Our San Marcos, Texas SEO company has written about this topic in the past, but today we’ll be looking towards the future of our industry. While no one can say definitively what will happen in 5 years, trends have been going on in the industry over the past few years. They will likely continue, so we can get a good idea for what’s coming in 2022.

Featured Snippet

Search engines will continue to extract and emphasize featured snippets from web pages. Featured snippets now appear on about 15% of all queries, making them much more common than Knowledge Graph cards. While it’s not yet clear if they’re increasing click-through rates significantly over regular results, featured snippets make it easier for searchers to get what they want without clicking through several results.

Image Optimization

People are more likely to click on images than simple text, so it makes sense that Google and other search engines are starting to factor image labeling and optimization into their algorithm. Getting your images properly labeled, optimized, and managed with SEO best practices will be an ongoing job for everyone who manages images on their sites or blogs. It doesn’t require work after launch but needs ongoing attention as you add new content.

Long-Form Content

Typically when people think of content marketing, they envision short pieces used for online advertising. However, long-form content is also an excellent strategy for search engine optimization in 2022. Take advantage of the trend by making your long articles around 1,500 words or more, and go into great detail about the topic. This is highly beneficial to readers who want in-depth information on a certain subject. Long-form content ultimately ranks higher on Google since these pages have higher quality scores.

The EAT Principle

EAT is an acronym that stands for Experienced-Authoritative-Trustworthy. This means that your site’s content should come from a source that is experienced or authoritative on that topic. These sources may have a slight edge over new ones. You can use other sites as sources, but make sure you attribute authorship appropriately and do not violate copyright laws.

When a business offers specialized services or products that relate directly to their industry or location, it’s probably safe for them to have EAT-compliant content on their site. A company selling products or services on a particular topic will have far more credibility than someone who is not selling. For example, would you trust content from a non-doctor about which medical treatments are effective? Most likely not.

Mobile Optimization

As today’s consumers and business owners use their smartphones and other mobile devices as their primary means of connecting to information and services, SEO professionals will need to take note of these changes and re-evaluate how they’re marketing themselves. For example, more than 1.5 billion smartphone users do a Google search or visit a site that includes a Google component every day. We predict that over 87% of all site traffic will be coming from mobile phones in 2022.

Conclusion

SEO is an ever-changing field. While 2021 was a bit of a slow year for updates, expect 2022 and beyond to bring more updates on algorithm changes and guidelines regarding content and website optimization. Our approach as marketers will be sure to change as well based on those new regulations. We’ll need to ensure that we’re providing high-quality and engaging information for users, and keeping up with these updates will make it easier for businesses online.

Digital Marketing and Search Engine Optimization in Austin

Is your business struggling to keep up with the latest digital marketing trends in the Austin area? Our San Marcos, Texas SEO company has a lot of experience in this competitive market, and we’re ready to lend our expertise. Contact us to learn how we can help you stay on top of the ever-changing SEO landscape to get your business more online leads!

While browsing the web, you may have noticed similar sets of icons used on all kinds of different sites—think of all those phone, envelope, and map marker icons that seem to be everywhere. If you’ve ever used a website building tool or content management system, you may already be familiar with using these icon sets like Font Awesome or Material Icons. These are examples of icon fonts, and they offer a way for web designers to leverage a browser’s text rendering capabilities to deliver any shape imaginable. With page load speed and cross-device compatibility being more important than ever before in today’s web landscape, icon fonts can be a valuable way to improve a website’s performance and user experience quickly and dramatically.

How does this technology work, and how can you use it to its maximum effect? We’ve put together an overview of how exactly icon fonts work, how to use them on a website and how to create your own with any shapes you can dream of. Exciting stuff!

What Are Icon Fonts?

Let’s start with the basics. All digital fonts work by assigning a letter, number or special character to a string of numbers called a Unicode. For example, in a typical font the letter “A” will be assigned to the Unicode “U+0041.” Every time you type or typeset the letter “A,” that code is used to identify which typographic character should be rendered.

Icon fonts work in the exact same way. Instead of assigning a typical text character to a given Unicode, a font designer can assign any shape they choose. This concept isn’t new, as dingbat or ornament fonts have been around since the beginning digital typography to allow typesetters to easily add glyphs and other symbols to page designs. They’ve gained an increased relevance in recent years, however, due to their versatility and performance in the world of modern web design.

What Advantages Do Icon Fonts Bring to Web Design?

Being fonts instead of raster images, icon fonts offer several advantages over <img /> elements when designing a website. For one, digital font files like .TTF or .OTF have a much smaller file size than the typical .JPG or .PNG image file, and this is especially true for web-optimized font files like .WOFF. This alone can go a long way towards increasing a page’s load speed, which plays a huge role in the user experience in today’s age of mobile device browsing.

On top of this smaller size, having every icon you need in a single font file can lower the number of HTTP requests the browser needs to make to the server when loading a web page. If you have a page with several icons in the form of image files, the browser will need to send separate requests to fetch each image individually, one at a time. Having all those images load in a single request will allow the page to load much faster and with much less demand on the server.

In addition to these speed improvements, icon fonts allow web designers to take advantage of all the CSS properties that can be used to style text. From color changes to text shadows, scaling, transitions and animations, icon fonts a are just as versatile as any other piece of text on a website. Last but not least, they can be rendered at any size without losing quality just like typography.

Can an Icon Font Replace Every Image on Your website?

Despite their exciting potential for CSS styling, fonts can only render flat shapes with a single color. They can’t take the place of photos and other complex images, and even icons with multiple flat colors are better served as PNG files. They also can’t be set as background images through CSS, and workarounds to achieve this effect may be more trouble than they’re worth.

If your site uses a large number of simple, flat shapes, however, then it’s the perfect candidate to take advantage of an icon font’s benefits.

How Are Icon Fonts Used in Web Design?

As mentioned before, many website builder apps and content management systems like WordPress make it easy to add icon fonts to a web project. Many WordPress themes come pre-loaded with icon sets and easy ways to implement them right out of the box, no HTML or CSS needed. Even without these tools, using an icon font is just like using any uploaded font on a web project. There’s a broad range of free icon fonts available for designers to download, and these fonts can be uploaded to a hosting server and implemented with the “@font-face” CSS rule like any other font. From there, the “font-family” property can be used to set any text content in the icon font.

CSS

@font-face {
  font-family: myIconFont;
  src: url(https://example.com/fonts/myiconfont.woff);
}

.my-icon-font {
  font-family: myIconFont;
}

In the above example CSS, the @font-face rule is used to load the icon font by specifying its url in the “src” property. The “font-family” property is used to assign a name to the icon font, and any element with the “my-icon-font” class will be set in the specified font.

