Twitter Releases its Official Marketing Calendar for 2019 Twitter has released a new, free resource to help guide marketers’ social media strategies in 2019. The 2019 Twitter marketing calendar identifies highly anticipated events that will unfold throughout the year.
In addition, Twitter estimates the number of Tweet impressions each of the events are expected to reach, based on internal data. Events in the calendar range from obvious to niche.
Everything from Valentine’s Day to Talk Like a Pirate Day is contained in the calendar
Marketers can use this information to capitalize on unique, once-a-year, opportunities to boost their reach.
For example, pizza places may want to take advantage of the upcoming National Pizza Day on February 9. It’s estimated to generate 34M tweet impressions. Bars and restaurants may be able to sell more cocktails on February 22, National Margarita Day, which is estimated to generate 14M tweet impressions.
Brands may find it worthwhile to tweet during the MTV VMAs on August 18, which is estimated to generate a whopping 2.5 billion tweet impressions.
Those are just a few of the many events included in Twitter’s marketing calendar.
For more information on the 2019 Twitter marketing calendar, to view the calendar, or to download it, visit this link.
How to use long-tail keywords to build your short-tail rankings Some SEO professionals may advise you not to bother chasing rankings for competitive keyword terms, but columnist Stoney deGeyter believes that you canbuild your authority for these keywords over time by focusing on the long tail.
If you have a relatively new or low-authority website, then you know how difficult it can be to rank for high-volume, short-tail keywordphrases. Heck, any competitive keyword can pose a challenge, even forwell-established sites.
I often hear experts talk about going after the low-hanging
fruit of keywords. “Forget about the short tail,” they say.
I agree that that going after the low-hanging fruit is agood strategy, but not at the expense of those highly competitive phrases thatwill drive some great traffic to your site. Rather, it’s that low-hanging fruit that paves the way to ranking for those more competitive phrases.
Very few searches are truly unique
When it comes to search terms, there isn’t a whole lot new
under the sun. Google says that 15 percent of all queries they get have never
been used before, but that doesn’t mean it’s unique in the true sense of the
word. Let’s assume, for example, that neither of the following searches has
ever been entered into Google:
• how to eat a lemon without cringing
• how to eat a lemon without making a face
Are either of these terms really unique? Well, according to
Google autocomplete, they are relationally similar to these:
And that tells us that even if my two made-up phrases fallwithin Google’s 15 percent of “unique” queries, we can see that it’s only the particular query string itself that’s unique, not necessarily the sentiment behind it.
And it’s that intent that gives us a goldmine of
optimization opportunities.
Optimize for topics, intents and desires
Search any given topic, and you’ll uncover hundreds,sometimes thousands, of keywords. Those keywords represent different things searchers want to know about that topic. One look at a 100+ keyword list andit’s easy to see why you can’t possibly optimize a single page for every(relevant) keyword on a given topic.
This is where you need to segment keywords into groups, each
group representing a similar intent. Good SEO and usability dictate that each
intent requires a unique page of content to satisfy the searcher’s needs.
Let’s look at a simple set of short-tail phrases:
20,200 monthly searches, according to Moz
According to keyword volume data from Moz, these two phrasesalone garner over 20,000 searches per month. And while they may not be the most competitive keywords you can find, they’re important to this industry — whichdoes make them competitive.
But that set of keywords spawns other keywords with
differing intents:
The green group is easily optimized on the same page of our
core terms. As for the rest, if you do the quick math, the total monthly search
volume represents only about 10 percent of the volume of the main group. But
this is a small sample — four groups out of dozen grouped possibilities. Add in
the rest of the researched keywords, and you get much closer to the 20K number
of the core terms.
Breaking out your short-tail keywords into related groups of
long-tail keywords makes for some good keyword targeting, provided you have (or
can create) the pages and content for them.
Don’t throw out the short tail
Many people may tell you to ignore the short tail. It’scompetitive, too difficult, too costly and so on. And, yes, those are all valid points. But the key is not to focus on the short tail exclusively, but ratherto use the long tail to build up relevance for the short tail.
