Make sure to scroll to the bottom of the page to get your SEO audit report.
Are you interested in seeing where your website currently stands in regards to SEO?
It’s always helpful to have some sort of benchmark handy to understand what type of traction you currently have in the major search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo.
Doing an SEO audit allows you to focus in on areas where your website needs improvement and can really help you create a customized plan of attack moving forward.
Unfortunately, most people have no idea where to start in this process and do not have the proper tools in order to perform an in-depth SEO audit for themselves.
Luckily, I can help you and have been involved with SEO since 2007, helping businesses and individuals increase their organic presence in the search results.
Before we get into the details of my SEO auditing service, let’s go over a checklist of what I typically look into when I perform my analysis.
SEO Audit Checklist
When auditing a website and looking further into the overall SEO currently in place, it’s important to analyze ALL aspects that could be affecting your results.
This includes both on-site and off-site SEO.
Current Search Engine Rankings
Meta Tags
Title Tags
Meta Descriptions
Header Tags
Image ALT Tags
Content Analysis
Website Speed
Mobile Speed
Desktop Speed
Crawl Errors (404 errors, redirects chains etc.)
XML Sitemap
Domain Authority
Backlink Portfolio Analysis
Social Shares
Business Citations (for Local SEO)
Website Architecture
This list above is a good place to start and will really provide you with the data you need to begin implementing an SEO strategy for your website.
Too many “SEO auditing tools” online miss major parts in this process and mainly because they are not real humans working on it.
Sometimes the information provided by these tools can also be flat out wrong and the level of detail/explanation can be incredibly vague.
Having the expertise of an SEO specialist digging into the nuts and bolts of your website is far more beneficial than some mediocre online tool.
In fact, I don’t know of any tool out there that can give you all the information laid above in a single SEO audit report.
Which brings me to my offer for you below.
Get Your SEO Audit Report!
If the checklist above sounds overwhelming or confusing to you, let me do the hard work for you.
Not only will I provide you with a detailed SEO audit report, but we will also schedule a 30 minute phone call to review your results.
This way I can explain to you exactly where your website stands and what areas we need to focus on next to improve your organic search presence.
This is a report that you will 100% own and have forever to look back on and use as a benchmark.
I can deliver your SEO audit report within 24-48 hours.
I really think you’ll learn a lot once we go over your website’s SEO data and I will even give you specific steps to implement moving forward.
What are you waiting for?
Get your SEO audit report by clicking the button below!
Every business wants to win over the millennial market, but the hard part is figuring out how to do it. Experts know that traditional television, magazine, and radio advertising platforms no longer reach the youth market. Before you spend time scouring the internet for ideas to help you reach this coveted age group, you might want to continue reading as we’ll uncover useful strategies on how to market towards millennials.
Millennials trust strangers’ opinions
A recent study shows that 73% of millennials say they seek others’ opinions online when purchasing a product. They seek out online reviews, blogs, and websites that seem to offer authentic views about products and services. The reviews resonate with them even more if they seem to come from a person they view as peers. Millennials trust genuine opinions and spot phony advertising a mile away.
Instead of responding to pop-up ads on the internet or sleek magazine spreads, millennials seek out information and knowledge from ebooks, whitepapers, and videos. This type of content is called inbound marketing. For example, the cosmetic industry is embracing this type of marketing, by producing YouTube videos on how to use their products. Millennials pin these to their Pinterest boards and share them with their peers. This creates a lot of awareness and exposure around certain products.
Millennials want to interact with a real person from your company, and they don’t want to wait for an answer
These twenty-somethings will reach out to companies through their Twitter or Instagram pages and will expect a quick response. Companies who are quick to interact with their customers on social media report that they experience increased sales. Because of this, companies are hiring more employees as social media experts to interact with potential customers.
Millennials pay attention to key social media influencers
View the top YouTube stars to determine who is speaking to this generation. While some of these influencers have an international following, look for those who are active from your own community. Contact local celebrities who are active on social media and work out a deal to have them use your product or visit your business. For example, if you own a restaurant, reach out to your area’s favorite food bloggers or reviewers and invite them to try your signature dish.
Millennials have a fear of missing out
If millennials see their peers Tweeting or Snapchatting about a specific experience they had at a business, they will want to have that experience too. After all, they don’t want to be the only one out of their friends who hasn’t gone to the new local ax throwing place or who hasn’t eaten ice cream that allows you to breathe like a dragon. Encourage your customers to post about their experiences at your business. Create a backdrop where they can take photos of themselves enjoying your product or service.
Millennials embrace risk-taking
Understanding that millennials love trying new things may help you market to them easier. For example, in the food industry, Millenials are always looking for new and diverse flavors and new experiences in ethnic foods.
