SEO mistake

Top 7 SEO Mistakes You Should Avoid

SEO mistake

In this digital marketing era, it is undeniable that businesses are attempting to stand out from other rivals by coming with a variety of best-in-class digital marketing strategies. However, one of the most common approaches that most businesses are now focusing on is what is called ‘SEO’.

SEOstands for ‘Search Engine Optimization’, which is known as an effective practice that businesses rely on to get more organic traffic through search engines. Now, you may be curious as to the reason why SEO predominantly matters among groups of digital marketers. This is due to the fact that being more initially recognized means being able to stand a chance of business’s success. Thus, SEO is one of the most prevailing marketing strategies that businesses should not even once overlook.

The Role of SEO in Digital Marketing Strategies

Intriguingly, SEO forms the strong foundation of your business’s marketing strategies. It enables your business to engage with your desired audience, establish your brand trustworthiness, and enhance your website traffic. Much like when an appealingly designed storefront with captivating displays can draw in passersby, an SEO-optimized website can attract potential clients in powerful manners.

Apart from that, SEO functionally goes beyond merely drawing traffic. It centers on attracting qualified leads actively seeking products or services akin to yours. By concentrating on particular keywords and optimizing your site through this approach, you can guarantee that your site becomes more visible to the appropriate audience at the appropriate time.

7 SEO Mistakes Your Business Shouldn’t Make

When applying the use of SEO to your marketing strategies, it is crucial that the overall steps you opt for are literally effective and correct. Wrongful SEO approaches, as a consequence, can lead to numerous failures in your optimization efforts. Thus, MarketingGuru will address seven common SEO mistakes that your business shouldn’t make in your marketing strategies.

1. Opting for Incorrect Keywords

Selecting the right keywords is essential for the ultimate success of your SEO marketing strategies. Using irrelevant or overly competitive keywords can result in your content being lost in the ocean of search results. It’s vital to conduct thorough keyword research to identify relevant keywords with high search volume and low competition. By targeting the right keywords, you can improve your content’s visibility and attract more organic traffic to your site. Also, don’t forget to check if your included keywords are too stuffed — this can lead to failures in your SEO practice.

2. Neglecting Content Marketing

Content marketing plays an imperative role, as high-quality, relevant content is more likely to rank well in search engine results. Neglecting to create and optimize your content for SEO can hinder your site’s visibility and ranking potential. It’s important to regularly produce high-quality content that is valuable to your audience and aligns with your SEO marketing strategies. By focusing on content marketing, you can improve your site’s authority, attract more organic traffic, and enhance your overall SEO efforts.

 

3. Forgetting the Importance of Mobile-Friendliness

With the prevailing use of mobile devices, having a mobile-friendly website is also essential for SEO. Google and other search engines prioritize mobile-friendly websites in their search results, meaning that non-mobile-friendly sites may rank lower in search results. Therefore, it’s important to ensure that your website is responsive and optimized for mobile devices to provide a seamless user experience and improve your satisfying site’s performance.

4. Inadequate Social Marketing for Your Content

การตลาดออนไลน์ช่วงโควิด(digital marketing in covid)

Social media can be a powerful channel for promoting your content and driving traffic to your site. However, many businesses may overlook the importance of social media in their SEO marketing strategies. By actively promoting your content on social media platforms and engaging with your audience, you can increase your content’s visibility and attract more traffic to your site. Additionally, social signals, such as likes, shares, and comments, can also positively impact your site’s SEO performance.

5. Overlooking Tags and Meta Descriptions

Tags and meta descriptions are essential elements of on-page SEO that help search engines better understand the content of your pages. Forgetting to optimize your tags and meta descriptions can result in your content being less visible in search results. Therefore, it’s important to also include relevant keywords in your tags and meta descriptions, and ensure they accurately reflect the content of your pages. By optimizing your tags and meta descriptions, you can improve your desirable content’s visibility and click-through rate in the overall search results.

6. Ignoring to Include Some Internal Links

Internal linking is also another important SEO marketing strategies that helps improve your site’s visibility and unrivaled user experience. By linking to other pages on your site, you can help search engines discover and index your content more effectively. Furthermore, internal linking can help users navigate your site and find relevant content, which can improve their overall experience. Because of this, it’s important to strategically add internal links throughout your content to improve your site’s SEO outcomes.

7. Disregarding Website Auditing

Regular site auditing is essential for identifying and fixing technical issues that can drastically impact your site’s SEO performance. Neglecting to audit your site can result in a wide range of unnoticed issues that can harm your site’s visibility in search results. Owing to this, it’s critical to regularly audit your site for issues such as broken links, duplicate content, and crawl errors, and take corrective action to improve your site’s SEO performance.