The most common way icon fonts are used in web design, however, is through ::before or ::after CSS pseudo-elements. A typical approach is to create an empty <i> tag and use CSS to select that tag’s ::before or ::after pseudo-element, inserting the Unicode for the desired icon using the “content” attribute. Once the content is generated, additional properties are used to specify the icon font as the font-family as shown below.

HTML

<p><i class="font-icon dog"></i> Dog</p>

CSS

.font-icon::before {
  font-family: myIconFont:
  color: blue;
}

.font-icon.dog::before {
  content: "041"
} 

In the above example, the “font-icon” class is used to specify the correct icon set and styling to be used for all icons in the set, while the “dog” class inserts the Unicode for the dog character within the set. Since no actual content exists in the HTML, icons can easily be swapped out and changed using nothing but CSS.

How Can You Create a Custom Icon Font?

While there’s an ever-expanding selection of free icon fonts with even more options available if you’re willing to pay a premium, nothing compares to a set of original icons to make a website stand out and deliver value for a client. If you’re familiar with using software for creating and editing fonts, you probably already guessed that making a font out of icons is exactly the same as making one out of letters and numbers. Just be sure to export your font as a .WOFF or .WOFF2 if possible, since those file types are optimized for serving as web content.

For those of us without font editing tools, there are several web apps available that allow you to upload a set of .SVG files and export them as a font. One such app is IcoMoon, which is free to use as long as you don’t need to save your projects on their servers.

To use IcoMoon and similar apps, create a set of icons in a vector editing tool like Adobe Illustrator or the free Inkscape, and export each icon as an .SVG individually. These can be uploaded to a new icon set in IcoMoon, where they can then be mapped to whatever Unicode you choose and downloaded as a font file. IcoMoon even includes sample HTML and CSS to make implementation into a web project a bit easier.

Conclusion

Whether you plan to create your own icons or to use one of the exciting variety of existing icon sets out there, we hope this overview has inspired you to try this new approach to adding graphics to your next web project. In addition to their versatility and scalability, icon fonts can improve your website’s performance, making them a valuable asset for both usability and search engine optimization. And on top of it all, they’re just a lot of fun to work with!

We have all seen bitly links posted on Twitter, sent to us through email, and scattered throughout the web. Unfortunately, sometimes people have associated them with less than reputable sources, even if URL shorteners like Bit.ly and Ow.ly are both reputable companies themselves. This is an unfortunate development, because these can both be an important part of optimizing limited space on social media, websites, and in email marketing strategies. Google itself used the shortener Goo.gl before switching to their new dynamic links. With all the confusion surrounding URL shorteners, some have wondered if they will have a negative effect on your Google search engine ranking. Our digital marketing & Austin web design team looks at the answer to that question below.

Use a Well-Established Link Shortener

Before we begin, you need to make sure that you are using established brands. If you go with a new start up and it ends up going bust within a year or two, your links will go dead. These dead links will have a negative effect on your Google ranking. 

Another reason to use well known link shorteners over others is that studies have shown that users and customers are unlikely to click on a URL with a URL shortener that they do not recognize. 

Be Aware of Redirect Issues

URL shorteners use 301 redirects to their own sites that then redirect to the final destination. Google has offered clarification on whether they use the URL shorteners’ domain or the final destination in ranking factors, affirming that they do indeed use the final destination. Now of course, part of this means you need to ensure that it is indeed a 301 redirect and not some other tactic.

One pitfall to avoid is the fact that the shortened links are very specific, meaning that if you change just one letter, or do not copy the entirety of the link, you risk sending your customers to entirely unrelated content or a broken resource. 

URL Shorteners for A/B Testing

Another benefit of URL shorteners is that they offer the ability to get an in-depth look at how people are reacting to your links. They can help track social sharing, clicks, who is referring, reach, and conversions. While there are other ways to get this information, URL shorteners can make it easier when you are using a variety of different platforms to share links. 

This allows you to do significant A/B testing (deciding best practice through trial and error). You can try tactics such as branded links (links using shortened words or phrases instead of random letter/number combinations), or even try your hand at using your own domain to post shortened URLs. This works especially well in traditional media (radio, newspapers, TV) where customers are unlikely to remember long domains, or long randomly generated links. 

URL Shorteners and SEO

Let’s return to the original question: Do URL shorteners have a negative impact on your Google search engine ranking? The short answer is “no;” the use of URL shorteners themselves will not. Using a URL shortener that doesn’t use appropriate 301 redirects or one that disbands and leaves you with multiple dead links can lead to problems, but there’s nothing wrong with using a reputable shortener that will save space and allow tracking and A/B testing.

While using URL shorteners for these testing purposes will not have a direct impact on SEO, it can help you fine-tune your process and ensure that everything you share has the maximum reach. More reach and more shares means a better Google rank ultimately, which over time will increase your domain authority and total rank.

More from Our SEO & Austin Web Design Team

Looking for more information about factors that affect your website’s search engine rankings? Find more articles like this in our SEO blog, or Contact the digital marketing & Austin web design team at tekRESCUE to learn more.

With the spread of the coronavirus in Texas, many small and medium businesses have been forced to temporarily shut their doors to prevent the virus spreading. Losing as little as a few days, and in some cases potentially weeks, of business can be frightening for business owners and their staff alike. 

Luckily, while we all wait for this pandemic to pass, there are some steps business owners can take to continue promoting their brand to potential customers currently stuck at home. With proper digital marketing, you can keep your business in the minds of current customers at the same time as you reach out to new ones. To help you get started, our Austin SEO team has compiled some basic digital marketing tips below.

Utilize Your Website

Digital marketing encompasses a wide range of marketing strategies that reach customers online. These can include investing in PPC campaigns and geo-targeted ads, improving your SEO, maintaining an active social media presence, and more. All of these strategies have one thing in common: a good website improves them all.

What You Can Do

The downtime your business may be experiencing is a good chance for you to take a close look at your existing website. Ask yourself a few questions while you’re looking, such as:

• Does my website function well? (Do the pages load correctly? Are the links still active?)
• Does my website accurately represent my brand? (Is your logo up-to-date? Is your slogan accurate?)
• Does my website have a current SSL certificate? (Learn more about SSL Certificates)
• Does my website help customers access my goods or services quickly and easily?
• Does my website look professional on differently sized devices?

If the answer to one or more of these questions is no, it might be time to consider a website redesign. If you are able to redesign your website yourself, now is a good time to do so. If the updates needed require a professional touch, contact a local web design company for help (for examples of modern website design, see tekRESCUE’s portfolio).

Create PPC and Geo-Targeted Ad Campaigns

If your website is already performing how you need it to, you can take a look at creating online advertising campaigns. Two types of online advertising methods stand out in 2020: PPC campaigns, and geo-targeted ads.

What are PPC Campaigns?

PPC stands for “Pay Per Click.” PPC campaigns are a type of online marketing in which advertisers pay a specific fee only when their ads are clicked.