Target your specific customer
More than ever before, we are able to target products to not only an age group, but we can target marketing campaigns towards specific people within an age group. Learn who buys your product or service and look for other people like them.
Support a charity
Millennials are willing to spend more money on a product if they know that part of the proceeds will go to help a cause they support. This lesson can be learned from Toms, the shoe company that gives away a pair of their shoes for each shoe that is sold.
Create an app
Millennials use their smartphones for everything. Companies who optimize the mobile phone experience enjoy a younger customer base.
Millennials are the least likely age group to read magazines or newspapers. They also watch the least amount of television each day and listen to the least amount of radio.
Eighty-nine percent of millennials use social media. Of those who use social media, 82 percent of them interact with their favorite brands or retailers online. Forty-nine percent follow their favorite brands or retailers on social media.
Take the time to think about how your company spends their marketing dollars. If you want to appeal to a younger audience, you may want to think about hiring a social media expert to help increase your appeal.
And although these numbers may seem a bit small, looking back over the course of my blog analytics/metrics, I’m very happy with this progress.
Let’s look at the details below together:
Organic Traffic (December 2018)- 176 Visits
As stated above, organic traffic in December 2018 came in at 176 organic search visits.
A new all-time high for my website!
When checking my search engine rankings recently, I noticed a few of my blog posts shot up to the first page of Google, which in return helped me generate additional organic traffic.
These blog posts were written months ago, and Google is finally starting to take notice/reward me for my efforts….And especially since these were really well-written and longer-form style content (over 1,000 words in length for each).
Year-Over-Year Organic Traffic Increases (December 2018 vs. December 2017)
When comparing year-over-year organic traffic is up 61.47% (176 vs. 109).
Below are a couple of screenshots from my Google Analytics account to give you a better visual of my results.
The screenshot above is more of a birds eye view of my organic traffic over-time.
Looking at your data from different angles is always helpful and can help you identity certain trends.
This particular screenshot shows the difference in organic traffic in December 2018 (blue line) versus December 2017 (orange line).
You can see that there was much more action in regards to organic traffic in December 2018.
Comparing the full year of 2018 to 2017
The last metric I’d like to compare is the full year of 2018 versus the full year of 2017.
This shows me even further the progress that I’ve made for the full calendar year.
I highly reccomend looking at a comparison like this for your own site if you’ve been blogging for long enough. It really helps to see if your marketing efforts (in my case SEO), is paying off.
As you can see in the screenshot above, organic traffic when comparing 2018 to 2017 is up 293.29% (1,817 vs. 462).
Sometimes it can be hard to stay motivated when it comes to blogging, but when you start seeing increases such as this (over the long-term), you realize that all of your effort are truly paying off.
Reflection of 2018 and Next Steps
I must admit, I was really happy with my overall results in 2018.
I saw noticeable growth in organic traffic, grew my email list, increased my blogging income and learned a lot along the way.
With all that being said, I will not be “taking it easy” in 2019.
In fact, I plan on pushing even harder and implementing new tactics and techniques to my website.
Let’s take a look at some of my core strategies moving forward.
Consistent Content Creation & Long-Form Content:
No surprise here, increasing your organic traffic and online influence truly comes down to generating consistent and quality content. I am really good about publishing content to my blog on a regular basis (I average anywhere from 4-8 blog posts per month). Something I have really focused on in 2018 and will continue to do so in 2019, is writing long-form content. Meaning crafting blog posts that are over 1,000 words long. Google loves in-depth and helpful articles and will favor these websites heavily compared to sites that publish shorter content. The combination of publishing content consistently and ensuring that it’s fleshed out over 1,000 words long should produce excellent results in the new year.
Build Quality Backlinks From High Domain Authority (DA) Websites:
This is an area I feel I can ramp up a bit. The focus here would be to write quality guest post articles on other high domain authority websites in my niche. This means researching other influential bloggers that have a domain authority of at least 50 or higher and submitting well-written content for them to publish to their website. In return, you are usually allowed a link back to your website which eventually helps with overall search engine rankings, increasing organic traffic and referral traffic.
Upload 2-4 YouTube Videos Per Month:
My YouTube channel has been more of a secondary focus in the past but I’d like to prioritize this powerful platform just as I do my blog. There is so much traffic “hanging out” on YouTube on a daily basis, it’s incredible. More and more people are using YouTube as their main search engine than ever before and video marketing will only continue to be more important in the years to come. Currently I average 1-2 videos on my channel per month, but I’d like to double that to around 2-4 videos to start. My YouTube channel is small but it has been growing steadily monthly which gives me incentive to keep pushing.
Monitor/Improve Website Speed:
I believe a big reason for December 2018 being my highest month in organic traffic is due to the website speed improvements I made in late November 2018. I shaved off 3 seconds overall in total loading speed which can be extremely beneficial from an SEO standpoint. I will continue to monitor this in 2019 and also work on making my site even faster, if possible.
