Search engines love sites that appear to be active in their niche. Sites that are updated frequently and have a strong presence in their industry will rank better than those that don’t. So how exactly do you do this? Below are some habits that will help Google and Bing see you’re active in your industry and help your site with its rankings.

1. Write an Blog Post

This is perhaps the hardest thing for any website owner to do. It’s not easy to sit down an write an article daily. However, content is king and frequently posting articles to your site will provide you with tremendous SEO benefits.

Create high quality and long articles. Quality content is more likely to get more shares and longer content is more likely to provide you with SEO benefits.

2. Update An Old Post

Content can get old and outdated. And in 2011, Google came out with a new algorithm which favors fresh content over old, out-dated content. The goal of this update is to provide users with up to date, fresh content.

You’ll also notice this quite often when your searching for a news story in Google. Below, I searched for the term “government” and the top article is the article which was most recently published on that topic.

3. Post a Link to an Article on Every Social Media Platform

For every new article that you publish to your website, share it on every social media platform you own. Share it on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. Today, search engines are relying more on social activity as a ranking factor.

The more your content is promoted on social media, the better effect it’ll have on your rankings. In a case study by Search Metrics, we also see that social activity play a major effect as a ranking factor for SEO.

4. Interact on a forum in your industry

Forums and discussion boards are a great way to add niche relevance to your website. It also contributes to how search engines equate you to being an industry authority.

You might have the answer to a question in a past blog post on your website. Share your link and provide answers.

To find a forum in your niche, just search “niche” + forum in Google.

5. Interact on a blog in your industry

Just like forum post, blog comments also helps to add niche relevance to your site. Go out there and share your ideas and view points. Often times, websites allow you to blog comment with your link and name as the anchor text which is alright.

But it’s even better to write a few lines, or paragraphs (the longer the better) then add your link within the body of the blog comment.

To find a blog in your niche, just search “niche” + blog in Google.

Conclusion

It might be hard to follow each of these steps. However, to do all of this will probably only take about 2 hours out of your day. If you do this for two hours each and every day, I can guarantee that you’ll see ranking improvements within a few weeks.

The post 5 Habits To Help You Improve Your SEO Rankings appeared first on Thunder Rank.

And if you’ve talked to any digital marketing expert, you may have heard the phrase “Content is King.” And this is becoming more and more popular because of this information age we live in.

But what exactly does this phrase mean?

Truth is… If content is not apart of your online/digital marketing strategy, you’re doing it wrong. The information age has revolutionized marketing and I’ll share with you how.

1. Google is like the Cookie Monster
   

   Google, the most visited website on the internet, highly favors websites that have more content. Look at websites that rank for some of the most competitive search terms out there (personal injury lawyers, plumbers, financial loans, just to name a few) you’ll realize that all the websites located in the top search results have more content than websites ranking lower.

   This is also why blogs have also become more and more popular these days.

   Even if a website doesn’t necessarily have the highest quality content, it will rank over websites with the lack of content.

   So if you want to be able to get traffic from the world’s largest search engine, and most visited website, you’re going to need content on your website.

2. Content is Shareable

   You generally won’t see people sharing ads. And in many cases, that would be considered spamming. And no one likes spam.

   The greatest thing about content is that people will share it if they find it valuable.

   Valuable content will generally be helpful, entertaining, personal or controversial.

   When you have a valuable piece of content, you’ll find it quite easy to be shareable if you put it in front of the right people.

   And, guess what? Google loves shared content over non-shared content.

3. Increased Demand for Information

   About 10-15 years ago, if you had to find information on a topic, you’d have to go to the library, and search for various books pertaining to your topic. Then skim through the books to find the answer to your question.

   But today, we’re living in the information age. The easy access to information has changed all of that.

   According to Internet Live Statistics, there are about 3.5 billion searches per day in Google. Or 1.2 trillion searches per year.

   See the image below to see how this compares with stats from over a decade ago. So there are people looking for information out there, and if you create high quality information, there will be people out there willing to read and/or share your content with their followers.
   

4. Changed Buyer Behavior

   If you can vaguely remember life as it was a decade ago. If you made a large purchasing decision, how would you do it?

   Odds are that you would probably ask a friend, family member, or sales associate in the store for more information on the product to help you make a purchasing decision. But that process was much more involved.

   With the rise of information now being readily accessible at our finger tips, buyer behavior has changed. Today, people are more likely to do research online to find reviews  and ratings from consumers and editors.