And, in truth, this is a rather simple process. Let me
introduce you to a little thing I call “Optimize the Long Tail.”
In my process, you want to optimize not just for some of the
long-tail phrases — you want to optimize for all of them. Find all the keywords
in a given topic that have similar meanings, group them together, and find or
create a page to optimize.
Another quick example: Say you find a few keywords for your
product with the following qualifiers: discount, clearance, sale, closeouts,
surplus, cheap.
You see a pattern to those? They all have similar meaning,
which means they can be optimized together. Simply build a page where you put
all your discounted stock for quick sale.
But no discount page would be complete without a link back
to your main product page. After all, if the item they want isn’t discounted,
they may just go ahead and buy it at full price. So add in your text link to
the short-tail optimized page.
And then do it again with other keywords of similar intent. And
then again, and then again, and then again.
In fact, you may want to optimize out one entire short-tail
topic page before moving on to your next short-tail topic. This might mean
five, 10, or even a couple dozen pages, but each page optimized for a similar-intent
long-tail group provides a link and power back to the short-tail keyword that
you want to rank for.
Patience is key
It’s important that in all of this, you exercise patienceand have realistic expectations. Optimizing a dozen long-tail phrases won’tautomatically get you traction on the short-tail phrase you really want. Youstill have to build authority to all the pages. Without authority, you’re justnot going to rank for those short-tail phrases, regardless of how well you’ve optimized.
But optimizing out all those long-tail pages is great for
authority-building. Get those pages to rank on their own merits, and with each
page addition, you’ll be building on top of the existing authority you have.
You still have to market and promote and provide value.
(Don’t ever forget to provide value!) That may take years, but eventually
you’ll see your efforts pay off.
And the beauty of it is, while you’re optimizing long-tail in order to achieve short-tail, you’ll see the traffic and sales build. Eventhose less frequently searched long-tail phrases can add up to 50 to 100 percent of the traffic you’ll get from the short-tail phrases. And that’s whatmakes long-tail a crucial part of your strategy. They may drive less trafficper term, but they’ll drive just as much traffic in total.
Of all the SEO improvements you can make, one of the ones you have most control over is on-page optimisation. The tactic of improving your pages to earn more traffic through being more relevant to search queries, on-page SEO is something everyone can do. Our goal is to craft a page that helps the searcher achieve their goal, answering the intent of their search. Your efforts should focus on being as relevant and helpful as possible.
Websites come in all shapes and sizes, but no matter the subject matter or page layout, the basic set of on-page principles detailed below apply.
Create better title tags: One of the first things any searcher sees of your site isn’t visible on the page itself. The title tag displays as the blue link in the search results, and as the main heading when a page is shared on social media. This lets us optimise it in two ways.
Firstly, we can put our main keyword subject target(s) in it to show search engines what this page is about, preferably towards the beginning.
Secondly, we can build highly interesting titles that grab attention. Standing out in the search results this way can help earn us extra clicks. Of course, what will achieve this depends on your audience, and the type of page in question. A product description page and a blog post will have very different title tags.
Go through all your pages and look at your titles. Are you making the most of your keywords? And are they as interesting as possible (and suitable)? Each page needs a unique title tag, and tags should be 65 characters or less in length.
Use more interesting meta descriptions: Similar to your title tags, meta descriptions are a simple, but highly effective way to improve your SEO. Meta descriptions are used to generate the small paragraph of text that appears below a page’s title in the search results. They are designed to be a concise description of what you’ll find on the page. Although they do not count as a ranking factor, they DO influence click-through rate – a great meta description helps make a result stand out amongst its peers!
As a result, taking the time to review your meta descriptions and write the best ones possible is a key optimisation – these are essentially an advert for your page, so make them as compelling as possible!
To get started, look in Search Console for descriptions Google think could do with improvements. Then, using a piece of software called a crawler, we can see the entire website and look for pages with missing/ugly meta descriptions.
Don’t worry about the meta keyword tag: A piece of advice that refuses to go away – despite what some guides will say, don’t worry about using the meta keywords tag, it doesn’t help for SEO.
