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All posts in Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO vs Google Ads – ultimate guide to understanding the two

You might be wondering what the difference is between SEO vs Google Ads. You’ve heard that one is more important than the other, but you’re not sure which one it is SEO vs. Google Ads are both great digital marketing strategies for your business.

It is important to understand the difference between the two to make an informed decision about which one will work best for your company’s needs. This blog post will help you understand SEO vs Google Ads, so you can decide how to spend your marketing budget!

What is SEO, and how it works?

To solve your SEO vs Google ads confusion, we’ll start by explaining what SEO stands for – search engine optimization. Search engine optimization and search results pages help boost your website’s ranking in search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo!

To rank higher in search engines for keywords related to your business or industry of expertise, many things need to happen, including having quality content with tags on all site pages, link building from authoritative websites within the same industry, and others outside of the industry.

SEO focuses on target key phrases and keywords that target audiences for your site are looking for. Through keyword research, you’re helping your website to rank higher in the search engine results.

By using the right and relevant keywords, you’re directing traffic to your website. While using SEO involves website optimization, content creation, and establishing your company’s goals, you also need to track progress over time.

You need to monitor and check what contents are working and what is not.

Also, if you’re aiming to rank faster or have a specific target time, SEO won’t do that for you.

However, it’s a guarantee that SEO can give you a long-term solution between SEO vs Google Ads. Looking for a long-term solution might work best for you, depending on your business, quality score, google analytics, and marketing models.

In explaining SEO vs Google Ads, it’s important to understand how SEO can help optimize your website’s conversions. These conversions are the actions fulfilled by someone who visited your site.

Read more: SEO vs Google Ads – ultimate guide to understanding the two

How To Check The Return On Investment Of Your Search Engine Optimization

Normally, you can measure the return on an investment (ROI) by taking the gain generated by the investment and subtracting its cost. Sounds simple enough, right? Well, in the search engine optimization (SEO) world, it’s a bit less straightforward.

That’s because it can be hard to pinpoint exactly how much of your sales or leads are generated by SEO alone. It’s also hard to track exactly which costs have gone into designing and implementing your SEO strategy.

Given this difficulty, I’ve gone ahead and outlined my formula for calculating and monitoring the ROI of an SEO campaign. As the owner of two full-service digital marketing agencies, I’ve tracked SEO performance across countless client campaigns for over a decade. After years of success in the field, I thought I’d share my basic strategy for SEO analytics and monitoring.

Where ROI Meets SEO For E-Commerce

For those who specialize in e-commerce, there are specific ways you can track and manage your SEO performance. Thanks to Google Analytics (yes, including the free version), you can do this fairly simply. Below, I’ve outlined the basic steps involved.

First, open your Google Analytics account and navigate to the “ADMIN” panel within the left-hand sidebar. From there, navigate to the “VIEW” tab and select “e-Commerce settings” and finally “Enable Enhanced e-Commerce Reporting.”

Whether you use Shopify or WooCommerce, your next step is to initialize tracking on these platforms so the data can be communicated to Google Analytics. Here’s a thorough guide on how to do that. Once complete, you’ll be able to view a variety of key metrics, such as:

Read more: How To Check The Return On Investment Of Your Search Engine Optimization

4 ways to use local SEO to attract more patients

The typical healthcare consumer’s journey often begins with extensive research. In fact, search engines drive 3 times more hospital visits than nonsearch visitors.1

Therefore, if you are not getting enough patients through your door, there is a good chance that your company has a poor local online presence. Not enough patients are coming—they are going to your competitors instead simply because they found them first while doing a local search.

But all is not lost.

With a well-designed health care search engine optimization (SEO) campaign, you can improve your medical practice’s digital presence and attract more patients.

Below are some of the best ways to leverage local SEO and get more patients through your door.

1. Claim and optimize your Google My Business listing

All local businesses, including health care providers, should claim their Google My Business (GMB) listing. Not only does GMB significantly influence search engine rankings, but it is also one of the first things that potential patients see (Google’s Local Pack) after conducting a local search query.

Fortunately, claiming your GMB account is easy and free.2 After signing up and claiming your listing, you will need to provide the following information:

• Name of practice

• Address

• Phone number

• Email address

• Hours of operation

• Photos of the practice

• Short description about the practice

The idea is to bring the GMB listing to life by providing complete information about the practice to potential patients. To optimize a GMB listing, make sure that you frequently update it and answer questions that people may have.

What about multiple locations?

Even if you have a main phone line for answering calls and booking patient appointments, all office locations should have their own Google My Business listing.

Otherwise, when a patient searches for your secondary locations (satellite offices), they are likely to end up finding the Google listing for the main location. This can result in patients

Read more: 4 ways to use local SEO to attract more patients

Why Do Pillar Pages Matter For SEO?

A pillar page is an organized piece of content on a website that can help search engines see its worth and connection with other pages on the site. If the page is structured well, it can impact the website’s rankings because of the high searched terms or additional highlighted useful information. Our agency has experienced good results with the value of pillar pages for SEO.