Network with other Bloggers & Entrepreneurs:
By networking with other bloggers and entrepreneurs, you never know what type of opportunities can open up. It’s even good to connect with people who are a step or two above you, as there’s always more that one can learn in this ever evolving digital world. I will really be looking to build more quality relationships in 2019 to expand my reach and refine my skills even further.
The start of a new year is always a great time to reflect on your past efforts/results and also a great time to set new and concrete goals for yourself moving forward.
How were your results in 2018?
If you’re looking for more guidance on how to generate more traffic and exposure for your blog, please connect with me here.
The digital nomad vocation has become immensely popular in
recent years. With the unprecedented expansion of seamless global connectivity
and the fact that you can latch on to a stable Wi-Fi network almost anywhere in
the world, it’s no wonder why this interests so many people. As a digital
nomad, you’re the entrepreneur, the leader, and the growth guru of your
company. Your work environment is wherever the road may
take you, and the possibilities for success are as endless as the road ahead.
That said, it’s important to understand that entrepreneurial superstardom in
the digital nomad world doesn’t come easy, as there are numerous notable
competitors you will have to outpace, and a myriad of hurdles you will have to
overcome along the way. With that in mind, let’s take a look at the five
crucial steps you need to take in order to ensure a bright future as a digital
nomad.
Resolve outstanding financial obligations
Financial ties can not only hinder your success, but they
can also prevent you from starting this next chapter in your life. Besides, can
you imagine leaving the country for God knows how long while having outstanding
debts with the tax service, your bank, and the likes? You’re either not going
to be able to leave, or your debtors are going to be very unhappy with you when
you come back.
This is thin financial ice you’re treading on, so the first thing you should do before you make travel arrangements is to settle all of your debts. A good way to do this is to sell your belongings. While the idea of selling your home might not appeal to you at first, understand that this is the quickest way to a large sum of cash you can use to organize your finances, settle debts, and plan for the travels ahead.
Create a budget and a viable revenue plan
Meticulous finance
management will be the key to sustainability and long-term success in the
digital nomad world, so don’t take the task lightly no matter how much money
you have in the bank. Unless you’re the heir to the throne of Brunei, you will
need to allocate your resources, and adopt a frugal
mindset, at least until your blog and other online endeavors start making
money.
How do you make money as a blogger and a digital nomad? There are a number of ways, and you should use all of them to your advantage. Firstly, you can sell ad space to companies who want to advertise on your website. Additionally, you can create your own products, build a responsive email list, sell affiliate products and much more. Consider writing for other companies as well, and don’t shy away from selling your own writing skills to others.
Get insured against every liability
The biggest threat to a digital nomad can be health issues,
personal safety, and long-term financial stability for themselves and their
loved ones. There is no telling what could happen to you on your travels, and
if you’re serious about making this your profession, you should take these
problems very seriously. This is especially important if you’re travelling to
other continents for the first time, such as from Asia to Africa and beyond.
For example, Asian digital nomads are advised to obtain comprehensive travel and life insurance. This is why long-term universal life insurance in Singapore has skyrocketed in popularity in recent years, and it’s why you should follow the same mindset and get adequate coverage yourself before you set sail. Travel insurance will ensure you get medical attention no matter where you are, and life insurance will provide coverage to your family and loved ones should anything happen to you.
Don’t risk it, this is an unpredictable path you’re about to
take after all, so make sure you’re protected against all liabilities.
Declutter your life and organize your luggage
Moving on to lighter subjects, there is a need to declutter
your life thoroughly and organize your belongings for maximum comfort and
efficiency while traveling. Contrary to what you might think, you really don’t
need to bring your entire wardrobe with you, as you will undoubtedly buy more
stuff on the road, and per the occasion.
You can start decluttering by throwing away or giving away everything you know you don’t need. To make some extra cash you can also sell your stuff online. Once you’re don’t to the bare essentials, you can start packing for your first journey. Organize your clothes and equipment according to the destination. Check weather conditions, cultural and legal circumstances, and any other factor that might influence your choice of wardrobe and conduct.
Be rigorous, be dedicated, and work hard
Being a digital nomad is hard work.
Sometimes, it can feel as if you’re not making any progress at all, but the
most important thing to do is to stick to your guns. Never waver and always create
quality content on a regular basis, adopt the right SEO and marketing strategies,
and you will inevitably build a loyal following. It just takes time and
persistence. Stick to a schedule, be dedicated, and build your brand.
To travel the world and get paid for it is one hell of a dream, and it sure beats any nine-to-five job. Before you start this next chapter of your life, be sure to take these vital steps in order to mitigate risk and pave the road to a thriving future as a digital nomad.
