Month: May 2017

Categories
Digital Marketing

What is Keyword Tiering and How Can It Increase Paid Search Profit?

Running PPC campaigns that meet your business needs without breaking the bank isn’t exactly an easy thing to do. It’s quite the balancing act for many, including those who consider themselves PPC professionals.

The entire goal is getting more clicks – and hoping those clicks not only translate to site traffic, but to leads that will eventually convert to sales. But when you’re on a budget, and even when you’re not really, you don’t want to pay for the wrong clicks. If you’re paying for a lot of clicks, but aren’t seeing a return on investment, those low quality leads are a waste of money. And even though sometimes the wrong clicks can still make you money, it doesn’t always translate to a profitable sale.

That’s where keyword tiering comes in to save the day.

What Is Keyword Tiering?

This is a method of prioritizing your paid search ad spend based on keywords you know are performing well. Some keywords are a waste of money and you need to stop bidding on them. When you stop bidding on the ones that yield you no profit, you leave more room in your budget for those that do.

It’s not possible to rely solely on branded terms because they are the ones that perform the best. You still need traffic and conversion volume, which translates to sometimes bidding on keywords that aren’t as optimal as you’d like. But the more of those kinds of keywords you have, the less profitable your account becomes.

If you’ve got a decent account manager, they’ll find a balance between the keywords so you’ll get profit and conversion volume at an affordable rate, but since your business needs change for a number of reasons. This means the number of conversions and sales your business can handle may also change.

Think about it. If the majority of your sales team is out on vacation, it doesn’t make sense to spend a bunch of money bringing in high quality leads while no one is around to close the sale.  Yeah, you could reduce your ad spend on all your keywords, but I’m here to tell you that you should just cut spending on the less profitable keywords. Tiering allows you to turn tiers on and off as your business needs change.

Setup Keyword Tiering

Step One: Check Your Tracking

Before you get started, it’s critical to have a quality conversion tracking system in place. If you don’t, your keyword tiering system may not be as effective as you’d like. It’s only as good as the data used to support it.

If you do not have several months worth of quality conversion data available, this must be setup before you can continue with the rest of the process.

It’s incredibly easy to track form completions in AdWords, but if you want to make keyword tiering work for you, it’s necessary to track all the conversion actions that matter to your business. Some examples include:

Less than 30% of AdWords advertisers are using high-quality conversion tracking methods. If you’re one of those accts that doesn’t have adequate tracking, you need to fix that first. If you’re using AdWords to generate leads, you must know which keywords produce sales. If you’re not aware of how profitable your keywords are, you won’t be able to develop effective tiers.

Step Two: Categorize Keywords

When you have one to two sales cycles worth of solid tracking data, it’s time to setup your tiers. Of course the right strategy will vary from one business to the next, and may even change over the course of business operations. In this example, I’m giving you four tiers, and that’s the starting recommend most people recommend. You may find you can get away with less, but you may also find that you need more.

Keyword Tiers

Tier 1: Proven Profitability

These are the best keywords you’ve got. They are the ones that are consistently producing profitable sales, and are generally driving most of your revenue. Unless your sales team is way too busy with the leads you already have, or you’re short staffed while your sales team is away, there’s no reason to ever turn this tier off. If you do, you’re missing out on new profitable business. And there’s no reason for these keywords to miss out on impressions because of your budget issues. Always remove the budget from a lower tier and allocate it here. Paying for impressions should always be on these keywords first.

Tier 2: Producing Sales

Keywords you place in this tier are generally a reliable source of qualified leads and sales, but for whatever reason, they’re not consistently as profitable as you’d like them to be. Your cost per click may be running a little high for these leads, or maybe the customer lifetime value associated with these keywords is low.

A lot of the time, it’s possible to optimize a bit and turn tier two keywords into tier one keyword. When this happens, promote it, but until then, leave it in the second tier.

If you’re looking to increase your lead volume, and you’ve reached the maximum share on the first tier, then you move down to this tier. The account will not be as profitable, but you’ll still get good leads and sales for a reasonable price.

Tier 3: No Sales – Yet

In this tier, place the keywords that are promising, but haven’t translated to sales yet. They may give you leads, but you’re not really able to predict whether or not those leads will convert into revenue.

If your sales team is really hungry and you’ve maximized your impression share on both tiers one and two, it’s time to turn on this tier. The right sales person can usually turn an unproven source of leads into a reliable stream of clients.

