Better Understand Your Customers

Monitoring your website will help you understand how customers interact with your website. Without tracking user behavior on your website, it’s hard to know what your customers want or what’s causing them confusion or frustration. Track user behavior so you know what your visitors are interested in and where they struggle along the customer journey.

Process mining is a great way to uncover customer behavior insights. By learning about your customers and how they make buying decisions, you can better align your website with their needs. With process mining, you can also identify hidden opportunities to upsell and cross-sell products or offer support when customers need it most. Get started with process mining by identifying potential data sources that you can use to learn more about the customer journey.

Improve Your Website Conversions

Improving your website conversions will help you turn more visitors into paying customers, boosting the return on investment (ROI) of your marketing campaigns. Measuring certain website performance metrics can help you learn more about your conversions and identify opportunities for improvement. For example, you can measure how long customers tend to spend on your website and how many people only visit one page before clicking away. These metrics may indicate issues with things like website layout, page content, and ease of navigation.

Rank Higher in Search Engine Results

It’s also important to know where your website ranks in search engine results. High rankings lead to more organic traffic—visitors coming from unpaid sources, like search engines. This traffic is free, so you want to maximize it! SEO metric tools make it easy to monitor your search engine rankings and identify areas for improvement. This will help you continually optimize your SEO strategy and encourage more users to click through to your website.

Enhance Your Marketing ROI

Monitoring your website performance can do a lot for your marketing ROI. If your marketing campaigns are successful at driving traffic to your website, but few visitors are turning into paying customers, you’re missing out on a lot of potential revenue. By measuring web traffic, visitor count, bounce rates, and user behavior, you can make adjustments to your website to improve conversions. As a result, you’ll see more sales without increasing your marketing budget!

Prevent Cybersecurity Issues

Too many businesses overlook the threat of cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Don’t make this same mistake! Cybercriminals target small businesses that lack the defense systems necessary to prevent attacks. By neglecting website security, you’re leaving sensitive customer information and business data vulnerable to theft and loss.

Monitor your website for cybersecurity vulnerabilities so you can stop cyberattacks. For example, Computer.org explains that it’s important to install the latest software and plugin updates on your website to avoid security vulnerabilities. Many website building platforms allow for automatic monitoring and update installation, so take advantage of these. Another way to prevent attacks is to monitor your website traffic for potential sources of trouble. DDoS protection software does a good job at continuously monitoring traffic to detect attack attempts before they get out of control.

Your website performance can tell you a lot about your business and whether or not you’re progressing towards your goals. By keeping an eye on a variety of important performance metrics, you will better understand what your customers want and how simple adjustments to your website can increase conversions.

Are you looking for a new domain name for your website? Smart Choice Domains can help you find the best available domains at a fair price. Check out our website to learn more!

As technology continues to develop rapidly, more and more options are becoming available to businesses who want their websites to reach as many people as possible. And since nearly 40 million Americans live with some level of hearing impairment, it’s not hard to see why companies around the country are taking steps to make the design of their websites and content completely accessible to the hearing impaired. While it requires a bit more time, energy, and money, creating an accessible website can quickly pay off in the end. If this sounds like something your company needs to address, here are some tips to get you started.

Hire a Pro

A lot goes into web design and content creation. Add on customizing your site and content to meet the needs of the hearing impaired, and it becomes even more complex. Unless you have expertise in these fields, you will save a significant amount of time and energy by hiring a professional. Plus, it will likely save you money in the long run. 

Provide Captions and Transcripts 

One of the most important things you can do to make your website more accessible is by adding captions and transcripts to any content that has sound. This would include any video content, live captions, and other features that involve sounds and cues. With closed captioning, your hearing-impaired audience can follow along with the message of your videos, and transcription can do the same for your audio files. 

Consider Sign Language Interpretation 

Making your website accessible can even affect how you write your content. For example, when writing your video and audio content, keep in mind that many hearing-impaired individuals use sign language. Since sign language is quite different from standard written English, it might be hard for your hearing-impaired audience to fully engage in content that is too abstract. Be conscious of writing your content in a straightforward, concise manner so that your whole audience can engage in your captions and transcripts. 

If you need transcripts for your web video, the best way to hire professional transcription services is to search freelance job sites. You can find plenty of candidates who are knowledgeable, skilled, and experienced. 

Pay Special Attention to Visual Elements

Individuals who are hearing impaired — especially deaf individuals — are more sensitive to visual elements. Keep this heightened sensitivity in mind when you develop your website. Of course, you want beautiful, engaging design, images, and videos. However, make sure there is a good balance between visual elements and written content. That is, try not to fill pages with vibrant colors and intricate designs; instead, leave adequate room for words and white space. 

Deepen Engagement.