Let’s start with the basics.

What Is A Pillar Page?

A pillar page acts as an index of a particular subject that shows (and links to) related information that the reader might want or need. A pillar page cannot have all the information about a single topic, so it has to be spread on other pages.

For example, a blog post focuses on a topic with much information. For SEO, the blog post should include links that create a network for the search engines to crawl the content further. Even a homepage or product or service page can be tied to a pillar page.

Pillar pages are a valuable part of a content strategy. You can write about a topic and narrow down the post with relevant material. A pillar page surrounded by associated content can allow site visitors to dig deeper all in one place—your post.

How Do You Create A Pillar Page?

A pillar page should include a broad range of keywords, be useful to readers and promote taking action. Here are some important things to remember while creating a pillar page:

Read more: Why Do Pillar Pages Matter For SEO?

Google: Don’t Remove Old News From Your News Site For SEO Reasons

Google’s John Mueller said he would not recommend that you remove old content or old news from your news site for SEO reasons. He said “I don’t think you would get a lot of value out of removing just old news.”

John said this at the 50:12 mark into the last video hangout this past Friday. He was asked about removing old news from a news publisher site for SEO reasons. John said it is “not something I would recommend.” He said “from that point of view I wouldn’t do this for SEO reasons.”

I don’t think you would get a lot of value out of removing just old news.

It’s also not something I would recommend to to news websites because sometimes all the information is still useful. So from that point of view I wouldn’t do this for SEO reasons.

If the reasons why you want to remove content or put it into kind of like an archive section on your website for usability reasons or for maintenance or whatever.

That’s something that you can definitely do but I wouldn’t just blindly remove old content because it’s old. The advice is a bit different from a year ago but not totally different.

Read more: Google: Don’t Remove Old News From Your News Site For SEO Reasons

SEOs experiencing delays in data on Search Console performance reports

“We’re currently experiencing longer than usual delays in the Search Console performance report. This only affects reporting, not crawling, indexing, or ranking of websites,” said the Google Search Central Twitter account on the morning of Tuesday, September 21. “We’ll update here once this issue is resolved. Thanks for your patience!”

Many SEOs have noticed the change in their Search Console reports this morning and have taken to social media to ask if they’re the only ones seeing the issue. “Is there a GSC bug? Apologies if I am late to the party here, but the last day we even have partial data available is the 18th?” asked Tessa Bonacci Nadik, Director of SEO Product at Cox Automotive.

She’s not alone. Other SEOS say September 18 was their last day of data. Aleyda Solis reported that her last day of data was September 17.

We’ll continue to update this piece as we know more.

Why we care. If your data isn’t updated, don’t worry just yet. The glitch will likely be fixed soon, but make sure to inform your clients and adjust your weekly reporting to ensure no misunderstandings or data mistakes. If you’re using the Search Console API, it’s also likely you will see 404s until the glitch is remedied. Google assured SEOs that the glitch isn’t affecting how sites are seen or indexed, just how the data is being relayed back to them. It’s also a good reminder to go into Search Console regularly to check your data and not just rely solely on tools that may pull the data into automated reports.

Read more: SEOs experiencing delays in data on Search Console performance reports

From Google and Facebook, I Learned Why Every Ecommerce Store Should Focus on SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become a buzz word over the last few years. Many areas of online business have been implementing solid SEO strategies for a while, but ecommerce is still slow to join the rest. Ecommerce stores have been trained to use paid methods, like Google Shopping Ads, Facebook Ads and other social media ads to get people to click through to their store. However, with the ever-increasing cost it takes to acquire new customers, ecommerce store owners should get on board with SEO and develop a solid content strategy for long-term growth and reduce their cost to acquire new potential customers.

The one-legged stool

As I mentioned earlier, the cost of bringing new customers to your ecommerce store is going to keep increasing. If your store is solely reliant on paid traffic, let’s say from Google Shopping, and Google decides you violated one of the many advertising policies, all your traffic dries up and you’re out of business. No traffic means no sales and no sales means you’re out of business by the end of the month.

Relying solely on paid traffic channels is like having a one-legged stool. It’s a lot more secure for the health and longevity of your business to have more legs under the stool, in case one leg gets taken away from you. SEO is one of those legs you need to apply. Not only is it free traffic, but as long as you provide valuable information for the readers, there’s no risk of being removed in the same way paid channels can shut you out.

The results of a well-executed SEO and content strategy take time. Often, an ecommerce store won’t see significant organic traffic for 6 to 12 months after publishing those first pieces of content. But if you keep implementing and producing solid, helpful content, the effects compound over time.

I got banned from Google and Facebook

I share all this from my own experience as an ecommerce store owner. I relied solely on Google and Facebook ads to get traffic and for some unknown reason back in early 2019 both platforms decided I had violated a policy. After that point, I couldn’t get back in their good books.

Read more: After Getting Banned From Google and Facebook, I Learned Why Every Ecommerce Store Should Focus on SEO

The Greatest Challenges & Threats in SEO

Insights from our recent State of SEO Survey report show that although the last year began with uncertainty across the industry, SEO is now more in demand than ever before.