Tier 4: Producing Leads

At this tier, you’ve got your keywords that could go either way. They’re bringing you leads, but those leads aren’t the best match for your business. They are the ones who are unresponsive, or worse, trying to sell you something.

But, you stick with them because occasionally you’ll find the golden nugget that makes it worth it. It’s best to leave these keywords off until there’s major complaints about lead volume. Most often, the keywords you place here are expensive busy work for your sales team.

But, if team morale is down, turning on keywords in this tier will at least keep some leads in, which is better than nothing. Once the team gets busy working on tiers one to three again, you can turn the fourth tier off.

Back to Setup

Step 3: Labeling Your Tiers

At this point, you need to sort your keywords tiers within AdWords, so it’s time to label them. If you’ve never used labels in AdWords before, all you have to do is click on the Keywords tab. From there, click Columns, then select the double arrow next to Labels, and click Apply.

Next, check the boxes on all your tier one keywords. Click labels in the drop-down. Create new label, and name it “Tier 1”.

Repeat the steps with keywords in the other tiers you’ve setup for your business.

Step 4: Maximize Profitability

Once your tiers are setup, use them! To make it easier, setup custom filers for each tier. This way you can quickly see the keywords that are in that tier. Click on the Keywords tab, then choose Create filter from the drop down menu. Set the filter to “Labels contains any” and choose the tier you want. Save and apply the filter.

Over the course of the next quarter, you should notice your cost per conversion drop dramatically, as well as the cost per sale.

Smart Keyword Tiers Make the Most of Your Budget

Keyword tiering can help you make the most of your paid search budget, which is especially important if you’re working with a less than ideal amount of money. This strategy will of course take time to implement, but will increase the overall value of your AdWords account.

Do you use keyword tiering? If not, do you plan to now? Tell me what you think in the comments below.

Categories
SEO

The Warning Signs of a Bad SEO Company (And How to Find a Good One)

Let’s face facts: in the digital media marketing world, there’s always room for improvement. The latest technology or tactic can change an entire marketing strategy and it’s important for marketing companies to be self-aware of their flaws.

In the spirit of constructive criticism, I’d invite most SEO companies today to take a look in the mirror and realize just how problematic they’ve become for the entire industry.

This isn’t an attack on any one SEO company in particular, but rather a comprehensive look at the fundamental flaws that appear in 90% of SEO companies in business today.

The reality of SEO is that it’s a full-time job. Small business owners trust SEO companies to handle all the details because SEO itself can be a complex, intimidating aspect of a marketing strategy, especially if you’re completely new to the world of digital media marketing.

Unfortunately, this general ignorance about what people should actually be doing when it comes to SEO has lead to some less-than-ideal business practices. More importantly, these SEO companies rarely actually help their clients in a meaningful way (but more on that later).

Without further ado, it’s time to get into exactly what’s wrong with most SEO companies today.

Lack of Transparency

If I was only allowed to address one issue in the SEO industry, it would be this one. Here’s a prime example: most SEO companies are hesitant to share past results. Why? Because generally speaking, they likely don’t have anything substantial to show you. The idea is that any reputable SEO company should be willing to show off their successful efforts.

No one expects perfection from a company, and having examples of failures is unlikely to compromise a business – provided they’re outweighed by plenty of success stories. And yet, most SEO companies will be hesitant to provide you with any kind of results they’ve had for previous or current clients.

Of course, the smoke and mirrors don’t end there. There’s the common ‘proprietary process’ speech that most SEO companies give, where they’re either unwilling or unable to give an explanation of their services or even general process. If you don’t know exactly what a company is going to do, that’s a problem.

Despite how tedious and challenging SEO can be, the basic fundamentals of SEO are available with a quick Google search. Assuming that this particular company hasn’t somehow stumbled onto some cutting edge technique that completely throws convention out the window, they should be able to explain their process clearly to you.

But it gets worse. If you haven’t had a conversation with your SEO company about your general business goals, that should be a red flag. The days of siloed marketing efforts are long gone. As the digital media marketing landscape continues to shift, it’s important for marketers to implement a variety of tactics and incorporate your business goals into their process.

Conversations about strategy don’t just need to happen, they need to take into account the overall goals for both your general marketing strategy and your business itself. Improved ranking on Google should be a step in the process, not the entire strategy. Purely technical SEO strategy is narrow-minded by today’s standards, and it does little to address the real question that should be on any good SEO companies’ mind: “How can we help our clients?”

