Search Engine Optimization Archives

December 10,2020

How to Prepare Your Digital Marketing for the New Year

Digital marketing has drastically changed this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As we approach another year, you need to note these changes and consider them when charting your new digital marketing game plan. By looking at the critical facts and anticipating another wave of possible changes, you will be closer to implementing the best marketing strategies.

Planning takes a lot of work, and implementing is even more difficult. But with your wise decisions supported by carefully considered factors, you are for sure on the right digital marketing path. In this post, you’ll get to see how marketing evolves on a strategic level and what specific trends you need to look out for next year.

To develop an effective plan, contemplate how your short-term goals can influence your business in the long run. Focus on the importance of statistics, research, trends, and data to grab opportunities when strengthening your digital marketing strategy.

Here are a few tips on how to prepare your digital marketing for the new year:

1. Determine Your Goals and Objectives

Knowing what you want to accomplish ensures that you won’t get lost while achieving your objectives. Marketers are more likely to get stuck at a certain point when there isn’t a clear set of goals and objectives.

Evaluate the results of your annual performance and use them to create a more effective plan and strategy. Since digital marketing is evolving quickly, what may be good and useful today can quickly become outdated and not work at a future time.

2. Provide a World-Class Customer Experience

Customers keep on coming back when they have a seamless experience with your service. This helps you build a positive business culture, making people feel important and satisfied. But the question is, how can it be possible to gain customers even without convincing them?

The answer to that question is the quality of service you will provide. With that being said, you have to make sure you keep an eye on website optimization first.

Make access convenient and friendly – More and more people are using mobile devices. When it comes to searches, you have to make sure that your website allows mobile viewing.

Add a chatbot to your website – Chatbots are available anytime to answer queries from customers. It has been proven to be very efficient and cost-effective.

Optimize voice search – This is another convenient way to help customers with their concerns. It is practical and helpful, especially for busy people who have no time to do text-searching. It would be best to have an updated Google My Business profile to ensure that your business is optimized for voice-based search. An updated GMB profile means your business will be included in Google results.

3. Widen Your Social Media Presence

Get a feel for what resonates most with social media audiences by publishing a compelling set of topics. It is challenging to boost your social media presence when you don’t have many followers yet. This limitation can be remedied because there are tools for different platforms to help you spread the word about your business. These include tools such as Facebook Insights and Instagram Stories. In Facebook Insights, you get to know the statistics about your posts’ interactions. You can then determine where your audience comes from. Meanwhile, Instagram Stories are perfect for showing customers why you have a relatable brand.

Another way to reach your target audience is to hire influencers. Look for influencers who have followings that are likely to be interested in your products and services. These influencers don’t need to have millions of followers, as it won’t be cost-effective. Micro-influencers are best for this arrangement since they have a hold on a specific market niche.

4. Increase Traffic Using Quality Inbound Links

Inbound links are backlinks or hyperlinks that connect one web page to another. Link building is a great way to improve search engine ranking. Never overlook the importance of an inbound link if you want to rank on search engines and be at the top spot. Just always remember that what counts here is the quality of inbound links and not quantity alone. An authoritative or recognizable website can help you meet this goal since most people trust a reputable website that produces high-quality content. High-quality content is considered such when it’s relevant, unique, and creative.

5. Consider Video Advertising

Videos are compelling when they have creativity. It can influence and persuade many people about their buying decisions. Having a video advertisement gives you a chance to tell your story and build a connection with prospective clients. The cost can be high when producing videos but rest assured that the benefits will exceed the expenses when it fulfills its purpose.

6. Consider the Effects of Adblockers

Ad blockers filter out advertisements, whether it’s paid or organic. Many internet users rely on these blockers to avoid being bombarded by multiple ads. Given that, if you are running a pay per click campaign, users surely won’t see your ads. Regardless of how well designed and intelligent your marketing strategies are, it’s of no use when people won’t see them. To resolve this, you need to think of another way to reach your target audience by exploring other marketing channels. For instance, email marketing will bring you closer to your prospective customers. In this highly personalized method, you obtain a higher return on investment and reach a wider channel.

Marketing tactics are changing, and the best way to keep up is to be incredibly flexible. In order to become successful, there’s a need to adapt to change and be open to continuous improvement. The methods you have created during a calendar period might not suit the new trends in the next calendar year. So, don’t settle too much in your existing strategies. Try to assess and, if necessary, reinvent. The progress that results from well-planned digital marketing drives the whole industry forward.

Need help managing your digital marketing efforts? Reach out to us today and learn more about how Salt Rank can help your business grow online!

August 24,2020

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Help Your Business Succeed With These 10 Quick SEO Tips

Amidst this coronavirus pandemic, many businesses have now opted to go on online platforms since physical distancing is strictly implemented.

Many stores have been closed since it is not cost-efficient to keep them running due to the limited number of customers, and the bills just keep coming. So, it is better to set up your website and make the necessary transactions online.

The first thing to know in setting up a website is advertising your page. With millions of pages up and running today, it is challenging to make your website known and visible to the public. To help improve your website’s visibility, you need to know about SEO or Search Engine Optimization.

Basically, SEO increases a website’s traffic by raising the possibility of being seen by a search engine, using keywords in your website content that matches a keyword search. If your site is fully optimized, it will increase the possibility of showing up first in search engine results, thus gaining you more customers and popularity.

Knowing these SEO tips for small businesses will surely help you start your path in the online market:

1. Decide on the Type of Website

There are many types of websites used by businesses. Your website can be an online shopping site, a service provider website, a publishing website, etc. Also, having a website name related to what type of business you are doing helps in getting a match in keyword searches.

2. Use Significant Keywords in Online Content

As you fill up your web page with different content, you may also need to add several statements or paragraphs describing your page. It helps to use keywords related to your business in these paragraphs so that the search engines will also capture these keywords and put them up in search results.