Websites are a part of your company’s marketing, which ultimately should lead to sales. To make the website more user-friendly for those with a hearing impairment while simultaneously boosting your company’s selling potential, create multiple platforms for contact options. Those options could include email, online forms, live web chats, or even video conferencing. Also, consider using click-to-call links, and designate portions of your website solely to contact information in order to facilitate smooth communication.

Making your website more accessible to your hearing-impaired audience helps everyone involved. Not only will hearing-impaired individuals be better able to engage in the site’s design and content, but your company will be able to broaden its reach. Think about implementing the tips listed here, and remember to hire a professional web developer to help along the way. You might be surprised by the positive results and feedback you get from people across the country! 

Need a new domain for your website? Explore the Smart Choice Domains marketplace for the best domain names for your business!

Image via Pexels

To be clear, we’re not talking about buying expired domains to build private blog networks (PBNs) for growing traffic. If you’re more interested in that topic, you can check out our other post, Where Do You Find Good Expired Domains?

What we’re here to discuss is the impact that expiring domains could have on your site.

How old should a domain be to have any effect on SEO? Is there any correlation between domain registration and higher SERP rankings?

Let’s talk about it.

What Does Domain Expiration Have to Do With SEO?

The older a domain is, the better its chances of ranking higher in the search engine result pages. That’s been the long-standing belief of some SEOs.

And honestly, the logic behind it makes sense.

Google looks for all sorts of signals to determine if a site is good or bad. Some believe that domains registered for extended periods appear more legitimate than newer domains.

But is there any truth to this?

The short answer: No.

Think about it. There are plenty of reasons why someone would choose to renew their domains annually. It could be due to budget constraints. It could be part of their strategy. Or maybe they just don’t like committing to a domain registrar for long periods.

None of these reasons has anything to do with the quality of a site or its content.

Also, newly registered domains need to have a fighting chance. If domain registration becomes a ranking factor, none of them stands a chance.

Besides, a site that’s been around for a while can be just as spammy as any other domain. There’s no guarantee that it will operate in good faith under the guidelines that Google has set.

Someone can also buy a domain and hold on to it for years without using it (commonly referred to as domain parking). Some companies even choose to purchase new domains and use them to redirect some of their old pages.

But you don’t have to take our word for it. This theory got disproved and laid to rest several times already.

Debunking the Myth

Just look at these reports from SEO Roundtable. The site has gone on record several times debunking the myth, citing sources from Google itself. But despite their best efforts, SEO Roundtable can’t seem to put people at ease.

Here’s a brief timeline of the reporting:

May 2008 — It’s believed that registering a domain for prolonged periods signify that you’re committed to your site. However, some believe that it has no bearing at all. September 2009 — Google goes on record that domain name registrations have no impact on search engine rankings. November 2016 — The issue is once again brought up. Google’s John Mueller denies that domain registration is a ranking signal. He points out that this is not what you want to spend your time on. April 2017 — People once again asks if domain age matters when it comes to SEO. This time, John answers in one word: “No.” November 2018 — You get where this is going. John Mueller once again had to emphasize that there is no link between domain registration and site ranking. He goes on to say that domain registration is more of a practical matter than anything else.

Here’s the Twitter exchange where John explains his answer.

Notice that he mentions that there are restrictions in place that limit registration lengths. This is true. There’s a limit as to how many years a user can register a domain.

But what about new domains? If not old domains, maybe newer ones have an advantage?

As it turns out, they don’t. At least according to John.

There you have it. Google doesn’t appear to give either new or old domains any advantage. It treats both domain types the same.

Why the Persistence Then?

If Google itself has denied the claim numerous times, then why are people insisting that there’s a connection?

It may have something to do with a patent that Google has in its possession. Without getting into the weeds of the patent, it does mention obtaining historical data and using it to rank pages.

Do note, however, that just because a company—especially one that’s as big as Google—has a patent to something does necessarily mean that they’re using it.

But there’s more evidence that supports the sceptics’ claims.

In an interview with Small Business Search Marketing, Jon Glick (a former member of Yahoo!’s search team) disclosed that domain registration is a factor.

Then there’s commentary from known SEO personalities like Sean Si who claim that domain age does matter.

So Should I Worry About Domain Expiration?

Yes and no.

While other online marketers would say that it does matter, there’s no evidence to suggest that domain age impacts SEO in any way.

However:

There’s still a need to worry about domain expiration. It’s always a vital part of your website, and you shouldn’t take it for granted.

You don’t want to lose your domain because this will force you to secure another. That’ll affect not only your branding but also your inbound links. You’ll lose your organic traffic and rankings.

One way to avoid that is by automatically renewing your domain registration. This means your domain registration gets renewed before or as soon as your contract expires.

Keep in mind that by enabling this feature, the registrar will automatically bill your account for renewal.

There are other compelling reasons why you’d want to renew your domain registration automatically. Let’s take a look at a few.

You’ll Never Forget to Renew

In July 2017, Marketo (a marketing software automation company) started receiving complaints about users not being able to access the system. While their team scrambled to figure out the issue, one of Marketo’s customers—a domain name specialist—knew what was going on.