You’ve probably seen examples of this type of advertising at the top of search engine results. Below is an example of two PPC ads at the top of a Google search engine results page (SERP).

The benefit of PPC campaigns is that they can quickly boost traffic to your website. If you choose appropriate search terms for your ad to appear under, the fee you pay per click should end up being a trivial amount compared to the amount of sales you receive from the resulting traffic. Still not sure if PPC advertising is right for your company? Check out how Google Ads Works.

What Are Geo-Targeted Ads?

Geo-targeted ads are PPC ads that target users in a specific location. These locations can be very broad, such as users in San Marcos, TX, or they can be very specific, such as users on a certain block. Some geo-targeting services even allow campaigns to target users during a specific time-frame.

Geo-targeted ads are beneficial because they allow you to target your customer demographic very precisely. However, using them effectively does require some research to determine your target demographic and how receptive they are to PPC advertising. Interested in setting up geo-targeted ads for your business?

Improve SEO For Your Business

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and is a type of organic marketing, as opposed to paid methods like PPC campaigns. The goal of SEO, like PPC campaigns, is to increase traffic to a website and therefore increase sales or your products or services.

However, instead of paying for each click to your website through a PPC ad, SEO leads potential customers to your website by improving rankings in search engines and cleanly representing your brand online to your target audience (Still not sure what the difference is? Read this article on SEO vs PPC Marketing).

Best SEO practices in 2020 revolve around a few core concepts:

On-Page SEO

These strategies apply to elements on your website and include:

• Content Creation – Search engines strive to simulate human users in order to return the most relevant content in response to search queries online. One of the most important parts of having your website recognized as an authority in your business niche is having high quality content available.
• Content Optimization – Optimizing your content is how you alert search engines that your content is relevant to a query. This requires determining a set of relevant keywords (New to keyword research? Find out How to Find and Target Keywords) and placing them in strategic locations on your website while avoiding keyword stuffing errors.
• Technical Optimization – Your website is more than just content, and the technical aspects of it can also affect your ranking. For example, websites with faster load times rank better than those that load more slowly. Also, websites that are mobile responsive rank higher than those that aren’t (What is a Mobile Responsive Website?).

Off-Page SEO

These strategies apply to areas where your brand appears outside of your website and include:

• Presence on the Web – Having links to your website appear across the internet is as important as having quality content, since your goal is for users to find that content. Signaling search engines with keywords is an important step toward that goal. The next step is signaling by creating backlinks to your website. This tells search engines that your content is helpful enough that it is being linked to across the web. 
• Syndicating Content – Sharing your content is another great way to send users back to your website. There are many ways to share content. Some can be done quickly, such as sharing on your social media. Others take a little more time but are just as, or more, important, such as offering to write content as a guest for a popular blog in your business niche.

What Can I Do?

All of the different aspects of SEO can seem daunting, and deciding where to begin can be difficult. Here are some suggestions to help you get started.

Where to Begin On-Page SEO: As a business owner, you can start evaluating your on-page SEO by taking a good look at the content on your website. Is it high quality content that can answer questions users might have about your business products and services? Does it represent your brand accurately?

Where to Begin Off-Page SEO: A good starting point for evaluating your off-page SEO is searching for your business online. Does your business have a listing with the major search engines, such as Google and Bing? Is your business information correct where it appears in directories and on social media?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, now is a great time to take the necessary steps to fix issues that are hurting your SEO, and therefore your ranking, which will cost you customers. Still not sure where to start?

Improve Your Social Media Presence

Our final tip for promoting your business from home is to take a look at your presence on social media. As mentioned briefly above, having an active social media account can help boost your brand’s presence online in several ways.

Promoting – One of the most important reasons to maintain a social media presence is to promote your brand and products or services. Putting your business on social media gives potential customers additional opportunities to find you. Linking to your website and your content on social media also furthers this goal. The more users go to your content for answers, the more authority it gives your website, and the more opportunities it gives users to find solutions to their needs in your products or services.

Connecting – Of nearly equal importance is the chance social media gives you to connect with your target audience. There are countless examples of this appearing across social media platforms as the coronavirus pandemic continues. Restaurants that have been closed by city ordinances have reached out to their customers on Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms to post updates on how they are evolving to meet their customers’ needs.

In addition, many businesses have started sharing resources that can help their audience get by during the period of social distancing. This not only puts your brand in front of potential customers, but it also lets them know that your business cares about their experience. This is a chance to meet your customers’ needs not only through your products and services, but through your concern for their well-being during uncertain times.

Take This Time to Promote from Home

The current pandemic has left many individuals feeling uncertain. Whether you’re having to work from home for the first time, or trying to find a way to support your employees while your business is unable to operate normally, remember that we’re all in this together. Use the information provided above to promote your business to customers online during social distancing, and to let your community know how your services can help them.

Find Help from Your Local SEO Company Near Austin

If you need additional support promoting your business, contact the Austin SEO team at tekRESCUE to learn how we can help. Located in San Marcos, TX just south of Austin, our search engine optimization and digital marketing team can help you promote your business locally and spread your brand awareness even in these difficult times. We’re here to help!

If you have a business, your number one priority beyond monetary gain is probably going to be growth. There are so many practices that can help you gain recognition in your community, and the rise of the internet has created a whole other realm to conquer when it comes to business strategy. While there was a time that having a great service or product was all you needed to be successful, now a days you have to be intentional with your online presence. One of the most crucial ways you can keep your business at the top of the competitive food chain is by constantly fine tuning your SEO (search engine optimization). If you have a business but are not familiar with optimizing google friendly content for your website, we would love to help get you started with this abridged guide to your SEO. 

What is SEO?

When you type something into the search bar of any search engine like google, in a matter of seconds there are pages and pages of resources for you to click through. The order in which that content is displayed has to do with the relevance and how the content for each of those websites or links is rated. This is SEO. Your goal, as a business, is to be sure that your page pops up on the first search results page and as close to the top as possible. The statistics for where your weblink falls on the google search page and how many clicks it will get are staggering! According to DataBox, there are well over 6 billion daily google searches, and 67% of all clicks following that google search goes to the top 5 search results. Meaning, mastering SEO will mean more traffic for your website as people search for content related to your goods or services, and more online traffic means more business for you!

High Quality Content

When it comes to the content that is shared on your website, it should meet a couple of parameters in order to boost your SEO. Whether this is in the form of regular blog posts, web page content, social media posts, or any other form of writing done for your business site, the information needs to be engaging and relevant. “High quality” does not just apply to writing error free content (which should go without stating), but your posts should be both useful and entertaining and the type of content that others want to read and hopefully share!

