It is a very common misconception that the more pages you are targeting a keyword, the better you would be ranking for that keyword. However, this is not true. In fact, targeting a specific term across multiple pages almost has the opposite effect and thus you would be doing more harm than good for your SEO. When you have multiple pages ranking for the same keyword, you are actually competing with yourself. Thus, each page has a lower conversion rate than one consolidated page and this is what is known as Keyword Cannibalization.

What is Keyword Cannibalization?

Keyword Cannibalization means you are cannibalizing your own results. It means you are splitting links, content, and conversions between two pages that should otherwise be one. In this way, you are not helping Google to find the depth of your knowledge, instead, you are asking Google to weight your pages against each other and choose out the ones which you think suits the matching keywords.

For example, suppose if your website sells jackets, and “Jackets” is the only keyword you are targeting, you are telling Google that every page is about jackets regardless of whether they are sports jackets, running jacket, etc.

Negative effects Keyword Cannibalization can have on your SEO

Many people who are suffering from Keyword Cannibalization are not even aware of what is wrong with them. At times, they might be happy that one page is ranking in the fifth and sixth slot for their targeted keyword, without realizing that one dedicated page would certainly rank higher and convert better.

Diminishing the Value of your Page

Instead of having one highly authoritative page, you are splitting your CTR to multiple moderately relevant pages. You have turned your pages into competitors and fighting with your own self.

Google May Devalue the more relevant Page

Keywords are one of the main ways that help Google understand what the particular website page is all about. Google tries to understand which page is the best fit.

Sign of Poor Page Quality

At times, multiple pages are targeting the same keyword and tell your users that your content is probably stretched thin. It also signals Google that your content may or may not match your keywords.

Conversion rate will suffer

Without any doubt, one of your page will convert better than the rest. Instead of directing new visitors to that page and making it the most authoritative, you are losing potential leads.

How to identify Keyword Cannibalization

Once the problem has been identified, fixing keyword Cannibalization is easy. Create a spreadsheet that lists all of your site’s important URL and the keywords associated. In addition, you can also use a keyword mapping tool to get better results.

Moreover, keyword cannibalization can also occur if the meta information in your title tags seem to target the same keyword. With the help of a rank tracking tool, you can also check if the content and keywords are mistakenly applied to the wrong page.

How to Fix Keyword Cannibalization

Restructure your website

The simplest way is to take your most authoritative page and turn it into a landing page that link to other unique variations.

Create New Landing Pages

You might be lacking in a landing page that consolidates all of your product pages in one place. In this case, you would benefit from creating a unique landing page to serve as your authoritative source page and link to all of your other pages.

Consolidate your content

If your pages are not unique to warrant having multiple pages targeting the same keyword, consider combining them into one page. This is a great chance to take two underperforming pages and turn them into a more authoritative source.

Find New Keywords

If you are already blessed with highly diverse, content-rich pages, and the only thing your website is suffering from is a poorly planned keyword strategy, then all you need is to find new keywords. Make sure you use proper keywords and your keywords describe your page’s content accurately.

Conclusion

Keyword cannibalization is more prevalent today than the earlier times. Its victims are usually webmasters who recognize the importance of SEO for their business. With the right tools and a positive attitude, you can give your SEO a well-deserved boost.

SEO

How to determine if a Backlink is Natural, Quality or Good?

August 16, 2017 brainwork Leave a comment

With the tradeshow season and Q4 coming up, terms like natural links, quality links, and good links are going to be thrown around. Whether you are going into a client pitch or attending a search marketing conference, it is important to know all the different types of links. Through this article, we will help you to know about each type of link, provide you with relevant definitions, and help you determine which types of links may help you to boost your rankings.

Natural Link

A natural link is one that occurs organically and not easily seen as being placed by your company. The natural links do not:

Have tracking parameters
Redirect through JavaScripts or Monetization tools
Exist within sponsored or paid content

A natural link usually exists as a reference to a piece of content, website or a source.

Unnatural Link

The unnatural links are usually paid ones that can be placed and tracked by PR firms, media buyers or are monetized through affiliate programs. If these links are followed, then they can potentially lead to Google taking a manual action on your site or you could get hit by Penguin.

Unnatural Links are the ones:

With a tracking parameters like UTM source and medium.
Within sponsored content on a site (As search engines do not know who paid for the content to be placed)
From sites using monetization scripts since some scripts say you get paid for linking to retailers

You can find these in the site’s code, outbound redirects, and other suitable techniques.