Author Bio:
Lauren Wiseman is an entrepreneur, currently based in Melbourne and a regular contributor to bizzmarkblog.com. She assists clients in growing their personal and professional brands in a fast-changing and demanding market environment. Covering finance and investment topics, Lauren strongly believes in holistic approach to business.
Excel is a potent business tool. Some business owners mistakenly think of it exclusively for accounting purposes. In truth, Excel can be used in some capacity by every department and individual. It’s incredibly useful for organizing lots of information and data into a format that is easier to derive insights from. It can speed up day-to-day processes and ultimately make an organization run more efficient.
To unlock all of these benefits and more, businesses should think about training their employees on how to utilize Excel. Saving time and money and staying more organized are indeed compelling reasons for a company to want to ensure its employees are adequately trained at using Excel. But, if you need more convincing, here are 6 more reasons why you should invest in Excel training for your employees.
They May Not Be As “Proficient” As You Think
Excel is a skill that many applicants and employees claim to possess. “Proficient at Excel” seems to be a fairly common attribute, yet there’s a wide range of possible skill levels that fall under the umbrella of the word “proficient.” While you may think that the majority of your employees are experts in Excel, the reality is that many don’t have a lot of the know-how to really unlock all of its benefits. Alternatively, they may be working with the knowledge that is dated because the program is frequently updated. Learning Excel in 2009 doesn’t do as much good after ten years have passed.
It Can Be Taught On-The-Go
Because most of your staff is, at the very least, familiar with Excel already, you don’t need to dedicate a lot of time to training. The beauty of teaching Excel is it can widely be taught on-the-go through lessons that apply to each individual’s duties. This will allow everyone to learn Excel lessons that are actually useful and will immediately impact their day-to-day work life.
Arguably, the most frictionless way to teach Excel on-the-go is to encourage employees that have already demonstrated superior knowledge in the program to offer their guidance to neighboring employees.
It Isn’t Just For Numbers
As touched on before, there is a popular misconception that Excel is only useful for crunching and organizing numbers. While it is a powerful accounting assistant, Excel is usable in some other capacities. For starters, the ability to arrange lots of information in convenient and organized cells helps make sense out of complex material and allows us to see patterns that would otherwise be invisible.
Excel is also a powerful tool for creating schedules, to-do lists, time logs, forms, project management charts and much, much more.
Gets Everyone On The Same Page
There’s a good chance that your business is already using Excel in certain areas, like accounting, CRM or inventory management. While the program saves individuals in these departments lots of time, as those spreadsheets move to other departments, where Excel isn’t used often, it can create roadblocks. Excel training gets all of your employees on equal footing when it comes to navigating spreadsheets and charts. This makes it easier for information to be communicated across departments or during meetings, especially when in the format of spreadsheets.
Simplifies Common, Cumbersome Calculations
On the other hand, when it does come time to do some number crunching, Excel can save some serious time. Learning even some fundamental Excel formulas can make quick work of having to add large lists of numbers together or perform complex calculations. Plus, there’s less risk of human error causing miscalculations and inaccurate figures.
When new data has to be entered, you don’t have to start the calculation all over; Excel does it for you. This will save your company and its employees lots of time, which can then be spent on more critical tasks.
Other Businesses Use It
Even if your business only relies on Excel for a couple of small tasks, you should still consider teaching employees basic Excel tips and functions because other companies that you do business with may use the program to a greater extent. Thus, being familiar with the program, even if you don’t use it much, is also essential. After all, you wouldn’t want your employees to be confused or at a loss if these companies send over important information business spreadsheets.
Conclusion
Excel has a lot of business potential, yet many organizations fail to unlock all of its value because their employees are not trained in using the program to its full ability. If you genuinely want your company and its employees to work as a cohesive and efficient unit, Excel training can help get you there.
As a blogger you need to be prepared for some monthly fluctuation in in terms of organic traffic.
Although it’s good to analyze the monthly trend, it’s even better to compare your traffic data year-over-year versus month-over-month.
So even though my organic traffic is down slightly month-over-month, I’m still seeing good increases when comparing the data year-over-year.
This shows that my SEO work and blogging efforts are paying off and resulting in natural organic growth.
Was November my best month to date?
No.
But my long-term view/mindset keeps me from getting discouraged. I feel that too many people in the blogging space expect to see incredible growth, month in and month out when that is just not realistic.
Of course this is possible depending on the person, niche and blog, but please look at the long-term trend instead of a narrow monthly view.
It’s also important to point out that traffic can sometimes slow down a bit around November and December due to the holidays.
But these months are perfect for creating concrete goals and strategizing for the new year to come.
With that being said, let’s take a look at my blogging results for November 2018.
Organic Traffic (November 2018)- 143 Visits
Organic traffic in November 2018 came in at 143 organic search visits.