Have sensible URLs: A more technical topic, most sites can review and optimise their URLs, especially when creating new pages. Making URLs short, readable and keyword-subject-rich is a simple way to make the most of them. There are a few guiding principles, such as using hyphens instead of underscores and adding your primary keyword target – especially in the first few words. If possible, keeping them short and simple while reflecting site hierarchy is best.
One common mistake is using auto-generated URLs in many CMSs – these can use codes to describe a product where we want to have descriptive text. For example, www.retailer.com/product/gb/&categoryid=18&productid=567824 will work perfectly fine technically, but we’d prefer something more descriptive such as www.retailer.com/tvs/samsung-48inch-hd34589. Just like a title tag, we’d like the reader to be able to guess what’s on the page from the URL.
Make the most of your images: No doubt your new site has many beautiful images. But are you using them to their full potential?
Make sure you have made them as svelte as possible by reducing their size (both in data and physical size) so they are fast to load. Then, use a descriptive filename, and make use of alt tags to provide descriptive text so search engines can understand what the image is of.
Have clear headings: The main heading of your page tells visitors, including search engines, what the page is about. Heading tags let us mark up what is a heading or sub-heading on the page, and we can use the h1 tag to show the primary header. Most CMSs do this automatically.
Review your h1 tags across your site, using a crawler to find them all if required. Do they all describe the page accurately? Do they use the keyword target? And do they match the title tag in what they say the page is about?
A great way to put people off your page is to tell them one thing with the title tag, and then not match their expectation with your main heading. Don’t keep repeating keywords through your sub-headings – use variations and natural language to describe your content.
Improve your content: A big topic to finish, and the broadest. Look at the content you have for your page. Does it fully cover the topic in question? Does it address all the relevant keyword variations you can find?
Does it address common audience questions? Is it written as well as possible to improve engagement? Search engines love quality content, so you need to be making your page as good as possible each time. Look at who is ranking well for your keyword targets. How can you create a resource that is clearly much better? How can you solve problems?
Google’s mobile-first indexing now powers over half of Google’s search results. Why does it matter? If your desktop pages are different from your mobile pages both in terms of content and structured data, then your rankings may be impacted.
Google has generally moved sites that have parity between mobile and desktop pages first to mobile-first indexing. But with over half of the search results now indexed through mobile-first indexing, it is just a matter of time until your web pages are moved over as well.
Google announced last Wednesday that over half of the pages shown in search results globally are from Google indexing that content using mobile-first indexing procedure. That means that it is more likely that the pages you visit from a Google search are based on how Google crawled and indexed that content based on the mobile version of that page.
What is mobile-first indexing? Mobile-first indexing is simply how Google crawls and indexes the web. Instead of looking at the desktop version of the page, Google looks at the mobile version of the page. In more simple terms, Google is crawling and indexing your web page based on how it renders on a mobile phone versus a desktop computer.
Why does it matter? If your desktop pages are different from your mobile pages both in terms of content and structured data, then your rankings may be impacted.
Google has generally moved sites that have parity between mobile and desktop pages first to mobile-first indexing. But with over half of the search results now indexed through mobile-first indexing, it is just a matter of time until your web pages are moved over as well.
How will the social media landscape change in 2019? Here are the key trends identified in the online search engine watch magazine that you need to consider for a successful marketing strategy.
Social media marketing needs to be frequently adapted to the changing trends. The rapid pace that social media platforms evolve requires from marketers to be alert if they want to maintain successful tactics.
2018 had been a busy year for all social media platforms. There were lots of positive and negative stories that had to do with their usage and it’s now time to review our social marketing strategies.
Social Media Trends for 2019 The only way to survive in-between data breaches, emerging technologies and new platforms is to ensure that you:
Understand your audience
Review your social media marketing strategy
Allocate time and budget to new tools and technologies
Keep your focus on what works
Do your best to build trust with your users in every campaign
Social media marketing is going towards a stage that focuses more on ROI, new technologies and a trusting relationship between the brand and the customers.