Semi-natural link

It is a natural link but uses tracking parameters. If you click through from an influencer who has been paid to share a link, this link will lead to the landing page that may have the tracking parameters in place. Bloggers, aggregators, and others who follow that link may copy and paste it directly into their site giving natural links that also have these parameters. Make sure that as a person reaches your site through a tracked link, you set a redirect to pass the parameters but also resolve to the natural page structure.

Quality Backlinks

Quality backlinks are links that come from high quality sites. Quality links come from quality sites, which has the following criteria:

The site is niche or at least has a regularly updated section of the particular topic
Media kits and publicly viewable advertising sections
There are no outbound links to adult, illegal, payday or scam sites
You won’t be able to see that they allow sponsored content
The acquired links will be by staff writers and not contributors
Finding them in Google news feed is a good sign that they are trustworthy or high quality in Google’s eyes.

Good Link

A good link is very different from a quality link. It is a type of link that has a positive impact with a less risk. The factors of a good link vs. a bad link can change based on the type of SEO that one is doing.

A good link does not link to sites that have a banned content. Contraband or several other things that are forbidden.

At times, there would be a blogger who has a great niche content but has no age or authority and may quit blogging in a year. This may seem like a good link, but this may fall under a category of ‘maybe’ or ‘Ok’ types.

Another type is where there is an established blog without a huge following. They might not be doing well in Google though with organic even when they have a great content. This would be considered as an ‘Ok’ link. Another one could be a blog that is content relevant but does not have a ton of SEO traffic but has a lot of engaged readers. This is a good link as they have a quality audience and if they continue on the same path then it could lead to a great source of sales.

The idea behind good backlinks is to determine and watch how they impact you at present and what they may do in the coming future. Each site is unique and each link should be considered separately.

When someone talks about natural links, it’s all about quality. Focusing on quality over quantity is what can help to protect your site in case of Google updates. More significantly, focusing on quality can help regularly bring in significant readers through referring sites who may also become customers, engaged readers, and a new source of backlinks and social media traffic.

SEO

4 Tools that will create your SEO Lifestyle Much Easier

July 26, 2017 brainwork Leave a comment

Working with a variety of clients and projects on a daily basis, a lot of projects spend an enormous amount of time in estimating, developing strategies, analyzing and reporting. At the same time, the business has to grow, generate more leads, and develop customer loyalty and make out more money. So, the big question is how can you make all these things happen while keeping your clients and team happy?

There are many ways for agencies and SEO professionals to increase their revenue and customer loyalty regardless of whether it is generated through new technologies and enhanced internal processes.

Working close by to several agencies, five of the most common points they are struggling with are:

Finding solutions on how to personalize and enhance relationship with clients
Finding new ways to generate leads
Creating more accurate forecasting
Accelerating strategy execution
Building better value proposition

Automation, new widgets, and tools are often the cure for almost all problems.

Here is a list of tools and options that can help with reaching these objectives to the best satisfaction of all the parties involved.

1. Generate more quality leads through Lead generator Widget

A lead generator is a great tool that helps in attracting qualified leads using the instant SEO audit as an attraction. It is a widget that is installed on your website and provides your potential clients with a detailed report on how well their web page is optimized for a certain search inquiry. In return of this, you would be getting their contact information along with their report ending with a hot lead and a list of problems at hand in order to start the conversation going.

Brainwork Technologies offers this option within their top plans. It looks very sleek and can be customized to reflect your unique brand styling. Another important feature is to choose out a pop out from. For this, following these steps is a must:

Select the widget type and install: Choose the form, the color, the budget, the text and where you want to place it on your site.
Add a small piece of the HTML code to your website pages.
Get alerts on new leads and convert them into your potential clients.

2. Build Trust and personalize a client Agency relationship

The White paper is a popular option in different SEO platforms as it is aimed at presenting your SEO services as per your own technology. It is not necessary that all the SEO platforms would be offering white label as a part of their subscription. The value of the white label in building trust and credibility with your clients is beyond doubt. With minimum development work, you can use your domain and sub domain to provide personalized SEO services to your clients.

By using the white label option, you can customize the system to reflect your own interface and login page, change the header and footer of your domain. The reports that you would be sending to your clients will look as if they have been generated via your own SEO technology. Through this, it is easy to add and manage users with custom access to other SEO features like backlink monitoring, website audit, etc.