Also, make sure to write original content. Duplicate content from other web pages dramatically decreases your chances of showing up first in search engine results. Be sure to write original and unique content for your website with the right keywords to attract your customers.

3. Add Keywords in Image Captions

For business websites that are selling products online, images are the most critical factor in selling your product. Since the customer may be wary of the actual quality of the product, it is vital to provide high-resolution images of the product.

One of the most essential things to do is adding captions to these products with the right keywords. If properly done, your product will be one of the first images to show up in a search engine result, if you match the search result’s keywords. This will also add more traffic and views to your website. The product description must always be clear, without any unnecessary words.

4. Make Sure to Put Significant Keywords in Links

Your website will have a unique address, for example, https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2016/04/13/30-quick-and-easy-seo-tips-for-small-businesses/.

This is an example of a good website link. A search for “SEO tips for small businesses” will inevitably lead the customer to this website since the link has keywords matching the search result.

If you can predict what the customers will input in the search engine, you can use that to your advantage and try to match your website link’s keywords to the most common keywords used by the customers.

Also, avoid using shortened links composed of random letters and numbers since it will be hard for the search engine to match it with the keywords used for the search.

5. Link to Related and Relevant Websites

At first, your website will start off small and will be limited in visibility. To further expand your network, you can start by adding links to your page to other more prominent websites. It may be hard at first since it will benefit the other site at first, but once you get a few clicks to your own link, you will start to get more traffic, and it will show up more in search engine results.

Make sure your link looks as trustworthy as possible since there are too many malicious sites trying to bait customers into clicking their links. We also advise you to post your links only on trustworthy and reliable websites.

6. Improve the Usability of Your Homepage

Your homepage will be the first to greet your online customers. Make sure that it is user-friendly and appealing to the eyes. Make sure to include all the necessary keywords in texts so the search engine can quickly locate your website.

7. Write Articles on Product Comparison

Many customers are always comparing which product is better as they browse through the internet for product reviews. Making articles on product comparison is a great way to capture the interest of customers, especially on products that are trending and are the latest on the market.

By using keywords such as “Which is better,” “vs.,” “product comparison,” “what to buy,” etc., you can ensure that the search engine will show your articles in the results, thus redirecting the customers to your website.

You can also add links to the articles for online buyers if they want to purchase your product. This is also a great way to increase your sales.

8. Always Write New Blog Posts

There are websites with blog sections containing topics about their products and other related matters. Adding this section to your site will provide you more chances of hitting a match in search engine algorithms and therefore increasing the traffic to your website.

9. Use Proper Header Tags When Designing Your Website

Search engines such as Google often show a small preview of the website at the top of the search results. This preview will help the customer decide if visiting the site is worthwhile or not. If you properly structure your website using header tags, it will be easier to attract the customers to your website since you can easily show that you have what they are looking for.

10. Consult With an SEO Expert or Learn It Yourself

Many people who are just starting in online businesses have no idea what SEO even stands for. To be successful in the world of online businesses, one must be fully equipped with knowledge on how to conduct their business online. For new business owners, it may be better for them to consult an SEO expert if it is their first time transitioning to online platforms.

Many websites have increased their sales just by knowing these SEO tips for small businesses. It is important to take every advantage you have in this competitive world of commerce.

August 14,2020

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Why Optimizing Your Old Blogs is Important

Maintaining a blog can be taxing at times as trends on the internet change every single day. What’s in last month may be old school in the present. Consequently, what was previously generating you hefty prices might be getting stagnant now. This is why you need to know how to optimize old blog posts.

Optimization is the key to achieving success in terms of reachability to your target customer or audience; however, coming up with brand new content for current blogs may be time-consuming to do. It may also cost more due to the manpower and research that goes with it. Then, after all the effort you’ve put in, it just gets little to no traffic.

Historical Optimization may help you save time, money, and effort wasted in creating new content but with the advantage of spending less on all the mentioned factors. This inbound marketing strategy involves updating or revising your old content to get more traffic and attract more clients. If you’re skeptical, here are some points to convince you about the importance of incorporating Historical Optimization into your business blogging routine:

1. It Costs NOTHING

Generating new blog posts and all your time spent formulating ideas and data costs money.

However, rewriting old ones costs you zero cents and can even give back tons of traffic, which means potential profit for you and your business.

All you have to do is update any outdated details in your blog. This includes:

rechecking for accuracy concerning the current date when it’s going to be posted
updating or adding new images
optimizing keywords
updating internal links
adding subheadings
reconstructing readability if necessary

You just have to revise and update the entire content piece for better timeliness and relatability. Afterward, you can keep track of how it is doing by calculating its conversion rate. If it does not perform any better, you can always improve the above steps mentioned. It will only cost you effort, and not a single penny, so it’s always worthwhile.

2. How to Get Started

In a report made by HubSpot, they concentrated on knowing what exact keywords people use in searching for posts they are looking for specifically. After figuring out the keywords that ranked highest for such topics, they used it in their past blog posts to boost their reach and searchability.

This resulted in them having an increased conversion rate of 240 percent per post, which encouraged them to do the same for their other 12 posts. The results produced a double number of leads compared to what they initially generated.

Using this technique not only allows you to increase your post’s traffic but also lets you find organic and sincere clients that may soon be paying customers, as your post comes up with what they are exactly searching for.

3. It Gives You the Right Amount of Content

Readers can only read a limited amount of content per day. Some may even be content with reading only on a blog post about a certain topic. Optimizing old blog posts to be relevant again in the present may allow your content to be on top of the search engine and reach your target audience without you having to churn out as much content as possible.

The supply of content gets too overcrowded while at the same time, the demand is static. Constantly reaching out to the audience with new content might just be seen as inappropriately fitting into a huge crowd. Through historical Optimization, you’ll gain no wasted effort and time from trying to leverage new content. It lets you settle with just the right amount, with the maximum possible conversion.