The Importance of Starting an SEO Project in 2019 As 2019 comes ever closer, as business owners and webmasters, we’re all thinking about how to market our website or business even more effectively in the coming year. We’ve seen many new and emerging trends dominate the financial markets in 2018, from cryptocurrencies to artificial intelligence, but we need to capitalise on those trends that will continue to help us succeed in a competitive world. Search engine optimization has always been an essential strategy to improving a website’s traffic, and it’s one to stay.
In this guide, we’re going to take a look at why you should consider starting an SEO project in 2019, focusing on some new technologies to watch out for.
Why SEO?
Implementing an effective SEO strategy is crucial to maintaining a solid marketing foundation; by implementing the correct techniques, your website will gain credibility and trust with Google and other search engines. This trust will ensure your website will rank highly for competitive keywords, leading to an increase in traffic and sales, ultimately ensuring optimal growth in your consumer base for 2019.
This means that once you have implemented your SEO project, and laid the foundations to a successful one, then the real majority of the work has been done, and all that’s left to do is to wait until your page starts ranking on search results. As users start to interact with your website and share your content, Google will notice the excellent user experience and start to rank your website higher. This is without you doing any other work, once the initial SEO project has been completed.
If we compare this to social media marketing and other forms of traditional marketing, they require a constant source of time and money, whereas with SEO, the benefits are long-lasting and will continue to reward content creators and webmasters who create high-quality content.
Increase Traffic for the Long-Term SEO can often be the deciding factor between the success and failure of a website. If a website doesn’t target the correct keywords or implement little to no SEO strategies at all, their pages will rank poorly on Google, leading to very poor traffic. Most websites report receiving the majority of their traffic from search engines, with only a small minority report receiving more traffic from social media. While social media marketing can bring traffic, this traffic is often short-lived, as the next news cycle or hit viral video takes over the feeds of users.
We’ve all witnessed marketing campaigns that were incredibly successful in the short-term, but as soon as the campaign ended, the traffic began to dwindle, and dramatically so.
This is due to the nature of the marketing campaigns. Investing in having a social media influencer promote your website or business can be important and lead to fantastic click-through-rates and traffic, but this traffic is short-lived, similarly to the social media news cycle.
Therefore, SEO is essential help your website become successful, because by investing in SEO, you are investing in a long-term strategy, which will lead to traffic reaching your website continually.
You can then invest in other short-term marketing techniques, since you’ll always have a new supply of traffic arriving at your website every day. With this traffic, you can further optimize your site by doing A/B testing, placing Call-to-Actions in your pages, and increasing lead generation. This can only be practiced in the long-term by ensuring that search engine traffic reaches your website.
That’s why maintaining an excellent ranking on Google can ensure a constant supply of traffic. If you have “evergreen” content, that is, content that stays relevant throughout the year and is not solely seasonal, then you can ensure that traffic will always arrive upon your website regardless.
Establish Trust with Google Gaining the trust of major search engines, such as Google, can be incredibly beneficial to your website’s online presence. While it can take several months, even a few years at times, for search engines to establish trust with a website, the trust built can be incredibly important for the website’s future endeavours in the marketing world.
Trust is often built by ensuring users have an excellent experience on-site, aren’t distracted by popups, and generally don’t exit quickly upon arriving (this will affect your website’s bounce rate). This done through creating high quality, engaging content and having a mobile-responsive, well-designed website that offers an excellent user experience.
Low quality websites that offer users a poor user experience will never build trust with search engines, and can never rank well in search results, therefore their websites will remain with poor visibility and have little growth.
But why build trust in the first place?
If you want your website to rank highly in search results, then building trust with search engines is an incredible bonus. Your site will often rank highly even without much backlinking efforts on your and your marketing team’s part, because this trust has been built over several months and years.
Become an Online Influencer If your website gains the trust of search engines, then other competitors are more likely to notice your website and may want to form partnerships, where you both produce vlogs or content related to your niche and promote the others’ content; this can be a fantastic source of extra traffic, and new customers.
While guest posting is strictly not recommended these days, other websites would be more than happy to drop a link to one of your articles in their social media posts. This partnership can be extremely beneficial to the livelihood of your website, and can bring customers from other domains too.