This is down slightly when comparing month-over-month but I am still up when comparing year-over-year.
Year-Over-Year Organic Traffic Increases (November 2018 vs. November 2017)
Organic traffic is up 22.22% when comparing year-over-year (143 vs. 117).
An interesting thing about this comparison, is that November of 2017 is when my blog really started to see its first growth spurt.
Back then (Nov. 2017), that was my highest month in regards to organic traffic in around 12 months.
Now the reason I’m stating this is because being up 22.22% year-over-year when that was at one point my best month in organic traffic is still pretty good.
Let’s take a look at my organic traffic chart overtime to understand this better:
You can see the growth I’m talking about when looking back at November 2017 (and months prior) and although there’s been some fluctuation month-over-month recently, I am indeed UP when comparing Nov. 2018 to Nov. 2017.
Next Steps for Increasing My Blog Traffic
One very key point to highlight is that on November 28, 2018, I increased my website speed by around 3 seconds.
I believe this is really going to help moving into the new year, as my website was pretty “sluggish” prior.
As for other strategies I plan on implementing, much of this remains the same month-in and month out.
1.) Create Long-Form & High Quality Content: Part of the reason for the growth I have seen thus far with my blog, is due to creating quality and in-depth blog articles that get ranked in Google (targeting both broad and long-tail keyword phrases). When I first started this blog in 2016, my posts were much shorter in content and I believe not as valuable as they are today. You always want to try to provide as much helpful information to your readers as possible, so they keep coming back for more. I will continue to push out as much quality content as I can on a consistent basis.
2.) Focus on My YouTube Channel: Although my YouTube channel is very small still, I’ve noticed since I’ve been more consistent with my video content creation, it has steadily been growing each month (more so than in the past). In return, because I leave my blog links in my video description, this has driven some nice extra referral traffic to my website and resulted in more subscribers to my email list. A lot of people spend their time on YouTube these days and love watching videos to find the information they are looking for. If you don’t have your own channel yet, I encourage starting one up. You can see and subscribe to my YouTube channel here. It’s still a work in progress!
3.) Guest Posting on High Domain Authority Sites: Link building is a strategy that I can be a bit more consistent with, especially since it’s so vital to the organic growth for any website. Google wants to rank websites that have a strong backlink portfolio so it’s essential to work on this on a monthly basis. I’m really going to refine my guest posting strategy, and try to publish articles on higher domain authority websites for the best results. This should yield in higher search engine rankings, increased organic traffic and also increased referral traffic.
Make sure to have a plan each month for your website. You do not want to approach this blindly.
Keep producing content for people to see, answer questions, solve problems and always engage with your audience.
Learn from any mistakes or hurdles you encounter and always be fine tuning your efforts.
How have your results been?
Are you having success with any particular strategy?
One of my coaching students Mark Newsome runs a great blog over at YouCanMarketOnlineNow.com, which provides tons of valuable content for small business owners, entrepreneurs, direct/internet marketers and much more.
Mark hired me as an SEO coach/mentor to help him drive more targeted organic traffic to his website.
At the time of writing this, I’ve been working with Mark for the past 8 months, helping him really strengthen and tighten up both his on-site and off-site SEO.
Something that we ran into a couple months back is a common mistake that I see SO many bloggers and webmasters make.
What mistake am I talking about here?
Intrusive Popups and/or Interstitials on Mobile
Now that Google has put forth mobile first indexing, it’s crucial that we really analyze our website from a mobile perspective.
Intrusive popups/interstitials tend to take up a large portion of the screen when viewing the website on a mobile device which leads to a bad user-experience if someone cannot easily click out of it/navigate your website.
This can potentially result in decreased search engine rankings in Google and therefore decreased organic traffic.
There have been some websites that have recorded significant decreases in both search engine rankings and organic traffic as a result of having an intrusive popup in place.
So we need to make sure any intrusive popup is deleted, cleaned up and/or modified on your website if you currently have one present.
Example of Mark’s Intrusive Popup on Mobile
As Mark and I dug more and more into the SEO of his website, I noticed that he indeed had an intrusive popup in place that was taking up probably 90% of the screen (when viewing on my iPhone).
See screenshot below:
As a visitor, if you were to try to navigate Mark’s website on a mobile device, there wasn’t even an option to exit out of this popup, which raises major red flags in Google.
Visitors were not able to see the content on his website due to this popup taking up the majority of the screen.
I immediately knew we needed to take action on this to avoid further issues and potentially a penalty from Google.
We located where in Mark’s WordPress site this popup existed, which was in a widget with some Aweber html code pasted in there, and deleted it completely.
This got rid of the intrusive popup on mobile and allowed users once again to navigate Mark’s website efficiently and effectively.
I had a hunch that this would really help Mark’s website in terms of search engine rankings and organic traffic, and thankfully I ended up being correct.