Choosing Keywords

When you are writing content for your website, one of the most important aspects you need to lead with is the keywords you use. Planning this prior to writing the content is recommended. Consider what keywords are most associated with the topic and utilize those as much as possible. Knowing the right keywords will likely require you to know the market well and what others in the industry are posting. Your keywords should be chosen based on what people are actively searching for, so catering your posts to the latest trends is highly recommended. If you aren’t sure how to get started on strategic keyword usage, don’t fret! There are dozens of online databases that you can use, like Word Tracker, to help. Not only does this assist you in carefully choosing keywords, but this is also market research that is invaluable to you as a business owner. By choosing your posts based on need and then stacking those relevant posts with the right keywords, you are likely to boost your SEO rating so that more people visit you website, read your content, and subscribe to your services!

Capitalize on Images

We live in a visually driven society, and your online presence is no different! If you are already using images in your content, great! Keep it up! If you aren’t, you should start immediately. If you fall into the camp of people who have been using images regularly in the content that you are posting, be sure to follow some of these basic guidelines in optimizing them, because, yes, refining what you are doing to make it better is what business is all about!

Size and placement – The file size for the photos you use is very important for your SEO ranking mostly because this affects load time. If your photo size is too big and it slows down your page being loaded, this will greatly affect the traffic on your page. 

Title and caption – Giving the photos used for your content a little caption along with a solid title really helps to optimize the image, and in turn, the entire post. Be very intentional with this caption by utilizing the keywords related to it while still remaining very brief in the overall description. 

File name – Be sure that the image is saved with a strategic file name utilizing those relevant keywords. So, instead of a series of numbers and letters that many JPEG files comes standard as, name the photo something related to the content. Your intentionality for the sake of your SEO will do wonders even in these small details!

Make Your Content Shareable 

Now that you have created a well thought out, strategic, and visibly pleasing content, you will want to make it easy for viewers to share it with their followers. One of the most beautiful (and sometimes painful) aspects of social media is how easy and fast information can be spread. With just the push of a button, your content can be shared and made available to a whole new pool of potential clients/followers/subscribers for them to click on, and clicks in the digital world are like gold. There are several resources, like Simple Sharing Buttons, where you can make custom “share” buttons to post to the many popular social media sites. 

When it comes to your business, your online representation and SEO matters a great deal in terms of success. We, at tekRescue, pride ourselves on taking your online presence to the next level while putting the highest priority on network safety. If you are looking to take your business to the next level, consider letting us take care of your cyber presence so that you can focus on the big picture, creative aspects of business that you love!

With the implementation of mobile first indexing in google and the rise of voice activated devices, there are several SEO (Search Engine Optimization) trends to look out for in 2019. Reaching your targeted audience will need to focus on more than just keywords and advertising in search engines. People in today’s society are more in a rush than ten years ago. Back then, everyone was using their computer to search things. People are using their phones to shop while taking walks, asking Siri for ingredients for a cake while in the kitchen baking, or asking Alexa to turn off the lights when they go to bed. People are eager to use technology and taking into consideration the audience and how they will use technology is a strategy to use when implementing SEO.

Voice Recognition is Changing How We Search

Many people have started using their voice for search inquiries. If you think about it, people aren’t going to be using their voice in the same way they would search using a computer or mobile device. Many times people will only type in the minimum amount of words to get results on a search, especially if using a mobile phone. For example, if someone is wanting to get coffee in San Marcos, they might search ‘coffee shops in San Marcos’.

Now, say that out loud. You might get some strange looks from anyone nearby, although your cat might not mind. The point is, people don’t talk like they search. Because of this, sites that are more likely to be searched for using voice technology should focus on key phrases instead of just keywords. Typically, voice searches are looking to have what, how, when, or where questions answers, so adding these words to your SEO will increase traffic for voice searches.

Amazon is (Still) Changing How We Shop

Another trend to look into is to have sites that are selling a product be advertised or sell through Amazon.  Statistics show that over half of shoppers in the United States go to Amazon before any other site when making a purchase.  Half of the people that went shopping at other places and didn’t make an initial purchase check Amazon for price comparison.  If you don’t include Amazon in your SEO strategy, there is a chance that half the consumers won’t even see your product if using a search engine like Google.

Advanced Geo-Targeting is Changing How We Find Things

Another trend that is growing is local search geo-targeting.  Usually when someone searches a location, the address will be displayed.  Advanced geo-targeting focuses on displaying more than just the address and will include cross streets, extensions to common contacts in a larger corporation, and other nearby locations.

Another way geo-targeting is advancing for people who are searching for stores with an item in stock. Basic searches will show what stores are nearby, and the only way to check if it is in stock is by clicking the link to the store.  Using geo-targeting in your SEO strategy allows the user to see what store has what they are looking for available without having to do an additional search.

These trends are just a few of the ways SEO is advancing in 2019.  Taking these things into consideration when implementing SEO could help increase traffic and keep the customer happy.

Long-tail keywords are long and specific keyword phrases. They are likely to be used by customers who knows what exactly they want. The customers are often closer to a point-of-purchase. They may prove to be difficult to use at first, but you will realize how valuable they are after you know how to use them.

Imagine you have a furniture business and a person searches for ‘furniture’, what are the chances of your business coming on top of the search results? Well, it may not even appear in the first page because there a lot of furniture entities out there. What about if you specialized on say, contemporary art-deco furniture? There are a few of such out there and the chances of a visitor landing on your site are very high. The customers looking for the product will find the exact product. Now, contemporary art-deco furniture adds up as a long-tail keyword.

Long-tail keyword management entails establishing a good relationship between your business communication lines and the customers, actively shopping on your platform. Look at this example: you search for ‘sofa’, it will be difficult for you to navigate your way to click on a sale. But if you google a specific model and make of, say, a sofa, you will end up getting the exact product you’re looking for. Therefore, customers who use long-tail keywords knows exactly what they want.

Of course, with long-tail keywords, traffic to your site will be minimal. But the little traffic you get is valuable because visitors are very likely to buy your product or services.

Long-tail keywords on a graph of keyword popularity

The term ‘long-tail’ was coined from how it ‘behaves’ in a distribution curve. If a graph of keyword popularity is created, phrases such as Facebook and Justin Bieber will feature as the most popular recording numerous searches. Surprisingly, such keywords make up a small percentage of keywords used in the internet. In fact, the searches could add up to about 15%. What makes up the rest of the searches? Well, long-tail keywords makes up about 70% of the searches and mid-length keywords about 20%.

Less traffic for higher return on your investment

You will face a lot of competition for rankings from shorter keywords and ROI can be low.  If you implement long-tail keywords wisely, you can attract less traffic but earn higher return on your investment. This is because you will be getting committed and focused customers. The customers are close to point-of-purchase.

Less competition translates to lower costs

The long-tail keywords are valuable to both businesses looking for higher google search ranking and advertisers who run search marketing campaigns. The long-tailed keywords comes with a lower cost per click because of the less competition.