Final Thoughts

To recapitulate, it goes without saying that SEO is worth applying to your marketing strategies as it helps enhance your business visibility through search engines. However, it is more important to note that there are certain conditions that should be seriously taken into account while integrating SEO to your marketing strategies. As such, partnering with some professionals like MarketingGuru will leverage your SEO efforts to the highest triumph as desired. Contact us today for your upcoming digital marketing success!

grey-line-modern-trend-fashion-youtube-thumnail

SEO Checklist 2023 to boost your search ranking

SEO services are known as a hack for web owners.

MarketingGuru is a full-service digital marketing agency in Thailand that notably specializes in SEO services across regional and global companies.

We serve digital marketing services to clients from different industries and business experiences with measurable results. Over 50+ Clients are happy to contract with us because of the 200% of ROI.

However, organic keywords are not always key! From our expertise in SEO services, we will discuss Other crucial elements to be a top-search in Google ranking below.

  1. Improve website usability 

First of all, website architecture matters for either customers or Google easily navigate. Whereas, it is a first impression that influences visitors to stay on your site instead of clicking the red x button of a window without action. Unorganized themes and layouts evenly decrease their trust and credibility. 

Web owners may use Google Analytics and Google Console to track users’ behavior and what information they are looking for to drive digital marketing effectiveness. Also, you can keep your site accessibility and availability :

  • Make it crawlable to get detected by robots
  • Visual sitemaps to plan your page
  • Consistency, simplicity and accurate

  1. Check site speed 

Presently, Responsiveness is a big concern to be one of the ranking factors by Google and repeat business. Customers are prone to feel confused and frustrated and abandon your site if they are not able to see and connect with content quickly. Don’t make them wade through a slow experience! Keep Testing your site speed and check if it works well with any different devices, locations and operating systems.

Here are some tips to speed up your site

  • Use external CSS/JavaScript and code
  • Optimized graphics and video size 
  • Apply browser caching
  • Minimize an iframes

  1. Find your competitors

Our Digital Marketing agency helps clients to outstanding competitors by utilizing SEO services. These tools will bring analysis of competitors’ offerings, marketing strategies and target markets. Additionally, medium-tail or long-tail keywords entail support pages and compare what needs to be improved. Also, researching new ideas like relevant keywords in the same category. Though, be unique as a way of attracting potential customers.

  1. Assess your content, always

Content evaluation is of considerable importance whilst marketing algorithm updates are ever-changing. Content creators and Digital Marketing agencies need to follow and implement search rater’s guidelines. This assessment ensures that content resonates with your audience and provides solutions for customers’ pain points. Determine your content: Does it trustworthy and provide value to visitors from search engines viewpoints? Does it feed high-quality and up-to-date information?

Poor content can cause serious damage to your audience’s experiences besides bad design or slow page loading. Lots of advertisements or spammy links from other sites are not a bright idea either. As is known, SEO services facilitate users to find keywords that are relevant to your title and target. You can get the most out of those words to attract more traffic and engagement for free with When organic keywords optimization.

Common elements to create top-quality content:

  • Know keyword intent to increase conversion rate
  • Help the reader to navigate easier to find what they are headed
  • Verify what types of pages you want to display
  • Understand Google algorithms and make them brief, guided and accurate

Apart from content quality, meta-description quality should not be ignored.

  1. Link buildings

Regarding SEO services, off-page SEO is another of the most powerful search engines. specifically, it brings a huge traffic boost to your website directly. Considering, the core of off-page SEO is building backlinks. Your ranking depends on quality of the content rather than quantity. Although linking is contemporarily and competitive use the right tool such as LinkAssistant to source leads and search for potential links. Furthermore, utilisation of white hat techniques avoid the risk of penalty. Besides, natural links will fuel brand awareness.

301 and 302 redirects, for instance, have just deemed no harm to SEO because they can elevate PageRank and traffic efficiently. Especially, in the right place – visual content displayed on Facebook and Pinterest. Next, specify “Canonical URL “ to clog duplicate content and Google from index one of them.

  1. Create a robot.txt File

  1. Fix technical SEO issues

Keep in mind that having SEO issues without knowing it is a complete waste of money. We understand that nobody wants to lash out at the Digital Marketing budget due to labeled crawl equity in Google. As well as company ROI and marketing goals are blocked.

Perpetually check and update your site links that may indirectly cause a budget issue. Broken links, long redirect chains and redirect issues cease a crawler from visiting your website as they imply your content is low quality. Such links damage bounce rate, company reputation and relationship with Google. Again, Users may concerned about whether your company is reliable or not.

  1. Track and measure SEO KPIs

Finally, Key Performance Indicators for SEO are a basis for any marketing companies and agencies. It gauges their progress to make better decisions on campaigns. Moreover, remarkable outgrowth helps to maintain customer retention and perceived value.

Google Analytics and Google console even more improve ability and provide insight from CTR (click-through rate), conversion on your landing page and customer engagement. Which is difficult to measure. Use analysis on keyword performance to have a deeper understanding of marketing projects.

  • Traffic
  • Backlinks
  • Conversions

MarketingGuru digital marketing agency is ready to professionally enhance your web ranking to be a top search in Thailand!