Results From Eliminating the Intrusive Popup on Mobile
I made sure to add an “annotation” in Mark’s Google Analtyics account to track when we fixed his intrusive popup issue.
This way we could see if there were any positive results from cleaning this up on his website.
I knew this may take a couple of weeks to a few months to see any sort of uptick in organic traffic/rankings from our efforts, so we patiently waited as we focused on other SEO work.
Upon checking on this recently, I was really ecstatic to see a noticeable increase in organic traffic over the last couple of months.
Please see the screenshot below to see what I’m talking about (this data is plotted monthly).
Now let’s briefly explain this simple yet powerful chart above:
The bottom red arrow pointing to the “annotation” is when we fixed the intrusive popup which was on September 9th, 2018.
You can see the next two months to follow (October and November 2018), were two of Mark’s highest months all-time in organic traffic!
Incredible that just from fixing this intrusive popup issue, we saw such a large increase in organic traffic both month-over-month and year-over-year.
To get a better idea of the impact of this fix, let’s look at some specific stats:
Month-Over-Month Increases
Organic traffic is up 67.61% when comparing October 2018 vs. September 2018 – (101 vs. 67 visits).
Year-Over-Year Increases
Organic traffic is up 376% when comparing year-over-year (October 2018 vs. October 2017) – (119 vs. 25 visits).
Google almost immediately recognized this change and as a result the organic traffic for Mark’s website increased significantly.
We will continue to monitor this in the coming months, but both Mark and I are thrilled at the initial results we are seeing.
(Note: When making an important change such as this one on your website, a good tactic is to “fetch” your site within Google Search Console. This could result in Google seeing/indexing the edits/adjustments you made faster.)
Conclusion:
The key takeaway here is to make sure that you do not have any intrusive popups or interstitials that are affecting the way users access or navigate your website when on a mobile device. If you do, please consider either deleting them altogether or modifying them so that they take up much less of the screen (like a horizontal banner towards the top of your website – see article here for more examples). This one fix alone can do wonders and improve the overall SEO of your website.
Do you have an intrusive popup/interstitial on your website?
Many businesses are competing in the online market. The fact of the matter is that it’s an ongoing effort and struggle to maintain your presence, influence and reputation online. Once you’ve established your visibility, you can’t neglect it. Otherwise, your business will soon lose its relevance and fall behind your main competitors on the market. That’s why it’s very important for companies to continue competing and find new ways to stand out from the rest. However, this endeavor is more difficult than it seems.
The main reason is that online consumers oftentimes change their preferences, buying decisions and overall behavior. Based on the current market trends and modern technology, consumers can change their behavior overnight. On the other hand, businesses must be on alert at all times, so that they can adapt on time and ensure they can meet new consumer expectations. Boosting your online influence is one of the surest ways to achieve that. Therefore, here are a few ways to boost your influence online in 2019.
Understand your audience’s needs
The key to boosting your influence these days lies in truly understanding your audience’s needs. Online consumers are getting savvier each year and their expectations tend to increase. Knowing what your audience needs and wants is one of the best ways to improve your online influence. Therefore, do a lot of research. One of the most effective ways you can achieve that is to directly ask your audience what they want, need, expect and prefer.
Asking for feedback isn’t a sign of incompetence. Instead, you’re making sure you understand your consumers, in order to deliver a seamless experience to them at all times. Another way you can learn a lot is to listen to what consumers are saying about other businesses, mainly your competitors. Try to understand what your competition does right and what they do wrong, in order to learn from their success and their failures. That way you can improve your own efforts, in order to gain a competitive advantage.
Provide convenience
One of the things that consumers hold on to, no matter how much their overall behavior changes, is their need for a seamless experience. Consumers want to do their search, shopping and other activities online in an efficient and convenient way. What’s more, consumers generally dislike interruptions, difficulties and hindrances. That being said, you will vastly improve your influence by simply ensuring convenience for your customers.
For example, if your customers prefer to pay via invoices, then let them. Sure, invoices may not be so convenient for your business, as they may hurt your cash flow, but that can be easily remedied with reliable invoice finance. There are more ways to improve cash flow management, like focusing on forecasting and supplier payment terms. Multiple payment options provide benefits to every customer and that way, customers won’t suffer any inconveniences or misunderstandings.
Become an industry expert
Today, consumers aren’t just looking for businesses that can provide them with an excellent product or service quality. In fact, they want to get informed, educated and assisted before making a purchasing decision or other desired action. Nowadays, boosting online influence oftentimes comes down to positioning yourself as an industry expert. The way you can do that is by providing consumers with relevant and useful content, such as articles, white papers, research papers, eBooks and so on.