3. Use Marketing plan to speed up Estimation and Enhance Accuracy

Automating the estimation and preliminary strategy within the initial stages of your sales cycle effectively cuts the time it takes to execute while ensuring accuracy. It is a simple mini project management tool at your fingertips with an SEO twist.

4. Budgeting is a science – Treat Accordingly

Forecasting and the estimation of your SEO potential is a crucial puzzle piece for generating greater revenue while side by side making your clients happy. You can use Excel files and guess how much return on investment you might achieve from your SEO efforts. Alternatively, you can also use tools from Brainwork in order to forecast and justify your budgeting. Through this, you can easily predict how many clicks your client can get based on their search rankings. In addition, you can also access the expected traffic volume, traffic costs and more. You can then generate reports and export them in different formats to present them to your clients.

In today’s business environment, making more money is not just about increasing your rates or budget, but rather it’s all about value proposition, business processes, and technologies. This affects the overall business efficiency of your organization.

There are various platforms such as Search engine ranking that offer almost everything that you need to successfully operate your agency, might help eliminate unnecessary clutter and complexity further helping you to grow a prosperous business and long-term client relation in the field of digital marketing.

Content Writing, SEO

How to Balance free and premium content with SEO

July 10, 2017 brainwork Leave a comment

For several years, websites that keep their main content behind paywalls have mixed results with organic search. There are several SEOs and business owners who forget that Google is not only about keywords and technical structure, rather it’s about providing a satisfying search experience for the user. Google has no interest in sending users to a website where the content mentioned is behind a pay gateway. This would certainly be a poor user experience, especially if similar content is provided on several other websites. Now this is not true for all instances, but there are often brands who built up a strong presence.

The Paid Content Problem

Google says that strict paywalls pose problems, as they want to provide the user with a positive search experience. The reason behind all this is that it offers free content as well as premium, allowing users from organic search and social media to sample a substantial amount of their high-quality content for free.

Post Excerpts for Free Users

There are many people who tend to forget that Google’s main objective is user experience. A lot of top content websites provide excerpts and snippets to free users. This is quite normal if your competitors are using similar. However, if they are offering more than this, then you need to do so as well. When Google assess a page’s content, it looks for both main content and supplemental content. According to survey it is seen that websites focusing on monetization, rather than user value saw an impact on rankings.

First Click Free

The concept of First click free was introduced by Google so that users who are coming from organic search could see an article, usually behind a paywall for free and then subsequent clicks onsite to other articles and pieces of content trigger the paywall. Google originally limited a user to five free clicks peer day, but this has since become three due to publisher pushback.

SEO

Top 5 Ways to Defend Against Negative SEO

June 20, 2017 brainwork Leave a comment

It is possible to harm, if not destroy, a site through the use of malignant backlinks and forceful backlink spamming. The negative SEO is a rightful danger that can result in lost organic search visibility and revenue. Therefore, it is possible to shield against negative SEO.

What is Negative SEO?

Negative SEO is the practice of executing wrong SEO techniques on another site. Usually, a disgruntled competitor and his or her follower with the goal of reducing the site’s rankings unleash an SEO attack. Most of the SEOs are happy with the rules. Websites publish their content, promote their selves on social media, and roll up with the punches every time Google updates their algorithm. However, there are times, when you get on the wrong side of someone who does not share your conscience. They might bog down your site with hundreds of spam links, full of fake reviews or simply hack your website entirely. However, if you are careful and alert, you can usually catch malicious SEO attacks before they do irrevocable harm.

Whether you are a victim or might get attacked, here are five things that you can follow to protect your website against negative SEO.

Negative SEO is real. It is possible to damage, if not destroy, a site through the use of malicious backlinks and aggressive backlink spamming. Negative SEO is a legitimate danger that can result in lost organic search visibility and revenue. But it is possible to defend against negative SEO.

Whether or simply want to protect against a potential attack, here are five things you can do to protect your website against negative SEO.

1. Perform Regular Link Audits

Regular link audits are good practice for any business, but they can save your bacon if you’re ever the victim of a negative SEO attack. Monitoring your link profile growth is hands down the best way to spot suspicious activity before it spirals out of control. Nevertheless, if you suddenly notice a drop and have not been working on link building then some actions should be raised.