Small business owners end up with less than satisfying results from these businesses for the simple reason that they were led to believe the strategy would have more depth and impact on their business. The unfortunate reality of SEO companies today is that (if you’re lucky) you might get your rankings improved on a SERP by a small amount for a limited time. By the time you’re done with them, you’ll be wondering what on earth you really paid for.

Shady Practices

Understanding the reasoning behind this lack of transparency is an important part of realizing what’s wrong with the SEO industry today. Here’s a good rule of thumb: SEO companies that seem like they’re hiding something are usually hiding something.

These businesses thrive off of small business owners and other clients not knowing what’s going on behind the scenes. And since most SEO companies practice this kind of behavior, it’s difficult to ever truly gauge what’s being accomplished, what’s been accomplished, and whether or not your goals will end up being reflected in the marketing strategy.

First and most obvious red flag? The guarantee of first page rankings. To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with aiming for first page rankings. Any SEO company worth working with will likely give their all when it comes to creating and implementing a strategy to get you on the first page of a SERP.

The issue is the guarantee. No matter how effective or successful this SEO company claims to be, they can’t promise the impossible. And rest assured, it is impossible to guarantee first page rankings, especially if they give you a timeline like, “You’ll be on the first page of Google within the first 90 days.”

The reality of SERP and rankings is that even with an impressive track record, it’s impossible to guess with absolute certainty whether or not your business will end up getting a first page ranking. Unless your SEO company has a special ‘in’ with Google or Yahoo, it’s unlikely that they’ll be able to deliver on that promise. What’s more likely is that this guarantee is an empty promise designed specifically to get you to hire them.

Speaking of things that SEO companies will do just to get your money, let’s discuss one of the most concerning aspects of a surprising amount of SEO companies today: black hat marketing. While the world of black hat marketing can get pretty complex, we’ll keep things simple here and say that if you’ve noticed links to your site popping up in some questionable places, you’ve probably got an issue worth discussing with your SEO company.

The shady behavior doesn’t end there. Some ‘industry leaders’ choose to hire uneducated, outsourced labor to do all the heavy lifting just to maximize their profit margins. They choose to swear by ranking reports instead of case studies simply because it’s easy. Some companies go so far as to create fake traffic with no relevance or actual impact on the business other than providing them with an inflated, unrealistic sense of how many visitors they’re getting.

This is why it’s so important to have a clear idea about what an SEO company plans to do for your business. The sad state of most SEO companies today is that they aren’t looking to help you long-term. In fact, a frightening amount of these businesses operate under a very simple business model:

  • Use a call center to contact and aquire new clients.
  • Promise a 90-day guarantee, telling new clients they will have page 1 search rankings in just 90 days.
  • Have the new client sign a contract wih fine print that states that SEO is a continually changing environment and results are not guaranteed.
  • Outsource the SEO work to India, Pakistan, or the Philippines where SEO work is cheap but extremely inconsistent and unpredictable.
  • Expect that clients will cancel after 90 days when they don’t achieve the promised results.
  • Expect an “acceptable” level of charge-backs when clients are unhappy (approximately 120 days into their contracts).
  • Replace lost clients with new ones.

Rinse and repeat.

This is the business model of 90% of SEO companies, who have built their entire business around tricking you and anyone else they work with. It’s a waste of time and money.

Finding the Right SEO Company

Most SEO companies have a variety of issues that need addressing, but they all stem from the same place: a lack of concern over the client’s experience. Plenty of SEO companies have decided to play the numbers game, banking on the fact that there will always be another person to fall for their tricks.

We bring all this up because at Sachs Marketing Group, we counteract this culture by having a singular focus: fixating on bringing long-term, meaningful value to our clients. We prioritize transparency from start to finish because it gives our marketing strategy the best chance for success.

We’ve created a way for clients to essentially look “over our shoulders” while we work, with a web-based SEO workflow spreadsheet that documents each and every task we complete and attach all the supporting evidence that the work was actually done. We also regularly upload reports showing web traffic, ranking positions, and changes in page rank and authority. Clients have the ability to log into this system anytime they want to see the progress on their campaigns.

Our competitors would argue that by showing our processes in such detail, we run the risk of educated our clients to the point that they will no longer need us. To which we say: hogwash! Our clients stay with us long-term because we deliver results. We have nothing to hide and no fear that we may become obsolete by over-educating our clients.

