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Why User-First Approach Matters to SEO

When it comes to search engine optimization, many focus on Google algorithms, sitemaps, and backlinks and tend to forget their primary goal: providing users with helpful information. 

Years before, cramming keywords into your page and slapping on several meta tags can make your web page appear on the first top 10 search engine results pages (SERPs). However, Google recognized that these methods do not provide users with top-quality answers to search queries. As a result, it began to adapt its algorithms to improve the user experience. You can find the evidence in updates like Panda (February 2011), Core Web Vitals, and other regular core algorithm updates. 

You do not necessarily need to abandon keywords and the traditional SEO aspects completely. Google still takes the fundamental attributes of SEO into account. However, implementing a user-first approach plays a significant factor in organic search. 

Follow these 5 essential steps to make a user-friendly website and increase your ranking on the SERPs.

  • Learn Design Fundamentals

Having a clear understanding of the design fundamentals helps you improve user experience and make your website run smoothly and naturally. Be sure to work with a professional who understands the principles of design fundamentals and explains the psychology behind them. Knowing the reasons why can help you make better decisions that will have a desirable impact on your users. 

  • Addressing User Pain Points

Statistics is essential when working with an established website and dealing with various user problems. Google Analytics can help determine pain points that trigger users to leave your website. Setting up heat mapping and logging can also help address user pain points. Heat-mapping tools allow you to monitor how visitors interact with your website. 

Some solutions enable screen recording to keep track of how visitors navigate through web pages and identify the factors that prevent conversion. Obtaining this information can help you make better choices on how you can improve your pages and ensure a desirable user experience. Additionally, it allows you to see and re-evaluate the specific benefits that your visitors are looking for from your website.

  • Test Everything

After acquiring data, do not start making adjustments and improvements to your website. While the information you have gathered does not necessarily provide solutions, it can help identify potential pain points. 

If you detect a problem or need to perform a significant change in your page’s layout, put up an A/B test to ensure that the revision is beneficial to the users. A/B testing involves the distribution of traffic between 2 versions of a similar page. Check which page version performed better. It should help you enhance your objectives during a specific time and with a certain number of conversions. 

The data you acquired from your A/B testing efforts can help address and confirm or refute your theory about the pain points. This helps determine if you are on the right path toward a solution and make sure that the adjustments are helpful and do not injure your users.

  • Give the Users What They Desire

Balance is everything in SEO. If your goal is to only please the search engines, you will likely fail to connect with your target audience. If you focus all your efforts on designing your website from the user’s point of view, you can potentially overlook other valuable search engine elements. To hit the sweet spot, make sure to focus on both users and search engines. 

  • Continue to Learn

To be an expert in digital marketing, you should be ready to expand your knowledge and explore more about SEO. As Google continues to modify its search algorithm, you should continue to look for new strategies to attract more website visitors and boost your search engine rankings.

Tips to Make Online Reviews Work for Your Business

Many people rely on online reviews for everything from choosing a pizza parlour to hiring a plumber to install and repair the pipes in your home. In today’s digital marketing world, it is impossible to understate the impact of online reviews on your business. Recent surveys reported that 86% of virtual shoppers read online reviews before making a purchase.

When it comes to online reviews, the key phrase is “social proof.” This shows that people liked the product or service you are offering or competing with. By providing prospects with a number of social proof, customer reviews can help increase conversion and build the credibility of your company.

While customer reviews can help boost your sales, the way you utilize them can leverage your conversion-boosting potential. Here are some helpful tips on how you can empower your business using online reviews.

  • Claim Your Google My Business (GMB) Listing

While you can find customer reviews everywhere online, Google is the most popular review site. About 64% of consumers check the reviews posted on Google before visiting a business. Creating a GMB page enables you to keep track of and respond to your reviews. These reviews will be displayed in Google and Google Maps search results, which helps establish the credibility and quality of your business.

  • Encourage Customers to Leave a Review

Getting reviews from your customers helps attract new prospects. That is why you will need to create a strategy that will continuously encourage customers to leave reviews. However, recency matters to most potential customers are looking for in a review.

According to surveys, nearly 34% search for reviews that are posted between a week to a month. Consistency in getting reviews can be a powerful tool to earn the trust and confidence of your target customers.

Sending a link to your review page on GMB, Yelp, or website can make it easy for prospects to leave a review for your business. It also helps you to respond to their reviews. Customers tend to leave a review, especially if they feel appreciated.

The customer will receive a notification when you respond to their review. According to BrightLocal’s data, 20% of customers expect business owners to respond to their reviews within one day.

  • Resist Deleting Negative Reviews

The last thing you want from your customers is negative reviews. However, deleting reviews on Google is never a good idea. You might be surprised to learn that 46% of consumers do not trust businesses with a perfect five-star rating. Customers often get suspicious of businesses with too-good-to-be-true reviews. Even your most loyal customers will still want to know your potential drawbacks. Additionally, receiving a negative review helps you see how you can improve your products or services.

  • Respond Well to Negative Reviews

Many business owners may feel tempted to censor negative reviews. This dishonesty can have an unpleasant impact on your business. Never let unpleasant reviews sit there. Use it as an opportunity to respond to your customers in a polite, helpful, and constructive way. Replying to customers helps improve their satisfaction and loyalty, and even encourages them to recommend your business to other potential customers.

  • Proactively Feature and Broadcast Reviews

You can strategically display customer reviews on your website or add a headshot if possible, especially if it is written by an industry expert, a celebrity, or an influencer, so people can easily spot them.

