Migrations On BluHorn TV
• What To Do When Your Traffic Takes A Nosedive After Your Redesign

The post How To Prioritize Link Building Tactics During A Site Migration (Updated September 2019) appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Since accepting the offer, you and your team have put in months of hard work to get it done. Launch day came and went; all of your hard work was finally about to pay off!

But as the weeks following the site redesign go by, the exact opposite of what you expected to happen, happens.

Sales dwindled. Phones that constantly rang eventually came in drips. Qualified leads became mostly spammy submissions.

The C-suite is naturally going to ask questions, so like any good marketing professional, you turn to your data for the answers.

Instead of that reassuring feeling you’ve come to expect from your analytics, the answers you find in the data shock you.

Users? Down. Sessions? Down.

In short, your traffic fell off of a cliff. It tanked hard.

Failing to consider website redesign SEO is a very real possibility that marketers and site owners face whenever they consider redesigning their site. Without bearing in mind the impacts a redesign can have, you can seriously hurt your organic search traffic.

If you’ve experienced a significant traffic loss post-redesign of your site, this post is for you.

We break down why that may have happened. On top of that, we cover a few options you have for getting that traffic back.

First Things First – Did Your Traffic Really Tank?

This might sound like a redundant question. After all, you can take a look in your Google Analytics account and clearly see that traffic is down.

Traffic can decrease for lots of reasons, but here are some ways you can evaluate your site to see if your site traffic actually tanked due to not properly planning for a site migration from an SEO perspective.

Check Your Site Code for Missing Analytics Tags

No matter what analytics platform you use—Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, Piwik, Clicky, and so on—there is some kind of site-wide code these platforms use to track how users interact with your site. Without it, analytics tools have no way of recording traffic data.

Ask yourself; is this code installed on every page of your site?

If you’re unsure, crawl your site with a tool like Screaming Frog to see if your code is missing from any pages.

Did you install Google Tag Manager (GTM)? According to BuiltWith, at least 7.8 million live websites use GTM. If you did install it and add your analytics tool to one of its containers, you might need to do some troubleshooting.

In case you didn’t know, the easiest way to figure out if your site uses GTM is with Tag Assistant, Google’s free Chrome browser extension.

If after the above you’ve concluded that your analytics configuration is correct and tracking works as expected, proceed to the next step.

If analytics tracking is not collecting data as intended, try fixing it first, and then wait for more data to see if your site’s performance continues to suffer.

Did You Contract Your Site in Any Fashion?

We have consulted with many companies who redesign their sites and then become concerned when their traffic takes a hit. As we begin to dive in, our analysis typically uncovers several reasons why their traffic tanked.

• A support forum or knowledge base that was once public facing on their own domain is now discontinued or hosted by a third-party provider like Desk.com, Freshdesk or Zendesk.
• Content now deemed outdated or irrelevant to the site has been unpublished, such as old blog posts or company listings in a directory.
• Business model or service offerings have changed, resulting in fewer pages on the site to be indexed to generate search traffic.

Businesses evolve, so we all understand that changes like this happen.

However, we tend to overestimate the extent by which 301 redirects will save your traffic.

It is true that 301 redirects will send your visitors from a former URL to a new destination in an SEO-friendly way.

However, if an older webpage had keywords mapped to it via Google’s index, it could take a long time for Google to figure out where to find the new page and whether it is worthy of prior rankings.

Let’s say that you decide to sunset old, irrelevant blog posts and 301 redirect those URLs to your main blog page, here’s what is most likely to happen:

• Search engines will follow that redirect over the course of 90 days, sending traffic intended for your old pages to your blog main page.
• Over time, Google will learn that you eliminated those posts and that your blog main page is not a relevant match for your old pages.
• Google will stop ranking your old pages for the search queries they used to occupy.
• Over time, your traffic from search engines will drop significantly.

Now, this doesn’t mean that 301 redirects are bad. If you legitimately migrate content from one URL to another, then you should always use a 301 redirect.

If you have backlinks that send referral traffic that you don’t want to lose, refer those visitors to a new destination with a 301 redirect. Or, better yet, see if you can get the referring site to update the link to your new page.

When you do that, however, you are still signaling to the search engines that the page you are redirecting no longer exists. Because of that, the search engines will remove that page from the index over time, and your rankings will go along with them.

If you did decide to reduce the size of your site and your search traffic tanked, that likely should have been expected. It is possible to bounce back and regain that lost traffic, but not without a serious effort to improve SEO across the board.