We provide free consulting for full-stop marketing services in Thailand, Contact us today!

278618404_504537751255461_2944604273100916828_n

What are the five reasons for paraphrasing?

Paraphrasing is a technique commonly used by writers to express the ideas of another author using their own words. In simple terms, it involves rephrasing and restating existing concepts from published sources. Paraphrasing has gained significant importance in content writing for various reasons. In this post, we will discuss the key reasons why you should consider incorporating paraphrasing into your writing.

 

The importance of paraphrasing 

 

Paraphrasing holds significant importance for a variety of reasons. In this regard, the following five factors are widely recognized as the most crucial ones.

 

1. Paraphrasing helps you present ideas in a better way

 

As mentioned earlier, paraphrasing involves presenting ideas rather than the exact words of another writer. To effectively present ideas, thorough research and ideation are necessary. During the research phase, it is advisable to take note of key points that aid in understanding the core message of the content. These main points and ideas should be carefully considered when writing your own version.

 

2. Paraphrasing helps you keep away from the accusation of plagiarism 

 

The most crucial reason why paraphrasing is important is that it helps you avoid plagiarism. When you are using the same ideas and words of another writer in your content then you are simply committing plagiarism. But if you paraphrase content then you can keep yourself away from the accusation of plagiarism. It’s a way to present information using your unique expression, protecting you from unintentional or intentional plagiarism.

 

3. Paraphrasing Reduces the Need for Extensive Research

 

Creating a new content can be time-consuming and research extensive research. However, there is an alternative approach that can help streamline the research phase. By opting to rewrite or paraphrase existing content, you can significantly reduce the need for extensive research. To ensure originality, it is advised to gather ideas and information from various sources and then paraphrase them to craft a fresh and unique post.

 

4. Paraphrasing helps you make your writing style better

Practicing is crucial. It not only helps you enhance your writing skills but also allows you to avoid errors and improve the quality of your content. Another important aspect of paraphrasing is its ability to simplify complex information. By utilizing this technique, you can easily refine your writing and make it more accessible to readers.

 

5. Paraphrasing helps you save a lot of time and energy 

Paraphrasing offers a valuable way to save time and energy in content creation. By investing time in outlining and planning your content can help organize your thoughts and streamline the writing process. Additionally, utilizing online paraphrasing tools further facilitates quick content generation. Embracing paraphrasing techniques, coupled with effective planning, allows you to save significant time and energy while creating engaging and original content.

 

Enhancing Paraphrasing Accuracy and Reliability with Online Tools

 

Paraphrasing accurately and with complete reliability can be challenging, as there is always a risk of plagiarism. However, you can use online paraphrasing tools to help you create and present new content with precision. These tools are user-friendly and, best of all, free to use.

 

To utilize an online paraphrasing tool, simply copy the content from your reference sources and paste it into the tool’s input box. After inserting the text or document files, click on the ‘Paraphrase Text’ button. Within seconds, the tool will generate a fresh version of the content. By employing artificial intelligence and ENL (Emulated Natural Language) technology, an essay rewriter produces human-like content easily and quickly.

 

By incorporating these tools into your writing process, you can confidently rewrite content while maintaining accuracy and reliability.

Read more articles click

Viruses, coronavirus or bacteria cell in close up. 3D render of global crisis patogen

COVID-19 Digital Marketing and SEO Tips: How to Prepare Your Business for the Downturn?

The COVID-19 epidemic has impacted many businesses across the globe. At this point in time, companies around the world that felt the impact of dwindling sales and falling consumer spending as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak.

As a business, you must have a plan to be ready for the long run despite the pandemic’s effect on your business for this period. Because of governmental regulations from countries around the world and recommendations from the World Health Organization (WHO), people are looking to stay at home or avoid going to crowded places. This results in many businesses, especially those in the retail sector, taking a hit in their sales.

Don’t Panic and Pull the Plug on Your Campaigns!

The COVID-19 period will be trying times for businesses. Those that are operating on tight cash flows will struggle to stay afloat. However, we must realize that this epidemic will not last forever and eventually, life will carry on. This is no time for you to panic and bail on your business.

We’ve heard from customers and customers of our friends that are concerned about their marketing campaigns, with some even pulling the plugs on their campaign and keeping their marketing on hold until the hold epidemic dies down. For brick-and-mortar stores, this is a good time to look into alternative marketing methods. Online marketing could be an avenue worth exploring if you’re a retailer that hasn’t engaged in it yet. In our opinion, when dealing with the business downturn, companies should look for alternative means to market rather than to immediately pull the plug. Reason being, pulling the plug on your campaigns now might potentially lead to an even harder struggle when trying to recover from the downturn. You will very likely be competing in an oversaturated environment as businesses aggressively market in an attempt to recover from the impact of COVID-19.