   Consumers will search for services and products your business provides and to narrow down their options, they’ll choose a business based on buyer reviews and ratings. This is also why online reputation management is so important for businesses today.

Overview

So overall, you can see how the rise of the information age has revolutionized the the way we do marketing. People are searching for content more than ever these days but to really give yourself an edge over your competition, you need to be able to provide quality content for your market.

The post How the Information Age Affected Marketing appeared first on Thunder Rank.

But if your website isn’t mobile friendly, you won’t be going down alone. There’s actually quite a few big brands that are expected to get burned also such as the BBC, David Beckham, Wikipedia and many which actually fail the mobile-friendly website tests.

Checking your Site?

If you’re not sure if your site is mobile friendly, you can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Website Test. What you’ll get is a page which will either tell you your website is mobile friendly or not mobile friendly. You’ll either get a red or green notification telling you whether or not your website is mobile friendly such as what you see in the image below.

The Good News?

The update is aimed at mobile rankings. As far as we know, the update will not affect the desktop search results. So if your website’s traffic is primarily desktop based, you will be alright for now. However, this is not an excuse to put of updating your website.

From http://www.smartinsights.com/mobile-marketing/mobile-marketing-analytics/mobile-marketing-statistics/

According to Smart Insights, there’s been a sharper increase in the amount of mobile internet users in comparison with desktop internet users. So yes, you’ll be okay for now. But in the future, your non-mobile friendly website will come around and bite you, especially if all your competitors have mobile-friendly websites and are stealing potential leads from you.

What are my options?

Responsive Website

This is a pretty good idea. It makes it easier for you to update your website since it’s the same website, just being morphed around on both mobile and desktop.

However, even though responsive themes are great and will pass Google’s mobile-friendly website test, some contact might not show very visibly, and some images might get cut off. So even though a responsive theme will save you when it comes to the search results, you might still lose out on potential conversions through your site.

Dedicated Mobile Website

This is a pretty good idea if you have a pretty good desktop website that doesn’t need to be redesigned. This is basically building a second site which would be solely for mobile users.

An added benefit for a mobile site is that it allows you to actually control precisely what mobile users see in comparison to those on a desktop computer. It also gives you much more flexibility in really making your pages highly targeted to mobile users thus increasing your conversion rate for mobile-users.

Summary

If you have a website, it only makes sense to build it to be mobile-friendly or build a separate mobile friendly website. If most of your traffic is obtained from desktop users, you’ll be safe for now. But with the rise of mobile internet users, there is a lot of potential traffic and leads to be lost out on in the future by not having a mobile counterpart.

The post Are You Ready for “Mobilegeddon”? appeared first on Thunder Rank.

It’s quite interesting to take a look a quite a lot of businesses and see how structure is overlooked. And this is definitely a more prominent issue with business’s providing a wide array of services. And often times, these business, although larger, might rank lower than a smaller business which focuses on one specific service or product.

This is because the larger business has a site which is too large with content that is not easily accessible and relative to what people are actually looking for online.

The Importance of Structure

The few reasons why it’s very important for you to plan your website’s structure beforehand is because of the following benefits:

• Indexing – Getting your site listed in Google
  Your website and webpages won’t show in search engines unless they are first indexed.
• Ranking Advantages – Distributing ranking power throughout your site
  A web pages ranking ability comes from the amount of back links pointing to it. What other easier way to generate links for your pages, than from other pages on your website. By linking to various pages within your website, you spread the linking power across these pages.
• User Experience – Easier for your users to navigate
  Between 2000 and 2013, the average attention span has dropped from 12 seconds to 8 seconds. What this means is that users want to find what their looking for quick and if they can’t find it, they’ll move on to finding it elsewhere. So an organized and structure website will help your website’s users better interact and find what their looking for much easier.

How Amazon does it?

Amazon is one of the best examples of a good website structure. Take a look at the image below. 

One thing you notice here is that they start with broad categories and start to narrow down on exactly what you need. Then when you actually go in and click on those links, they have a long list of further links which narrow in even further to what you might be looking for. This type of structure is called website siloing.

This is generally what your site structure should look like.

Where to start?

If you’re wondering how exactly to start structuring your website, start with keyword research. This can help you determine what exactly people are looking for. So for example, lets choose a lawyer in Toronto. This lawyer specializes in various areas of law such as Personal Injury Law, Immigration Law, Family Law and Criminal Law. I go to Google’s Keyword Research Tool as shown below. I would do keyword research on these areas of expertise and find the related keyword with the highest search volume.