A very recent case of negative SEO happened with Robert Neu, founder of WP Bacon, a WordPress podcast site. It was in 2014 he was the victim of link spam, which gave him thousands of links with the anchor text “Porn Movie.” This negative result cost him hundreds of visits, and he dropped 50 spots in ranking for one of his main keywords. However, due to his strong efforts, Neu was able to recover rankings and traffic that he lost as a result of the attack in relatively short order. Despite a continued stream of spam, he was able to submit a rejected file listing the attacking domains. Links can also suffer if you have been hacked. At times, the hacker can alter your content to include spam links or modify your links to redirect to theirs. These attacks are dangerous and can be difficult to spot, and the only way to safeguard your website is to perform regular audits. It is crucial that you monitor your link profile growth carefully so that you can catch an attack before it costs you too much. Use the link auditing software or perform a manual audit to check on your backlink health.

2. Keep an Eye on your Site Speed

Speed is a key ranking factor. If your website is becoming lethargic and you have no idea why you should use the crawling software to look for anything suspicious. If you cannot find anything and there is still a problem, you might be the victim of forceful crawling. This causes a heavy server load, which means your site will slow down and might even crash. If you are a victim, you should contact your hosting company or webmaster to try and determine where the load is coming from.

3. Watch your Keywords

In late 2014, Bartosz Goralewicz experienced something strange, a client’s site was getting thousands of hits that would land on the page and then immediately bounce. This began to have an effect on their rankings, the user experience is also an important signal, and this looked like bad UX. The main issue that happened was that someone had programmed a bot to target certain keywords, land on competitor’s sites, and then bounce, which created a false SERP bounce rate. This dangerous attack is difficult to be spotted if proper monitoring is not done for the keywords CTR. Just log into Google Search and look at your CTR across all keywords. If you notice a downfall without any reason, contact Google.

4. Search for Scrapped Content

Content marketing has been very famous for the past few years, but everyone is not equally creative when it comes to content creation. Consequently, scraping has become all too frequent. Scraping is the method of lifting content from your website and copying it to other websites. Usually, the attacker will claim this to be his own in an attempt to beef up their thin content, but at times they will combine it with a link farm attack to spam your site.

5. Upgrade your security

Negative SEO may not be common, but cyber attacks definitely are. Make sure your software is up to date and all security methods are applied to your software. In addition, make sure that your CMS software is well equipped with a powerful encryption system to protect users. Also, migrate your site to HTTPS, especially if you are having an e-commerce site. Not only does HTTPS encryption offer you better security, but it is also a ranking signal and it might improve your overall SEO ranking.

On a concluding note, we can state that Cyber attacks are not technically negative SEO, but they will have an impact on your SEO. Google is good at catching problematic linking behavior and curtailing it before it has an impact on your SERPs. If you think that you have been the victim of negative SEO, do what you can to isolate the problem. Your best bet is to monitor your site performance carefully and to catch up with problems before they escalate.

Digital Marketing, SEO, Web Design

Follow these simple tips to Make Your Mobile Design SEO Friendly

May 25, 2017 brainwork Leave a comment

If you are already with a perfect idea and design for your website and are all set for its development, then there is no need to rush. All you need to do first is to think about an SEO first with an emphasis on an optimized mobile design. As per statistics, it is seen that average Smartphone conversion rates are up 64% compared to average desktop conversion rates. Thus, in order to beat this competition one must optimize your mobile design for SEO. This will lead to more visibility and longer engagement, which are the two vital elements for successful conversions and higher return on investment.

In order to move on in the right path, all you need to do is to check out these five tips that will make sure that your mobile design is SEO friendly. This is essential not only for success but also for sustainable success and is some of the essential points for almost every digital marketing agency helping companies optimize mobile designs for SEO.

1. Fast Page Speed

No one wants a slow loading time, especially on a mobile device. Many of these pages that are overwhelmed by slow mobile speeds feature valuable content, but users move on quickly after stumbling on slow pages. The quicker your website will be, the more engagement you will receive on your website. Analyze everything on your website and compress the size when required. Compress larger images when possible as every byte counts on a mobile site when it comes to speed.

2. Beware of Pop Ups

As per Google pages that show pop up messages in between providing a poor user experience. This is the reason why Google now penalizes businesses. Due to the small size of the mobile screens, search engines see these penalties as imperative to provide better UX for users. If a pop-up covers main content or is a standalone one that needs to be dismissed before content is displayed, this will have a drastic effect not on the UX but also on the SEO.