The use of online marketing to help tank some of the damage that your business is about to take in this period is crucial. Marketing firm Dentsu Aegis Network’s research has shown that 14% of 155 surveyed stated that they were moving their offline media budget to online media. This makes sense as the more this virus progresses on, the more people are going to take it more seriously and self-isolate. Thus resulting in higher internet usage naturally as these are some of the forms of entertainment for people to pass time when they’re not outside.

What we would suggest for businesses to do in this trying period is to prepare for what happens afterwards. The higher internet usage during this period creates more opportunities for your brand to engage with your target audience. Thus, if anything, your business should be looking to capitalize on these opportunities presented to you as a result of the circumstances. Here are some of the ways that you could use SEO and Digital Marketing to prepare your business for the COVID-19 downturn.

1. Prepare For What Happens Afterwards by Retaining Existing Customers

Your business’s presence will be important in these times. After all, if you operate in the retail sector, chances are people will start forgetting about your brand as social distancing and staying at home becomes more commonplace during this period.

In order to prepare for the aftermath of the whole Corona virus situation, it is important for your business to remind customers that you still exist. You are at risk of losing your customers if you distance (pun intended) away from them without any communication. Besides, it is cheaper to retain existing customers than to acquire new ones.

For a start, your company could look to create more content than before during this period. The idea behind using content to engage with existing customers in this period is that naturally, more content will be consumed as everyone starts to increase their internet usage. It is important to remind your customers and keep them updated about what is going on with your business in terms of upcoming innovations and promotions after the whole COVID-19 saga looms over. This will help your customers be reminded of your company’s existence and creates more customer touch-points to engage with them (although we would recommend you keep physical touches at a minimal of course).

Social Media is another great way to help with retention. This is evidently seen from statistics predict that ad spending on social media platforms is set to rise by 22.2% as a result of the Corona Virus. A recent study has also shown an increase in 76% in daily accumulated likes on Instagram advertisement posts in the past two weeks. These statistics show much extra time consumers will be spending on social media during the outbreak.

The key to retention is engagement and communication with your customers. Your customers are interested in finding out how your business is handling the whole COVID-19 situation and what alterations are made to your business delivery methods. They would also want to know that the company that they are buying for cares for its employees, customers and community by implementing measures to help prevent the spread. Thus, it is essential that your company partakes in social media engagement to remind your existing customers of your brand’s efforts in preventing the spread of COVID-19 and interact with them to keep them with your company.

2. Make Sure Your Google My Business Profile is Up to Date

Image result for google my business

COVID-19 has caused many businesses to operate on special hours in order to help prevent the spread of the virus. To help with your customer’s experience of buying or using your company’s services, you must update your Google My Business (GMB) profile. This is a recommendation from Google. Google has asked businesses to update their business hours on their GMB profile, update their business descriptions and write posts to update customers. For example, if your restaurant is only doing take outs during this period, it is important to let your customers know that so they can plan accordingly.

Additionally, you could utilize GMB’s Question and Answer feature to help people understand what your restaurant’s status is and answer some of their worries during the COVID-19 season. Get your employees to help upvote the answers so that it would show up in your business’s knowledge panel as the main question.

If you haven’t already set up a Google My Business profile (which you definitely should!), it is important to have one right now during the COVID-19 epidemic. This is because local searches will see a surge with more people searching for keywords related to businesses near them. To avoid catching the virus, people are looking to commute less in order to avoid large crowds and consequently, they will look for the nearest places to get their necessities. Now is definitely a good time to capitalize on local searches and gain more customers!

3. Have Anything Related to COVID-19 or Cancellations as a Negative Keyword

Image result for google ppc

This tip is especially essential if you’re in the travel or events industry and running Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertisements. Due to travel bans from governments around the world, travellers’ plans get changed. Companies that want to help their customers out in these circumstances and improve their PR would offer cancellations and even refunds. If you are currently running PPC ads and in these industries, it is best for you to plan in the long run. If this all sounds very foreign to you and you aren’t too sure about what PPC ads are, we have an article written for you that explains the benefits of Google Advertising.

To plan for the long run, you could perhaps shift your PPC budget to target more keywords that are for promotions in the future. Plan for promotions that are only going to happen maybe 4 or 5 months down the road and start targeting these promotions. On top of that, another trick you could employ if you’re still advertising for your company with PPC is to add negative keywords. Keywords tied to cancellations of bookings like “cancel” or “covid-19” can be added to the negative matches list. This helps you not waste your budget on people who are not searching to make a booking.

4. Use of Keyword Research to Plan Business Delivery

With the different ways the COVID-19 can spread, businesses look toward different business delivery means. What is important here is that your business can make use of SEO and digital marketing to help with planning out your business delivery means.

Say for example you’re an events company. Instead of your usual delivery of hosting seminars in exhibition halls, you could look for alternative methods like hosting a webminar for your audience online. Or, if you’re in the grocery or food and beverage business, you would do take outs instead of dine-ins.