Another way to highlight top reviews is by converting them into social ads as it draws more attention, especially on Facebook. Make sure to add the average rating badges on the footer of your website and cite reviews in your nurture emails.

Allow your website visitors to search reviews using keywords or star ratings to filter reviews. Various surveys reported that potential customers who use the search feature on a product or service page are more likely to convert at 202.9%, including people searching for 1-star reviews.

The Basics of Digital Marketing

Exploring the technical aspects of digital marketing may seem like a daunting task for budding entrepreneurs. However, learning the ABCs of online content development, SEO techniques, and campaign ads might be easier than you think.

User-friendly and instinctive, these digital tools, when used correctly could significantly increase your market reach, industry influence, and customer engagement. It’s important to remember that even though the medium of marketing has moved online, the basic principles of advertising and consumer interaction stay the same.

With every upgrade you make, high-quality customer service still reigns supreme. Whether it’s big or small business internet marketing, prioritizing consumer needs is vital. And, in today’s competitive market, the only way you can do that is by adapting to digital changes that offer faster transactions and easier communication with your clients.

Digital Marketing and Importance

Compared to traditional advertising, digital marketing allows you to reach a wider audience, compete with bigger businesses, generate more leads, and increase ROI. It helps you achieve all these with the help of search engine algorithms that exposes your brand and web pages to more traffic.

To do that, you also have to prove that your content is credible and deserves a high search ranking. You can do so with SEO upgrades and digital marketing tools. If you’re unfamiliar with how to go about this, you can always ask for expert help from digital advertising agencies.

10 Basic Tools of Digital Marketing

The best thing about digital advertising is the ease that it provides to users, whether amateurs or experts. With all the available tools provided by search engine algorithms, you can easily manage your digital campaigns.

Here is a quick run-through of the useful online marketing tools that you can use:

1. SEO

Photo Credit: Oleksandr Pidvalnyi | Pexels

Considered the foundation of digital marketing, search engine optimization or SEO is an inexpensive and fundamental method that allows you to make your website and content meet the standards of search engine algorithms.

As Google wants to provide high-quality results for every online query, they tend to sift through the thousands of data published daily and rank these websites based on relevance, authority, and credibility.

They do that by assessing the overall performance of your website, from the use of keywords, backlink building, on-page elements, and more. For your company’s website to gain traction in its first few days of upload, you have to ensure that it’s equipped with every possible upgrade that will fit with the required website qualities that algorithms demand.

Making a mistake could significantly decrease your search ranking and authority. So, if you’re unsure about how to go about it, you can always hire experts from SEO companies.

2. Online Advertising

Also coined as paid media, this aspect of digital advertising is the process of collaborating with search engine algorithms to boost your online presence. Usually, only the websites that are in the coveted first SERP are the ones most visited by netizens.

By using these paid ads on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Google, you’ll get to achieve more exposure for a limited time.

Online advertising also allows you to track the performance of your campaigns through analytics. You can maximize your online advertising performance by asking for help from experts.

3. Content Marketing

Creating premier content for your websites and campaigns is a must in digital advertising. Doing so will increase customer engagement and online traffic organically. The more comprehensive and relatable your content is, the higher its reach will be.

This content development is not limited to articles only as you can explore other mediums, such as videos, infographics, audiobooks, and more. As long as it resonates with your target audience, you’re on the right track. For a more efficient way how to perform this, you may consult with internet marketing services near you.

4. Email Marketing

Comparable to traditional marketing cold calls, this outreach allows you to connect with your target customers in a more personalized manner. It’s also a more efficient method of marketing as you can reuse email templates over and over again and send them to multiple accounts.

This method also makes it easier for you to generate leads and update your potential customers regarding company events, discounts, sales, and more.

5. Social Media Marketing

Social media platforms are the perfect channels for customer-company engagement. They serve as virtual communities where certain customer demographics can gather and share their opinions regarding a product. You can take advantage of this organic exchange by creating a solid and approachable online presence.

6. PPC Ads

Also, a part of paid media, this form of digital advertising allows you to increase content exposure with more affordable pricing. As long as you keep paying, your ads will reach a wider market. However, this is a short-term solution and is best used seasonally.

7. Mobile Marketing

Mobile phones are now an integral and inseparable component of daily life. Portable and small, these devices allow individuals to better interact with the digital world. Statistics also show that majority of online searches are done on mobile. So, it’s best to make your website design mobile-friendly making it accessible to all your potential customers.

8. Influencer Marketing

Photo Credit: Plann | Pexels

Influencers are today’s relatable version of Hollywood stars. Easier to connect with and reach out to, these individuals tend to be more grounded with their fans. With that said, you can utilize their close relationship with the customer demographic to your advantage by sponsoring them.

This technique is commonly used in digital marketing for dentists as they offer free trial services to influencers and advertise the results to their fans.

9. Video Marketing

Customer content engagement is crucial in digital advertising. However, traditional forms of online content such as articles and infographics may bore your audience. To make your content more memorable use a multimedia format that stimulates more senses. Video content also tends to go viral and gain more exposure.

10. Audio Marketing

Radio is not the only channel for audio marketing. With the rise of podcasts and eBooks, you can now reach an untapped door in the market, where hundreds of customers are waiting. Audio ads on Spotify, Google, and Alexa can dramatically increase your market reach. So, make your campaigns more versatile by developing content variety.

More than half of the world’s population can be found active online. From simple chatting, daily posts, and ordering merchandise, any customer can do anything in the comforts of their own home as long as they’re connected to the web.

This unprecedented level of social connectivity and bonding only reinforces the business opportunities that digital marketing provides.