Search engine optimisation (SEO) is at the very least a part of daily vocabulary and it likely makes up a large whack of your strategy – and budget. Even for the savviest of marketers, though, it can come with its challenges and complexities.  

Here are some of the top SEO conundrums and how best to fix them, when you do accidentally take a wrong step.

Picking keywords incorrectly

You or your clients may assume that a certain vocabulary describes the site you are trying to rank, but it’s worth checking whether these words are the correct and most widely-used ones by the demographic that you are looking to target.

It’s imperative that when choosing your keywords that you put yourself in the searcher’s shoes and consider what your target audience would be looking for. If you find yourself agonising over which keywords to choose, tools such as Google Adwords Keyword Planner and SEMrush can help you decipher which terms may work for you.

Pepper key terms everywhere

If you want to establish rankings for certain phrases or words, it’s fair to assume that you should use these terms in as much content as possible and cover your website with them. Unfortunately, this practice, though common, does not boost your SEO rating; in fact, it will actually harm your presence in the long run.

Google is sophisticated and as a result, trying to play the system and overuse keywords can lead to being blacklisted and marked as spam, causing a massive bash to your SEO.

Overlooking keywords in the URL

While some overlook the importance of using keywords in the URL, it is a basic component of SEO. Inner pages are often ranked more frequently for chosen search terms over home pages, so adding key terms into the URL itself will likely help to bolster your homepage and inner pages up the rankings.

Be original

Duplication is a mistake many make more often than you may think. As a once-common practice in the industry, it is still undertaken by many old-school thinkers. Forever keeping up with SEO magicians, however, search engines have cottoned onto this and they now penalise those taking this arguably lazy, spammy approach.

Don’t let your content go untitled

Once you’ve uploaded and are ready to publish your content masterpiece, be that a blog post, feature or some other media, take a second to look at your title tags and meta description.

These titles are often forgotten about – an error in SEO 101. They are essential in increasing your SEO successfully and must not be ignored. Good tags and a relevant meta description get taken into account by search engines when skimming over your site.

For example, if you’re publishing a piece on running shoes, your title should either include the brand product or name and even a commonly asked question that the content will answer e.g. “What are the best running shoes?”.

Seek external links

You can’t get the most from SEO without building a portfolio of high-ranking external do-follow links from other sites. The best way to go about this task is to produce content that these sites might be interested in covering or publishing themselves, providing they will link back as a credit.

This content could be a tool, an infographic or long-form article that you’ve hosted somewhere on your site. If the content is intriguing enough, the hook is strong and the angle is relevant to the third party’s agenda, you will have a high chance of generating do-follow links back to your content on high DA news sites.

Stay relevant

It can be tempting to start writing about something completely unrelated to your core mission.  Be warned, though, that straying too far from your keywords can ultimately hurt your SEO mission.

Google looks for content that is going to answer a user’s needs; if you fail to focus your feature or article on answering these needs, that content will not rank highly for your search terms.

Cramming a load of different topics into one piece of content can also be damaging as it will likely result in shoddy, rushed content that answers nothing and ultimately reduces your SEO.

Although SEO has been a focus for many the past few years, it’s still a fairly new and exciting topic that changes regularly. Everyone is learning together so don’t panic, mistakes will likely be made along the way and can be fixed if you follow the right guides.

The post Common SEO Conundrums and How to Fix Them appeared first on PerformanceIN.

Millennials make up a large chunk of the population (30% in America) and, with them being the most lucrative market, it’s no surprise that brands want to know how they could possibly hook in this influential group of people that could potentially turn into loyal customers.

Generation Y has become a priority but marketing to them is a mystery to many brands, especially if your marketing team is older and slightly out of touch. Here are five handy tricks to follow if you find yourself in brainstorming sessions scratching your head, frantically trying to come up with ideas on how to appease millennials with your brand’s messaging.

Ensure you ALWAYS utilise online

It should come as no shock that millennials love to browse the internet, with it being found that they spend an average of 25 hours per week online. They are actively searching for content to interact with and, if you aren’t utilising the power of the internet, your brand will seriously lose out.

You need to make sure you are creating engaging content that will excite a younger generation. For example, creating a tool or calculator which will give them a personalised outcome will encourage them to interact with your content, as well as possibly share it on their own social media channels.