To help you make a better-informed decision on what is the kind of business delivery mean your company should execute in these times, you can utilize keyword planning tools. Not sure whether or not you should do drive-in pickup or curbside delivery? Should you do a recorded webminar in place of your events or a live stream on your Facebook page? Keyword researching will help you to make these decisions. By finding out which of these keywords have higher volume in your area, you can help make better-informed decisions on which forms of business delivery is more suitable for you.

Adapt, Improvise, Overcome!

Image result for adapt improvise overcome
Source: KnowYourMeme

The unexpected epidemic of COVID-19 has indeed caused many businesses to tank. We hope that in this article we were able to help you understand how you could use digital marketing and SEO tactics to help keep your business prepared for the months to come.

Just remember, this phase of COVID-19 will pass eventually and everything will return to normal and stabilize. Search Engine Marketing will remain as an essential tool for your business still after all of this is over. Do not panic and pull the plug on your digital marketing efforts, just adapt to the situation, improvise on your campaigns and delivery methods and eventually, overcome this tough period. After all, tough times don’t last, but tough businesses do!

If your company needs an SEO expert well-versed in producing content for social media as well as help you manage your PPC campaigns on multiple platforms including Google, Facebook and LINE Ad, do not hesitate to contact us now on our website! Our business is still fully running despite this outbreak so rest assured, we will definitely get back to you as soon as possible.

chain-PEXU228-2048x1536

4 Simple Ways to Start Building Quality Backlinks

chain-PEXU228-2048x1536

If you are reading this article, you would have already known that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a key aspect of bringing in traffic for your online business. There are two main aspects of SEO that businesses do in order to help optimize their websites, they are On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO. On-Page SEO generally refers to any effort that a company makes on its own webpage (or rather on its page source) to rank higher on Google’s Search Engine algorithm. The variety of techniques that they could employ range from compressing image sizes to speed up the loading time to adding alternate text to pictures to help them rank better for keywords. Building backlinks is a key technique utilized in off-page SEO efforts of businesses. Today we will discuss 4 simple ways to start building quality backlinks for your business.

 

What are Backlinks and Why Do I Need Them?

backlinko serp
Source: Backlinko

Backlinks are as the name suggests, links that link back to your website from other websites. In order for your webpage to rank well on Google’s Search Engine Result Page (SERP), your website has to have a lot of these backlinks. This is so because backlinks are one of the higher valued variables in Google’s algorithm to determine your website’s score, which will translate into where you rank on the SERP.

As a business, backlinks are key to your success as ranking on the first page of Google is critical in improving website traffic. One popular statistic that you might’ve already heard is that 89% of all the clicks on a search term go to results on the first page. Just imagine how much more traffic can your business get monthly if you’re on the first page! Backlinks are also a great way to help you boost your page’s Domain Authority, which measures how trusted your website is. DA is also another factor that Google takes into account strongly when measuring which websites belong on the first page.

With these much benefits that backlinks can bring you, we hope that you can understand why we take our backlink building very seriously. This is because it is a sure-fire tool to help your website improve its Search Engine rankings. Therefore, it is important that we don’t just get any random backlinks, but also DoFollow backlinks that are of high quality.

DoFollow backlinks are the only kinds of backlinks that Google takes into account in its algorithm when ranking webpages. One way of figuring out whether or not a backlink is DoFollow is to go into the page source of the webpage where the backlink is. On the page source you should press Ctrl + F and find for the term “NoFollow”. If the term “rel=nofollow” follows after your backlink in the page source, that’s when it is a NoFollow backlink. Quality backlinks are defined by backlinks that are from webpages of high domain authority, which can be checked with simple Google Chrome extensions like the Moz toolbar extension or the ahrefs toolbar extension.

Now that you’ve understood the severity and importance of backlinks, let us move on to ways which you can get quality backlinks.

1. Publish Your Blogposts or Guest Write for Blogs

blog writing

One way to gain solid backlinks of high domain authority and exposure for your business is to guest write for blogs. There is a multitude of different blog guest writing sites that can give your businesses a backlink with a high DA. Sites like Medium and WritingCooperative, with a DA of 96 and 71 respectively are good platforms to kickstart your blog guest posting journey.  MyBlogGuest is also another site that we would recommend you to write on as it is a platform for the blogging community which allows people to search for blogs that accept guest posts. Another perk to guest blogging is also that it allows your business to showcase its products and expertise. This helps creates trust and interest amongst readers interested in the topic that you are blogging about, helping to bring in quality leads for your company.

Additionally, guest posting is a good way for you to build backlinks for specific keywords that you are targeting. The technique employed for this aspect is called “anchor text”. Anchor texts are by definition, the clickable text in a hyperlink – which are often in blue and underlined when unclicked. The anchor text is a powerful tool in backlinking because it helps search engines to determine the relevant keyword that the page you are linking should rank for.