Marketo forgot to renew their domain registration automatically.

Fortunately, that customer was kind enough to buy the domain and hand it back to Marketo. If the domain somehow ended up in the wrong hands, the billion-dollar company would have suffered a tremendous loss.

If it could happen to a company that big, it could happen to anyone.

By setting up your account to renew as soon as it expires, you’ll save yourself from all the hassle. You can focus on other aspects of your business without having to worry about domain registration.

You’ll Save Money

Registration fees are set to increase in the next couple of years. As The Verge points out in their post, domain prices could improve for the first time in eight years.

From the average price of $7.85 per domain, it could rise to $13.50 over the next ten years.

By signing up for a longer plan, you’ll pay for a couple of year’s worth of domain registration at today’s prices.

You’ll Be Able to Sell Them Easier (and at a Good Price)

Old domains are an easy sell, especially if yours is a good one.

Why?

While the domain name itself is an essential factor, its SEO benefits also go into consideration. As mentioned earlier, some people believe in the value of aged domains. And they’re willing to spend on acquiring them.

Recently, some businesses bought domains at Sedo, a buy-and-sell marketplace for domain names. The prices went north of $2,000 — the highest of which went all the way to $150,000.

You’ll Appear More Authentic

Domains that have been around for longer tend to be more authentic than newer ones. People prefer sites that have a proven record. This is especially true for sites where the wrong information could prove fatal.

Let’s look at medical sites as an example. As it is, there are tons of fraudulent sites online that capitalize on the latest health scare.

Take the coronavirus. Hackers are now taking advantage of people looking for news about the life-threatening illness. They are creating malicious sites by buying coronavirus-related domain names and using them as a delivery system for a malicious malware called Emotet.

The same issue arose during the 2020 U.S. presidential campaign. Phishers are now using fake domains to impersonate presidential hopefuls such as Bernie Sanders (or any of their representatives). Their end goal is to have people download suspicious files or set up a call that they can record and publish.

Now more than ever, people need reliable sources of information. And believe it or not, domain age is starting to play a role in determining which sites are legitimate and which ones aren’t.

You’ll Never Have to Depend on Renewal Requests

Renewal requests can be irritating. Imagine receiving them every couple of months. By signing up for longer periods, you’ll rid yourself of these prompts and have peace of mind.

You might think turning them off would solve the issue. But we’re only human and therefore tend to forget. By the time you remember to renew your domain subscription, it may be too late.

Take pay.io as an example. The company only recently discovered that their domain had been acquired back in 2012. They only found out about it in October 2019.

Why the big fuss?

Domain names with a .io extension are valuable. The domains swipe.io and cook.io were sold at $68,000 and $39,750 respectively.

So don’t risk losing your domain because you missed a renewal request. Renew your domain for more years so you never miss a payment.

Keep your domain names secure.

Conclusion

Look, there’s reason to think about domain expiration. But it shouldn’t be your sole focus. If you want to improve your SEO, your time would be better spent fixing dead links, enhancing your anchor texts, link building, reaching out for blog opportunities, or any of the other proven SEO strategies.

If there’s a key takeaway, it’ll be this: Make sure you don’t forget to renew your domain registration once their expiration date comes around.

Also, don’t forget the email address you used when you signed up for your domain names. Otherwise, you won’t be able to access your domain service provider’s interface.

Read more: craigcampbellseo.com

Would you like to receive more story requests from bloggers and journalists? Don’t you want to see more and more news stories mentioning your brand? Your first step to building more online coverage is to create an effective press page.

Why Create a Press Page?

I lost count of how many times I wanted to reach out to a brand (usually that’s a marketing tool I was curious to explore further) and struggled to find any clear instructions on how. I’ve also lost track of how many times I gave up when trying to mention a brand on Twitter and couldn’t find their Twitter handle anywhere.

Those brands missed a nice opportunity of being mentioned (which could even be a missed opportunity of onboarding a new brand advocate).

A well-built press page would have made that opportunity a reality.

Fundamentally, the major goals behind building a press page are:

Attracting “linking leads” (i.e. bloggers and journalists) by making your brand look interesting to them. Delivering clear instructions on how they can get in touch (without leaving them wondering). Providing you with a little bit more control over the online sentiment surrounding your brand (by surfacing favorable mentions). Should You Create a Press Page or a Press Site?

There are certain pros and cons to setting up a dedicated site to curate news and encourage press contacts.

The biggest benefit of having a separate site is an ability to take more than one position in Google for your branded queries. Google is trying to show diverse results per SERPs, aiming to show no more than two results from the same domain for a particular query in the top results. So having additional sites will help you control more of your branded search SERPs.