Your Traffic Really Did Tank. Now What?

If you’ve come this far, you have probably confirmed that your site:

• Has fully functioning analytics code.
• Has not been contracted in any way.
• Has still lost a significant amount of traffic.

You’re probably ready to hear all about what options you have to course correct.

To get started, let’s go through the three most common reasons why your site traffic from search has likely tanked.

1. Old 301 redirects weren’t updated.

As previously mentioned, you should use 301 redirects if you migrated pages to new locations on your site. Many companies are successful at mapping redirects from their previous site to a new one.

Depending on how many versions of your site have existed, these may be the only redirects you need to manage.

Lucky you!

But, if your site has been on the web a long time and undergone multiple changes, then setting up redirects from the most recent version of your site to the new version is just the tip of the redirect iceberg.

Much like how Google has a record of every single thought you have ever searched, they also have a history of every single webpage your domain has ever hosted.

And here’s a little tip—the search engines want to know the new destinations for those old web pages.

If old redirects are causing your traffic to tank, here’s how you can fix it:

• Map those old redirects to their new destination, placing a priority on the ones with backlinks pointing to them.
• Upload those redirects wherever they need to be placed.

While this is a very tedious and time-consuming fix, you should start seeing search traffic return quickly once you begin placing these redirects on your site.

2. SEO data wasn’t migrated from your old site to your new one.

You spent years cultivating the perfect title tags, meta descriptions, subheadings and schema on your site.

But when you launched your new site, you may have rewritten all of your content, and forgot to copy over all of that SEO friendly information.

When the search engines crawled your new site and realized you didn’t have any of that beautiful SEO data they have come to expect, they dropped your site in the rankings, favoring newer content they deem more relevant to searchers.

If this is the cause of your traffic tanking, here’s how you can fix it:

• Review your old site files (hopefully, you have them backed up somewhere).
• Transplant as many of the previous title tags, meta descriptions, headings and schema markup settings you can on your new site.

Similar to redirecting old web pages, adding old data is also a very tedious fix, but very necessary.

While not as time-consuming as mapping redirects, recovering traffic this way might take a little bit longer because the search engines will only update your content when Google recognizes and accepts the changes made to your site.

3. Your developers forgot to remove the noindex/nofollow tag from your header.

We see this happen to redesigned sites a lot, and it still amazes us every time because it requires such a simple fix.

Commonly referred to as the robots meta tag, you can use this tag in your site header to tell search engine spiders not to index a page or follow its links. Check out this great resource if you want to know everything there is to know about this tag.

Developers sometimes forget to remove this tag from header files when they migrate from dev environments to production. Removing the tag is so simple to do, but it happens more often than you’d think.

When developers forget to take this tag out of your header, search engine spiders stop crawling your site. Meaning that your pages get removed from the search engine index.

No one can find your site in searches anymore.

Your rankings decline.

Your traffic tanks.

To determine whether or not you have a noindex, nofollow tag in your header, pull up any page on your site and hit CTRL + U to look the page’s source code in your browser.

Once the source is opened in a new tab or window, hit CTRL + F to search for either “NOINDEX” or  “NOFOLLOW.”

Do you see the following line of code in your source file?

If yes, then this is likely the cause of your traffic drops. Here’s how you can fix it:

• Login to your content management system
• Navigate to your Settings or admin area
• Adjust your settings to enable or encourage search engine visibility (completing this varies wildly based on your platform).
  • In WordPress, you can navigate to adjust this setting under Settings > Reading.

Website Redesign SEO & Your Next Steps

It’s a commonly quoted statistic in the web design community that a site should be redesigned every three years or so.

Depending on your industry, you might be doing redesigns more frequently. Either way, a general rule of thumb for companies that rely on website traffic to generate business opportunities is to redesign their site every few years.

So, if you haven’t already done so in recent memory, you should likely plan on tackling a website redesign sometime in the next nine to 12 months.

If you have recently redesigned and your traffic tanked, here are a few things to remember before you freak out:

• Your tanked traffic doesn’t mean you have tanked rankings.
  • Make sure you have your tracking code placed throughout the site.
  • If you reduced the overall size of your site, your traffic is likely to go down, also.
• Just because traffic is gone now doesn’t mean it will be gone forever.
  • Was every page on your site properly redirected?
  • Was your important SEO content transferred to your new site before launch?
  • Was the noindex, nofollow tag removed from your header?
• Time is of the essence. The longer these issues go unaddressed, the longer the recovery time.