We’ve never shied away from our responsibility to improve your business. And because of all that, we’ve never had a charge-back in an industry where most SEO companies charge-back 8-23% of their total monthly volume. Earlier, we cited the shady business model of bad SEO companies. For comparison, here is the Sachs Marketing Group business model:

  • Conduct a thorough SEO analytic review of your market, website, and web presence.
  • Gain a clear understanding of your target market.
  • Set very realistic goals and expectations.
  • Do all of the Internet marketing work in-house; never outsource.
  • Build relationships with hundreds of other websites in similar markets for collaborative, mutually beneficial efforts.
  • Generate high-quality web content written by native English speakers with an exceptional command of the English language.
  • Be completely transparent in terms of our daily work flow and show our processes to you.
  • Keep in contact contact and provide progress reports regularly.
  • Become intimately involved with your conversions (sales) and maintain a vested interest in your online success.

Retain our clients (our first client who came to us in 2010 is still with us today). We have no contracts with any of our clients and yet they choose to stay with us long-term.

The results are no credit card charge-backs and happy clients who enjoy an increased return on their marketing investment (ROI) as a direct result of our efforts. We go above and beyond what most SEO companies even consider doing, because we’re in business to be of service to our clients, not rip them off and make money.

We don’t just say we care about our clients – we show it, day in and day out.

Categories
SEO

How to Protect Your Business From Negative SEO Attacks

Black hat SEO refers to using tactics that are against search engine terms of service to manipulate ranking. As the SEO industry has changed over the past couple of years, as Google and other search engines seek to improve search result quality to provide a better user experience and traditional black hat techniques are becoming less effective, negative SEO is the new solution. Since it is harder to rank for competitive keywords than it was just three years ago, negative SEO uses a number of black hat techniques to sabotage the competition’s ranking as a method of increasing your own.

Negative SEO attacks come in a variety of shapes and sizes, including:

  • Building spammy backlinks to your website
  • Spammy blog comments
  • Distributing copies of your website’s content all over the internet
  • Working to remove your best backlinks
  • Hacking your website
  • Pointing backlinks to your website with keywords promoting Viagra, gambling, and other negative niches

If you’re not a big website and you don’t think you have to worry about it, realize there are hackers and people out there who mess with random websites for fun. And you don’t have to know what you’re doing to find someone who does. If you’re out to create trouble for someone, a quick search of Fiverr for “negative SEO” shows plenty of providers who are willing to launch massive negative backlink campaigns against any website you want. The threat is real, so rather than waiting to see if your website falls victim, it’s best to take a proactive stance.

You can fall victim to one at any given time, even if you’re not a major brand with a lot of competition. And if you do, it doesn’t necessarily mean the competition is to blame. I’m going to show you how to protect yourself from a negative SEO attack, because prevention is much easier than cleaning up the mess afterward.

 

Setup Alerts in Google Search Console

The Google Search Console, formerly known as Webmaster Tools, is an excellent source of information about what’s going on with your website. Setting up email alerts can let you know when certain issues arise, such as:

  • Website is attacked by malware
  • Server is having connectivity issues
  • Pages are not being indexed
  • Google manually penalizes your site.

If you’re not already using this service, I’ve written a guide on how to get started with Google Search Console. There you’ll be able to learn how to add your website and setup the necessary email alerts. Remember, this is not the same as Google Analytics, but provides some additional useful information about your website.

 

Keep an Eye on Your Backlinks

The most common form of negative SEO, especially as evidenced by what’s available on Fiverr is the creation of mass amounts of low quality backlinks. This is why it is important for you to keep a close eye on your backlinks so you can see when someone is building links to your website.

There are all kinds of backlink checker tools out there like Open Site Explorer and Ahrefs, but those require you to manually look at your backlinks every morning. There’s nothing wrong with that of course, but when you’re busy, it’s easy to forget to do. I’m a big fan of automating what you can without sacrificing quality, and then using the time savings elsewhere to improve your business. Monitor Backlinks will email you when it sees new backlinks are added to your website. Plans start at $25 a month for a single website, and allow you to monitor two competitors. There’s the option to skip competitors and make it a little cheaper, too. There’s a free 30-day trial so you can make sure you like the service, too.

When you notice new backlinks are being added, but you know you’re not the one behind them, you can start taking action to get them removed or disavowed. More on how to do that in a bit.

 

Use an Email Hosted at Your Domain for Building Backlinks

Spammers and attackers will often try to remove the best backlinks your website has. They do this by contacting the website owner of the link, pretending to be you, and asking that the webmaster remove the link.