Bigger companies usually have several domains building additional online context around the brand (and controlling more branded SERPs):

Amazon hosts all brand-specific information on a separate domain aboutamazon.com

Radix offers a perfect domain name for your brand’s press room: .press:

Radix press domain ideas

On the other hand, building a separate site comes at a price: You need additional resources to build, design and maintain a separate entity.

I leave it up to you to decide, but I am personally leaning towards a separate entity option.

1. Past Mentions

There are a few important reasons why you want to curate your current press coverage:

Linking to pages that mention you will boost rankings of those pages. This helps you surface your positive mentions and, hence, better control your company’s online sentiment. Featuring various stories around your brand gives journalists more ideas of possible angles for their own articles. Publicizing your mentions encourages more bloggers to feature you (in hopes you will link to them from that section as well). “As featured in” section offers you the power of social proof. Both your customers and journalists will trust your brand more once they see you are being covered in the news.

This section may contain all kinds of links that mention your brand in one way or another, including:

Your mentions in the news outlets. Your management’s interviews. Articles quoting you or your management. Your CEO’s keynote coverage, etc.

It is also a good idea to curate your own press releases in this section.

Nextiva does a great job curating news coverage of their brand:

Great press page example from Nextiva. You can sort the list by year to find older / newer stories featuring the brand.

You can sort the list by year to find older / newer stories featuring the brand.

2. Contact Information

The best idea is to put a real person here, instead of a generic contact form. EPAM is a great example of doing that well:

Great example of highlighting your press contact on your press page.

Knowing who to contact and being able to choose from a variety of options is likely to encourage many of your company’s linking leads to start the conversation.

3. “Behind-the-Scenes” Company Information

Again, one of the major goals behind a good press page is to make your company more interesting to bloggers and journalists, encouraging them to think of it as part of a story.

What’s a better way to make your company more interesting to people than by humanizing it. Show your team, your pictures, your conference trips, your charity events. You have a lot of uniqueness in your brand. Just show it.

4. Style Guide/Assets

Offering bloggers and journalists additional assets to include in their articles may incentivize them to create a more eye-catching context.

Instagram is a good example of providing exhaustive instructions as to how bloggers may be using their logos and where to download a high-resolution file. They also offer high-resolution screenshots for download and use within articles:

Instagram’s asset collection is a great example of a style guide and assets for press to use

5. Your Social Media Channels

Finally, offering additional ways to get in touch is always a good idea. Plus, linking to your social media channels will allow bloggers and journalists to tag you in social media updates when your feature goes live.

Besides, encouraging your linking leads to follow you around would tie them closer to your brand and potentially keep them engaged.

Optimize Your Page for Organic Visibility

Finally, getting your press page (or site) rank for a variety of branded (and possibly even generic / non-branded) queries is key to generating more press coverage.

Text Optimizer will help you create an effective copy for your Press Coverage, which will help it rank higher in Google. Text Optimizer will check your current brand-name ranking and use semantic analysis to extract related concepts for you to include them in your copy:

It is also a good idea to come up with a user-engaging strategy making sure people who have found themselves on our press page will continue browsing the site.

Alter offers a few great user engaging options, including exit-intent popup that shows up exactly when your site users are ready to leave. You can control the pages that will show up and the content they will include:

Conclusion

So many companies are getting proactive with link acquisition and press coverage tactics, yet they forget the inbound aspect of them. Before investing in your journalistic email outreach, make sure you have a convincing landing page set up. That way, linking leads will know why and how to mention you when providing the coverage.

Setting up a press page (or a press site) is a one-time task, but it must be done in order to see your brand generating more and more organic mentions around the web.

The post How to Create an Effective Press Page to Attract Coverage and Links appeared first on Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting.

Read more: convinceandconvert.com

Most user searches are made just because of two reasons: to find information ie  (informational query), or to find information and buy (commercial query). You need both the types of users – the ones who seek information, and the ones who want to buy – because in either case, it is a win-win situation: you’ll either convert them into your customers, or you’ll win yourself some long-term subscribers.

It’s time you should know the off-page SEO tactics by their name, hence we crafted and put together a complete checklist of everything that you should aim at in your SEO endeavors:

Before we could slightly talk about off-page SEO, we should revise our knowledge on what SEO is exactly in the first place. Although this might sound very redundant (after all, this is how you landed on our blog, already knowing what SEO is and its very functioning), we will draw a quick picture of what SEO means today. Search engine optimization (SEO) stands for the cumulus of search marketing efforts which are meant to make websites and online presence stand out both in the search engines’ and users’ eyes. SEO should make your brand shine in the sea of other brands, all fighting to get among the first position in SERPs. Furthermore, it seeks to satiate users’ thirst for fresh, high-quality, relevant, and useful information.