4. It Maintains Relevance

Change is constant, and with every tick of the clock, the content market is getting stricter. Statistics show that over 87.6 million affiliated blogs are published through WordPress each month. Given this strict competition, it might sound impossible or like too much hustle to constantly come up with top-performing content. Strategies improve, tips and tricks differ, and niche trends vary. But one thing is for sure, meeting your current audiences’ taste means going with the flow of relevancy. Who would rather waste a second on content that is not timely? To retain relevance, you can do the following historical optimization techniques:

Refresh content from a few months, or two years ago. High-performing blogs from this time bracket might just need a little shine on them to regain their sparkle. Since they are not that old yet, they require lesser historical optimization. Just sprinkle a few up to date details.
Lengthen shorter content. Short but concise might have worked well for you a year ago. Still, your previous content might have benefited from more information now. Perhaps, the list of top airbrush makeup products last year only reaches five, while a newer number is introduced now. You can provide those updates and provide more value to your audience.
Update year-specific posts. Posts with a year in their title generate high traffic because, of course, of relevance. But while they might serve as effective prize pigs, they grow dusty quickly too. Fortunately, it won’t take you a single sweat to optimize them. For instance, your blog titled “Why Invest in Real Estate in 2019”, might still have the same possible details in them, and thus, it only needs a title to revamp.
Add valuable keywords. In-depth keyword research is the key to improving your SEO potential. By finding out the most valuable keywords for your content, and optimizing their density, you can regain value with your post and possibly rank up in the search engine results.

Takeaway

Learning about Historical Optimization may boost your business and blog posts interactions and engagements, albeit using the simplest tricks available. At Salt Rank, we believe that every business has a chance to grow and be marketed in an impactful and meaningful way. With us, you can discover efficient marketing and SEO programs that can take your business to the next level.

January 28,2020

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How To Capture Company Diversity With An Online Marketing Agency

For a long time marketers all aimed at attracting WASPS: white anglo Saxon protestants. This strategy used to make sense because they made up most of the consumer market. In 2020 that approach is not only outdated but potentially harmful to your business. Perhaps it’s time to seek an online marketing agency to ensure that you are reaching a full spectrum of new business.

For starters, it ignores the changing demographics of the United States.

In 2019, millennials made up the largest generation in the United States and around the world. They are also entering their prime spending years, and this represents a golden opportunity for marketers everywhere.

Millennials today are the most diverse generation ever to exist, so narrow targeted campaigns will no longer work.

Inclusion is also a key value of this generation, and a significant 70% said that they wouldn’t consider a brand whose promotions and offerings weren’t diverse enough if there was another alternative.

What this means is that marketers today must embrace a concept now known as diversity marketing.

We’re going to give you an overview of diversity marketing from the perspective of an online marketing agency, strategies that you can utilize in your marketing efforts, and some examples from companies and that have used it correctly.

Diversity Marketing Definition

Diversity marketing refers to any marketing campaign that recognizes the differences within subgroups of people. These subgroups include age, gender identity, ethnicity, religion, sexual identity, disability, and so on.

You can go into even more segmentation through sorting them by weight, marital status, job occupation, education level, income, and you get the idea…

In short, diversity marketing means hyper-targeting your marketing campaign in order to connect with the largest variety of people within your target market.

When Should You Do Diversity Marketing?

When you’re starting out your business or brand, it’s ok to have a very focused business persona. However, as your business grows, you’ll need to reach out to a wider range of customers in a genuine manner. If your message is shallow, then you’ll experience poor results in your marketing and possibly incur other negative side effects. Here are some examples of those negative side effects:

Offending your target customers. If you aren’t diverse enough or come across as ignorant, then you risk offending your potential customers and possibly current ones as well. For example, addressing a group of people in the wrong way is a common mistake that businesses make.
You can lose out on potential customers. With diversity marketing, you can make your target audience feel like you know them personally, which will help you gain their trust. They can also relate to your brand better that way too.
Change can be difficult. Going from a non-diverse approach to a diverse approach isn’t easy, but the longer you wait the harder it will be to pull off. And as time goes on it will become harder to explain when your competition is going full steam ahead into diversity marketing.

The time is now to put diversity marketing into practice in your digital marketing strategy. The question is how do you do it? With these tips of course! Here are some simple ways that you can capture company diversity with your online marketing.

Market Research is a Necessity

Market research is a key step in diversity marketing, especially with an online marketing agency. The US population is more diverse and outspoken now than it has even been before. Companies are also discovering the internal advantages that diversity brings, including increased productivity, more innovation, and a better company message.

Diversity looks at all of the following (and more): race, age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, and gender identity. So to be successful, you must understand your target audience and how your brand fits into their lives. There’s just as much to learn from failed campaigns (like the ones from Pepsi and Visa) as from the successful ones.

So how can market research help you incorporate diversity into your digital marketing campaigns? In the following ways:

Lets you know about potential problems before they infect your wider campaign. For example, are you going to use a Spanish ad translation? If so, then have a native speaker look it over and make sure that your translation isn’t offensive or inaccurate.
Allow for a review of images. Pepsi learned this lesson the hard way with their protest ad featuring Kendall Jenner. It’s always a good idea to get an outside perspective before allowing an image or ad to go viral (in a bad way).
Prevent disaster. Be careful not to get stuck in your company bubble. If you don’t get any outside opinions or ideas, then that will lead to stagnation and failure in the long run. Additionally, if you’re surrounded by people who already know your company, product offering, and brand, then you’ll be at greater risk of making errors in judgment.

Don’t Cut Yourself on Too Much Edginess

So you’d like to run an edgy campaign. Well, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Doing something different from your competition can certainly send you to the top. However, you should always have a voice of reason in your campaign sessions who can bring up some key questions.