Now that you are up to speed on the most common reasons why your traffic may have tanked, we hope you can take the necessary steps to get it back.

This is one of many helpful guides and resources we have on our site related to SEO migration services. Click one of the links below if you need a boost to your confidence in the growth of your digital marketing campaigns.

• 7 Proactive Steps For SEO Site Migration Success (Checklist)
• The Complete Beginner’s Guide To SEO Website Migrations
• Craft CMS vs. WordPress: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide
• Sr. Strategist Bentz Talks SEO Site Migrations On BluHorn TV
• How To Prioritize Link Building Tactics During A Site Migration

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

The post Website Redesign SEO: What to Do When Your Traffic Takes a Nosedive appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Countless brands and publishers rely on search engine optimization (SEO) to improve organic search performance.

But even after concerted efforts to improve their rankings, many websites are left scratching their heads as to why they’re not getting the results they want.

The fact is that rankings for your target keywords matter.

Whenever your competitor ranks higher than you for a keyword, they earn more traffic, more leads, and more sales.

If your site is just one position lower than your competitor, they are benefitting infinitely more; even when your site performs well for a keyword.

No one likes taking a backseat to the competition, but we’ve got some great news.

You can improve your organic rankings. All it takes is a little know-how and persistence.

In combination with some competitive analysis, this guide will help you figure out why your competitor outperforms you on Google Search. Not only that, we have a few tips on how you can fight back and claim the rankings you deserve.

Why does my competitor rank higher than me?

Try to remember what Google is seeking to accomplish for their users.

Google regularly scours as much of the Internet as it can, while also attempting to understand the value and context of every web page in its “index.”

When a search happens, Google relies upon its proprietary algorithm to judge what web pages/content in its index best serve the intent of the user.

Let’s say a person wants to buy a new pair of running shoes but doesn’t know what brands to consider or how much to spend. They might search for [best running shoes 2018], in which the results would look something like this:

The first page of search results displays an answer snippet from the top-ranking blog post, and nearly all other results are similar style posts from multiple websites.

But let’s say after evaluating a few helpful blog posts, they decide on a specific shoe to purchase. This person might search for the exact product:

In this example, the search triggers significantly more ads. Additionally, the top two results belong to the manufacturer of this particular shoe, followed by other shoe retailers.

The two above scenarios demonstrate the differences between what Google is seeking to satisfy for informational vs. transaction-based searches. Understanding what users intend to get from a search is critical when optimizing your website.

Google is trying to provide its users with trustworthy results from reputable websites that answer their query, while also providing a relatively good user experience.

If your competitor ranks higher, something is leading the search engine to believe that your content is inferior for satisfying user intent.

SEO is all about creating and improving content for search users while also giving Google every reason to serve your content over your competitors.

Here’s how you can improve your rankings through competitive analysis.

1. They’re Doing a Better Job of Answering Intent

Identifying keywords can be easy; figuring out the intent behind those keywords requires a little finesse.

The absolute best way to understand intent is by performing a manual search for your target keyword.

Because Google tries to serve personalized results, your search might look different from what others will see. Here’s how to get “depersonalized” search results on Google.

1. 1. Open an incognito version of your browser (on Google Chrome, you can open a new window with Ctrl + Shift + N)

1. 1. Perform your search

1. Append the following to the end of the URL in the address bar and hit enter —> &pws=0

We should note that this process doesn’t always work with location-specific searches, but it will get you better results than performing a search the standard way.

Once you’ve taken these steps to reduce the chance of personalized results, analyze everything that comes up on the first page.

Consider things such as:

• • How many ads populate?

• • Is there a video or image carousel?

• • How many answer snippets and/or knowledge boxes?

• What types of content ranks for the keyword? —Is it a blog post, sales page, gated resource, visual asset, or something else?

That last one is pretty important to look at since the type of content that ranks is ultimately what Google thinks will best satisfy the user’s intent.

If your competitor is doing a better job than you at answering user intent, you will have your work cut out for you.

2. Google Assumes They’re More Reputable

Intent is really important, but search engines also want to serve content from websites that they deem to be trustworthy and reputable.

Google judges trustworthiness by evaluating brand signals and a website’s backlink profile.

Brand Signals

In Google’s eyes, brands with a consistent online footprint often offer users a better online experience and relevance. Google considers things such as brand mentions and their overall online presence.