3. Design Carefully

Your mobile first design should have a touch screen navigation that can be easily scrolled with fingers that are either too big or too small. Make sure your mobile design caters to all for a smoother UX. Thus, the smoother the UX, the more engagement which leads to a better SEO.

4.Titles and Meta Descriptions

The meta descriptions should be shorter for a truly enhanced mobile experience. Google has kept the mobile meta descriptions length up to 130 characters or less. Yoast SEO has the perfect solution for all businesses. Yoast has settings for both desktop as well as mobile when creating titles, URLs, and meta descriptions so that each one can be optimized.

5. Simple Design with clear CTAs

Due to a small screen, simpler designs are the perfect choice for mobile. Do not add on too much onto a page that it goes against the positive SEO practices. Make on-page content short and up to the point, and do not forget to add clear CTAs such as easy to find and a clickable contact info that includes phone numbers and addresses. This allows visitors to easily engage, which can help smoothen the flow of conversions. In addition, make sure to shorten the menu items for mobile design as this is going to help you in SEO by allowing for easier navigation. If there will be too many menu and sub- menu then things will get complicated and users might lose interest. Also, make sure all the contact forms are designed after considering the mobile design.

On a concluding note, it can be stated that as mobile continues its natural trend towards more users over a desktop, having a mobile-first design with SEO at the forefront is imperative to success.

Digital Marketing, SEO, SEO Services India

The High Rising Demand for SEO Agencies

May 17, 2017 brainwork Leave a comment

SEO Practices play a crucial role for your website in order to gain prominence on the digital ground and propel higher on the Google search pages. Further, it is worth noting that there exist certain factors, which bear positively on your website ranking. SEO Practices come handy to ensure that all these vital factors are considered while necessary changes are incorporated in the light of these factors. Consequently, backlinks and inbound links are fixed on the internet to draw traffic to your website. Search engine optimization is the method of improving the quantity and quality of traffic to a website by making its contents search engine friendly. The SEO Agencies organize and amend a website to make it as well-matched as possible with various search engines.

In case you have incorporated a business website in your field of operation, then it is crucial that relevant content is published on it. Further, this published content should convey the knowledge, exact message, and information to end-users. This will strike the right way with the purpose of your website as well as the purpose of the content. Moreover, it is the responsibility of the SEO Agencies to ensure that visibility to your website widens.

Here are some of the concerns, which prompt the need to sign with SEO Agencies:

SEO propels organic traffic to your website
SEO brings in enhanced tend more towards organic results, unlike paid ads
SEO helps in boosting website ranking
It is a cost-effective option, unlike expensive paid ads in search engines
SEO has a vital role to play in increasing conversion rate

Internet marketing is at the heart of SEO. Therefore, thorough research should be carried out in order to ensure that you crack a deal with a good SEO Agency such as Brainwork Technologies Pvt Ltd. Moreover, you can dig into a wide array of benefits, availed by SEO only if you opt for an experienced and competent provider, which will formulate a right SEO technique in the light of your needs. Considering to the fact that there exists a number of SEO Agencies, make it a point that you sign on with a trusted and reliable one, with over a decade-long presence in the industry. Furthermore, going through the reviews and comments regarding the services of an agency will fill you in a lot about the company.

Therefore, the main goal of SEO Agencies who develop marketing strategies to push your product and services online is to make sure the content published by you is interesting.

SEO

Does your Website need an AMP to Affect SEO

January 2, 2017 brainwork Leave a comment

A faster and more responsive mobile web is a feature that any user could get on board with. In response to this, Google has developed an open source solution entitled AMP i.e. the Accelerated Mobile Pages.

The AMP framework is out and has been speculated to have two benefits for SEO. It is a free, open-source framework that allows you to create mobile pages that deliver content quickly. It consists of HTML, JS, and Cache libraries, specific extensions and AMP focused properties, accelerate load speed for mobile pages, even if they feature rich content like infographics, PDFs, audio or video files. The aim for AMP is for publishers to be able to load their sites faster on mobile since mobile responsive could be clunky and slow because desktop resources are heavy. Also, there is no deny the fact that most of the elements of a desktop website are unnecessary for a mobile site. Until the past, AMP was just for user experience, but now Google has backed it up and is motivating websites to follow it. Once Google has cached the AMP version of your site, the content lives on Google’s servers as well as your own.