Help consumers solve a problem or answer questions and they’ll regard you as influential and valuable. Also, provide detailed product descriptions to help consumers familiarize themselves with your offers and also help them decide to make a purchase. You can post such information on your own blog, as well as publish articles on other relevant sources through guest posting. That way, you’ll not just gain influence but exposure as well.
Establish your social media presence
Social media is the key for both business visibility and their influence online. The majority of target audiences reside daily on social media networks, and the best way to make a name for your business is to impress your social media followers. There are various ways companies can boost their online influence by leveraging social media platforms. For example, establish a meaningful relationship with your audience by engaging in conversations with them on a regular basis and by providing them with relevant and top-quality content.
What’s more, establish a relationship with social media influencers. Influencers, as their name suggests, can influence purchasing decisions for their followers, encourage them to endorse a business and persuade them to follow someone else. Having the support of an influencer on social media can do wonders for your own influence online. Another thing you can do is develop a brand. Brands are meant to elevate businesses on the market and vastly improve their presences, reputation, awareness and of course, influence.
When it comes to boosting online influence, not much has changed. Businesses that want to be influential on the market in 2019 will have to make an effort to meet their consumer needs, demands and expectations. What’s more, keeping up with the latest market and technological trends is also an excellent way to not just remain relevant but also become influential.
Author Bio:
Lauren Wiseman is an entrepreneur, currently based in Melbourne and a regular contributor to bizzmarkblog.com. She assists clients in growing their personal and professional brands in a fast-changing and demanding market environment. Covering finance and investment topics, Lauren strongly believes in holistic approach to business.
What is your plan to boost your online influence in 2019?
These days, Instagram is one platform that is getting increasingly difficult to conquer with each passing day, especially for businesses. With the constant algorithm tweaks, the unfortunate truth is that the impact of your content is getting less and less. However, it’s certainly not all doom and gloom. Instagram launched its stories feature back in August 2016, essentially the platform’s answer to Snapchat, and it has only been on the rise ever since. Much like Snapchat, Instagram Stories offers a way for users to share real-time photo and video content in a slideshow format, which then disappears after 24 hours.
The reason behind the popularity of Instagram Stories is undoubtedly its authenticity. In a nutshell, it is a way to see behind the scenes, behind all of the curation of the feed, and gives your audience a chance to see who you really are. The feature is undeniably valuable for businesses as there are so many ways it can be utilized which can help to enhance your social media presence and brand awareness. In this post, we’re talking through some of the easiest ways you can start making the most of everything Instagram Stories has to offer for your business.
1.) Use the story features to boost engagement and gather feedback
Some of the features available to you within Instagram Stories make for effective ways to to engage with your audience. Features such as polls and questions not only make it incredibly easy for your audience to participate, but utilizing these features also doubles as an opportunity for you to learn from your audience and gather feedback, whether it be with the intention to streamline your content, or perhaps even to improve the product or service you are offering. Within just a few moments, you can start to see authentic, real-time results.
2.) Keep it consistent
As with anything in the world of social media marketing, consistency is key. Instagram Stories is certainly no exception to this. In fact, consistency may just be one of the most important aspects in order to really make the most out of this feature. First and foremost, the amount that you post on Instagram Stories should be consistent. Every time you upload a new update, your Story appears at the top of your audience’s feed for 24 hours. Posting more often with little updates boosts your brand awareness and helps you to stay front of mind. If you are consistent with this, your audience will become more and more familiarized with your brand. Also, the more regularly you post to your Stories, the more discoverable you become, providing a great opportunity for you to expand your follower base. You should work to keep your brand visuals as consistent as possible. Many of us swipe through Stories like there’s no tomorrow, so if you are consistent with posting and doing so regularly, consistent visuals just makes it easier for users to recognize who the content is coming from.
3.) Plan your content in advance
We’ve already talked about how Instagram Stories provides you with the opportunity to post real-time content, and how it cannot be argued that this authenticity is such a benefit. Whilst that is indeed true, when you’re in the midst of running a business, it can be hard to find the time throughout the day to think of content to post to Instagram Stories on the spot. Thankfully, you have the option to upload content older than 24 hours, from your camera roll. This allows for busy social media marketers to plan content ahead of time, such as a pre-filmed intro to a livestream, without completely losing the essence of real-time content.
4.) Include a clear call to action
If there is one thing to be learned from social media marketing, it’s that CTAs are much more effective when they are clear and as easy as possible for the user to follow. Thankfully, Instagram Stories makes it super easy for you to include a clear CTA with which you can’t really go wrong. If you have over 10k followers, you’re in luck. You can add in a ‘swipe up’ link and some text to tell your viewers to swipe up for your latest offers, news, or whatever else you wish to share with them, and with one swipe they’re on your website. If you haven’t reached 10k followers, don’t fret. You can ask your viewers to ‘Click the link in bio!’ with eye-catching text. There is also a library of gifs which can add swipe up arrows and ‘link in bio’ alerts to your post, all whilst making your content more fun than a standard call to action.