Advanced Off-Page SEO Techniques for 2020 and Beyond 1. Link Building Is Vital

You should build and chase quality links. That’s the first and most important thing to remember about the links. According to the SEO terms glossary, “NoFollow is an attribute webmaster can make use of when linking to a website that tells the search engines to essentially ignore the link. Social networks are notorious for using the NoFollow links when linking to external websites. Links without the NoFollow attribute are also referred to as DoFollow”. If you’re wondering actually what impact does NoFollow links have on your website, here are some actionable data and tips, all backed up by case studies and Google’s position in that matter.

Link building is the most popular marketing technique which is deployed by professionals all over the world. It’s the foremost most desired outcome of all – ok, to some extent.  It is very important that, even though Google suggests that content is the #1 ranking factor, it’s often preferred by the masses over the principle of crafting and providing quality fresh content. Yet content is still contributing a lot to all your linking strategy.

Links are translated as the votes or applause to your website and overall appreciation of your brand. The same link building effort can be contributed to the rise of what’s known today as black hat SEO. Sometimes, people are so desperate to gather the links that they start playing with fire and perform the following: forum signatures, enroll your website in content directories, link the exchange schemes, link networks, blog directories, comment link (a.k.a. comment signature), article directories, and so on.

There are things that make a good referring domain, hence a link, valuable (or not), and this are popularity, topic match between the two domains tied by a link (is the link relevant?), anchor text, link freshness, website trustworthiness, domain authority (DA) and/or page authority (PA), and no. of links used by the “sender” page. Hence, pay attention to whom you’re linking to and how you’re doing it.

Three main types of links populate the web:

natural links: a user/customer/reader knows the content on your page and has a positive view over your services, and links to your business as a sign of trust, appreciation, and endorsement; manually build links: gained through direct link building efforts; wilfully asking customers to link to your product, or influencers to share your content; self-created links: when posting your website link in comments a.k.a. comment signature, or in web directories, forums, press releases, etc (most of them enter in the black hat category)

The wisest move would be to practice natural link building. The best way to do this is to make your content worthy of links, and links will come naturally. Guest blogging is also a good idea but be careful not to overlink your website and make your contribution more spammy than useful. Also, you can build your links at a normal, traditional pace, if you will, which is gradually, or else Google will think you’re doing some black-hat magic.

2. Harness The Social Media Power

Social signals do matter a lot to Google when ranking a page. You should try to win your audience in order to make Google (or any other search engine) like you and rank you high. Especially when mentions of your brand can count as links, as we previously mentioned.

Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Instagram are the buzzwords of the day. They’ve never been so successful and strong in their entire existence. They surely know how to engage people, provide them with the means to be inspired and cheered up, serve them the friends they need (although, most of the time, available only in the virtual world), serve them the share and like they so much crave for. However, the brands and online marketers seized the moment and saw in these social platforms the best playground for brand advocacy and promo.

Shares and likes are the new social media magic tricks. They can make your business grow and spread like wildfire. Whenever sharing the relevant, fresh, and engaging content with your community of users, you win-win new subscribers, fans, or leads.

3. Add an RSS Feed Subscription Box

It’s better to have fewer subscribers that are visiting your site on a regular basis, than a multitude of one-time visitors. This is why all the more or less reputable blogs and brands provide an RSS subscription box on their walls. RSS is short for Rich Site Summary. And I think that says it all. RSS boxes/stream RSS/channel RSS, are better known as subscription boxes, make page information available in XML format. People are drawn to the trigger-word “subscribe” and can leave their email address to receive information without having to proactively search for it on the web.

By using this type of contact form, you not only enrich your contact and subscriber agenda but also have an intrigued recipient whom you can send and communicate all your company updates, news, blog posts, etc. You can opt for this Google Feedburner.

Many times, users are so happy to benefit from continuous rich info, data, and news without having to manually look them up, and rather got satisfied when receiving them by email in the comfort of their homes or work offices. And since you might be also looking for some high-quality marketing newsletters to subscribe to, we crafted that one already, so you won’t have to worry about it.

4. Don’t Shy from Blog Commenting

There are also some minds who argue that it’s a bit delicate to recommend as it can easily turn into a black hat practice. Blog commenting is an excellent off-page SEO activity that can drive organic traffic to your website and SERP ranking.

There are loads of articles on the web on how to correctly do blog commenting and everything you need to know is one click away. But the general tone is that you should definitely do it “white-hat”, and leave any miscellaneous tactics aside.

Give your insight on topics, and attract attention to you, but don’t exercise the comment signature.  Just mention your brand inside the body of relevant and useful tips, and make its appearance relevant there.

5. Guest Posting is Still Hot

Similar to the blog commenting, you should define all your reasons for contributing in such away from the very beginning. Most guest blogs come to advertise their business or product and can sometimes turn into some spammy and annoying reading. Be fair, and make giving actionable, fresh, and relevant info your first concern. Not the links to your website.

By writing guest posts from time to time, not only help you build quality backlinks (duh!) and trigger more organic traffic to your website, but also something else. Yes, you display professional conduct by writing not only on your personal blog but contributing to others too. There are brands who like to flirt with knowledge coming from other professionals in the field, although that happens quite seldom. And that’s one of those times when you have to choose your men wisely.