For the most part, websites can do a lot to control or improve their brand signals:

• • Staying active on social media platforms

• • Publishing new or improving existing content on a regular basis

• • Guest posting on other industry-relevant websites

• • Setting up Google Alerts for negative press mentions

• • Using social listening tools to engage with customers

• • Following best practices for press releases

• Maintaining profiles on review websites (e.g. Yelp, Google My Business, Clutch, etc.)

Backlinks

One of the most important things Google looks at when evaluating the credibility of a website is its backlink profile.

Across the Internet, every single link which points back to your website is considered a backlink. Google looks at how many backlinks your site has as well as the quality and relevance of the links pointing to your site.

If a website links to yours, they’re essentially vouching for you.

Generally speaking, with more backlinks, your site has a better chance of being perceived as trustworthy.   

Below is from original research conducted by Ahrefs where they examine how backlinks have potentially more of an impact on rankings than on-page SEO factors.

Keep in mind that acquiring backlinks and improving your site’s profile has many considerations and implementing a strategy can become complicated.

Without making an explicit recommendation on where to start with a link building campaign, try reading a few helpful posts on our blog to learn more on that subject.

The first step in improving your backlink profile?

Simple—perform a little competitor benchmarking to see how they stack up.

You can approach this in two ways:

• Domain authority (DA): Domain authority is a helpful metric coined by Moz, an SEO software company.
  Moz has a tool which evaluates a website’s backlink profile and assigns a score between 0 and 100. The higher the DA, the more likely a site is deemed to be “authoritative” or trustworthy. Although it is somewhat of a subjective metric, DA is a quick method of comparing two websites’ backlink profiles.

To figure out a website’s DA, download the free MozBar plugin for Google Chrome. When on a site, click on the MozBar logo in the Chrome window and you’ll see the DA for that site—just don’t forget to repeat this process on your own site.

• Backlink research tools: While the MozBar is a great tool for quick analysis, you won’t get too much in the way of usable insights. Domain authority won’t tell you anything about how many backlinks your competitor has or what types of websites are linking to them.

To go deeper and get a better idea of how to improve your backlink profile, you will need to use link research tools such as Ahrefs, Majestic SEO, or Moz (all require a paid subscription). If you can’t justify paying for one of these research tools, most SEO agencies—including the SEO team at DOM—leverage these tools as part of their services.

How you decide to tackle a link building campaign is up to you, but both of the above tactics should give you an idea of whether link building should be a priority.

3. Your Content is Inferior

Let’s face it; your competitor’s content could just be objectively better.

Your content doesn’t have to be groundbreaking or awe-inspiring—it just has to be of a higher caliber.

Identifying your content weaknesses is a good idea because you can improve upon those weaknesses or focus on the things you do well.

Take the time to sit down and pick apart your content as if you were an outside editor.

At the same time, analyze your competitor’s high-ranking content. Think about how the following contribute to its overall quality:

• Readability — Everyone consumes content differently, so try to format and structure your content in a way that it is enjoyable for your target audience. Consider that traffic from mobile devices continues to grow, meaning that your website will look different across multiple devices.

Is the text too big or too small? Can your content be broken up into multiple sections or condensed into bulleted lists? Do blocks of text or paragraphs feel too long?

• Word Count — You may have heard that longer content is more likely to rank and score more links, but there’s no such thing as a magic word count. But on the opposite end of the spectrum, we always recommend, at a minimum, to have more than 300 words on any page targeted for keyword optimization. Beyond that, the final word count is somewhat meaningless. 

However, when analyzing your competitor, you may notice that their content has a significantly higher word count. If the high-ranking content has a high word count (1k+), there are likely two things at play: comprehensiveness and keyword density.

• Comprehensive Detail — The question shouldn’t focus on whether or not your content is long enough, but rather, how comprehensive is it? Remember, user intent is what you’re aiming to satisfy, and how deep you go on a topic will depend on your keyword(s).

If a user wants to learn about a topic, you probably need to go deeper. If they need a quick answer to a question, write something that gets straight to the point and provide additional context later.

• Keyword Density — Keyword density is the number of times a keyword is mentioned in comparison to the total word count. In the old days, many websites leveraged keyword stuffing (a practice we highly recommend you avoid) to reach arbitrary keyword density percentages. The problem with inserting your keywords without careful thought results in your content feeling “spammy.”