In this case, the keyword “Personal Injury Lawyer” has the highest search volume. Some other related keywords are “car accident,”  “work injury” and etc. So here’s what a good structure would be for a full service lawyer.

Note: Please note that there is no exact science to this. So you don’t necessarily have to name your page “Personal Injury Lawyer Toronto.” As a title like this might throw users off. So you want to find the middle ground between being user-friendly and search friendly by not using weird titles which aren’t necessarily the best title in a grammatical sense. But it can still rank well with the title “Personal Injury Law” as shown in the example below. This is because Google is also pretty smart in understanding content and knowing what content is related to different keywords.

As you can see, you have the home page linking to the boarder categories which are likely to be much more widely searched. Within those categories, sub-categories talking about more specific areas of law are created.

Summary

Generally, when it comes to organizing content in a way that easy to find is generally a problem with businesses that provide services and products in a wide range of categories, such as Amazon and full service businesses, such as a law firm providing services in multiple areas of law.

With such a large website with a lot of content, it can become quite overwhelming to organize the content in a way that is user-friendly and search engine friendly. But if you do keyword research before and figure out what people are looking for and organize your content around that with pages targeting high volume keywords at the higher levels of the hierarchy, you’ll definitely boost your website’s usability of search engine friendliness.

The post Website Structure and SEO appeared first on Thunder Rank.

You’re Clients are looking for you online!

If you’re looking for a local service, like plumbing for example, the first place you’ll look is most likely Google or Bing. You’ll pull out your phone, or go to your computer and type “plumber in city name” to find a plumber. Or if you’re looking for a local Chinese restaurant, odds are that you’ll go straight to Google to search for a local Chinese restaurants. And for any type of service, you’ll do this to find out where and how you can get in contact with a local business to provide you with those services.

An online presence is something that is very important for any business. And as time goes on, the more important it will become. Last year, there were over 1.2 trillion search queries in Google alone. That’s over 40,000 per second. So there’s an abundance of potential traffic which can be tapped into online.

How to develop a presence?

The two most effective methods of online marketing for local businesses is SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and PPC (Pay Per Click) Marketing. And there are three places you can potentially show up. You can either show up in the PPC Advertisements, the Local 7 Pack or Map Listings, and last but not least, the general search results which you can see below. Pro’s and cons of each will be discussed below.

Pay Per Click Advertising

Pros: Pay Per Click Advertising works instantly. You go to Google Adwords, deposit some money, setup a campaign and your ads start running instantly. So there is no long waiting to start getting traffic and you online pay for the clicks you receive.

Cons: Depending on the market you’re in, the cost per click can be quite high, and there can be a lot of competitors bidding to get the top spot. So a lot of tweaking and monitoring has to go into this type of marketing to make sure your getting the most out of your advertisements. In the picture below, you’ll see the average monthly searches, competition, and suggested bid for various plumbing related search terms in Mississauga.

Another negative for PPC marketing is that it produces a lower click through rate. Stats have shown that people click on results in the 7 pack, or the general search results more than the paid ads. 

Local 7 Pack & General Search Results

To get into the Local 7 pack, or general search results, you’re site and online brand profile must be search engine optimized and these are the golden spots to be listed in. And in many cases, a well optimized site will be listed in both the local 7 pack and general search results, such as MrRooter.ca as seen above.

Pros: There are no continual costs. Once your business is listed here, you don’t have to pay per click, per visit, per phone call or anything like that. So if you were a plumber in Mississauga, and you were listed here, imagine what that would do to your business! So basically, there is a huge return on investment in the long run if your website is optimized to be shown here.

You also get a higher click through rate, and if you’re business is listed in the 7 pack, it’s very easy for a search engine user to click your phone number on their mobile phone, and initiate a call with you.

Cons: A slower process. Search Engine Optimization doesn’t just happen overnight. It can take anywhere from a month to over 6 months depending on the competition in the search results.

Having an Effective Website

People are attracted to a functional and attractive website. Moreover, with the rise of smart phones, many people people will be looking for your business on a phone.

A business can have the best optimized website in their market, and get a lot of traffic to their site. However, if their site is not designed beautifully and functionally, a lot of that traffic will not convert into proper sales. And if you’re website is not mobile-friendly, you’ll lose a lot of potential customers. So a well designed website that is functional and mobile friendly is key to get the most out of your online marketing campaigns.

The post Local Business Guide to Search Engine Marketing appeared first on Thunder Rank.