Conclusion With the rise of social media and other forms of marketing, it can be tempting to forgo starting an SEO project, but for long-term traffic and success, SEO is crucial to achieving those.
Here at Direct Submit SEO Services, we focus on helping websites kickstart SEO projects and focus on strategies that will help their website gain the trust of search engines. Make sure to contact us today via our website or call 0845 272 2350 if you’d like to learn more.
Google Search Algorithm Update For the past week or so, there has been chatter within the SEO community about Google search algorithm updates. The Search Engine Roundtable journal are reporting that the chatter is very limited but those who are complaining are seeing huge changes for their sites in Google search. But again, it does not seem very wide spread.
The reason the story is being covered is because after about five days of hearing this chatter, it is still going on. Most of the tools show normal volatility but some are a bit off the charts.
It can be that a lot of people are already taking it easy before the holidays and are not noticing the changes on their site, thus not chatting about it in the SEO communities. Or it can also mean that very few sites are impacted by whatever is going on.
Generally, Google doesn’t make huge changes to their ranking algorithms before the holidays. But that is not always the case.
There are so many ways webmasters and “marketers” continue to misunderstand keywords’ role in general SEO initiatives, and how they shouldbe used in the day-to-day strategy.
Let’s take a more look at specific types of keyword abuseand mismanagement, including irrelevant usage, writing for a specific keyworddensity, and keyword stuffing.
Irrelevant Keyword Targeting/Confusion
All too often, novice SEO practitioners try and fit their
content and messaging within the confines of their keyword research (and not
much else).
These “marketers” will shape the content and its metadata to
represent keywords it’s not properly aligned with, nor the proper intent of the
users conducting the searches for the high-volume keywords being targeted.
This causes brands to likely lose the attention of readers
before ever having the chance to communicate a real message with them.
If the keywords marketed for don’t align with the content on
the page, the disconnect will hinder the success of content even if it’s
otherwise of good quality.
Don’t try to mislead users and direct them to content that
is misrepresented by high-volume keywords in order for increased visibility.
Google knows what this looks like, and it can truly be
defined as an obsolete SEO practice (as well as a “black hat” technique, in
many instances).
Keyword Density
Writing for a specific “keyword density,” like many
keyword-focused marketing tactics, is just missing the mark.
Google no longer depends on keyword density (or the ratio of
specific keyword usage to the overall page copy) to determine whether a webpage
is an effective source for answering a search query.
It is so much more advanced than simply crawling for
keywords; search engines like Google use a multitude of signals to determine
search results.
While keywords remain important to the topics and ideas they
represent, they are not the lifeline for ranking for high-value search queries.
The quality of content and how the messaging is delivered
are the lifeline for that.
Keyword Stuffing
This is probably the oldest trick in the book. SEO is about
keywords, right?
So, loading up our webpages with keywords, especially the
same high-value keyword we are aggressively targeting throughout the website,
is going to help us show up higher in search, thus outranking out competition?
Absolutely not.
Search engines have, for a long time, known what keyword
stuffing is and what kind of text combinations are unnatural. They notice these
as attempts to manipulate search results and demote the content as such.
Yes, there may still be valuable content that uses simple
keyword stuffing, either intentionally or unintentionally, that is not demoted
because of its actual value to users.
Back in the day, webmasters trying to game the system wouldgo as far as putting every keyword variation of a high-value keyword in thewebsite footer or, even more sketchily, make those keywords the same colour asthe site’s background, effectively hiding them from humans but not the search engine crawlers.
For more information on how Direct Submit can help you make more of your website, call today on 0845 2722350.
Examining Links & Bad Redirects
While links are great to help drive traffic and boost your SEO ranking, they could also ruin your SEO efforts if they aren’t managed well.
Broken links on your web pages should be rectified or removed as soon as possible. Reasons for broken links could stem from entering the wrong URL, removal or permanent move of the linked webpage by the destination website, or a software on the user’s end that is blocking access to the destination website.
There is a WordPress plugin for WordPress users that can be integrated into the website to get rid of dead links. You can also manually check for broken links by using the broken link checker plugin.