2. Use an SEO Software to Look Through Your Competitors’ Backlinks and Emulate Them

Ever wondered why some of your competitors are ranking so consistently on the keywords that you have chosen to compete with them for? You can find out how exactly they are doing this by using SEO tools like ahrefs or Spyfu which allows you to look through your competitors’ website backlink profile. Ahrefs’ site explorer tool is perfect for helping you to reverse engineer your competitors’ website SERP success.

By checking on your competitors’ backlink profiles, you will be able to find a goldmine of sites that you can build your backlinks on. These may come in a variety of blog commenting, online business directories and also (as mentioned earlier) guest blogging. The use of such software also allow you to sort the backlinks by DA and DoFollow and NoFollow backlinks. All of which makes it easier for you to identify good sites and opportunities that you can build your backlinks on.

3. Linkless Backlinks.

Worth mentioning is the new type of backlink which search engines are apparently now employing to help determine your website’s value. The new type of backlink is called “Linkless Backlink” which may sound counter-intuitive, but are said to be the future of backlinking.

These linkless backlinks are brand mentions on any part of the Internet. Regardless of whether or not there is a link to your website, Google will use the brand mention as a signalling of trust for your website. This helps to increase your website’s DA, which is crucial in helping your website rank on the first page.

Linkless backlinks are harder to build though. This is because these “backlinks” are strictly just mentions of your brand on the Internet. For that to happen, you would probably have to generate buzz surrounding your product. This isn’t easy as it would require for your company to create content that gets your target audience talking and engaged.

4. Show Your Expertise by Being Interviewed

interview for backlinks
Interviewing businessman on press conference

One last easy way to earn backlinks are through interviews. Online interviews are a great source of earning backlinks especially if you operate in a niche. There are websites out there offering interview opportunities such as HelpAReporter and ProfNet which helps connect journalists to field experts. All these opportunities are great tools to help your website increase its online visibility as well as score some high DA backlinks. Interviews don’t just act as a way to earn backlinks, they also help increase your brand’s reputation as it helps your brand look reputable in the field that you are in. Social mentions can also be earned through interviews as well. By contributing your knowledge, you can also potentially create a pipeline of social mentions for your company as more journalists seek you out for future interviews.

What Are You Waiting For? Go Score Them Backlinks!

Today’s article is just an introduction to backlinks and some of the ways that your business can earn them. There are also a plethora of other methods that you could carry out to earn them that we have not mentioned. Other ways including finding broken links, asking for testimonials from your clients and including your company’s signature on your client’s website if you’re in web development. You can be creative in finding ways to earn those quality DoFollow links for your business and build your online presence. These four ways are just a couple to help you kickstart your backlink journey. We hope that we have got you sufficiently covered for starting on your backlinking journey!

If you are interested in other aspects of digital marketing, why not check out our blog post on 5 Ways To Improve Your SEO Ranking? MarketingGuru has also became an official LINE Partner Agency. This makes us able to help run advertisements on one of the world’s largest social messaging platform, LINE, for our clients! Check out another one of our article on how LINE is huge for your online marketing campaign.

5 Ways How To Improve Your SEO Ranking

It’s every marketer’s dream to be ranked first for their chosen keywords and stay at the top of the search engine result page (SERPs). While some look for shortcuts to improve SEO ranking, the hard truth is that search engine optimisation (SEO) is never a sprint, it is a marathon that requires continuous improvements. Before reading further, if you are new or unfamiliar about SEO, be sure to head over to our handy SEO guide before continuing.

SEO is probably the most powerful digital marketing tool a marketer has. Not only it is cost-effective, but the long-term benefits also outweigh the short-term cost. In short, once you have already been ranked high on the SERPs, it is unlikely for such ranking to drop drastically.

Companies fight fiercely for search ranking because the benefits are great. Statistics from Databox shows that Google receives approximately 75,000 searches per second, of which 67% of all the clicks go to the top five organic results. Hence, appearing on the first page of search engines is extremely important in getting website traffic – think of it as having a retail outlet right at a busy cross junction, it just means more customers!

There may be many ways and approaches to improve SEO ranking. However, we narrow five ways to help you improve SEO ranking

#1: Avoid Keyword Stuffing

A common mistake most digital marketers commit is flooding your articles and website with the chosen keywords. This may have worked in the past but not now.

Engaging in keyword stuffing will affect your engagement levels with your readers as it reduces readability. In fact, it is also a signal to Google that you’re attempting to trick their algorithms. This method will backfire, and you will end up not being listed in Google’s search results.

Instead, strategically plan for the keywords you would like your website to rank for by using keyword research tools such as Moz. For instance, you decided to rank “IT Services” after conducting keyword research. The ideal approach for keyword optimization is to use the keyword once in your title, description paragraph, introduction, and a few times in your body text – and that is sufficient. Just remember not to spam your article with keywords, quality works better than quantity here!

#2: Avoid Low-Quality Backlinks

Backlinks are among the heavily weighted ranking factors by Google. A backlink refers to the incoming links from other websites. This may be a result of other websites mentioning you in their articles or re-publishing your content.