Create informative content

Gone are the days that magazine ads or direct mail campaigns were the only way in which a brand could reach their target audience. Instead, brands should be looking to create informative content such as whitepapers, blogs or even videos that millennials can read or watch and learn as they do so.

Generation Y trust experts and are 247% more likely to be influenced by blogs or social networking sites, so getting this informative content out on your social media channels and on landing pages of your website is a must.

Video content should be created when appropriate too; millennials have a large appetite for video marketing, with 76% of them revealing that they follow brands on YouTube.

Engage with your audience

As a brand, you need to be ready and willing to engage with your audience via social media. Some of the best brands have conversations with their followers in their own, tailored tone. Some prefer to be witty and comedic, others choose to be more informative; but whatever tone you do choose to take, you need to make sure you are replying to as many existing or potential customers as possible.

It has been suggested that 84% of companies believe that social media marketing does enhance relationships with their customers, so utilise this amazing tool and ensure you aren’t being left in the dust.

Piggyback

Piggybacking on awareness days, news and events can be a great way to attract new millennial customers. With generation Y constantly browsing their social media channels and the wider web, they often seek out news on events or national days, so you need to tailor content surrounding this and ensure you are using the correct hashtags to get involved.

For example, if it’s National Pet Day, you could create an image of a dog or cat, relate it to your brand in some way and then hashtag #NationalPetDay to make sure anyone looking up this incredibly ‘important’ holiday will see your content and maybe be encouraged to follow you.

Utilise influencers

A recent study by Defy found that whilst millennials hate traditional advertisement, 58% of them wouldn’t mind sitting through an advert if their favourite digital influencer was somehow involved.

Social media influencers and YouTubers have become the new A-listers and should always be considered when a brand is looking to appeal to millennials. There are plenty of platforms out there, such as Tribe, which can help brands get paired with appropriate influencers, but you can also always directly communicate with agents to get their insight. Just make sure you do not get overcharged as influencers can ask for a hefty sum for just one post. Always haggle and shop around.

The post Five Ways to Appease Millennials Using Inbound Marketing appeared first on PerformanceIN.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has become one of the most important parts of digital marketing when businesses of all sizes are looking to grow and be seen by potential customers.

Such is its importance to companies’ strategies that many have either employed specialists or sourced outside help from agencies who work in this industry. The long and short of it? If your business isn’t paying attention to SEO, your quest to increase your traffic or sales is going to be much tougher.

However, while most businesses are giving SEO the time of day it deserves, it would seem that many are still ignoring the importance of going local whether underestimating its value or lacking some knowledge. Like it or not, however, local SEO is just as powerful and imperative as its big brother, and here are a few reasons why as a business owner you should not be ignoring it.

Trust local

Many people, especially the younger generation, have become quite cynical but they do seem to trust those local to them. With this in mind, it’s crucial to take full advantage by ensuring you are appearing on the first few pages when a local searches for services or products you can provide in their area. Convenience with this group of people is also key and businesses local to them could not be more convenient!

To appear on these pages, you just need to make sure you have provided your business name, address and phone number, whilst also working on optimising your keyword searches. Soon you’ll be attracting all those new customers who searched “garden shop close to me”.

Google knows where you are

Most people do not realise that they have their location set on things such as Google, which means that their search results are often tailored to where they live, even if they did not specify that they wanted local businesses.

In fact, not only will the organic searches be local, but the ads that appear before your organic search results will be local to the user, which results in a 50% click-through rate on these ads. This ultimately means that you have to be confident you are trying everything you can, not only by ranking for your key search terms to ensure you are in that number one or two spot, but also making sure you are appearing in these local searches in the first place.

Business listings are still relevant

Putting your business or company on sites such as Yelp and Yellow Pages should still be utilised as much as possible, as these pages can and will appear in Google results. It’s important to make sure your information on these platforms and the details you give Google are consistent to ensure you are creating brand retention.

You should also encourage customers to leave reviews on review platforms as, when a prospective customer searches your business name and ‘reviews’, these pages will show up. When doing this, however, ensure you are also monitoring the reviews and replying and rectifying any negatives!

