3 Important Steps to Avoid Future Panda Hits

When dealing with a substantial drop in traffic due to an algorithm update, nothing can be better than seeing recovery. Typically, it takes months of recovery with hope that your hard work will pay off. But, unfortunately for some recovery never happens.

When you see something like the screenshot below, it’s hard not to start dancing. The screenshot is from a person who recovered from a Panda hit. It took over four months to recover.

To make sure the recovery work is going to pay off, consider the following three steps.

1. Carry out an Analysis of Top Landing Pages from Google Organic

When you are hit by an algorithm update, it is very important to analyze the top landing pages before the Panda hit. Since that is the place where Google gets user engagement data from, you can find some glaring issues when analyzing those pages.

Now, when Google traffic is back due to recovery, it is recommended to analyze the top pages that receive traffic to make sure everything is alright from the point of view of content quality.

Compare the screenshot below with the previous one to determine the change in traffic level.

2. Check Mobile vs. Desktop Traffic

If 50% of your Google traffic comes from smartphones users, than that is 50% of information Google is going to measure when it comes to Panda.

It is important to understand how much mobile traffic hits your website from Google, and where that traffic is going. Thus, use several mobile devices to analyze top landing pages for smartphone users. 

3. Carry out a Crawl Analysis

If you have recently recovered from Panda, it is useful to crawl the top pages receiving traffic from Google. This will help you gather data about those pages at scale. For example, finding poor content, soft 404s, duplicate content, etc. Some findings will be favorable, while others can lead to serious bamboo. 

There are several powerful tools for crawling. For small and medium-sized websites you can use Screaming Frog, and DeepCrawl for larger-scale websites.

When you recover after an algorithm hit you feel just amazing. Performing a post-recovery analysis enables you to identify technical problems, content issues, ad issues, user engagement problems, etc. 

5 Essential Link Building Strategies to Get Quality Traffic

Driving quality traffic to a website is perhaps the major goal of any SEO practitioner. Beginning with the very first days of Web 1.0, there have been a lot of strategies that brought a 15-second fame after which you had to recover after search algorithms hits.

However, one tactic remained unchanged and still gets a huge number of quality links to your website.

Although the Panda and Penguin updates produced many changes as to the way we look at off-page and on-page SEO, Hummingbird makes it compulsory that we get Google-proof link-building strategies if we don’t want to get into the dark cage of the second page and beyond a SERP.

Before launching your link-building campaign, it is essential to get your link-building strategy right. Here are the most important steps that will help you select the perfect tactics to implement.

How to Understand Google’s Quality Rules

There are several distinct guidelines to show what you should do:

·         Don’t use content that is scraped from well-ranked websites.
·         Avoid poor guest posting;
·         Don’t syndicate your own content for popular blogs;
·         Forget about doorway websites;
·         Don’t run affiliate programs.

Relevance Matters

While the quality of the websites that link to your website is of crucial importance, it is equally essential that these websites are relevant to your business. You page rank strongly depends upon how useful users find a search result.

Here is a four-step test to figure out if a link is relevant:

·       Ensure the link you’ve earned come from sites in the same field as yours;

·       If the website is not related to yours, find a section that has to do with your business;

·       Links from website that don’t relate to yours will work only if the content on the page that gives the link is related to the content on your webpage directly;

·       Your earned link should be relevant to the overall context of the page that gave you the link.

Diversify Your Link Building Strategy

Don’t pick and stick to one single link-building approach. By narrowing your tactics, you are more likely to lose importance in the eyes of Google.

Here are the link-building strategies that still matter in 2014:

• Producing high quality content;
• Getting recommendations and citations from trusted websites;
• Syndicating your content;
• Becoming a popular guest blogger;
• Etc. 

Rand Fishkin of Moz said that a clear shift in link-building tactics has been noticed in 2014. See the illustration below.

Don’t Use the Strategy Your Competitors Do

Many SEO practitioners today forget about on extremely important thing: brand building. The greater brand awareness, the stronger your brand image. Thus, it won’t take much effort to get quality links.

The only way you can get a unique identity is using your own tactics and not copying the ones your competitors use. Analyze the two brands illustrated below. They both target the same audience, but use two different approaches. 

Make the Anchor Texts Natural

The idea here is simple. Stop using keywords as anchors for each link you create. Your readers are smart enough. Make your links natural and don’t worry if your anchor text doesn’t match your keywords. As long as the link is relevant, you work is done. 

Link Building’s Evolution

There is a great difference between link earning and link building. Link building requires a lot of work on your part, while link earning happens without any efforts especially as to getting links.

Let us take content as an example. You have invested a great deal of time and hard work in your content in order to introduce it to the targeted audience. What would be your next step?