Author Bio:
Article written by Stuart Cooke Blog Editor at NIParcels.com.
Website loading speed is becoming increasingly important not only from a user experience perspective but also from a search engine optimization (SEO) standpoint as well.
I noticed over the past few months, that my website was loading way too slow and I needed to make some adjustments to improve it.
I know in the past for clients I have worked with, that improving the speed of a website can directly impact search engine rankings and traffic coming into your website.
Think about it for a second, Google will not want to rank a slow loading website high in its search results.
Instead, they will want to rank a website that loads as quickly as possible so users can get the information they need without waiting too long.
At the time of writing this blog post, I just recently made some speed adjustments on my website. Meaning that it may not be for a little while until I see any ranking/traffic increases.
However, I added an annotation in my Google Analytics account (see screenshot below) to reflect the date where I started making these website speed improvements.
I will most likely do a follow up blog post in the coming months, to report on any progress I am seeing as a result of improving this metric on my site.
Now let’s take a quick before and after look at my website speed statistics.
The website I recommend using to check your the overall speed of your website is GTmetrix.
It’s free and they give you a really thorough analysis of what you need to work on to speed up your site.
Website Speed (Before) – 5.9 Seconds
As you can see, my website speed prior to making any adjustments was at 5.9 seconds (fully loaded time).
It didn’t start off that slow, but overtime with the more I was working on my website, adding plugins etc., it started to get a bit sluggish.
I remember loading my home page a few weeks ago, waiting patiently and saying “Okay, it’s definitely time to put website speed at the top of my priority list!”.
As an SEO specialist I know investing my time in areas such as website loading speed will pay off big over the long-term.
Now let’s take a look at my website speed after I made some tweaks/adjustments (don’t worry, I’ll explain exactly what I did to make my website faster).
Website Speed (After) – 2.9 Seconds
My website speed after making some necessary improvements is now 2.9 seconds (fully loaded time).
When comparing my “before” screenshot to my “after” screenshot, you can see that I improved my website speed by 3 total seconds!
That’s honestly a really good start and my website loads much more smoothly and fluently now.
However, this is an on-going effort in order to maintain and even improve my website speed further down the road.
Let’s get into the steps I took to see a 3 second overall improvement in website speed on my WordPress blog.
How Did I Improve My Website Speed In WordPress By 3 Seconds?
It wasn’t one main thing that attributed to my website speed improvements but a handful of adjustments I made after doing some deeper research.
1.) Got Rid of Unnecessary Plugins:
I ditched all plugins on my WordPress site that I wasn’t using and ones that were really making my website slower. First, I deleted all of my “inactive” plugins that were just sitting there collecting virtual dust. Next, I deleted plugins that were indeed active but that I was barely using or that served very little purpose. For example, Jetpack was an active plugin that was making my WordPress site super slow (I didn’t realize until digging deeper) and I was barely even using it. Once I deleted this plugin alone, I saw an immediate improvement in loading speed when testing my site again in GTmetrix.
My advice to you here is to really clean up your plugins within WordPress and delete any that you are not using. This means delete them completely and not just set them to inactive. I think I ended up deleting 8-10 plugins on my WordPress website in total.
Originally I was using W3 Total Cache plugin, but after reading a few articles from resources that really know the subject of website speed, I soon found out that WP Rocket is the best caching plugin…and especially when it comes to improving your website speed. If you have a single site, you can get access to the plugin for only $49 for the entire year. A steal of a deal in my opinion. This dramatically helped with my site speed and every blog post I write now, I have various optimization options that I can check off (see screenshot below). This is after configuring WP Rocket in the proper way.
3.) Downloaded a Plugin Called WP Optimize:
This is a simple little plugin that cleans out a lot of unnecessary junk within your WordPress site and keeps your database fast and efficient. It automatically optimizes your WordPress database by cleaning out post revisions, auto-draft posts, trashed posts, spam and trashed comments and much more.
4.) Compressed/Optimized all Images Using a Plugin Called Smush:
This plugin has really helped improve my WordPress website speed, especially since I’m a blogger and have tons of images uploaded on my website. Smush resizes, optimizes and compresses all of your images with their plugin. Large image files can really slow down a website and this plugin is a quick and easy solution to help optimize your media in the most efficient way possible.
The website speed optimization steps above were the main areas I focused on this last round.
In another 1-2 months, I will re-visit my website speed once again to see where more improvements can be made.
I hope this was a helpful guide and know that even implementing one or two of these steps could really help your website speed.
Remember that this and SEO in general is an on-going effort and will be something that you need to continuously revisit.
Stay persistent, track your progress and remain patient!