Here is how a mobile page with and without AMP looks like:

The page without AMP looks visually appealing and all the credit for this goes to the responsive design of the page. However, on the other hand, there are quite a few elements that the AMP enabled page lack in it. Its navigation bar is more detailed. Meanwhile, the AMP versions social buttons can be accessed all at once and are easier to tap, which simplifies sharing.

How is AMP helpful?

AMP is useful as it helps websites to load faster that improves usability and persuades users to stay longer on a particular site. Thus, the fact can be simply stated: Faster load time leads to a better engagement, further reducing the bounce rate and improves mobile ranking.

However, AMP does not improve engagement on its own. It does not let our content to become more useful or entertaining. Even if your load times are perfect but the content is not interesting, still your SERPs won’t increase due to the high bounce rate. Therefore, in order to make AMP work outstandingly for your site, you need to have the best of both, that is fast load time plus excellent content.

AMP has the possibility to make your visitors happy, which means a lot to Google and once your image is good on Google it surely gets a higher ranking for you, brings in more traffic and helps in increasing revenue.

Who will benefit the most from AMP?

The sites that will benefit the most from AMP are publishing sites, that are the sites that produce content. This cannot be applied to your client by simply making their entire site into AMP. Doing this might affect conversions negatively. Rather, one can transition your client’s blog section or news and updates section into AMP.

Does it make any Sense to Implement AMP?

Here are the pros and cons of implementing AMP:

Pros of AMP

It speeds up website load time

AMPs are lean, slick, and fast. Users want pages that do not make them wait. So AMPs basically guarantee that your site brings in more visitors.

It increases mobile ranking

AMP is not a ranking factor, but it has a positive influence on mobile ranking due to its faster load time. If Google starts prioritizing AMPs, it will have even more of an effect on SERPs.

It improves server performance

If your site generates a lot of traffic from mobile, AMP will reduce the load on your servers and improve their performance.

Cons of AMP

Ad Revenue is reduced

Even though the AMP supports ads, but the potential to bring in revenue is severely limited. And it is not worth to implement ads on AMP pages.

Analytics are a bit stripped

AMP supports Google Analytics but requires a different tag, which needs to be implemented on all AMP pages. It will take a lot of time to place this tag and would be able to collect and analyze data.

Amazing speed is achieved, and all the credit goes to the Cache

Google does not provide any specific technology to make your pages super fast. It simply saves cached versions of AMP tagged pages and when a visitor accesses these, it simply serves them up from the cache.

On a concluding note, you should consider implementing AMP on some of your site’s critical pages such as blog posts, contact us, etc. This will help you to move from desktop to mobile and support your SERPs.

SEO

Keep your Sales Page Ranking High this Festive Season

December 20, 2016 brainwork Leave a comment

All of us must be familiar with the fact that what an SEO strategy is and how it should be prepared and worked upon in order to get the best results. However, with this, it is also very important to understand that sales are quite high especially during the holiday season. Thus, holidays and sales can be talked about together in one go.

With Christmas, New Year, and Black Friday just around the corner, it is surely the perfect time to think about the post sales. All one needs to know is what is every business organization going to do with the landing pages that they have created over the past year? Is it all just simply going to be removed or can it be used in any sense?

The simple answer to all this is NO. Nothing is going to be a waste for the company who has put in all the efforts. No sales SEO Strategy is ever a waste. For instance, let us take an example of a very famous company Black Friday. This year, it saw a 20% average increase in organic traffic and a 40% increase in the organic revenue and surely, this growth is something that no company would ever like to lose. So instead of discontinuing all the efforts, it is better to put the SEO holiday plan to a stop until next year and start it again once the holiday time is back.

SEO Strategy for Sales

Sales SEO strategy is an e-commerce SEO approach for website pages that are purely date or season related like Christmas, New Year, and Black Friday. The main purpose of this strategy is to build and maintain SEO efforts and ranking year after year without creating redirection and starting off from zero each year.

Nevertheless, before starting with any SEO plan the important question that comes to mind is ‘What are the things that are needed to start off with this SEO Strategy?’ Every organization can start with a non-year specific landing page. This page can be a content page or a category page. This one page should be your main page that can be used for all your related sales pages. Any current pages that are date specific can be redirected to this main landing page.