So with all that in mind here’s how you can embrace edginess AND diversity in your ad campaigns

Outside perspectives should be welcomed. Make it a point to hire outside consultants or remote workers to get some honest opinions and viewpoints.
When trying to birth new ideas, bring as many different backgrounds, and ethnicities into the discussions as possible.
Your ultimate goal should be empathy. Your customers should be able to relate with your ads despite (or perhaps because of) their edginess. However, you should use caution and make sure they aren’t condescending or offensive.

Some examples of good ads following these principles are the Coca-Cola “America is Beautiful” ads, and any ads by Apple, which is a company that is leading the way in utilizing diversity marketing.

Test Your Ads

The last step is to test your ads on small groups. Run A/B test ads before starting your full-blown digital marketing campaign.

Remember, the more testing you do, the more sure you’ll be that your message will align with your target audience’s values.

Contact Salt Rank today for more information on how an online marketing agency can help implement diversity marketing for your small business.

November 02,2019

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How Can SEO Improve Business?

You’ve likely heard countless times that SEO is an invaluable digital marketing method. However, even if you have a basic understanding of its importance, you might still not have a solid enough grasp to use it to its full potential. Salt Rank is a well-oiled and diverse SEO agency and digital marketing company that aims to educate clients.

SEO is made up of multiple elements, and understanding what they are and how they work is the key to understanding its overall importance. To sum it up, though, SEO is important because it increases the visibility of your website, and thus the traffic and sales.

SECONDARY BENEFITS

-create brand awareness

-position yourself as an expert and authority in your field

-build relationships with potential customers

So, let’s talk about SEO and everything you need to know about it to succeed in today’s digital world.

The Key Aspects Of An SEO Agency

Keywords

The days of keywords being the only thing that mattered in SEO are over. However, that doesn’t mean that they aren’t still hugely important. The way that keywords differ today is that they must be chosen carefully to fit the content on the page. In other words, they must be relevant to the page’s content. But first of all, what is a keyword? It’s simply a phrase that your target audience would use to find your products or services. You can use them to help your potential customers connect with your website and your business.

Content

Good content is essential for SEO because it’s the vehicle that carries the rest of the techniques. Think of it this way: your customer needs a vehicle to reach you online (your content). It needs to be the right kind of vehicle, though, meaning that it has to be content that your target audience would be interested in.

For example, if your website is about cooking, then you would need to write blog posts about different cooking recipes, cooking techniques, cooking stories, nutritional information posts, etc., you get the drift.

If you write good content and follow the right SEO techniques, your blog posts would come up first in the search results, thus allowing you to start building a relationship with prospects by presenting them with valuable information.

If that person wanted to try a new recipe, your blog might be the first one that comes to mind. If you’re going to have any hope of succeeding with content marketing, then your content has to be interesting, shareable, relevant and engaging.

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO is exactly as the name implies; it’s SEO practices that happen away from your website as opposed to on-page SEO. The primary way that this happens is through building up backlinks to your website. These are links from other websites (preferably high authority websites) that tell Google that your website is trustworthy and useful enough to garner backlinks from other relevant websites.

There are several legitimate tactics for getting backlinks for your website. Some of the most popular methods include guest blogging, giving shoutouts to influencers in your content, and creating highly sharable infographics.

Local SEO

The importance of local SEO is increasing, along with the usage of mobile devices. Today at least 57% of searches are done by mobile devices, including tablets and smartphones, and at least half of those are done with local intent.

This means that, for example, a local restaurant can attract customers using local SEO techniques. For instance, if you’re a seafood restaurant, then ranking for “best seafood in [city], [state]” would be highly desirable.

Other techniques for implementing local SEO for your business include: creating pages for your business on all of the different Google apps and websites (Google Maps, Google+, Google My Business), creating different website pages targeting different local keywords that you want to rank for, and finally, claiming directory listings.

Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing, or SEM, refers to paid advertising. It includes many different options such as display ads, pay-per-click (PPC), Google AdWords, Google shopping ads, social media ads, native ads, and the list goes on and on…

While it’s not an essential component of SEO, it does still have its place in directing highly targeted customers to your website.

The Importance Of SEO

In case you need more convincing about the importance of SEO, the following points should help hammer it home:

Gain Visibility And Rank Higher

Visibility is a crucial function of SEO, and it’s directly correlated with your ranking in the search engines. It’s an especially critical factor when 1/4 of all web users never click past the first SERP.

Gain Traffic To Your Website

This is one of the main objectives of SEO. Ranking number one or in the top 5 results are the key to this. Nearly 33% of clicks go to the top search result, and the first 5 results receive 75% of the total clicks.

Grow Your Authority

This is a relatively new metric that search engines are now using. In the early days of the internet, authority didn’t matter, but it matters now more than ever before. The simple reason is that there are just too many websites these days, and the authority metric helps to narrow down the list of websites that have a chance of ranking.

Give A Better User Experience

This is a side effect of creating good SEO, which is another reason why SEO is essential these days. Great content + good on-site SEO = a good UX (user experience). One example of good on-site SEO is having a website that’s responsive to all types of online users, including mobile users, desktop users, and laptop users.

Grow Your Business

In the end, it all boils down to this. An SEO agency will help you to achieve all of your business goals. When an agency and a client join SEO forces, magic can happen in:

-building stronger relationships with your audience

-creating a better experience on your website for your customers

-increasing your online authority and helping to gain the trust of new visitors

-bringing more people to your website

-giving you an advantage over your competitors

-increasing sales and conversions

All of this results in creating a more loyal customer base as well as producing long term growth for your business.

October 17,2019

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What are the Best Digital Marketing Strategies on SEO

Whether you are running a business in Kansas City or running a business anywhere else in the world, you know the importance of having an effective online advertising and marketing strategy. An integral part of any digital marketing strategy is Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

What is Search Engine Optimization?

SEO is a collection of tools and techniques that help your website to rank higher in search engine results, thereby putting your site closer to the top of the search results, driving more traffic to your site and hopefully more business.

SEO used to be about adding keywords to your site for search engines to find; now, it is so much more than that. It has now become a highly involved strategy that often requires so much time and attention that many companies are hiring website designers and marketing experts for support.