When you write comprehensive content, you’ll find yourself naturally referencing your target keyword multiple times. Additionally, you likely also mention contextually relevant words and phrases, otherwise known as latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords. While aiming for keyword density can help, only use it as a rough guide.

• Citations & Outbound Links — In many cases, your content will need to quote outside references and research from third-parties to back up various claims. Think back to your days in school or university when you frequently wrote research papers; citations were always a must. You may be weary in linking out to other websites, but it is actually a sign of credibility for search engines when you link to highly-relevant, trustworthy resources. Just do yourself a favor and avoid research that’s out of date, or worse, from your competitor.

4. Your User Experience Stinks

Technical SEO optimization accomplishes three things.

The first is to configure your site in a way which makes it easier for Google to crawl every page.

Second, technical SEO helps provide context to Google so it can understand what your site is all about.

Third—and arguably the most important—Google wants to make sure users have a positive experience.

Evaluation of user experience has everything to do with “quality of life” aspects.

If your competitor is providing a better experience, Google will recognize this and pick them over you every time.

There are numerous technical SEO factors which touch on user experience, but here are the most crucial ones that could be giving your competitor a boost in the rankings:

• HTTPS Encryption — Google has been pushing site owners to make a move in securing their websites with an HTTPS encryption. Ideally, a secure website minimizes the chance that malicious third-parties can steal sensitive information from users. HTTPS encryption is slowly becoming the norm, but many sites have yet to do so.

To learn more about making your website secure, check out this piece from our blog.

• Mobile-Friendliness — If you wait too long to configure your website with mobile-friendly design, you’re only hurting your potential in the long term. Mobile devices will soon overtake desktop traffic and have already done so in many parts of the world. Failing to create a positive experience for these users will cost you more than what it takes to implement mobile-friendly design.

• Page Load Times — With Internet speeds improving across the globe and technological advancements over the last decade, long load times are frustrating for anyone. Many factors feed into page speed, but the idea is to decrease these load times as much as possible.

Final Thoughts (+2 Bonus Tips!)

The competition may be eating your lunch now, but with so many options and tactics to choose from, anyone can claim their rightful spot in the SERPs.

In addition to everything we’ve covered in this post, here are two extra tips to help fight back against your competitors:

1. Spicing Up Meta Titles & Descriptions —Even if your competitor is outranking you, you can still entice users to choose your listing over higher ranking results. Keyword placement is still important, but think of your organic listing like an ad. Meta titles should read like powerful headlines, and descriptions should contain a strong call-to-action.
2. Write Link-Worthy Content —Your audience will most often determine what your content is about, but why not kill two birds with one stone? While you satisfy user intent, also keep in mind that you should be creating content that other websites want to link to as a resource. You’ll reduce friction in future link building campaigns while also boosting the credibility of that page for every new link you score.

If you want to beat your competitor in organic search, an in-depth audit of what they are doing right will give you a decent road map to get you going.

How you want to proceed is all up to you—just be better than the other guys.

Fire up the 80’s training montage!

Interested in beating your competitors but not feeling confident on how to do it? Talk to us today to learn about how you can qualify for an SEO audit.

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

The post Your Competitor Is Crushing You on Google – Here’s How to Fight Back. appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Digital marketers constantly seek out the next big trend to get the attention and awareness they crave.

Despite a surplus of hype floating around, a dedicated influencer campaign has a lot of potential.

Brands partner with influencers to increase awareness amongst highly engaged and loyal fanbases. And while awareness is great, motivating customers to act keeps companies in business.

By reading our guide, you will have an excellent base to understand what influencer marketing is, whether it will work your business, and how to jump in with your first campaign.

The world of influencers may feel like a fresh idea, but in truth, this concept is anything but new.

What is influencer marketing?

Influencer marketing is when companies partner with individuals who have considerable online and social followings – people referred to as “influencers.”

An influencer describes a respected or well-liked person. Because of their reputation, an influencer has the power to affect or change the way other people behave – or think.

With enough dedication, any person can grow an audience and their influence through the Internet. But if you think about it, aren’t influencers just online celebrities?

Yes –  influencers are modern-day celebrities. In fact, we’ve seen influencer marketing before the age of the Internet.

The Evolution of Celebrity

The traditional idea of a celebrity is someone who is well-known or famous. For hundreds of years, society classified noteworthy content creators (writers, actors, singers) or public figures (business people, government officials, royalty) as celebrities. Our notion of these kinds of personalities is still true today.