6. Forums Posting Is a Thing

Forums are a great place to promote your website and that’s obviously part of off-page SEO techniques. Quora, Reddit, Yahoo Answers, eHow are the most important hubs from where one can gain a lot of actionable info and authentic answers to their questions. Forums are a great playground to get to meet your peers and have a chat with them on topics of interest to you.

Similar to blog commenting or guest blogging, it’s good to mention your brand, but avoid to do it bluntly. First, provide all the actionable info on the specific topic and then, if relevant, fit your brand between the lines. These Q&A platforms are true gold mines but they have to be won first, by using the right words, tone, and style when posting a contribution. Make it relevant and transparent. Especially when these mediums can bring you a lot of organic traffic to your website, and if lucky, conversions.

7. Build Trust

It’s so natural that off-site SEO includes trust as well. After all, that’s how you get your social media or customer votes. Transparency is one of the must-haves in helping trust be built. Post useful content and don’t try to deceive your readers with catchy titles and zero quality content. That’s definitely not how you build organic traffic!

Page Authority (PA) and Domain Authority (DA) are two important indicators of how search engines see your website. It’s like having your whole life in front of your eyes. You should check your PA and DA, and also your inbound links’ ones with a site explorer tool.

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is that setup that makes your website’s relationship with the user be safe. This type of link is making sure that the data passed between the web server and the browsers stay private and unharmed. Users trust a site more when they see that their data is secured by this encrypted link when entering private data such as credit card numbers, usernames, and passwords, or any other sensitive information.

One way to building and checking your users’ trust is to make sure you get business reviews. You can start by asking your present customers to check your rating section and leave a contribution there. It’s important to let them know how and why it’s important that you need their opinion on your services, all expressed and posted publicly. The more customers you’ll have, the more reviews you should get. Especially if you’re having a Facebook page where people can stay up-to-da about and connected to your business, and leave reviews.

8. Incorporate Videos and Images

People like to play and experiment, even if it means to play something else and they just witness it. That’s why augmented reality is a massive hit nowadays, with Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook incorporation motion visuals projected onto the real world and driving people crazy with fascination. And all this AR is connected to video and image.

Video and images are viral nowadays, so you should bet in them. How else do you think platforms like YouTube, Vimeo (video), Flickr, Pinterest, Photobucket (photo), Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat (video & image) have reached this far with their success story?

Off-site SEO is all about getting attention to your website, thanks to outbound activities, unrelated to your page contents. Hence you should promote your business through videos, podcasts, infographics, quotes, etc. Just take the example of Tasty by Buzzfeed or Tastemade. They’re rolling out videos like crazy and people love it, love it, love it. I bet they get more likes, shares, and bookmarks than some blog posts published by someone really good at SEO and digital marketing.

Getting back to our sheep, hub pages like Pinterest, Youtube and so on, have massive PageRank and trust, hence you should join them and associate your business with them, by using their platform to post all the stuff about your products. Given their sharing and like/thumbs up/upvote system, you’ll gain brand awareness through shares and likes.

In addition, the links that you get from YouTube videos and their meta description are extremely valuable and they help you improve your off-page SEO.

Last but not least, don’t forget about optimizing your uploaded file titles, file names, description sections, size, and links. SEO works in these niches too.

9. Build Relationships with Webmasters/Influencers

Although already mentioned this before, you should make friends among those you admire and whose steps you wish to follow in your career. Although with such a busy schedule, they’re usually willing to guide, inspire, and help. Rand Fishkin had the same message when speaking at Inbound, in 2013.

Start connecting with them, impress them enough to make them share your content and you’ve won yourself some quality relationships. But beware, you have to make sure you don’t overlook them in time, but always make sure to keep in touch with them, ask for their advice and feature them in your pieces of content. This way, your content is more bound to being shared across their own personal social channels, than random content on your blog.

10. Be Present On the Web

McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and Bic are everywhere. There are more people who might’ve heard about them than those who’ve heard of a camera, let’s say.  And that’s because their marketing strategies are unbeatable. Know how to address all customer segments, satisfy all fans, and deliver tasty and cheap food, or useful tools.

Off-page SEO techniques increase brand reputation and authority. So one should be present, live this very moment to make your brand heard. Think of easy-to-understand ways to communicate your brand to your customers and attract them with quality services. Make them feel special. Learn how to talk to all customer segments or, at least, define your target audience, instead of floating around in the marketing space with no clue whatsoever.

11. Craft a Sparkling Brand Image

Nobody wants more of the same thing. Think about what people need most and don’t get, seize the opportunity, and deliver. This is how you’ll leave customers’ memory of you, of your uniqueness and utility, and someday, of your greatness.