You don’t have to pay for a premium for every click. Look for long-tail keywords to drive your ad rankings and push your Adwords campaigns forward. Look for the longer and specific keywords from a reliable and renewable source. Many keyword suggestion tools have overlooked this valuable category.

Finding your long-tail keywords

Look for a reliable free or premium keyword research tool which will generate the keywords for you.

If you’re looking to improve your SEO scores looking for a new website design, consider contacting tekRESCUE, your search engine optimization company serving businesses in Austin & San Marcos TX.

Understand Your Google AdWords Quality Score

Most new users of Google AdWords often fail to understand the Quality Score formula. You need to know and understand the factors that help in the formulation of your Quality Score, how to optimize your account and achieve a good Quality Score. The system of Quality Score helps in determining the relevance of your keywords and ad copy in the search query. This system is assigned based on the keywords level but can also affect the overall ad group and the performance of your campaign.

Why do you need to care about Quality Score?

Quality Score is crucial because Google ranks keywords using three levels, which are Great, Okay, and Poor. These levels are also used with Cost per Click (CPC) bid to come up with the Ad Rank, which is the overall score. As such, a Great Quality Score would cost less than a Poor Quality Score if it was to rank in any competitive position. A Great Quality Score also earns you lower minimum CPC than a Poor Quality Score. In simpler terms, it may be the difference between bidding for $5 per click and $0.5 per click.

Some of the factors that affect your Quality Score include:
• The click-through rate (CTR)
• The relevance of every Keyword to its ad group
• Relevance and quality of your landing page
• Ad-text relevance
• History of your AdWords account performance

Advantages of improving your Google AdWords Quality Score

In any analysis of PPC accounts, you will find a correlation between the success of PPC and Quality Score. If you optimize your Scores, you will benefit from the return of investment because higher quality scores dissociate with a lower cost per conversion. Most importantly, you have to understand that cost per conversion is different from Cost per click. It is all about how much you pay when someone takes the action that you intended him or her to take.

While not every click culminates to a conversion, cost per conversion is usually higher than the cost per click. The idea is that if you have a higher Quality Score, you have a lower cost per conversion. The high-quality score is an indication from Google that your PPC ad meets the needs of your customers. If you are better at meeting these potential needs, Google will charge you less for the ad click.

Increasing your Google AdWords Quality Score

Quality Score determines the frequency and where your ad, will appear, you have to boost your ratings by maintaining consistency in your account. You can focus on the following areas to improve your Quality Score:
• Keyword research
Identify highly relevant keywords that are a good addition to your campaign. Consider long trail opportunities that will contribute to your overall traffic.
• Keyword organization
Your keywords can be separated into tight and organized groups making them more effective because they are tied to specific ad campaigns
• Refining your Ad-Text
You can test your PPC ad copy that is more individual-specific ad groups. Higher CTR results from ads that are more effective and is one of the nominal ways of improvi9ng your Quality Score.
• Optimize landing pages though best practices that create pages that directly connect with your add groups to provide an excellent experience to your visitors.
• Add Negative keywords by researching, identifying, and excluding irrelevant terms.

How AI is Being Used for SEO

Here at tekRESCUE we specialize in Search Engine Optimization in the Austin area. If your looking to get more traffic on your Austin, Texas businesses’ web page, we are the SEO company for you. Drop us a line! We would love to hear how we can help your business grow.

This is the last in a three-part series we’ve been writing on Google’s upcoming Mobile-First Index. If you haven’t read the previous two parts, we recommend starting at the beginning before reading this entry.

Previously, we covered what changes Google is making to its indexing system and why these changes make sense. It’s an important change that will affect the rankings of nearly every site on the web. As such, the final part in this series will be going over what you can do to your website to make sure your rankings change as little as possible. Is your site ready for the Mobile-First Index?

Best Practice: Invest in a Responsive Website

Ask any web developer, and they’ll likely tell you that the best approach to any website is responsive web design. This is an approach to web development where the same content is served across all devices, with the layout of that content rearranging as needed to suit different screen sizes. This is in contrast to sites that serve different content altogether depending on the device that’s accessing the site. Responsive websites are by no means a new thing, but their advantages are even more clear with the Mobile-First index in mind.

The strongest of these advantages is that responsive web design is the best way to ensure that all visitors experience your site the same way, no matter what device they’re on. Desktop and mobile browsing will always have their fundamental differences, but responsive web design ensures that the quality of the browsing experience will remain largely the same. And because the content is the same on mobile as on desktop, responsive sites will see no change to their rankings once the Mobile-First index rolls out.

Second Best: Make Your Mobile & Desktop Content the Same

If your website isn’t responsive and making such a change is impractical for your business, then the next best thing is to make sure all versions of your site have identical content. Chances are, your mobile site might currently have certain sections missing, altered, or rearranged to help streamline the phone browsing experience. While these aren’t necessarily bad practices from a usability perspective, that difference in content means your site’s rankings will most likely change once Google begins to look at your mobile site instead of your desktop one.

To make sure your rankings change as little as possible, go through your mobile site and make sure its contents match that of your desktop site. This includes headlines, text, images, and all of the meta information this content might have.

Minimum: Make Sure Your Primary Content is on Mobile

If your company is pressed for time and can’t go through every piece of content to make sure the desktop and mobile versions match, you should at the very least shift your content and SEO focus to mobile. This is what Google will use to rank your site, so treat it with the appropriate thought, care, and considerations. If you only have the resources to focus on one screen size, make it mobile.

Recommended: Hire Professionals

Websites are an increasingly complex medium, and the sheer amount of devices available to access them today only compounds this complexity. Making sure every single one of your visitors sees the site you intend for them to see is by no means an easy task. As these technologies become more sophisticated, it’s becoming increasingly important that sites are built and maintained by qualified professionals with specialized knowledge in their fields.

Rather than preparing for Mobile-First on your own, our recommendation is to hire web professionals to help your site make this transition. Business owners have enough to worry about without having to make sure their site fits in with whatever whim Google has next. Save yourself the time and stress, and prepare your site for the Mobile-First Index the right way.

In our last blog post, we took a look at the Mobile-First Index, the looming shift in Google’s focus from indexing desktop content to that of mobile instead. If you haven’t read it yet, you should start there; it gives an introduction to what mobile-first means and how Google is planning to apply this philosophy to its search engine rankings.

In the second part of this series, we’ll focus on why Google is pushing for mobile-first design, as well as when you should expect the change in their ranking system to occur.

Why Google is Making the Change

So what’s the point of all this emphasis on mobile devices? Why would Google use its huge influence over web developers to push the focus from desktop to mobile? Simply put, more people are accessing the web through their phones than ever before. This has been a trend ever since the inception of the first iPhone, so it shouldn’t be surprising that mobile use has finally surpassed desktop use as a means of accessing the internet.