You can’t stop people from reaching out pretending to be you, but you can safeguard against the webmasters falling for it by making sure you use an email address from your domain, rather than a generic account like Gmail or Yahoo. This way, you can prove you work for the website and it’s not someone who’s posing as you. Your hosting plan will generally include a certain number of email boxes you can use.

You’ll want to keep an eye on your backlinks as you’re building them, so you can see if any manage to disappear. If you notice you lose a good one, reach out to the webmaster, ask why they’ve removed your link, and let them know what has happened. If you’re using Monitor Backlinks, you can tag the backlinks you want to keep the most, so you can verify if any of them get removed.

 

Secure Your Website

There are several things you can do to protect your website against hacks. If you’re using WordPress, check out this post on ways to secure it. I recommend using WordFence on your WordPress site, as it can protect your site from malicious attacks, and scan for changes in the core files. The premium version of the plugin can also let you know if there are any viruses on your site, and tell you if your site is being used in any spam activity.

If you’d rather take a different approach, you can use the Google Authenticator Plugin to create a two step verification password used each time you login to your WordPress website. You’ll have to enter a code that Google generates on your smartphone (available for both Android and iOS phones) before you can access your site.

Use a strong password with numbers and special characters. If you struggle with remembering, use special characters to help you spell a word, like $ for S or @ for A.

Create backups of your files and database on a regular basis. Ask your hosting company if they are doing this for you. Even if they are, it’s a good idea to keep your own copies. You can use a plugin to automatically backup everything to Dropbox or OneDrive.

If your website allows visitors to upload files, talk to someone at your hosting company to make sure you have antivirus installed to prevent users from being able to upload malware.

 

Check for Copies of Your Content

Use Copyscape to check for content on your website elsewhere on the web. You can start with your website URL, or just copy and paste the text from any page or blog post into the engine and search.

 

Use Social Listening Tools

It’s possible spammers will create fake social media accounts similar to yours to trash your brand name. To make sure this isn’t happening, you can use social listening tools like Mention.net or Google Alerts (not real time) to see who’s talking about you and what they are saying. If you see anything that’s not legit, take action to get the profiles removed as soon as possible. Report them as spam, and ask that your followers do the same. You can monitor everything from Facebook and Twitter, to videos, websites and blogs, and even images and forums.

 

Monitor Your Page Speed

If you notice your website suddenly takes longer to load, run some tests on Pingdom to make sure it’s not because someone is sending thousands of requests to your server. If you don’t stop this quickly, it’s possible the spammers will be able to take you entire server down. You can setup email alerts to find out if your server is every down. If you notice your site is being attacked, contact your hosting company as soon as possible.

 

What to Do If You’re Attacked

Create a List of Backlinks to Remove

Check the links that were created to your website recently. Manually check all of them to decide if you want to keep or remove them. If you want to remove them, put them in a separate list.

Create the list as soon as you get an email alert with backlinks you’re unaware of – especially if they look like they are spam.

Try to Remove the Links

Reach out the webmaster of the websites with the links you want to remove and request that they remove the link to your website. If you are unable to find a contact page, you can check the WHOIS registration to see if there’s an email address there. Sometimes it is hidden. If you cannot find a contact email address even after taking that route, or you do not hear back from the webmaster, you always have the option to ask Google to disavow your links.

Disavow the Rest

Disavowing links is the way you tell Google you don’t want them to count backlinks toward your link juice. I’ve written about disavowing links in more detail on the blog before, so I’ll let you go to that post to learn more about creating the disavow file and using the Google Disavow tool. Basically, you create a file with the links you want to disavow, then upload it to Google’s tool. The results aren’t instant, however, so you may end up waiting up to three months, though most are done within a month. That’s why it’s always a good idea to reach out to the webmaster and ask them to remove the links, too.

 

Negative SEO Isn’t the End of the World

If you’re the victim of a negative SEO attack, try not to stress out too much. Google is smart, and can tell when a negative SEO campaign is being launched. There’s no guarantee you’re going to be penalized as a result of the attack, since the search engine can tell you’re not the one causing it. In fact, the entire process could backfire and improve your rankings. Someone who invests in a negative SEO campaign against you is engaging in a high risk, low reward activity.

Have you ever dealt with negative SEO? If so, how was your recovery? Share your experience with me in the comments below.