Just look at Buzzfeed (I’m a huge fan, please pardon my enthusiasm). They get much more attention when posting something than a random marketing brand does. Because they knew how to shine their way in a world full of tips, recipes, and did-you-knows, and stand out, even though the market was already saturated. Plus, they also knew how to address various and different customer segments.

Or Neil Patel. He’s known all over the marketing industry and probably even farther. It’s because he knew how to stand out, be original, deliver easy-to-understand messages and content, one that suits all masses, not just the ones with advanced knowledge in the field of marketing.

12. Document Sharing Is Good for You

By sharing content about your brand on other platforms you’ll be able to rank for keywords your site wouldn’t otherwise be able to compete for, for various reasons like the competition is too strong. If you think your piece of content would serve others’ interests as well, upload documents to doc sharing sites like Scribd, Academia, and SlideShare.

Treat these documents like a traditional piece of content – do keyword research and fully optimize them: titles, file names, transcripts. Place the effective call-to-action and links back to your website whenever relevant and possible.

The benefit of having documents posted on such platforms is that PDFs and PowerPoint files can’t be crawled by the search engines but these sites make them readable. In addition, you also borrow some link juice for your website, which is again, awesome.

Similar to written docs, craft podcasts and videos on your to brand topic and then upload them to SoundCloud, YouTube, etc with a transcript. The transcript is where you can help search engine crawlers to bump into your content way easier. That’s SEO, baby!

13. PR Promo Game

The more you go out in the world, the more you know and the more you’ll get known. PRactise the habit of attracting the public eye, give and host interviews, gain your influencers’ audience for your brand too. Get visible, and you’ll get noticed.

Conclusion

For a long time now, search marketing is slightly second after email in terms of top online activities. Hence, you ought to appear in SERPs when users deploy queries.

Read more: bloggeroundup.com

You all know SEO is a long-term game… at least when it comes to Google.

And yes, who doesn’t want to be at the top of Google for some of the most competitive terms? But the reality is, we don’t all have the budget or time.

So then, what should you do?

Well, what if I told you there were simple ways to get more organic traffic and, best of all, you don’t have to do one bit of SEO?

Seriously.

So, what is it? And how can you get more organic traffic?

Well, this story will help explain it…

The old days

When I first started my journey as an SEO, I got really good at one thing.

Getting rankings!

Now to be fair, this was back in 2003 when it wasn’t that hard to rank on Google (or any other search engine for that matter).

Stuff some keywords into your page, your meta tags, and build some spammy rich anchor text links and you were good to go.

You could literally see results in less than a month.

SEO wasn’t too complicated back then. So much so, that I even started an SEO agency and created a handful of sites.

I was starting to rank my sites at the top of Google but they didn’t make a dollar. Literally, not a single dollar.

In fact, I was actually losing money on them because I had to pay for the domain registration expenses and hosting.

So, one day I decided that I was tired of losing money and I was going to do something about it. I took the keywords that I was ranking for and started to type them into Google to see who was paying for ads for those terms.

I hit up each of those sites and tried to get a hold of the owner or the person in charge of marketing.

I asked them how much they were paying for ads and offered them the same exact traffic for a much lower price. I was able to do this because I already had sites that ranked for those keywords.

In other words, I offered to rent out my website for a monthly fee that was a fraction of what they were paying for paid ads.

Next thing you know I was collecting 5 figures in monthly checks and my “renters” were ecstatic because they were generating sales at a fraction of the costs compared to what they were spending on paid ads.

So, what’s the strategy?

Well, it’s simple. Back in the day, I used to rent out my websites… the whole site.

These days I’ve learned how to monetize my own site, so I don’t rent them out.

But you know what, most of the sites that rank on Google are content-based sites. Over 56% of a website’s organic traffic is typically going to their blog or articles.

So why not rent a page on someone else’s site? From there, modify that page a bit to promote your products or services?

I know this sounds crazy, but it works. I have one person that just reaches out to site owners asking if we can rent out a page on their site. We do this for all industries and verticals… and when I look at how much we are spending versus how much income we are generating, it’s crazy.

Here are the stats for the last month:

Rental fees: $24,592

Outreach costs: $3,000

Legal costs: $580

Copywriting and monetization costs: $1,500

Total monthly cost: $29,672 

Now guess what my monthly income was?

It was $79,283.58.

Not too bad.

Now your cost on this model won’t be as high as mine because you can do your own outreach, monetize the page you are renting on your own, and you probably don’t need a lawyer.

And don’t be afraid of how much I am spending in rental fees as you can get away with spending $0 in the first 30 days as I will show you exactly what to do.

Remember, it’s also not what you are spending, it’s about profit and what you are making. If it won’t cost you any money in the first 30 days and you can generate income, your risk is little to none.

Here are the exact steps you need to follow:

Step #1: Find the terms you want to rank for

If you already know the terms you want to rank for, great, you can skip this step.

If you don’t, I want you to head to Ubersuggest and type in a few of your competitors’ URLs.