Outline of a Sales SEO Strategy

With the help of these e-commerce SEO strategies, every business will be working on your main page and subpages in a year. Through this strategy, the businesses can address the sale itself, its preparation and talk about the idle time between closure and announcement. Through this, you can also plan, prepare, and promote the discount and sales, where one can monitor and track the Return on Investment.

For example, when a business runs an annual new year’s sale on the first week of the year, then the organization starts preparing for this sale by October or November and start promoting it in December and have the sales put on until the first week of January. But if the sales strategy is for Black Friday, then it would be on a much larger scale as this is one of the biggest sales of the year.

Proper Announcements and Promotions

Whether it is a large sale or a smaller one, it needs to be promoted well and announced to your audience and customers before the sale’s date. The larger the sale it, the earlier the announcements should be made. Retailers usually prepare by announcing their sales with social postings and advertisements.

Sales Day

This is the final day for which months of preparation and marketing has been done. All one needs to do is to sit and keep an eye on your website and make sure that nothing gets disturbed so that customers can go through the full sales process in a simple and convenient manner. Every company can post a few things on the social media sites and send out an email or two informing customers about their sales offers. All the companies run these campaigns with the intention to drive traffic and sales to their site.

Closing of Sales

Once the sales end, the important thing that is to be done is to review the status of the sales and look into the year over year performance of the business. Along with this, it would also be beneficial to review your own performance compared to the industry benchmark and with the overall public stats.

The 2016 Black Friday’s stats saw that around 55% of the traffic was from mobile devices, counting for 40% of the sales. It was seen that the online sales reached about $3.34 billion with a year over year growth of 21.6%.

Landing Page

Make sure your landing page is genuine and has some quality content in it. If it is not appropriate, then make sure to create one that can be used for years to come. Make sure the landing page has all the standard SEO elements such as proper keywords, Meta tags, on-page content, ALT tags, images and one of the most important elements is to have a unique URL. Any old on-site links should point to the new page where possible. The landing page should have a social media open graph and Twitter markups, as this page will be shared via social media. Make sure this page is the only Holiday offer page listed within the sitemap with none of the previous year’s URL.

One the sales are over you can still continue with the strategy and let the page run, but hold it for a while. During the first month, make sure to close the sales that have just ended and calculated your ROI. Also, make sure to specify that the sale has come to an end and will come back once again the next year. Businesses can give in some sign-up links to ensure that users give in their email ids and they can be informed about the regular activities of the company and next year’s promotions and sales. During the next few months, try using various marketing techniques to turn your sales shoppers into regular customers. Finally, when your sales are around the corner, a few months before make sure to change the images, content and add on the dates and offers of the sale. Finally, 2-3 months before your sale, add on some backlinks to make it a success. Finally, work on your backend to ensure that your site is able to handle some extra traffic. No one wants his or her site to crash. Review your site’s performance, bandwidth, and RAM to ensure that there are no errors. In addition to this, also make sure to test your site before making it live.

On a concluding note, it can be seen that a Sales SEO Strategy is just like any SEO work that is long term. Even though the sale is only for a short while, but the preparations for it is all running slowly and steadily throughout the year.

Mobile App, SEO

12 SEO Guidelines for a Mobile-First Index

December 13, 2016 brainwork Leave a comment

In today’s fast moving digital world, websites largely depend on a different set of strategies to stay ahead than those used ten years ago. In today’s era, most of the people are searching on Google using their mobile devices.

At a famous event in October 2016, Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes announced that Google will create a separate mobile index within the next few months. This mobile index will become the main Google index with the desktop version. This is going to change the game all across for every business.
At present, it does not matter if you search from your desktop or a mobile device, you will get the same results. However, in the near future, this is surely going to change. Google has now started testing its mobile first index. This latest mobile index will first look at the mobile version of your website for its ranking and then later on finally fall back to the desktop version if there is no mobile version to be found. Google has been thinking about the idea of the mobile index since a long time that is more than a year but the process has been implemented and worked upon recently. It has been predicted that around 75% of the searches made in 2017 will be made on mobile devices. With these latest announcements, the website owners have no choice but to adapt to the latest ongoing trend to maintain traffic and rankings. A website that is optimized for mobile SEO is accountable to a different set of customers, search algorithms, and other technical implementations. Mobile search is not only for trendsetters but also for the online and in-store shoppers, Smartphone users and also for the not so tech-savvy.
Among the various mobile indexed websites that claim to have SEO as a priority, one thing is sure. Every SEO approach will now own a piece of that mobile first index puzzle. To put it forward in simple words, a website cannot attain mobile-first index success without first attaining high levels of responsive web design, optimized data and fast loading time among some of the other internal SEO strategies.