As a rule, publication of any content is always followed by the natural promotion through various channels:

1. Firstly, promote your content through various social media channels

2. Inform those loyal customers who could be interested in your new offer/article

3. Develop relationships

4. Take advantage of paid promotion (Depending on the type of content and budget available, it can include such things as Facebook ads, paid tweets and so on)

The above-mentioned steps are absolutely natural for any content creation process. In contrast, link earning doesn’t require any additional steps beyond that. Link earning allows you to just wait for the links to come in after promotion or publication.

Unfortunately, our world is too fast-paced today and all the people are self-centric. So don't even expect others to notice and reward your hard work! Don't hold your breath! If you really want someone to recognize your value, promote that value. Promote it intelligently and widely.

For those who choose building links, there are several useful steps after your content is published:

• Identify your specific targeted audience who can really like your content

• Identify possible websites where your targeted audience could spend time

• Identify active pages on those websites where a link would be useful 

• Contact the webmasters of those websites, telling them about:

     1. The authorship and that your content really exists
     2. The high value of your content to their website audience
     3. The pages where a link can be placed would be useful
     4. A request for feedback with reference to the content

Google's Evolution and Algorithms

There is no secret in the fact that Google has strong reliance on links. In the days of Google’s foundation, a search engine recognized a link as a really trusted source. A link was a signal of relevance and authority. Over time, Google has developed and adapted to the web. However, one thing stayed the same: links remained to be a considerable signal in its algorithm. Links were shortcuts to getting quick and easy rankings. The next Google’s step was quite powerful. It was Penguin. Nonetheless, Penguin hasn’t reduced the importance of links. Vise versa, Penguin effectively detects poor-quality links and works to punish those links.

Therefore, building or earning links is a quite complicated and confusing subject, particularly to those who don’t have a considerable experience in SEO industry.

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How to Get Your Customers to Come Back

One of the greatest mistakes of small-business owners is focusing only on attracting new clients forgetting about the importance of keeping them and turning them into loyal customers. In order to improve your customer relationship management, you should communicate with your customers regularly and keep providing them with top-quality service.

Here you can see three easy ways of how small businesses can keep their customers they worked so hard to earn:

1. Make a personal connection.
Firstly, focus on keeping your company in the customers' minds in a positive way.

Actually, every customer wants to feel special. This could be explained by the fact that people have a basic human need to be acknowledged and recognized. Sending e-mails to customers, whether it is wishing them a happy birthday, or congratulating on an anniversary, or just thanking them for their latest order, show them you care. Make it regularly even when you are not trying to sell them something.

2. Be clear and transparent.
What could be better for earning customer’s loyalty then watching the developers build their product or develop their service in real time? Make it possible for customers to monitor your work in real time: show which project tasks are already completed and which are in the pipeline. 
This can help you to create trust and transparency that are 2 main elements for retaining customers. 

3. Customize mobile deals.

You can take advantage of such mobile loyalty and customer retention programs as Cardagin in order to send special offers to customers on their smartphones and reward them with loyalty points. Sending your clients a personalized deal also shows that you are invested in the customer and that you know what he/she wants. As for today, smartphones are a really powerful instrument, so don’t miss the advantage! 


Make your customers сome back for ever and a day! Good luck!

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4 Tweaks You Can Make to Attract New Customers

Each new business requires new customers. If you want to turn a small company into a large corporation, think about the ways to attract new customers. You would say that repeat business is a perfect option! You are absolutely right, however to get there, you first have to earn long-established clients.
Here you can see some quite easy ways to consistently bring new customers in your business.

1. Get-more-personal approach. Any customer prefers dealing with those companies that they know, trust and like. According to Peter Drucker, the legendary leader in the development of management education, people purchase with their hearts, not their minds. So, if your website visitor doesn't feel comfortable on your site and doesn't feel that personal connection, there are no chances he would buy anything from you.

About Page is considered one of the most visited pages on any website. Don’t talk to visitors from a pedestal of youк accomplishments. Get simpler. Get more personal. It would be more interesting for visitors to read about the company story or the founders and their efforts to start the business than to see a formal list of company accomplishments. Your principal aim is to get people to know, trust and like you.

2. Make your website as simple for customers as possible. There are a lot of websites full of confusing for first-time visitors processes. People get annoyed and leave the website when there are too many options on it.

According to the fact that we have just 8 seconds to capture visitor’s attention, you should be clear and simple about what you want a new visitor to do on your website. Visitors appreciate the simplicity. Don’t forget that beauty of style depends on simplicity.

3. Offer testimonials. Firstly, people require proof of the product or service quality. They must know that products/services you are selling are worth buying, so reviews and testimonials are the first things they would look at on your website. Let the new customer know the whole spectrum of services or products your business offers, show them the results they will obtain and offer testimonials from people satisfied.