In the context of backlinks building, quality wins quantity. Multiple low-quality backlinks contribute nothing compared to a few high-quality links. Google view websites with multiple high-quality links as credible and authoritative.

Hence, avoid building backlinks with websites that are penalised by Google – websites with a low domain authority (less than 20) or spam websites. A website’s domain authority can easily be checked using tools such as Moz.

Tip: A good domain authority (DA) is more than 30 and you should ideally aim for the website with DA of 70. A page authority (PA) of at least 10 is generally considered good.

#3: Optimize Your Website For Speed

Whether mobile or desktop, it is crucial to ensure your website loads as fast as possible. This is especially true for mobile since Google’s has a mobile-first policy that uses the mobile version for indexing and ranking. Google provides some tools to check your website speed:

  1. Mobile-Friendly Test
  2. PageSpeed Insights

While the optimal speed varies depending on the industry, every webmaster should aim to increase the speed of their website’s pages. After all, a slow-loading website not only affects your SEO ranking but also frustrate your visitors.

2 seconds is the threshold for ecommerce website acceptability. At Google, we aim for under a half second.

Maile Ohye, Google

There are many ways to improves the loading speed and covering all of it is another topic for discussion. Here are some ways that you should take a look for possible improvements:

  • Image size: Be sure to optimize and compress all images before uploading them.
  • Server Response Time: Ensure your hosting plan is adequate, it may be time to upgrade or change your hosting provider.
  • CSS codes: When using gimmicks like third-party software, pop-ups or advertisement, make sure to remove unused CSS (code comments, formatting) to reduce loading time.
  • Redirects: Reducing redirects minimize the number of HTTP request-response cycle to be completed.
  • Pop-ups: Be careful with using unnecessary pop-ups as certain pop-ups will hurt your ranking.

Of course, there are many other technical aspects that affect optimal website speed. It would be best to consult your web administrator to improve your website speed.

#4: Fix Your Broken Links!  

A broken link is a dead hyperlink on your website that directs to a page with a 404 error. This could happen due to internal and external factors. Internally, your developer could have deleted a linked page, change the URL address but failed to update the correct URL or simply placing an incorrect URL into the text link. Externally, the same issue could happen on other websites you linked to which is beyond your control.

Broken links are frustrating for everyone. For your website visitor, they affect their access to information. For marketers, it poses a challenge as having too many broken links means that Google bots are less likely to crawl the site as they signal to Google that the site has a poor user experience. The end result is that Google is not impressed and view you as unreliable.

Note: Google is all about the user-friendly experience.

Regular maintenance is necessary in order to ensure your website does not suffer from multiple broken links. Fortunately, there are various tools available to conduct broken link checks. For larger websites, once a month is ideal, and you should rectify any broken links detected immediately.

#5: Go Big On Originality

Some websites utilize blogs as part of their SEO strategy. You will be surprised how many people actually think that reposting content from other websites has the potential to work wonders. In fact, if you index a duplicated article, Google will start to view your website as a ‘copycat’ and push you down the search ranking.

Generating good quality original content may require tremendous effort. However, there are a few ways to identify interesting original content to engage your audience:

  • Google Trends: Depending on the industry, you may identify a trending topic for new content.
  • Old Content: You may have a large archive of old content; sometimes a simple update of old articles may be all you need.
  • Existing Content: Look at your existing content and see if you can expand it further. For instance, we could write a new article on “Target Audience Persona” by expanding our Digital Marketing Strategy article.
  • Keywords: Based on the keywords you want to rank; you may come out with topics around them.

Ultimately, do not attempt to duplicate other content on any part of your site. It definitely not beneficial to your site. Once consumers find out that you are a ‘copycat’, your branding would only improve – negatively.

A Final Note

The road to achieving a fantastic SEO ranking is a long journey. There are no hacks for overnight success that improve SEO ranking. The only way to improve SEO ranking is to be committed to dedicating consistent time and effort to keep up with the industry’s best practices. Results will appear in due time and you’ll need to be patient!

If you are looking to improve SEO ranking, engaging a professional SEO agency such as MarketingGuru may be worthwhile. Not only do they possess the relevant experience and expertise, but you also save time trying to figure out the technicities that improve SEO ranking.

Your 9 Points Simple SEO Guide

Since over 75% of online searches never scroll beyond the first page of search engine such as Google , Search Engine Optimization, or SEO in short, is crucial in this modern digital age. However, the world of Search Engine Optimization is complex and the myriad of jargons and phrases can be confusing to those just starting out. Whether you are setting up a new website, seeking to improve your current website or just curious about what SEO is about, MarketingGuru’s 9-point SEO Guide is your handy guide to the complex world of SEO.

“practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results

Search Engine Optimization
Moz

So, what exactly is SEO? Moz defines Search Engine Optimization as the “practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results”. Simply put, it is optimizing your online content so that it appears as top results on Google when people search a certain keyword.