Creating Your SEO Strategy

As the online marketing industry and SEOs, in particular, are continually evolving with the application of new technologies and changing user behaviors, standard practices come and go in the blink of an eye. Trying to plan a successful online campaign without SEO, though, will likely keep your business from ever reaching its full potential. As your business is ever-evolving to keep up with trends and market demands, so too much your SEO strategy. You must be continually monitoring and adjusting so that you ensure that your business is not falling behind. So here are a few things to consider when planning your SEO strategy:

Know your target market – SEO today is not about just grabbing as much web traffic as possible. You want instead to be attracting high-value visitors that are interested in what you offer and hence, more likely to convert. In terms of demographics, you need to figure out what your target market is searching for. How are they performing those searches? Where are they located? The more specific and detailed your information, the more valuable your information for SEO planning will be. One tool to assist you with this is Google Analytics.
Mobile devices are big – The mobile market has exploded, surpassing desktops years ago. This means that the majority of your customers are completing searches only using their phones. Hence, optimizing your website for mobile users is critical if you want to rank well in search engine results pages. An excellent tool for helping you to evaluate your website as to the ease of use for mobile phones is to enter your site’s URL in Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.
Don’t neglect other search engines – While Google is a massive name in the search engine market, with a considerable share of the market, there is still a significant portion of users using other search engine sites to complete their searches. Make it a point to review how your website stacks up on other search engine sites. All it may take is something little, and your site can get a significant boost in ranking.
Know how your market is searching – When search engines were new, consumers had to create very broad search requests in an attempt to find what they were looking for. Searches like “take-out Kansas City.” Now, as search engine technology has changed, people feel more comfortable typing in things like, “where can I go for Chinese Food in Kansas City?” These changes in user habits, while subtle, can have a big effect on which keywords will be best suited to bringing valuable traffic to your site. Instead of focusing on what keywords get you the most traffic, try and focus your keywords on the traffic that will translate into the most conversions, revenue and overall profits.
Design your website well – A well-designed, user-friendly website, with interesting, relevant and easy-to-find information is key to boosting your traffic and conversion rates. Each page should be built around keyword themes so that search engines can easily index your site and rank you higher. Positive behaviors from site visitors (like time spent at your site and conversion rates) are your best bet for improving your ranking. So, make sure that you are keeping your content natural and focuses. Avoiding business jargon and keyword stuffing helps to ensure that users that click on your site will not be left unhappy, which will hurt your ranking.
Develop relationships with other businesses – When other business links to your website from theirs, search engines consider that to be an indicator that your site contains valuable content. While having dozens of links from low-quality sites used to be all it took, technology has developed here as well. The value of a link to your website also depends on the quality of the site that links you. So, developing partnerships with other related but different businesses, where links for each other are posted on both sites, can help you with improving your own site’s ranking. Just a few links from other high-traffic quality sites will do wonders for your ranking.
Take advantage of social media – Just as search engines are continually evolving their technology, so too is social media. What was once merely a platform for basic communication has become a highly profitable marketing channel. Many users begin their searches on social media and will make their way to your website from there. So, by keeping your social media site active and up-to-date, with engaging and personalized content, you will be attracting more people to your profile and, hence, your website.
Analysis, analysis, analysis – When looking to plan or update your SEO strategy, analysis is the key to determining what will work best. Start by tracking the most important website metrics and set a baseline performance for your site. Make one or two small content changes and see if you notice a boost in your site traffic or your site rankings. Avoid making too many changes at once or making unrelated changes simultaneously, as that will make tracking your results pretty much impossible. You want to be able to keep track of what was responsible for improvements in your site’s traffic and conversion rates, as well as keeping track of which changes did not work.

These are just a few of the possible tools and techniques that you can use to devise an SEO strategy. Contacting a local online marketing firm in Kansas City can give you a big head start into developing the best campaign for your business, as well as the continuous monitoring and adjusting that all good online marketing campaigns require.

June 25,2019

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Easy Tips You Can Use To Generate Leads Using SEO

For online marketing in Kansas City, lead generation is key to the success of your business. However, many people find that their attempts at lead generation don’t work. If you are in the same situation, you have probably wondered, what am I doing wrong?

The answer is usually pretty simple. You likely have not used SEO (or search engine optimization). If you are not using it, you need to start right now.

Applying SEO to your website will make it more relevant to your customers. Meaning Google is more likely to show it to them. You’ll be much more successful if you apply SEO when you do online marketing in Kansas City.

Don’t get intimidated by SEO! Here are our tips for your SEO lead generation strategy for your online marketing in Kansas City.

Find the Right Keywords

Without keywords, Google is going to have a hard time knowing when to show your website. One strategy is to use keywords that are often searched for but then you’ll have too much competition. Choose keywords for your niche audience that have a somewhat lower search volume.

Look at What the Competition’s Doing

Backlinks are links to your site from another site and show Google that you’re a trusted source. You can help build authority by having reviews of your business or product on other websites, someone referencing a blog you wrote, or social shares.

Create a Responsive Website

More and more people are using their mobile devices to perform searches and look up websites. Some estimates put the numbers at 60%! Your customers will leave your website if it’s hard to read on a mobile device. Make sure your website has a responsive layout to adapt to any screen size.

Don’t Ignore Your Online Listings

Make sure you claim your business in online directories. This is especially important if you’re a local business. These are opportunities to market yourself and drive traffic to your website.

Your Location is a Keyword

If you need people to walk through your storefront or office to make sales, use your location as a keyword. Your website will show up for people in your local area. They can work with you, unlike someone across the globe seeing your website.

Get Positive Reviews

In a market with so many choices, most of us rely on reviews to make our decisions. It goes without saying that your customer’s experience is your number one priority. However, after you provide that great experience, make sure you ask for reviews. The higher your ratings on trusted review websites, the more customers will seek you out.