Head over to the top pages report and look at their top pages.

Now click on “view all” under the estimated visits column to see a list of keywords that each page ranks for.

I want you to create a list of all of the keywords that contain a high search volume and have a high CPC. Keywords with a high CPC usually mean that they convert well.

Keywords with a low CPC usually mean they don’t convert as well.

When you are making a list of keywords, you’ll need to make sure that you have a product or service that is related to each keyword. If you don’t then you won’t be able to monetize the traffic.

Step #2: Search for the term

It’s time to do some Google searches.

Look for all of the pages that rank in the top 10 for the term you ideally want to rank for.

Don’t waste your time with page 2.

What I want you to look for is:

Someone who isn’t your competitor. Your competition isn’t likely to rent out a page on their site to you.A page that isn’t monetized. Not selling a product or service. (If the page has ads, don’t worry.)A site owned by a smaller company… a publicly-traded company isn’t likely to do a deal. A venture-funded company isn’t likely to do a deal either (Crunchbase will tell you if they are venture-funded). Step #3: Hit up the website

Typically, through their contact page, they should have their email addresses or phone number listed. If they have a contact form, you can get in touch that way as well.

If you can’t find their details, you can do a whois lookup to see if you can find their phone number.

What’ll you want to do is get them on the phone. DO NOT MAKE YOUR PITCH OVER EMAIL.

It just doesn’t work well over email.

If you can’t find their phone number, email them with a message that goes something like this…

Subject: [their website name]

Hey [insert first name],

Do you have time for a quick call this week?

We’ve been researching your business and we would like to potentially make you an offer.

Let me know what works for you.

Cheers,

[insert your name]

[insert your company]

[insert your phone number]

You want to keep the email short as I have found that it tends to generate more calls.

Once you get them on the phone, you can tell them a little bit about yourself. Once you do that, tell them that you noticed they have a page or multiple pages on their website that interest you.

Point out the URL and tell them how you are interested in giving them money each month to rent out the page and you wouldn’t change much of it… but you need some more information before you can make your offer.

At this point, you’ll want to find out how much traffic that page generates and the keywords it ranks for. They should have an idea by just looking at their Google Analytics (you’ll find most of these sites don’t use Google Search Console).

Once you have that, let them know that you will get in touch with them in the next few days after you run some numbers.

Go back, try to figure out what each click is worth based on a conservative conversion rate of .5%. In other words, .if 5% of that traffic converted into a customer, what would the traffic be worth to you after all expenses?

You’ll want to use a conservative number because you can’t modify the page too heavily or else you may lose rankings.

Once you have a rough idea of what the page is worth, get back on the phone with them and say you want to run tests for 30 days to get a more solid number on what you can pay them as you want to give them a fair offer.

Typically, most people don’t have an issue because they aren’t making money from the page in the first place.

Step #4: Monetize the page

If you are selling a product, the easiest way to monetize is to add links to the products you are selling.

For example, if you are selling a kitchen appliance like a toaster, you can add links from the article to your site.

Just like this article.

The easiest way to monetize a blog post is to add links to products or services you are selling.

Don’t delete a lot of the content on the page you are modifying… adding isn’t too much of an issue but when you delete content sometimes you will lose rankings.

As for a service-based business, linking out to pages on your site where people can fill out their lead information is great.

Or you can just add lead capturing to the page you are renting out. Kind of like how HubSpot adds lead forms on their site.

I’ve actually found that they convert better than just linking out to your site.

When monetizing the page you are renting, keep in mind that you will need disclaimers to let people know that you are collecting their information for privacy purposes. You also should disclose you are renting out the page and nofollow the links.

Once you are monetizing the page for a bit, you’ll have a rough idea of what it is worth and you can make an offer on what you’ll page.

I recommend doing a 12-month contract in which you can opt-out with a 30-day notice.

The reason you want a 12-month agreement is that you don’t want to have to keep renegotiating. I also include the 30-day opt-out notice in case they lose their rankings, you can opt-out.

And to clarify on the op-out clause, I have it so only I can opt-out and they are stuck in the agreement for a year.

Conclusion

SEO isn’t the only way you can get more organic traffic.

Being creative, such as renting pages that already rank is an easy solution. Best of all, you can get results instantly and it’s probably cheaper than doing SEO in the long run.

The only issue with this model is that it is really hard to scale.

If I were you, I would do both. I, of course, do SEO on my own site because it provides a big ROI. And, of course, if you can rent out the pages of everyone else who ranks for the terms you want to rank for, it can provide multiple streams of income from SEO.

The beauty of this is model is that you can take up more than one listing on page 1. In theory, you can take up all 10 if you can convince everyone to let you rent their ranking page.

So, what do you think of the idea? Are you going to try it out?

The post How to Get More Organic Traffic Without Doing Any SEO (Seriously) appeared first on Neil Patel.

Read more: neilpatel.com