In a study released by Stone Temple Consulting in 2017, researchers examined 77 billion different website visits. What they found was that nearly 56% of all traffic came from mobile devices, leaving well behind the 44% of traffic from desktop users. This suggests that for any given site, more visitors are accessing the content on their phones than on a desktop computer. And it doesn’t look like this trend will slow anytime soon.

In this light, it actually isn’t too surprising that Google would make such a bold move. If mobile users make up the largest percentage of website visitors, it makes sense to focus on this demographic when designing websites. We all know how frustrating it is to be browsing the web on a phone and encounter a site that doesn’t take mobile users into consideration. Google has been penalizing these sites for years, and now the transition to thinking of the mobile web experience as the default seems like the next logical step in this progression.

When The Change Will Happen

Now for the answer to the question you’ve no doubt had since beginning this series. When should you expect the Mobile-First index to take effect? The answer isn’t as simple as we’d hope. On this matter, Google executives have stated that they’re making the change once they feel the new indexing system produces “quality neutral” results. This means that they’re not flipping the switch until the Mobile-First index creates search results that are as good as or better than the current system.

This too makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Larger sites with the most credible content are often the ones that tend to be slowest to catch up to major changes in web standards. Smaller, more agile sites on the other hand can easily adapt to changes like the Mobile-First Index, giving them an advantage over their larger, more established counterparts. It’s easy to see how, at least at first, the Mobile-First index could create a search result filled with nothing but small, less established sites with dubious credibility. Best design practices don’t always signify the best web content.

A Tentative Timeline

While they may not have given us an exact timeline for this change, Google has indicated that it’ll likely take place sometime in 2018. This may be a far cry from the original 2017 dates they had hinted at early on, but it’s an indication that we should be ready for Mobile-First sooner rather than later. This is especially true considering the discussion that they may roll out the new index in batches rather than all at once.

Is your website ready for the Mobile-First Index? What should you be doing, or have already done, to prepare? We’ll be discussing all of this in part 3.

If you’re a business owner with a website, chances are you’ve already made some changes to your site for the purpose of ranking better on Google searches. And if you’ve been doing this a while, you no doubt know how adaptable you have to be to stay on top of all the latest changes the folks at Google make to their ranking system. The latest of these changes you may have heard of is the “Mobile-First Index”, a dramatic shift in search ranking priorities that Google has been warning for some time now.

What exactly is this looming paradigm shift, and why is Google planning to roll out such a huge change? Should you worry about it? Read on to learn all you need to know to stay on top of the next big change in the search engine giant’s ranking system.

What Mobile-First Means

Before we discuss Google’s ranking system, we’ll first go over what exactly we mean when we call a website “mobile-first.” Simply put, a mobile-first site emphasizes the user experience for small-screened, touch-controlled devices rather than large-screened desktop computers. Traditionally, websites were a medium developed for and viewed on large desktop screens. Even now, the desktop experience is often the optimal way a site should be viewed, with the mobile version often ending up an afterthought—a watered-down compromise for small screens.

In the case of a mobile-first site, on the other hand, mobile devices aren’t an afterthought at all. All of the designer’s thought, resources, and time go into the mobile experience, which they then adapt and altered appropriately for desktop use after the fact. This results in a site designed specifically for small screens and touch control, and you can easily tell the difference when it comes to the site’s usability on smart phones.

How the Mobile-First Index Works

Google has never been one to ignore these trends of moving towards mobile rather than desktop. It’s well known by now that for quite some time, Google has been penalizing the rankings of sites that aren’t “mobile friendly,” or aren’t easily usable on phones and other touch-based small devices. So what will be changing when Google rolls out its new Mobile-First Index?

The change lies in the content the search engine looks at when determining its rankings. Previously, Google has used content pulled from the desktop experience to rank a site, and generally ignoring the mobile experience as long as it didn’t have any glaring usability issues. Once the switch to mobile-first takes place, however, Google will completely flip the script. The search engine will ONLY take into account content displayed on mobile devices, completely ignoring the desktop experience.

What this Means for Web Developers

This might sound simple on paper, but the consequences of this decision are huge. Sites that feature their main content for desktops and treat the mobile experience as an afterthought will find it much more difficult to remain competitive in the rankings, and sites that place priority on mobile content will reap the rewards of higher rankings. In effect, Google will be putting its foot down and essentially forcing designers to prioritize mobile users.

Why is the search engine giant making such a huge push to emphasize the mobile experience? When should we expect the Mobile-First Index to roll out? We’ll be revisiting this topic to answer these questions in our next blog post, so be sure to check back later this month. In the meantime, you can brush up on your knowledge of the mobile web in some of our related articles, listed below.

RankBrain is a Google component that is designed to predict the behavior of users through an AI software that learns from historical data of users. RankBrain helps Google make sense of the millions of daily intricate queries that are submitted by users all over the world. Since artificial intelligence is the backbone of the Google Search engine, some details of a website can impact the ranking of the website. To help you optimize your website for RankBrain, considering using the tips discussed below.

Use Meta Description and Meaningful Titles

The first thing users see in Google search results is a page title. The title has to be clear, impressive, and it has to describe to the user the objective of the website page content. For best optimization, ensure that the title does not have too many keywords. The page title should help in ranking the main keyword, and it should also be attractive enough to make users click on it. Your website also gains rank from higher CTR (Click Through Rate – to learn more, visit our previous blog), and it stands out in search results. A great meta description will improve the CTR and user engagement.

Use Simple, Natural Language

The primary role of RankBrain is to process the search query of Google and match it to highly relevant pages. You have to write the content of your web page in an understandable language that is conversational enough for people. The best optimizeable content for RankBrain is the one that is perfectly natural, and therefore more useful to potential readers.

Add Rich Snippet and Schema Markup

Search Engine Optimization is usually keen on small things. To stand out in SERP results, you’ll need an impressive meta description, simple, clear web content, and a rich snippet. This will help your site to appear at the top part of the results page. When schema markup is added to your website, SERP page displays will be improved by adding rich snippets that will be present below the page title, the way meta descriptions appear. When rich snippet is used, the data that is published and the star rating can be added. Your audience will know what your page is about using the schema markup used by the search engine.

Avoid Using Too Many Keywords

Keywords are important for ranking websites, but that doesn’t mean that you need very many keywords. Avoid stuffing your website with too many keywords. Keyword stuffing can damage your SEO instead of helping to improve it. To optimize your website, you need to write fresh content that is crisp and easy to read, not stuffed with keywords.

Allow Only Quality Back-Links

Quality back-links will help improve your ranking. Add back-links that are from trusted or relevant websites. The links need to be related to the product and useful to the audience. You can use different techniques like social bookmarking, link exchange, and press release to get quality back-links. Avoid using manipulative SEO practice of getting back-links, as this can damage your site’s ranking.