In fact, some business brands have started embracing these mobile first constraints down to such a level that their mobile optimized websites rival their desktop counterparts. It is believed that mobile-first index will affect how Google will rank your website, determine the authority and will decide if your content is relevant or not based on Google’s guidelines. Although the mobile index will continue to be a single index of website and app, the Google algorithm will primarily use the mobile version of a particular site’s content to rank pages from that site to understand the structured data and to show a few snippets from the mentioned pages in the search results.

A mobile first index site will have three options. Either the website will be responsive, or it has a separate mobile site and lastly it does not have a mobile site at all.

How to Judge whether a Mobile First Index will impact your site?

If your website falls in any of the three categories, then you will surely be impacted for the switch to a mobile first index.

Mobile usually serves a different content than desktop.
Mobile removed structured data from a desktop.

It is said that if one has a mobile friendly website, then they are surely lucky.
Here are a few tips for a Mobile first Index website:

1. Plug up your websites Pages into Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test

If one is managing multiple client websites or if you are a small business owner, the first thing that you need to do is to check whether the pages pass Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. To check, one should start with the key navigation pages to plug in one by one. This would be a bit time consuming but surely it is going to provide you with excellent results.

If you do not have a mobile responsive site, then you should start with an implementation strategy before Google rolls out the Mobile first index.

2. Verify that your Mobile Pages are Being Indexed

One can easily forget to index their mobile websites. You need to type in your Smartphone and check whether a mobile is indexing your pages to Google or not. If nothing shows up, then it is clear that Google is not able to access your mobile pages.

3. Review Smartphone Errors in Google Search Console

Another important thing is to examine your Smartphone errors in Google Search Console. Depending on the errors that come out, you can move further. A common mistake that is often seen is a faulty redirect. A faulty redirect is when a desktop page is redirected to a Smartphone page that is not relevant to the particular search query. Cleaning these errors will allow Google to index your content better.

4. Update Mobile Content to Reflect Desktop Content

If you have a separate mobile site, then make sure to cross check the content that is published on the desktop as well as the mobile site. There are many mobile websites that are much lighter in content to maintain the page speed. With the new mobile first index, having diverse content on mobile and desktop can cause some major traffic and keyword loss down the line.

5. Remove Hidden Content in Your Tabs and Accordions

Double check to make sure that the content is visible to all users on desktop and mobile. Web designers and developers have a common approach to hide content in mobile to make the design appear clear. Every SEO marketer should look out for hidden content.

6. Add Structured Data on Your Mobile Version Pages

There are times when implementing structured data on a site, webmasters might skip adding them to the mobile site. With the new mobile first index, if you want to keep your structured data, you will have to add it to your mobile pages as well.

7. If you don’t Have Mobile Pages, Launch AMP Pages

Many times there are chances that you will not have the time to create mobile pages for your site. In such cases, you can create an AMP version for these pages. Google will use the AMP version to index even without the mobile friendly version.

8. Mobile Design

The SEO today has to know and understand more than just code and ranking. They should be very much familiar with how to use a design to influence rankings. The mobile design is an art in itself.

9. Maintain a Link Building Strategy

It is said that links could pose a problem in the future because users do not usually link to the mobile compared to desktop. There is a transition to mobile-first index but building links to your desktop pages are still vital to your SEO success.

10. Verify Your Subdomains

Once you upload your subdomains to Google Search Console, you will receive notifications for your mobile site. Google will notify you regarding any actions taken. As per Google, these subdomains are treated as two separate lines, so data needs to be collected on both the sides.

11. Optimize on-site SEO for Mobile

With the coming up of a mobile first index, one needs to rethink about the on-site SEO strategy that is from title tags to headers. For instance, the length of title tags is different on mobile when compared to desktop.

12. Speed

Making sure your site loads fast is essential to rank on mobile. Large images can slow down a site. So optimizing images to the correct size is a great achievement. You can also maintain speed by leveraging browser caching. Too many redirects can also take a lot of time to reload and provides you with a slow experience.

On a concluding note, it can be stated that, if you are planning to create a mobile version of your site, then keep in mind that a functional desktop-oriented site is far better than an incomplete mobile version of the site. It would be much better to launch your mobile site once it is thoroughly complete.