How to disavow negative backlinks
Google has a Disavow Tool that can help protect your site from penalties that may arise from bad linking and also help remove bad links. This tool simply sends a signal to Google to ignore negative backlinks. To disavow negative backlinks, look for the links you want to disavow, create a disavow file and then upload to the Google Disavow Tool. Once this is done, the specified links will no longer be considered by Google.
Bad redirects and best redirects – 301 and 302
301 and 302 redirects might look similar to a user but definitely not to search engines. While 301 is a permanent move to a new site, 302 is temporal but a lot of users get to mix both up and use either, without thinking much about the difference. If you use 302 rather than 301, search engines might view it as a temporal move and still continue to index the old URL, which could affect your SEO rankings.
3. Not maximizing Google Search Console
Google Search Console is packed with lots of benefits that should be maximized in order to have the best SEO experience. Some of the things to pay attention to in Google Search Console include search analytics, links to your site, mobile usability, robots.txt tester, sitemaps, index status, and security issues. Once an identified issue is fixed, your rankings will be improved and your website will gain more traction.
SEO Campaign – What is it, and how will it help my business? In order to succeed in business in 2019 and beyond, SEO, and especially local SEO should be a required part of your marking strategy. SEO stands for search engine optimisation, which means that the website for your business can reach potential customers using search engines like Google and Bing. Since getting your business in front of the right consumers is the first step to winning them over as customers, you can’t afford to skip out on a solid SEO campaign.
How do we know you need SEO?
By analysing current and past trends, we can determine what searchers want. In recent years, “near me” searches have been on the rise. This type of search is like when a consumer Googles something like, “dentists near me.”
You can replace “dentists” with any type of business or office.
What this boils down to is that people want fast access to information about local businesses that will meet their needs.
How can your business benefit from an SEO campaign?
Now that you know a bit about what an SEO campaign can do, it’s time to move on to understanding why it works and what the benefits are. SEO can:
Draw new customers to your website
Get customers the information they need
Help your business be available 24/7
An SEO campaign accomplishes all of this by making your website one that search engines love to show users. This translates to getting a high-ranking spot on search engine results pages, or SERPs.
More Customers Means More Growth
Many people often confuse marketing and sales because the point of marketing is to bring in customers to boost sales. However, you know as well as we do that it’s a different job altogether. Yet, everything in business is tied to the bottom line. Sales define a business’ success. They determine whether a business dives, survives, or thrives. The more customers you can bring into the business, the more sales your business can get. We know you know this.
What you might not yet know is that you need local SEO to keep bringing in customers. A business with strong search engine rankings is more likely to be found. Local SEO not only connects your business to consumers, but especially to local consumers. If you want to get people in the door, they need to find you online. They need to find you on search engines.
Google handles at least 2 trillion searches a year. That number has consistently been on the rise since the search engine’s inception. The power of internet search is not waning. You need to get on board with SEO if you want to continue to get customers in the door–whether virtually or physically.
The Benefits of Website SEO Search engine optimisation is very important if you want to increase your visibility in the online world. While the methods of getting your brand message out there have evolved as search engines have become more and more sophisticated, the basic idea is still the same. When someone searches for something in your industry or product category, you want your website to rank near the top of the search engine listings.
Ø Over 90% of internet users take advantage of a search engine to find what they want on the web and that figure is fairly constant across the globe, including the UK.
Ø While competition for keywords in your industry might well be high, there are a number of other factors involved in SEO that need to be addressed if you want to boost your rankings significantly.
Ø Strong SEO is part of the entire marketing mix and can feed into other aspects of your strategy such as local searches and visibility on social media.
Ø Website SEO is a mix of standard inclusions such as site maps and good content that needs to meet appropriate standards as well as ongoing initiatives such as building strong inbound links, internal linking, image tagging and regularly updated and engaging content.
Time to Get Your Website Noticed Direct Submit prides itself on the underlying process by which we approach each and every SEO project we are involved with. We understand that each client will have specific, individual needs and our approach in creating and implementing the correct SEO strategy is vital to the success of the SEO project.
This approach and attention to detail is what has helped Direct Submit become a leading Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) company. Call us today on 0845 2722350 and get your website working harder for your business.