Create a Blog

Blogs are a great lead generation tool. They give your customers relevant information and show your expertise. Optimize your blog with SEO for the best results.

Guest Blog for Others

Guest posting is writing a blog post for a blog in a resource your audience trusts. It helps build your trustworthiness. All you have to do is offer to write a blog for someone else’s website. These collaborations can be one time events or ongoing.

Optimize Images

Since Google can’t actually see your images, you can use Alt tags to describe an image to Google. This makes your images show up in searches and provides another way for people to find you.

SEO Lead Generation Strategy

SEO should be a vital part of your lead generation strategy. We hope you can use these tips to up your SEO game. Need more help with your online marketing in Kansas City? Contact us, and we can work with you with SEO and lead generation.

May 27,2019

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Kansas City Online Marketing: How to Generate Local Leads

If you are a Kansas City business, you can generate more local leads when you use Kansas City online marketing. Most companies generate the highest quality and greatest amount of leads through Google Searches. You know that you need new leads to grow your business, but how do you get them?

The answer is simple: Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short.

Kansas City Online Marketing firm or DIY?

Using a Kansas City Online Marketing firm like Salt Rank to improve search engine optimization is the way to get your website to rank on search websites like Google and Bing. The reason you want to show up on search pages is that the people who are searching for a solution to their problem and looking for your business right NOW. When they click on your website, it is a chance to turn a visitor into a customer.

If you want to try to DIY your SEO to generate leads, we will take you through the five easiest ways to do it. Keep reading for super useful information you can use today.

First: Find the Right Keywords

Keywords are the words that people type into a search engine to find the answer that they are looking for.

What you need to do is find the keywords that your customers are using and optimize your homepage for them.

keywords for kansas city online marketing

How do you find the right keywords?

1 – Take a look at what terms your customers are already using. You can find this information through your Google Search Console or Google Analytics.

2 – Ask your customers how they found you. A simple way to know what keywords to use is just to ask existing customers how they found you. If they say ‘Google’ ask them what search term they used to find you.

3 – Think about localized keywords like

[service] near me, e.g., plumbers near me
plumbers in [Kansas City]
doctors in [Kansas City]

Once you know your keywords, optimize your website for it! Make sure your meta description on each page is targeted to your keyword.

Do not overlook the importance of local keywords!

Why?

1 – Half of the people who Google a business physically went to the store within 24 hours.

2 – 60 percent of Americans use search to find out local products and services.

3 – Most people (71%) look the location of a business up to see that is real and get directions to it.

If you don’t know where to start with keyword research or optimizing your website, contact us today to get a free quote and consultation.

Second: Claim Your Google My Business Listing and All Other Local Listings

city photo of kansas city online marketing

If you have a local bricks-and-mortar store, you need to have a presence on local listing websites. Not only will this create great backlinks, but the people looking for your product or service will be able to find you.

Once you have your My Business listing, work hard to generate positive reviews. Over 85% of your customers trust online reviews. These days, they are just as powerful as a recommendation from a friend.

Salt Rank has a robust reputation management system that enables you to get 4- and 5-star reviews from your customers without having to reach out to the one by one.

However, if you are just starting out, you can ask your customers individually for reviews, and this will help you rank better on search pages.

Third: Write Blog Posts Consistently

kansas city online marketing girl writing

Blogs combine everything needed to reach visitors, engage them, and keep them coming back. Generating leads is easy when you have a great blog.

‘Consistent’ varies from industry to industry and business, but you should be posting a blog at least every 10 days.

But how do you write a great blog post?

Choose a great topic

Always write on a topic that is relevant to your customer. If you aren’t sure the type of content they want to see, you can start with your keyword research or thing of the frequently asked questions you get.

Create an outline

Write a great outline with the major points that you want to hit in your post. Then write the conclusion first. This will help you fill in the blanks as you write.

Create user-friendly and high-quality content

Notice how we are answering all your questions and writing in a friendly tone?

Publish content that’s easy to skim

Use a lot of headings and bullet points in your blog post to make it easy to read. Like these bullet points here!

Create engaging titles

Make sure that your titles speak to a problem or your customer in general. There is nothing worse than a dull, generic headline

Note: Make sure your headline is no longer than 70 characters

Use keywords

People can’t find you if search engines don’t know what you are writing about. Make sure your post is full of the keywords you want to rank for.

If you don’t have time to write blogs or don’t consider yourself a strong writer, Salt Rank is a Kansas City online marketing firm that can help you create high-quality, compelling blog posts consistently.

Fourth: Guest Post

podcast and backlinks kansas city online marketing

Now that you are writing posts consistently, you are ready to guest post. This is a great way to build authority and get backlinks!

If you aren’t a great writer, you can be a guest on a local podcast or do a video Q and A with a local YouTuber.

This may seem like a lot of work, but there are some excellent reasons to guest post

You Can Establish Authority in Your Niche

When you show up on someone else’s website, their audience will see you are a credible source on the topic they are interested in. Make sure you are only guest posting on quality websites. Their authority will rub off on you.

You Will Get Better, Local Backlinks (this is good for SEO)

Remember when we talked about backlinks above? Getting a link to your website from another local business will help your rankings when people are looking for ‘hairdressers near me’.

Your Writing Skills Will Improve

The more you write, the better you become. Practice makes perfect!

Your Social Media Will Benefit

People love to share what is new on their social media. When they share, you will be exposed to their audience, and a small percentage of them will find you on social. It’s not a lot, but if you are featured on a page with a large following, you will get lots of followers.

Brand Awareness

Guest posting or being a guest on a podcast is an excellent way to build brand awareness. Like in benefit #4, your message and brand will be exposed to hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of other people!

Fifth: Optimize Your Images

If you don’t have alt-tags, or image descriptions, or are not using progressive JPEGs, you aren’t doing SEO properly.

Why use alt tags?

Google can’t see, so it relies on your image descriptions to know what users are seeing.