Even so, it is not without its challenges. What issues are SEO professionals facing — and moving forward, what are the threats that might block success?

We surveyed over 2,800 SEO professionals about their experiences in SEO over the last 12 months. Keep reading to find out:

What the biggest challenges were in the last 12 months.

Whether SEO results trended better or worse over the last year.

What SEO pros perceive as the industry’s greatest threats in the years ahead.

What Were the Biggest Challenges in SEO Over the Last 12 Months?

At the start of the pandemic, there was a lot of uncertainty for everyone as businesses tried to navigate an unprecedented situation rife with real-world shutdowns, a near-instant shift to digital, and massive changes in consumer behavior.

As the pandemic unfolded many businesses had to pivot quickly in order to survive. Some struggled while others thrived as digital and ecommerce growth accelerated by several years.

Early in the pandemic, budget cuts were the biggest challenge for SEO professionals, as indicated by 37.6% of survey respondents.

Strategy issues (34.8%) were also a significant challenge in the SEO industry, as was a lack of resources (32.9%).

Read more: The Greatest Challenges & Threats in SEO

5 common pitfalls to avoid so you maximize your keyword strategy’s business impact

As an SEO agency, you already know the role that keyword research plays in understanding the business opportunities of your clients and how to gather hundreds and hundreds of keywords for your SEO campaign.  

But how do you go from a large list of keywords to an articulated, coherent, data-driven set that ensures you’ve zeroed in on the objective and know where you’re heading?  

Jumping straight to execution, crunching tactics and tasks might work in the short-term, but without a well-defined strategy in place, the risk of wasting client resources and, ultimately, trust is high.   

And you’ll know a strategy is good when you trust it to leverage your performance and generate results for your clients while ticking all the following boxes:  

Having a diagnosis which details the challenge to be solved. This helps you narrow your focus to a clear, simple problem that your client faces. Deciding on a guiding policy that defines the approach you follow for solving the problem. Developing a set of coherent actions: the tactics you’ll use, step by step, in accordance with your approach to get the best results and solve the problem. This logical structure, called the kernel of strategy, can help your SEO agency at every stage of campaign development, but for the scope of this article, we’ll be looking at how to refine the guiding policy by avoiding common keyword strategy pitfalls.  

Let’s take them one by one, so you discover new ways to get the most out of your keyword list and set yourself up for success:  

Pitfall #1 You include branded keywords in the mix Branded organic traffic is not SEO traffic.  

The navigational keywords related to your client’s website or other websites (even competitors) won’t be valuable for your SEO campaign, as you can’t directly influence them. Plus, your client owns all the branded keywords, and they’re using other channels to amplify them (marketing campaigns, advertising, paid search, etc.). You don’t need rank tracking or SEO for that.  

Mixing the two will muddle your data and will make your client’s position in the search landscape seem better than it actually is — which, in turn, will alter the strategy and your desired objectives.  

Read more: 5 common pitfalls to avoid so you maximize your keyword strategy’s business impact

Global Agencies SEO Services Market Report 2021: Market is Expected to Reach $83.7 Billion in 2025 at a CAGR of 19.6%

The global agencies seo services market is expected to grow from $37.84 billion in 2020 to $40.92 billion in 2021 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.1%. The market is expected to reach $83.7 billion in 2025 at a CAGR of 19.6%.  

The agencies SEO services market consists of the sales of SEO services and related goods by agencies or companies that provide search engine optimization services for businesses. These establishments are the entities which provide both on premise and cloud-based deployment SEO services and charge their clients based on man-hours, results based, and click based among many other models. Only goods and services traded between entities or sold to end consumers are included.  

Companies operating in agencies SEO services market are using “Zero-Click Search Results” to increase their appearance in the search results and this is a major trend in the agencies SEO services market. Zero-Click Searches alludes to a search engine results page (SERP) which answers the query directly at the top so that the user doesn’t need to do any further clicks to complete the search. A zero-click search is one that fulfills the search intent at the top of the SERP.  

According to the Search Engine Journal, 34.4% of all desktop searches result in no click while 62.5% of users never click search result links on mobile. Google presented zero-click searches in March 2020, with the aim to eliminate multiple results that searchers don’t really need and to satisfy the user intent faster. Zero-click searches include database-style searches, dictionary and encyclopedia-style searchers, and map direction style searchers.  

The agencies SEO services market covered in this report is segmented by service type into online services; offline services. It is also segmented by subscription into monthly; annually and by end-use industry into professional services; IT services; e-commerce; hospitality; recreation; real estate; others.  

The number of people using smartphones and internet services is increasing rapidly, especially in developing countries and this factor is expected to drive the market for agencies SEO services during the forecast period. For instance, in January 2020, the numbers of smartphone users in the world were 3.50 billion accounting for 45.12% of the world’s population.  

Read more: Global Agencies SEO Services Market Report 2021: Market is Expected to Reach $83.7 Billion in 2025 at a CAGR of 19.6%