Categories
SEO

Mastering Voice Search for Your SEO Strategy

The SEO industry is constantly changing as Google and other search engines seek to improve their user experience. One of the more recent changes we’re seeing is the rising popularity of voice search, particularly as it relates to local search. What used to be novelty is now a necessity as more consumers are on the go with their smartphones and tablets. Google says 20% of mobile searches are voice searches, but when you add in searches from personal assistant devices like Amazon Echo, Google Home, Siri, and Cortana, the actual percentage of voice searches is much higher.

Voice recognition is far more accurate than it used to be, which means it’s finally serving its purpose as a helper, rather than frustrating users to the point where they no longer use it. One report shows voice search accuracy has reached an impressive 92%. As consumers turn to personal assistant devices, voice search is reaching more every day consumers, so it’s no surprise we’re seeing an uptick in the number of searches.

If you’re a local business, it’s important to optimize your website for voice searches and the sooner, the better. One study shows 55% of teens between the ages of 13 and 18, and 41% of adults say they use voice search more than once a day. Their questions range from calling a contact, to finding local movie listings, to getting help with home, and even getting directions. The study also revealed people tend to use voice search when they are multi-tasking. 54% of teenagers use their voice search while they are socializing with friends, while 23% of adults say they use it for hands-free searching while they cook.

Perhaps what’s more interesting is that by 2020, nearly 1/3 of searches will take place without a screen, meaning we’ll see an increase in the number of smart speakers – which by that year is estimated to reach 21.4 million.

This means marketers have multiple ways to capitalize on voice search despite the fact that it’s still in its relative infancy.

Use Natural Language as Much as Possible

When people use voice search about a local business they want to go to, they will likely say something like, “Where is the best taco in San Diego?” (That’s a hard question to answer, of course, but, if you’re a restaurant serving tacos in the area, you want Google to choose you.) In this case, you’d optimize the content on your pages for “best taco in San Diego.” The natural language to your site’s content will definitely help you appear in the voice search results.

If you want other ways to add natural language to your website, consider adding Q&A pages using various words and phrases people are actually known to speak, as opposed to phrases they’d type into a search engine. When you create the content for these pages, write them with a conversational tone, to ensure the keywords you use will resonate with the voice searcher. Ultimately, you need to talk how your users talk.

Don’t Ignore Other SEO Standard Best Practices

Whether you’re trying to get into the voice search results or not, you should still make sure you’re doing the basics like creating and submitting your sitemap, using schema and other microdata so Google and other search engines can learn what your content actually means, and so on. You can use structured data markup to address things like your address, phone number, hours of operation, prices, and even directions from major highways. Make all of that work for you – because that’s what your customers will be searching for. You’ll also want to still avoid flash, and focus clean and lean code to keep your website loading fast because usability will always matter.

Make Sure Your Website is Mobile-Friendly

Google considers mobile-friendliness a ranking factor and has for a while now, since more internet traffic comes from mobile devices than desktop devices. Since voice searches are coming from mobile devices, you need to make sure your website is mobile responsive and can be indexed. Check it with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Tool.

You can design your website with a responsive theme or install a plugin, if you’d rather not build a completely separate mobile version of your website. Mobile responsive themes will automatically adjust the elements on your website to fit the visitor’s screen, regardless of their screen size or resolution.

Double-Check All Your Local Citations

Many people who are searching for local businesses, regardless of whether they’re using voice or standard searches, often add the phrase “near me” to the end of their query. Your on-site SEO probably isn’t going to affect the results much. (Trying to rank for ‘best taco in San Diego near me” would mean some unnatural text in your content.)

When this happens, the search engines pay more attention to the user’s physical location, and that’s why it’s important for you to have current, accurate local citations in the main search engine’s local directories: Google My Business, Bing Places for Business, and Yahoo Places, at the very least.

When you’re setting up those directory listings, be as specific as you can when you choose your business category, since this can increase the chance that you show up in voice searches targeted to your local niche. To improve overall local SEO, keep your name, address, and phone number (NAP) data consistent across all those directories. Check the accuracy of your listings in other directories like Yelp, and if you don’t already have an established profile on those sites, search for and claim your listings, or create new ones.

Business Reviews

We’ve known for a long time that online reviews of your business can make or break your reputation. But the number of reviews your business has is a critical part of ranking in Google’s local map pack. And when a customer takes the time to leave a review for you, take the time to respond to it, especially if it’s a less than stellar review. You may not be able to make the negative comments go away, but you can at least show potential future customers that you’re paying attention and you care.