Why use progressive jpegs.

Google prioritizes page load speed, and if you have large files that take forever to load, you will be penalized in the search rankings. Making your photos, progressive JPEGs will help your website load faster!

When you optimize your images, your website can show up in image searches, and your site will load faster.

You don’t want to show up on page six of Google, so optimize your images!

Here is a mini checklist you can use to optimize your images

1 – Save your pictures as a progressive JPEG

2 – Strip your picture of the metadata if it is too big

3 – Change your titles to describe what the user is seeing accurately

4 – Add alt tags

5 – Use the caption section (is you have WordPress)

Now you have all the tips you need to generate local leads to grow your business, by using SEO.

If you are too busy running your business and need help, you can contact Salt Rank, your friendly neighborhood, Kansas City online marketing firm!

April 24,2019

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Google Algorithm March 2019 Update

Google just rolled out a new update in March and you may have seen your client’s rankings and search traffic take a drop. If you are looking for answers, then you have come to the right place. This is an opportunity for Digital Agency Kansas City to benefit. We will take you through the Florida 2 update and the steps you can take to rebuild your client’s traffic.
This update really touches on a few key things, authority, relevancy, and user experience. As a digital agency, there is room for you to improve your customer’s traffic and ranking on Google by taking note of these things.

This new update utilizes a link distance ranking algorithm that determines the activity between websites. Depending on this ranking, a website can be considered more ‘trustworthy’.
The purpose of this is so Google can determine whether a website is spammy. How do they determine this? By checking to see if the website has links to other spam websites or if a website links to a normal, useful website that users want to see.
That being said, links aren’t the final, determining factor in your business ranking. The more important reason to care about links is to build your relevancy and authority in a certain niche. If your link is surrounded by relevant keywords, then your website will be more relevant in the eyes of Google for those keywords.

What does this mean for your digital agency?

Build the right links from the right people. Links are all about quality and you should avoid artificial link building where you can and avoid linking to spammy websites. If you help your clients create content that is authoritative and solves a question or helps with further reading, then you will get organic backlinks from other useful websites.

Build your authority

Speaking of authority, you must balance authority with relevancy and your user’s expectations. Just because you have an expert write your blog post, doesn’t automatically mean you will rank well. Google will rank your pages based on users getting the answers that they expect! Your website may not have the best answer, but if it is the answer that users expect to see, or want to see, then your website will rank better than your competitions.
Make sure that all your posts have an author listed. Why? Because if you don’t have an author, it is impossible for Google to know if it was written by an IT expert or a high schooler. Google looking for authors with expertise in the subject you are writing on.

What does this mean for you?

Make sure that you are listening to your target audience and answering the questions that they have in your industry. For example, when people google ‘digital agency Kansas City’, make sure that you are answering the questions that people expect to be answered. This may mean you are writing about what to look for in an agency or a listing on the top trends that agencies are looking for in 2020.

As long as you answer the questions along the buyer’s journey, you will be rewarded for it. Most of your clients don’t know where to start, so this is a golden opportunity for you to delve deeper into your target markets mind by answering their ‘how-to’ questions through your content.

Focus on User Experience

The user experience encompasses many things like mobile first, removal of aggressive or misleading ads, and, like we motioned earlier, giving them what they expect to see.

Expectations

Make sure your clients are ANSWERING the questions that their users came to their website to see. Create content that doesn’t stray too far from the topic at hand. If there is additional information that supports the answer, make a different blog post about it and link to it.
You really must focus on the user experience and look at content as a public service and not a way to make money right away. Which brings us to the next subject: advertisements.

Advertisements

Google is taking a hard stance on aggressive, misleading advertising that ruins the under experience. If your client has low-quality ads all over their site, they will be penalized, and this is your opportunity to get them big traffic gains by addressing this issue.

Mobile First

With mobile-first indexing, make sure you are paying attention to your mobile site having the same content and links as your desktop site. Google is looking to see the mobile and desktop sites are congruent.

What About Click Through Rates?

You may be wondering why we aren’t talking about click through rates in regard to this update. Again, Google is here to please the end user and give them the information that they want, but click rates are not the metric to be looking for. A bounce back to the google search page is more about the algorithm not providing the right search result than the content on your page. That being said, if your content answers the search query you want to rank for, then you will be rewarded if the user stays in your site and the bounce rate is lower.

Bottom line

Digital Agencies in Kansas City can take advantage of this update by encouraging their clients to focus on quality content, superior user experience, fair advertising, attention to technical SEO. Make sure you encourage your clients to improve 100% of their issues instead of focusing on just links or ads.

To achieve 100% improvement, make sure you are helping them to meet the Google user’s expectations, avoiding spammy ads and links, and using credible sources that answer questions along the buying journey. Never frustrate your user even if that means removing low-quality advertisements from the website.

Always ask: Is my client meeting their users’ expectations? Are we answering the right questions? If you answer yes to these questions when the next update comes, you’ll be ready.

April 11,2019

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On Page Optimization: Important Factors To Consider In 2019

The process of search engine optimization involves two major parts – Off Page Optimization & On Page Optimization. Off page optimization has more to do with promotional methods outside the website like posting links, using social media to achieve a better ranking in the search results etc.

On the contrary, On Page optimization forms the base for search engine optimization and refers to all the steps that can be taken directly within the website to improve its search engine ranking. It is the process of optimizing the individual web pages that comprise the website. It includes the content of the webpage as well as the HTML source code of that page. Basically, on page optimization techniques involve optimizing the code and content of each web page of the website. When looking for a business to do your optimization, look for a reputable Kansas City Online Marketing company. You need a company that will focus on the following factors to achieve better On Page Optimization of your website.