As broadcast and communication technology have evolved over several hundred years, so has the concept of the celebrity. Prior to the Internet, television, telephones, postal mail, and the printing press, word-of-mouth was the only way to achieve celebrity status.

Word-of-mouth is still potent, but it doesn’t spread as quickly without the aid of technology. Communication and content creation are the keys by which influencers achieve widespread recognition on the Internet.

Celebrity Endorsements in the Digital Age

Before the rise of Google search and social media, brands partnered with influential celebrities, but the dynamic was slightly different.

You’ve seen these kinds of partnerships before through celebrity endorsement deals. Companies would offer promotional consideration for celebrities to use their products or for their appearance in advertising campaigns.

Arguably one of the finest examples of influencer marketing is this montage of someone who was the epitome of celebrity in the 1980’s:

That’s right – at the height of his popularity during his film career, Arnold Schwarzenegger had countless television ads under his belt for several Japanese brands. The above video is just a sample of a few he did for Nissin, the world-famous ramen noodle maker.

The History of Influencer Marketing

Celebrity endorsement deals are nothing new, but the earliest case of celebrity branding dates back to the late 1700’s.

In 1765, English potter Josiah Wedgwood created a new type of earthenware that impressed the then British Queen consort Charlotte so much that she granted Wedgwood permission to style himself “Potter to Her Majesty.” Henceforth, Wedgwood called his innovative pottery “Queen’s Ware.”

At the time, there were no celebrities more famous than members of the royal family. Wedgwood from then on used royal endorsements as a marketing device to show the value of his pottery.

Fast forward several hundred years and celebrity endorsements have become prominent. Influencer marketing and celebrity endorsements are one and the same, but the term “influencer” has a specific connotation in today’s world.

Who is an influencer?

The word influencer is almost always in reference to a person who has created a broad audience through social media, blogging, or video sharing websites.

For the purposes of this influencer marketing guide, there are three types of influencers:

• Traditional Celebrities
• Macro-Influencers
• Micro-Influencers

Celebrity Influencers

The notion of a celebrity is somewhat relative since social media, search engines, and YouTube can give anyone a voice.

In this tier of influencers, “celebrities” refer to top-tier famous people who are easily recognizable. This includes people who have become influential in the public eye through press appearances, athletics, music, movies, and more.

One of the most dominant figures in the celebrity influencer tier is Kylie Jenner, the youngest member of the Kardashian-Jenner family of reality TV popularity. Kylie Jenner has a line of cosmetics, made famous through her robust social media presence.

As reported by social media insights firm D’Marie Analytics judging her Instagram profile’s engagement metrics, every one of Jenner’s Instagram posts is worth roughly $1 million. To put things in perspective, a 30-second ad during the 2018 Super Bowl cost an average of $5 million. So whenever you see the #sponsored or #ad hashtags in her posts, she’s getting paid big by advertisers.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BS7MP4ghTT_/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

Kylie Jenner is in her own league, but celebrity influencers typically have huge audiences; somewhere between 200K -1M+ followers and fans across multiple social platforms.

Macro-Influencers

These influencers may not have as much widespread recognition as celebrities, but their reach on social media is nothing to sneeze at. At this level, these influencers boast somewhere between 50K to 150k followers.

The costs are much lower, but they too have large online audiences that took serious commitment and talent to build up. These influencers partner with brands that matter to their communities, and subsequently these partnerships are useful to marketers for reaching large groups of people.

Consider the case of Ninja, the biggest name in Twitch streaming right now. Ninja live streams his video gameplay footage for roughly eight hours a day and pulls in an average of 100k+ concurrent viewers when he goes live.

With 2.9 million followers on Twitter and so many viewers on Twitch, you’d think more people would know about him. Despite this online presence, Ninja is only synonymous amongst the online gaming community and hasn’t reached the mainstream quite yet.

Here’s a clip from the end of an eight-hour charity stream where Ninja raised over $100K through viewer donations for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

Micro-Influencers

Despite significantly fewer followers than celebrities or macro-influencers, these individuals are more accessible to a larger number of brands. Their social media presence tallies up to around 2.5K to 40K followers.

These influencers are generally more relatable and have passionately engaged audiences. While this level is perfect and affordable for small companies, some humongous brands leverage both macro and micro-influencers.

Most people who define themselves as influencers fall under this category. In addition to many bloggers and smaller social media personalities, micro-influencers also consist of industry experts and thought leaders in heavily niche communities.