Google’s Not the Only Game in Town

Remember to think about what people are searching in Bing, too. Several platforms – including Cortana, Siri, and Alexa (Amazon Echo) use it, so you need to be, too. If you focus solely on Google, then you’re missing out on potential traffic from people who use those personal assistant devices at home.

Consider Searcher Intent

Mobile voice searches will use more natural language, making the long tail keyword even more important. You can brainstorm a list of naturally spoken questions people may ask about your product, service, or business.

I’ve already mentioned Answer the Public in other blog posts because it’s one of my favorite keyword research tools, but it’s really the perfect tool for this, too. Others you can use to help you brainstorm ideas for natural language phrases to include in your content include Question Samurai and StoryBase.

Beyond tools like this, your own analytics data is a great source of information about what your users are looking for. With Google Search Console reports, you can see what queries people are using to find your site – many of which use natural language. If you see a phrase or two that is bringing you a great deal of traffic, make sure to work those into your content.

Does Your SEO Strategy Need a Complete Overhaul?

Voice search isn’t new; it’s been around for a few years now, so the increased use doesn’t mean you need to completely rethink your current SEO strategy. It does, however, mean that you’ll need to make some adjustments to your content to make sure you have a fair shot at getting traffic from those voice searches.

Right now, analytics data cannot tell you whether the query came from a standard search or a voice search. It may never tell you, but then again with the direction voice search is moving in, it may be a feature we see rolled out in future.

Another study estimates half of all searches will be voice in 2020, so it’s important for businesses to get to work on it now, so they can be ahead of the game.

Are you working on optimizing for voice search? How is the process going for you? What’s holding you back? Tell me in the comments.

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Digital Marketing

To Use a CDN or Not to Use a CDN

A content delivery network, or CDN, is a global network of servers. They are spread out across the world, and are responsible for a relatively large chunk of all traffic online. They server as the hosting space for static web elements, which ensures the dynamic elements of your website are served quickly, resulting in a better user experience. While using a CDN may be the answer for some websites, it’s not for others. Let’s take a closer look at why you may need one and when it’s a good idea to use one.

Benefits of a CDN

Since CDNs have servers all over the world, the idea behind it is that visitors in the USA would get their content delivered from the closest server, while a visitor in Canada would get their content delivered from a server in Canada instead of waiting for the one in the USA. That means websites load faster, since the data doesn’t have to travel as far. A copy of your website is stored on every single server in the CDN, and the server that delivers the content is always the one the visitor is closest to, so as to improve website speed.

Website speed is of course, one of the factors Google looks at when it considers where to rank your website in results. While there are many things you can do to improve your page load times, using a CDN is a quick and easy solution.

Using a CDN saves bandwidth on your host server, and keeps your website online in the event that a server goes down, or is taken down by a high volume of traffic. If one server in the network goes down, traffic is rerouted through another server, which keeps your website online. Though it may load slower because it’s not necessarily loading from the closest possible server anymore, it’s better than the website being completely down, which costs you business.

It’s hard to directly estimate the cost of downtime on a website, because not all websites are created equal. Maintenance and downtime is required occasionally, and there’s a reason many brands do it in the middle of the night.

Let’s say you have three hours of peak traffic per day where you earn $150,000 in total profit. Your traffic generates about $50,000 in profits per hour, or $833 a minute. That means if your have a 10 minute period of unexpected downtime just cost you $8,330.

Even if you’re a website that doesn’t generate revenue directly, you’re likely still relying on website traffic to get customers in the door. If your website’s down, they can’t find your address so they can come in, or they may just assume you’ve closed your doors.

Drawbacks to a CDN

CDNs can be harmful if you rely on any kind of automated testing on your website. If the network makes a change to the file, or ends up being unreliable, it can be harder to track down the problem.

If the CDN closes down, you will have to re-host your website yourself. If it doesn’t perform well, it will negatively affect your website performance.

CDNs don’t work without an an internet connection, so you cannot develop your website offline. You cannot edit the JavaScript or the CSS on the CDN, since this would change everyone else’s sites on the CDN, too. It’s a major security risk.

It’s easy to forget to update a code library if versions changes. You can use the JQuery CDN to avoid it, but it could also break tests if you have a feature in a new version that wasn’t backward compatible.

Are There Cases Where You Should Not Use a CDN?