In Addition…

To optimize for RankBrain, you need to be creative. The number of mobile users is increasing. Voice search is growing and meeting the needs of the audience has become a priority in SEO content. Your meta description, page title, and page content need to be meaningful and meet the needs of the audience. You need to understand the needs of your customers by understanding their perspective. Simple language, fresh content, and long tail keywords will help your site rank improve. It may take some time, but it is possible to optimize for RankBrain.

Anyone involved with website design or digital marketing wants to improve their website’s SEO to increase customer traffic. In late 2015, Google announced that their AI called RankBrain would henceforth be the third most important factor in their website rankings. In order to best ensure that you optimize your website’s position in search results, it is important to have a thorough understanding of this key element of the rankings. This article will explain what RankBrain is and how it works to evaluate websites.

What is RankBrain?

RankBrain is a machine learning system that sorts and ranks websites to help Google show users the most relevant results related to their queries. It does this by examining how users interact with webpages that show up as results of their Google search, and incorporating its evaluation of these interactions into the site’s rank within the list of results provided in future searches. Each time a user visits a website, RankBrain gets more information that it uses to evaluate the site’s quality and relevance. Websites that score well according to the RankBrain algorithm will rank higher in search results than websites that obtain lower scores.

How Does RankBrain Work?

RankBrain takes note of how users interact with search results, considering both individual behavior and the behavior of all users in the aggregate. These considerations are made using dwell time and click through rate.

RankBrain and Dwell Time

Regarding individual results, the algorithm records whether they spend a long time on a site or navigate away from it quickly. The amount of time that users spend on a website before returning to the search engine results page is called dwell time, and is one of two main elements of RankBrain website rankings.

Dwell time measures the time spent on the page, which has recently been recorded to be slightly over three minutes for pages in the top ten Google search results. That is quite a long time since on average users spend only around 30 seconds on most web pages. Dwell time is considered an important statistic when ranking websites because the assumption is that if users spend a long time on a page, that page must have information they find useful. Since Google wants to provide highly relevant search results, it makes sense to prioritize pages with information that users find applicable. You can increase the dwell time for your website by improving its content and design.

RankBrain and Click Through Rate

When evaluating the behavior of all Google users, RankBrain looks at the percentage of users that click on your website in the list of search results. This is known as the click through rate and it is the second key factor in RankBrain website rankings.

Click Through Rate or CTR is the number of people who click on the link to a particular website. RankBrain’s algorithm assumes that if many people click on a site, it is highly relevant, but if only few do, the site is not as relevant or does not contain high quality content. Google wants its searches to generate results people will want to look at. Giving your website a catchy and descriptive title can increase CTR.

For more information about RankBrain and how to improve your website’s search engine ranking, contact tekRESCUE, located in San Marcos, TX.

Does it matter where we come from to get to where we are today? When it comes to visitors to your website, the answer is a resounding “yes.” A website is like a storefront in a busy downtown intersection—each visitor could have used any number of roads to get there. As the owner of this storefront, you’d want to bring in as many visitors as possible, from as many roads as possible. On the web, however, it takes different design techniques to drive different types traffic, and if you haven’t been designing with each traffic source in mind, you may be missing out on all sorts of visitors.

Today, we’ll be going over these types of web traffic and offering some tips you can use to better design your site to generate as much traffic as possible of every kind.

Organic Search Traffic

The first type of web traffic we’ll be looking at is organic search traffic. These are visitors that entered keywords into a search engine and clicked on your site in the search results. If you want to design your site to drive as much organic search traffic as possible, this is where search engine optimization (SEO) techniques come into play. Your focus should be on telling search engines what your site is about, and convincing them that your site is a relevant source of information for that topic.

You can give search engines an idea of what your site is about by choosing the right keywords and having those keywords appear in the right places. This includes page titles and headers, meta tags such as title and description, image alt attributes, and simply in the flow of your paragraphs. As we discussed in a previous article, quality content remains the best way to convince search engines that your site is a relevant, credible information source.

The biggest design challenge here is to design for search engines without sacrificing your goals of designing for human visitors. A site stuffed to death with keywords may generate a lot of search traffic, but no visitor will stick around long if the site isn’t designed first and foremost with people in mind. Incorporating your keywords in a way that feels natural and organizing your site’s content clearly will appeal to both the bots and the humans.

If you want to learn more about SEO in-depth, check out some of our other articles on this topic. We’ve covered it pretty extensively on this blog.

Paid Search Traffic

The second type of web traffic on our list is paid search traffic. Organic search traffic gets its name because it happens automatically: a search engine recognizes your site as relevant to someone’s search and feeds it to them on its own accord. Paid search traffic, however, comes into play when you pay for an ad to run on a search engine.

Ads can be very effective, as they usually appear at the top of search results and make your site very visible. This doesn’t guarantee traffic on its own though. To optimize the amount of traffic you get out of a search ad, your best bet is to design your ad with attractive copy that will draw visitors in and convince them your site really is relevant to their search.

An effective paid search campaign doesn’t end with the ad, however—the page that visitors end up on when they click your ad is equally important. Your goal is to lower bounce rates, or the rate at which visitors leave quickly after making it to your site. Designing an attractive, well-written, easy to navigate landing page is a great way to keep these bounce rates low and draw in new visitors from a search ad campaign.

That’s all we have time for today, but these are only half of the web traffic sources we want to cover. Come back next month to read part two, where we’ll be going over referrals and direct traffic!

There are a lot of complicated, behind the scenes stuff that goes on when trying to rank well with Google. There are things you can tinker with, exact keywords you can target, campaigns you can start, code you can implement, and more behind the scenes work that can get you to rank higher on Google. But all of that is changed the way it is and valued by Google for one reason: because they are trying to rank the highest quality websites first. At the end of the day, you can let us worry about the behind the scenes stuff, but one of the first and most important steps to take is to make sure that your website has good, quality content. And that is more than just a couple of pages about what you do and about your company.

That is a part of it, of course. All of it plays a role, and any original content is important. Having pictures can be good, as well as having unique code for tools, calculators, form submission boxes and other custom features help out with your ranking. But if you have quality content, you are going to be well off.

What is Quality Content?

Quality content is anything that informs people about either what you do, or what they need from you. And what quality content should you write about? Anything that a lot of people search for is great, but if you run a business, you probably already know what people are calling you about. And it is those questions that your blog posts should answer. You can also post your blog posts and articles to letter to the editors and guest writing spots online, which is a great opportunity for cross-promotion.

At the end of the day, what you do, what you know, and what your customers want and need are what you should write about. It may seem like a good idea to try to tackle advanced problems, and that in-depth content can be helpful. But what the best thing for you to write about, is the things that you already know. When you go outside of your field of expertise, that is when you start giving bad advice, and leading customers astray.