The Influencer Marketing Guide: First Steps

Influencer marketing can be a great tool to promote a brand, but there’s a lot of careful consideration before diving in face first.

Here are three areas to consider if you’re ready to partner with influencers.

1. Influencer Marketing Costs

Every industry has unique marketing costs, and influencer partnerships are no different. Influencers choose to work with companies that appeal to their audience on top of some tangible form of payment.

Companies looking to work with celebrity and macro-influencers will have higher costs. Most of these people have clearly defined rates for promotional partnerships.

No matter what they’re charging, here are the three best metrics to gauge your ROI when partnering with influencers of all kinds:

• • Cost-per-click (CPC): When using this metric, all posts from influencers should have some method of tracking link clicks if you want an audience to take a specific action.

• • Cost-per-engagement (CPE): For influencers with highly engaged audiences, this is a critical performance metric for promotional campaigns. This counts all likes, shares, and comments posts receive.

• Cost-per-acquisition (CPA): This metric measures how many sales or leads were generated by an influencer campaign in relation to payment provided to the influencer.

Micro-influencers may also request monetary payment, but there are times where they will consider alternatives. For example, if you’re a furniture manufacturer and want an interior design blogger to feature your company, sending them several big-ticket items is a perfect payment alternative.

If all of this is new to you and you’re unsure of how much to invest, start out small with micro-influencers. Shop around and request pricing from these influencers to get an idea of much it will cost to work with them.

Once you have a baseline of what to expect, you have the data to decide if moving to a higher-tier is worth it.

2. SEO + Influencers

A dedicated SEO campaign always accounts for link building efforts. For those who need a refresher, link building is the process of reaching out to third-party websites related to your industry and acquiring backlinks from those sites.

A long-time backlink tactic, brands still send their products to bloggers for free so the writers put together a review of those products. This tactic is useful for two reasons – awareness and backlinks.

Marketers often overlook an influencer’s blog or website since they are mostly concerned with tapping into the influencer’s social media followers. For the higher-end of smaller and medium-sized influencers, these people typically have a website with some kind of blog built into it.

The bigger an audience an influencer has, the higher their website’s domain authority, meaning highly valuable backlinks.

Most of what influencers will promise are social posts. If you’re going to the lengths of starting a partnership like this, you might as well get as much value out of it as possible. Even if the results from the social aspect are less than stellar, you’ll at least score a relevant backlink out of the deal.

3. Finding and Evaluating Influencers

The first place to start when jumping into influencer marketing is defining clear and measurable goals. Your goals will determine what your audience looks like.

The audience is an essential consideration for researching potential influencers because these individuals have built their reputation through specific social platforms or their content has a particular appeal.

From here, there are several influencer discovery tools you can use, but Google is your friend to help compile a list of influencers who could be a good fit.

In the beginning phase of researching an influencer, comb through of all their online properties (all social profiles, websites, YouTube videos, etc.). Try to get a sense of which platforms they do well and how consistently they interact with their community.

Next, make contact and lay out exactly what you’re looking to get out of a potential partnership. They’ll provide you with things like their engagement metrics and rates/pricing packages.

Since this is the Internet, try not to take them on their word regarding their online presence. Their pricing will provide a basis for calculating the cost-per-engagement. Dive into their profiles and try to gauge the average number of engagements per post.  

The last thing to be aware of in the realm of online influencers is that many of them have used and continue to use alternative methods for follower growth. Social platforms are cracking down on the act of buying followers, but it is still pretty common.

The best way to see if follower and engagement counts are legitimate is by checking comment sections. Many bot accounts have very fake-sounding profile names and have no activity on them.

Beyond that, you can use a free tool like Social Blade to see what their follower growth looks like over longer periods of time. If you find an influencer with consistently huge jumps in follower counts over the span of a year, something may not be right.

The Influencer Marketing Guide: Closing Thoughts

As the value of organic social media continues its rapid decline, marketers are beginning to accept that the free ride is over. Advertising on social media can be immensely effective for driving sales and leads, but influencer marketing proves that there are noteworthy alternatives when tapping into engaged audiences.

Partnering with an influencer has the potential to generate some remarkable results, but your mileage may vary. Working with influencers isn’t for everyone, but this influencer marketing guide should point you in the right direction to successfully putting your first campaign into action.

If you’re interested in learning how you can drive better results with search engine marketing, schedule a digital marketing consultation.

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