If your website gets a lot of traffic and your assets are mission critical, using a CDN could go well, but it may not. If you’re considering it for reliability purposes, it may be worth investing in a dedicated web hosting plan. But, on the other hand, if your website is full of complicated code where there are many assets on a single page, it may be worth the performance benefit. The risk of the CDN going down isn’t as big of a deal as keeping the website moving as fast as you possibly can.

Popular CDNs

There are a number of CDNs to choose from, so I obviously cannot highlight all of them for you. Here’s a look at some of the most popular.

CloudFlare: There’s a free forever plan with limited features for people with small websites, or people who just want to try a CDN. Pricing starts at $20/month per domain. Security features are also included to protect against DDoS attacks. Plans include a shared SSL certificate, but it’s possible to upgrade to a dedicated one for just $5/month.

Amazon Cloudfront: This is the CDN from none other than Amazon. The Free Tier includes 50GB data transfer out, 2,000,000 HTTP and HTTPS Requests. From there, pricing is per GB, and based on the regional data location of the data transfer out, with pricing ranging from $0.085/GB to 0.170/GB for the first 10 TB a month. You are only required to pay for the bandwidth you use.

Stack Path – formerly MaxCDN: This service provides a robust control panel with a free shared SSL. It also comes with real-time statistics and reporting, 100% network uptime, and a 30-day money back guarantee. Pricing starts at $9/month for 100 GB of bandwidth per month. Opt for annual pricing, and you’ll get two months free.

CDN77: This CDN charges anywhere from $0.029 to $0.049 per GB, depending on your location and the amount of traffic you get. This is a pay as you go, only for what you use plan. There is no contract, and no minimum monthly usage requirement. There’s a 14 day free trial, too.

How to Choose the CDN for Your Website

If you’ve decided you want to give a CDN a shot, consider not only the price and the customer reviews, but also the analytics information they provide, as well as the performance, and APIs. With your analytics, you should be able to measure throughput and response time. Throughput is the the consistency of your connection during a user’s session, so you want it to be a good number, and response time, of course is the length of time it takes for the server to respond to the request from the browser. You need that number to be fast, too.

Analytics reports should ideally be customizable depending on the information you need for your business. It should include information about GB delivered, end-user transfer ratio, hits per second, completion ratio, delivery by data center, and other metrics to help you learn more about your visitors.

APIs allow you more flexibility with your CDN, since they can allow operations to be integrated into your automated processes, dashboards, and workflows. APIs are how CMS plugins are able to function.

Your pricing will vary based on the amount of data you’ll transfer, so obviously the more traffic you get, the more you’ll pay. Your CDN needs aren’t the same as mine, so when you talk with companies about your options, make sure you’re aware of all the different pricing structures that are available to you. Make sure you have the flexibility to change between pricing plans as needed, so your CDN can grow as you do. Can you pay as you go or will you be stuck in an annual contract? Are their any recurrent fees for additional services? What are the one-time fees?

How to Implement a CDN for Your Website

If your website uses a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, Joomla or Drupal, then it is fairly easy to integrate on your website. Once you’re signed up with the provider you want to use, you’ll identify the static content on your site that your CDN should mirror. When using a CMS, it’s usually possible to integrate through adding a plugin to your website. There are certain CDN implementations that could require you to modify your name severs and DNS records on your domain.

If you’re running a custom website or web application, implementation can be a bit more complex, so I recommend you talk to your web developer before you do anything else.

After the necessary modifications are complete, you’ll want to test them. Check for mixed content and SSL related issues. You’ll also want to make sure your caching rules are setup, so you can make sure the cache frequency with the CDN is ideal.

When you need to modify your website or add new things to it, there are likely going to be changes in HTML, JavaScript and CSS files, which means there’s a risk the CDN will continue to serve the old content, rather than the new content. As such, you must make sure you have a purging mechanism you can rely on to grab the new versions from your server. You can do this one of two ways: either with the CDN’s user interface, or using an API call with a plugin from your CMS. Most of the plugins built for CDNs already have this function so it is taken care of for you.

Is a CDN the Answer?

A CDN is just one way you can boost your page load time. However, the best CDN for you will depend on exactly what you need. You need your CDN to have servers where your visitors are, to get the best possible performance, so if you notice a lot of your traffic comes from Israel, and there are no servers there – then you need to move to a different provider. But beyond that, you also need an affordable service that is easy to integrate and customize.

What’s your experience with CDNs? Share in the comments below.

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