SEO is a big word and this checklist will break it down into 3 broad areas: On-site, Off-site and Technical SEO.

On-site
SEO

On-site
SEO is simply Google’s ranking factors within your page such as headline,
content and page structure.

Point
1: Content Quality

The
key to on-site SEO is content and that means the quality of content will affect
a site SEO. While quality is subjective in nature, a website content quality
can be judged based on relevance, length and readability. One way to improve
content quality is to ensure that it meets the search intent of your visitors. Basically,
it means that your article must address what the visitors are looking for,
otherwise they would bounce off your page.

Secondly, article length is also important since there is a correlation between article length and page ranking, A longer article with relevant content encourage visitors to stay longer and thus also reduces bounce rate. Lastly, the usage of short paragraphs of not more than three sentence improves readability. It’s obvious that articles with long paragraphs can be tiring to read.

Point
2: Keyword Research and Selection

One way to identify search intent is to identify keywords people are searching for. This can easily be done using Google Keyword Planner to show the keywords’ competition and which keyword that will be easier for you to rank higher. Once you keyword selection is done, it is important to use them effectively by placing them at the beginning of your title and within the first 150 words.

Point
3: LSI Keywords and Synonyms

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords are words commonly found together. Though some LSI keywords may be synonyms and they differ in that LSI provides Google the context of your article. One way to identify LSI for your article is to use the Google Auto Suggest function. LSI can help improves your search ranking as it helps Google understand your page context, squeeze in more keywords and allow your page to be appear in search results of those LSI keywords.

Off-site
SEO

As
you can infer, Off-site SEO refers to the activities to increase search ranking
that are outside of your website and often beyond your control.

Point
4:  Inbound Links

Inbound
links are hyperlinks that connect your websites with other websites. Websites
with more inbound links are deem as having higher reputation and trust by
Google and thus rank higher. In this case, the quality of the links is more
important than the quantity.

Point
5: Trust

There
are four parts to building trust: authority, bounce rate and domain age. Authority
is a combination of domain authority (how widespread your domain name is) and
page authority (how authoritative the content of a single page is).

The
bounce rate determines how often visitors leave your website
after viewing just one page. This is when relevant content comes in to
encourage them to stay on your website. The older a domain age
is, the better it helps the website rank on Google.

Technical
SEO

Technical
SEO, as the name suggest, focus on the non-content aspects of your website such
as how well search engine crawl your site and index your content.

Point
6: Mobile Friendliness

With
the growth and adoption of smartphones across the world, it is not surprising
that more people are accessing the internet on their mobile phones. In fact,
more that 54% of Facebook users access the popular social media platform
through mobile phones. Hence, the importance of your website being mobile
friendly cannot be ignored. The benefits of a mobile friendly website go beyond
user experience, but it is also an important Google ranking factor.
Fortunately, Responsive Web Design (RWD) can solve this issue and allows
a website to appear perfectly regardless the type of device being used to view
the website.

Point
7: Page Speed

Another
important Google ranking factor is the page speed. This can be simply described
as the time taken to fully display content of a page. From search engine’s
perspective, a longer page speed means that it takes longer time for them to
crawl your page and this could greatly affect your page. Page speed goes beyond
ranking and that can affect your bounce and conversion rate when your website
visitors give up on waiting for the page to fully display it’s content.

Point
8: HTML and URL

The
text format is how Google crawls and index your content. Therefore, no matter
how appealing your website is, Google will not rank your website highly because
Google cannot understand your website. This means the usage of HTML is crucial
for search engines. Some tips on how to use HTML are as follows:

  1. Provide
    text for images.
  2. Create
    text transcripts for video or audio content.
  3. Use
    title tags, subheads and meta description for your textual content.
  4. Utilize
    Schema tags.

Your
website or page URL is also important and appear in many important places
during a search query. The use of intuitive URL not only help user experience
but also tell Google what a particular page is about. Some tips for smart
intuitive URL inculdes:

  1. Keeping
    it simple.
  2. Use
    hyphens to separate words.
  3. Use
    the URL to let visitors know what the page is about.

Point
9: HTTPS & SSL

Have you ever wondered what is the difference between ‘HTTP’ and ‘HTTPS’ ? The ‘s’ in ‘HTTPS’ refers to the Secure Socket Layer or SSL.  In short, HTTPS is more secure then HTTP and according to Google, websites with HTTPS would rank higher. Not only does a website with HTTP lose traffic, these websites would also have a ‘Not Secure’ notification pop-up for Google Chrome visitors. It is therefore obvious how important having SSL can help boost your SEO ranking.

A Final Note

SEO is a huge topic and these 9 points SEO guide are only to provide you an introduction of what each aspect of SEO is about. Often, companies do not have the time to start and manage an SEO project. This is where experts such as MarketingGuru step in. SEO is a key component of any digital marketing strategy and you should also seek to understand the difference between B2C and B2B digital marketing. Contact MarketingGuru to kick start your digital journey.