4. Develop a good marketing plan. A business strongly depends on marketing efforts. You must have a detailed plan of how you market your business to potential new customers. Today you can take advantage of a variety of useful services to automate your marketing efforts. Use automation to set up marketing campaigns for your business on social media and through email. These sequences run 24/7, which means you can make money while you sleep.

Today the Internet and social media can offer a huge marketplace for successful new business development. Attracting new clients is extremely important for your business growth. Hope, these four simple tips will help you succeed in your business area. Good luck!

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6 Ways to Make Your Inbound-Marketing Strategy Successful

In order to achieve success, you have to learn the practices and strategies that work best in 2014. It doesn’t actually matter how busy you are, you just cannot ignore the importance of your brand marketing. Take a look at the 6 most important things every business owner should know about inbound marketing.

1. The traditional marketing project doesn’t work anymore. According to Brian Halligan, the author of the book “Inbound Marketing”, we have to attract customers, engage and delight them online. The way today’s consumers shop has changed considerably, so businesses should adapt to it to survive.

The Internet has enormously changed the way we live our lives, now consumers have more options than ever to skip marketing, which is annoying. Today you have to really earn consumer’s attention. Invest in ways to engage the customers meaningfully with an inbound experience.

2. Your content should stand out. Consider how many channels your television provides you, how many social media channels and websites you pass by every day. The same things happen to your customers. Today’s marketing says that just producing content is not enough to succeed. Your content must be educational, inspiring and entertaining. Your content should encourage discussion and dialogue.

3. Use an individual approach. Most businesses keep the broadcast marketing strategy, addressing a big group of people. However, your website would function better with people-working-for-people approach. Instead of writing texts to impress your competitors, produce content that an individual customer will appreciate.

4. Inbound includes content and code. Many business owners mistake massive volumes of content for an inbound strategy, forgetting that shipping code is extremely important as well. Particularly, free tools are powerful in converting website traffic into highly engaged leads.

For instance, InsightSquared created Sales Funnel, is a helpful tool that make it possible for Salesforce users to quickly diagnose their sales funnel. Leads that try Sales Funnel convert at a rate almost twenty times higher than leads that don’t.

5. Get visual. According to marketing researches, the average attention span is just 8 seconds. So if you have a really quality 10,000-word article about your new product launch, chances are very little that your targeted audience will even look through it.

Therefore, creating outstanding visual content is a key to earning your customer’s attention for more than 8 seconds. If design is not your strong point, use Visage or Canva to create simple and nice visuals.

6. Hire wisely. If you think about hiring an in-house marketer in order to help with your marketing efforts, you need a professional person who fully matches your desired strategy. Invest in those who are highly analytical, digitally savvy and have considerable experience creating outstanding content.

Today’s marketing world requires much more efforts than eveк before. Successful inbound marketing is a peculiar science that needs a specific expertise and much experience. Even if marketing is not your preferable area, make sure you understand even the basics. Be original and have a good luck!

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7 Things You Should Test to Increase Your Site Conversion Rate

It doesn't matter what goal your marketing campaign goes in, working on the increasing your website conversation rate must be in everyday priority. Here are 7 tests you should not miss.

1. Make you you've managed the unique selling propositions that convert the most. Let’s say the following: you know that your services or products are quality and you know which the strong points of your product, however your potential customer is not aware of it. So test all the selling offers in your ads and social media in order to find out which of these propositions influence best on your conversion rate.

2. Test the landing page design in 2 steps. Firstly, test several page designs to find out which is the more successful in appealing most to your potential customer. Secondly, apply changes to the top performing design to test how different versions of the same page affect the potential customer attraction. The majority of your time should be dedicated to the top section of the page.

3. One of the most important questions to consider for marketers is what do I want visitors to do on my page. Let us make the question easier: What is the action visitors can take on my website page that can boost profits? Calls to action should have a great impact on your bottom line.

4. Landing page text. Check out the effectiveness of your text management: where the testimonials are placed? Where your benefits and features analysis are made? Do your headlines increase website visitor interest? You may also use such metrics as average time and sales on site to evaluate the performance of your webpages.

5. Desktop vs. Mobile traffic return-on-investment. Usually desktop and mobile traffic’s rates significantly differ. Compare the marketing budget you are spending on each device with the return income and decrease the budget of the non-profitable.

6. Add a chat button to the home page. Most of website visitors prefer consulting with a professional before purchasing a service or a product. Addicting a chat button on your website gives you one more way to convert visitors into leads.

7. Conversion rate of returning users. Invest in customers who have visited your website, spent enough time on it but didn’t convert. They are interested in your product or service, however want to compare all available offers first. Create campaigns to target past site visitors and test different offers to incentivize sales.

 Testing is one of the best ways to improve the conversion rate of a website. Good luck!

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