Originality & Consistency

As well, Google punishes those who copy content from other places. If you know about something, you can write all original thoughts and tips out without having to paraphrase from other places. The more you know, the better and more original your advice can be. As well, by writing what you know, you can show that you have an in-depth understanding of what companies need from your business.

It is important to be consistent with your posting. Pictures or infographics can be nice to break up the all text posts. Target keywords or areas of your business that you foresee as profit centers, but also post about things that may be barriers of entry to them using your business. When you help them solve those problems, that can free them up to support you.

Your marketing strategy as a whole does not exist in a vacuum. When you put out ads in newspapers, put out branded items, hand out flyers, there are several ways to have your physical marketing symbiotically exist with your online marketing. This starts with branding, consistency of message and services, and using physical marketing to drive traffic and search engine ratings.

Use Consistent Branding

Branding is important, and adds to the professionalism of your brand. This means using the same logo for print ads and online ads. For example, if you are a restaurant advertising your Tuesday Happy Hour in newspapers, you also need advertise it with your online marketing. Do not have conflicting pricing or coupons either. These coupons get shared, and having different times or prices reflects poorly in your customer’s opinion of your value.

Have Your Platforms Reference Each Other

There is also a huge opportunity to drive traffic. This starts with the obvious, including links to your social media and website on all of your ads. If you have an overly complicated website link, you can use a URL shortener like bit.ly to use a shortened URL people can type in to link directly to a page about your product or offerings.

This also means on Facebook, using a named link. Facebook pages start with using random combinations of letters and numbers if you do not name the link yourself. So your page may be “Facebook.com/aEx5wP9zL3…” etc. But you can link to Facebook page’s by naming your URL. So for example Facebook.com/Apple leads directly to Apple’s corporate page. But remember, you can only name the URL once. So decide on what you want it to be, and keep it short and sweet.

QR codes are another marketing strategy that has become common. QR codes are essentially barcodes for websites. Almost every smartphone can read them using a QR scanner. You can include the QR image on your ad, which allows people to quickly access your site.

Target Repeat Customers

Driving traffic can also be done by rewarding repeat customers who share your Facebook page or share a post about a special deal on their social media for some kind of discount. You can ask them to share it or like your page without being punished by Google’s ranking services. A cornerstone of effective search engine ranking is also having good Google and Yelp reviews. This does NOT mean that you should pay people to give you rankings or give them a discount for a good review. This does however mean that you should target your repeat customers to ask for reviews. If you have a mailing list, and you can keep track of who uses your coupons or reads your letters, because these people are more likely to have a favorable opinion of your organization or business. These are the people you email them to ask for a review.

You don’t have to choose between online and physical marketing. They can exist symbiotically to make both better.

Once you have found the social media platforms that are best for your purposes, the next step is using that social media influence to boost your search engine results performance. A lot of people know to use social media to build brand awareness and drive new consumers to your organization, but not very many use it to build SEO ranking. When beginning this process, you will want to:

1. Create content that gets shared and viewed
2. Include relevant links and keywords in the content
3. Share the social media page links.

Links generate the best SEO results when the content is repeatedly shared.

This also means that posting a link to your site on your profile bio will not have as good of results as making content that gets highly shared. While sharing helps a lot, what also helps is people liking, following, retweeting and favoriting your posts and page. The best way to make sure that they get shared is to make content that is valuable and interesting to your user base. If you run a local bike shop, you may want to post a video of you on the local trails, or a news story on a new law requiring helmets be worn or adding bike lanes. If you are a marketing agency, you may want to create an infographic or blog post sharing numbers related to your services or industry trends. A political organization may benefit from interactive content that is a call to action, like answering an online poll (Facebook and Twitter has built in polls), or asking for virtual signatures for a petition. Content that is relevant to your follower’s interests is going to have the best results. Don’t be afraid to mix up content types either.

Include relevant links and keyword topics in the content.

This does not mean doing what is known as keyword stuffing. That is essentially just taking keywords people search and just spamming every single sentence with keywords without necessity. The best content will have a topic related to the audience you are targeting, but not need to have keywords forced into it. So if you shared an infographic on your social media, and made a blog post about that infographic, sharing your blog link would be helpful and relevant. If you are a local business trying to share a news article about your town but not your business, it would be out of place to include a link to your products in said post.

Post the social media page on your website, and the website on your social media page.

This adds what is known as authority to each of their respective rankings. Also make sure to include your social media page on your Google Business profile. So you will want to link your Facebook and Twitter prominently on the site’s header, and on the Google Business profile seen from the search results. Also put links to your website homepage on your profiles. This seems straightforward, but you need to make sure to do that to get the most out of your SEO efforts.

The first thing to do when editing your Google Business page is to log in to your account. If you do not have access to the account, you can create a listing or claim an old one using the advice in this Google Article. You will want to edit photos, address, phone number, social media, and even things like menu or show times.

Basics

Photo:

Selecting the cover photo can be important, as many times when people search you directly or search through general categories like “restaurants near me”, it is the first thing they see. So you will want to select a photo that quickly displays what you offer at your place of business. A bar should display their selection of liquor or draft beer, a billiards hall should show their pool tables, a pizza joint should select an appetizing food picture.

Address/Phone Number:

Selecting the address is as easy as asking Google to mail a confirmation code to the address selected, and having a robo-call dial your business number.

Social Media:

Put the major social media platforms you use that have the most relation to your business. If you are a restaurant or local business, just use Facebook, and maybe Twitter and Instagram. But if you are for example a recording studio you may want to use your SoundCloud. What you select will depend on your business.

Basics of “Schema”

How to Get Advanced Info on Google Results Page

Have you ever noticed how some businesses have the ability to see their menu on the Google Results page when you search “restaurant name + menu”? For example, Italian Garden Menu gives the categories (soup, salads, appetizers etc.) broken down and the options within each category in a tabbed menu screen without having to click on the website. Or some movie theaters you can search “movie theatre + movie times” and get all of the movies playing soon in a menu on the results page.

Using schema is a great way to quickly show information without the person having to click on your website. Some users will stick to the results page to quickly browse results. Using schema caters to the quick browse crowd. “Schema” isn’t just for restaurants or movie theaters, but can also be used for bowling alleys, lodging and hotels for availability, pricing and conference centers, parks, stores for products, pricing etc., service providers like contractors to say what they offer and the list goes on.

Implementing schema is difficult and requires coding knowledge, but isn’t overly difficult. Though tekRESCUE provides schema for its websites, these articles are for showing you the basics of doing it yourself. The resource page for schema is “schema.org/docs/documents.html”. Where your websites displays its menu if it’s a restaurant, is where you would want to place your markup, though it all changes depending on want to accomplish. But to begin browse the documentation page, and then use the search button to find what your establishment is. So search, for example, “hotels”, “food establishment” etc. The getting started page is located here, “schema.org/docs/gs.html”.