1. Optimize the title tags

The title tags are one of the most important factors that can help with page optimization. Title tags are used to determine the intent of your page by search engines. A Google bot will list your website in the search results only if it sees the searched keywords included in your title tag. The closer your keyword is to the first few words of the title tag, the higher priority it is given by the search engines. That is why it is recommended that you start your title tag with the keyword. Another great idea is to add modifiers in your title and title tags. Words like ‘2019’, ‘review’, and ‘best’ are considered modifiers. These words are likely to be used when a user conducts a Google search and using them in your title tag can help you increase your ranking for long tail versions of your keyword.

2. Meta Description and Meta Tag Optimization

A Meta description tag is a short summary that is used to describe the content of a web page. Your website should have a Meta description focusing on your business and services. This piece of information is called ‘the selling snippet’. This snippet might be picked up by Google to display in the search results. If the user finds this information useful, they are more likely to visit your website. Increasing web traffic is the goal, and therefore, it is important to make your meta description interesting and precise. You can also add your contact number or a toll-free number so if someone is looking to contact you, they can directly call instead of visiting your website. Like the Meta Description, Meta tags are a set of keywords that you select for each web page. These keywords have to be well researched and relevant to your web page and posts.

3. Keyword Optimization

It is important to decide relevant keywords with appropriate research. There should be an optimum number of keywords in your posts to drive traffic to your website, but this does not necessarily mean that you should overuse those keywords. This would make your website unreadable and would turn away visitors. You can make use of several free tools available online and shortlist a few that are relevant to your subject matter. You can also use some long tail keywords involving common words like “top”, “cheap”, “best” that can be easier to rank for. To please the Google Gods, try to keep the keyword density between two to five percent.

4. Optimizing URL Structures

A study found that the shorter a webpage URL is, the better its Google rank turns out to be. That being said, it is important to make your URLs keyword rich. Use hyphens or dashes to separate words in your URL as Google does not identify underscores.

5. Content Optimization

Longer content is ranked higher by Google search engines as compared to shorter articles. Make sure your articles and blog posts are long and engaging, ideally ranging from 1800 to 3000 words. Of course, they should have good quality, and include relevant information for the reader. Also, make sure you add the relevant keywords within the first 100 words of your post. Don’t forget to add adequate internal links in every post. This helps the user browse related information within your website itself instead of doing a Google search again. The best example of internal linking is Wikipedia.

6. Heading Tags

Using proper HTML tags <h1> and tags <h2>on your post’s headings and subheadings is a good idea. This effect not only makes your post readable and structured but also makes navigation easy. Headings are the largest words on your post and hence the search engines tend to give them a little more weight than the rest of the page. It is even better if your keywords can be included in your headings although using it repeatedly without relevance will make it less important.

7. Image Optimization

A webpage is bound to have many images inserted in its posts. The images should always have an alt tag and an image description. They help in describing the image to the user and also help them to understand the purpose of the image. These tags help the search engine crawler index the image more accurately. Thus, the image description should always consist of the relevant keyword to improve your search rankings.

8. Video Optimization

Any business should concentrate on two types of videos: educational and emotional. It is important to optimize the multimedia content just as we optimize the written content to get the best out of it. Also, it is important to make your messages easily understandable through videos. The title of the video should be simple, short, engaging and should include the keywords. The description of the video should be concise, precise and target oriented. It should include your primary and secondary keywords through text. A perfect thumbnail image is the deciding factor as to whether or not a visitor will watch your videos – it is even more important than the title! An eye-catching and relevant image can get the audience’s attention quickly. Also, always include subtitles in your videos as many people tend to watch videos with audio off.

These eight techniques by a reputable Kansas City Online Marketing company for on page optimization will help search engines crawl your entire website effectively. This will lead to a better ranking in the search results and create enough traffic to your website.

2. Provide a World-Class Customer Experience

3. Widen Your Social Media Presence

4. Increase Traffic Using Quality Inbound Links

5. Consider Video Advertising

6. Consider the Effects of Adblockers

1. Decide on the Type of Website

2. Use Significant Keywords in Online Content

3. Add Keywords in Image Captions

4. Make Sure to Put Significant Keywords in Links

5. Link to Related and Relevant Websites

6. Improve the Usability of Your Homepage

7. Write Articles on Product Comparison

8. Always Write New Blog Posts

9. Use Proper Header Tags When Designing Your Website

10. Consult With an SEO Expert or Learn It Yourself

1. It Costs NOTHING

2. How to Get Started

3. It Gives You the Right Amount of Content

4. It Maintains Relevance

Takeaway

Diversity Marketing Definition

When Should You Do Diversity Marketing?

Market Research is a Necessity

Don’t Cut Yourself on Too Much Edginess

Test Your Ads

SECONDARY BENEFITS

The Key Aspects Of An SEO Agency

Keywords

Content

Off-Page SEO

Local SEO

Search Engine Marketing

The Importance Of SEO

Gain Visibility And Rank Higher

Gain Traffic To Your Website

Grow Your Authority

Give A Better User Experience

Grow Your Business

Find the Right Keywords

Look at What the Competition’s Doing

Create a Responsive Website

Don’t Ignore Your Online Listings

Your Location is a Keyword

Get Positive Reviews

Create a Blog

Guest Blog for Others

Optimize Images

SEO Lead Generation Strategy

Kansas City Online Marketing firm or DIY?

First: Find the Right Keywords

How do you find the right keywords?

Do not overlook the importance of local keywords!

Why?

Second: Claim Your Google My Business Listing and All Other Local Listings

Third: Write Blog Posts Consistently

But how do you write a great blog post?

Choose a great topic

Create an outline

Create user-friendly and high-quality content

Publish content that’s easy to skim

Create engaging titles

Use keywords

Fourth: Guest Post

You Can Establish Authority in Your Niche

You Will Get Better, Local Backlinks (this is good for SEO)

Your Writing Skills Will Improve

Your Social Media Will Benefit

Brand Awareness

Fifth: Optimize Your Images

Why use alt tags?

Why use progressive jpegs.

Here is a mini checklist you can use to optimize your images

Let’s talk about your business

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