Mobile marketing and local SEO go hand in hand

In a study conducted by ClickWise in 2016, it was found that a massive 60% of search traffic right now is mobile; this is a fact that should not and can’t be ignored by companies who are wanting to compete with the best. What’s even more fascinating is that one out of every three of these searchers have local intent.

This means that one in three people are looking for businesses local to them at any one time. These people are potential customers, so you need to be making sure that your company is taking note, otherwise these potential leads will be walking straight into the hands of a competitor.

Location is everything and businesses need to be aware of what’s going on, or they run the risk of being left in the dust.

People trust local

Many people, especially the younger generation, have become cynical about big businesses and everything they stand for, so they instead choose to trust those local to them. With this in mind, it’s crucial to take full advantage by ensuring you are appearing on the first few pages when a local searches for services or products you can provide in their area.

To appear on these pages, you just need to make sure you have provided your business name, address and phone number, whilst also working on optimising your keyword searches. Soon you’ll be attracting all those new customers who searched “garden shop close to me”.

The post Let’s Give Local Search the Time of Day it Deserves appeared first on PerformanceIN.

Working in marketing can be incredibly hard work; there is so much to stay well versed on, to monitor, to track and to plan. So much so that if someone were to try to do it all without the use of a few handy tools, they’d find themselves working all night long.

There are a variety of different tools out there on the world wide web that advertise themselves as being the answer to all marketer’s prayers, so it can be difficult to pick out the best of the best, especially for those new to the sector who aren’t sure where to start.

With this in mind, and to save people having to spend hours looking up reviews for each individual tool, below are six inbound marketing tools for those who do work in the sector and find themselves needing a time-saver or two!

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a crucial tool for analysing and keeping track of the performance of both what’s trending or popular and how a competitor’s content is performing. It allows a user to follow brand and keyword mentions on social media channels, which can help to see what works, what doesn’t and what not to do.

BuzzSumo is incredibly handy to use before a brainstorming session; competitors’ successes and failings can be a great inspiration to strive to do better. It’s also handy to see what’s topical right now that may be worth piggybacking onto.

SEMrush

SEMrush is an industry must and is perfect for keyword research for a variety of sectors. The functions of this tool are ideal for tracking the performance of organic and paid searches, as well as monitoring the audience growth for a client’s different social media channels. 

Knowing if content is organic or paid for is detrimental, especially if a user deals with clients who demand to know such stats.

CoSchedule

There is not always enough time during the work day to publish every little thing a client wants, so a tool to help with this is more than appreciated.

CoSchedule helps to keep a user more organised, allowing them to schedule posts and social updates for every one of their social media channels. Once a post is live, the tool also enables a user to keep a keen eye on the performance of each post meaning keeping on top of social has never been easier.

Screaming Frog

The content created by a user is only ever as great as the website it sits on. If the technical foundation of a website is broken from an organic search perspective, a business has no hope of improving their traffic with new and updated content, even if their content is amazing.

Screaming Frog is a website crawler which allows a business or individual to crawl a websites’ URL’s to identify any on-page SEO issues such as rogue no-index tags, 404s, missing title tags and meta-descriptions, as well as a number of other issues.

Before anyone starts producing content they should crawl their website to ensure there are no underlying technical SEO issues.

Buffer

Buffer is another tool to help those who are busy to schedule every post for the evening or weekend.

Buffer permits users to track which updates get the most engagement, enabling businesses to be smarter with the types of content they share. Buffer is really a no-brainer if for those who take their social media channels seriously. 

BuzzStream

Buzzstream is a must for those who need to outreach to influencers or journalists on a regular or even semi-regular basis.

Outreach is an incredibly important part of inbound marketing and should not be ignored or overlooked, even by those businesses who think they will manage without.

Using BuzzStream, businesses can create neat email templates which can be personalised to different prospects. This means that recipients are far more likely to reply as the email will feel as if a business or user has taken time out of their day to specifically tailor it to them. The platform also gives users the ability to manage and maintain their relationships; an absolute requirement in the industry.

Tools like the ones mentioned are used by the majority of those working in the marketing industry as, not only do they make life much easier, but they will help get jobs done with superior accuracy, organisation and in record time.

The post Six Inbound Marketing Tools That You Shouldn’t Be Without appeared first on PerformanceIN.