by Marelise da Silva | Oct 22, 2019 | SEO
The SEO game is one that requires both offensive and defensive strategies. Your offence requires a mix of having to constantly develop lots of great content, while also watching trends and competitor activity, and then adjusting your attack accordingly. When it comes to defence, here are three things you can do to build a protective wall around your rankings:
1. Guard Against Negative SEO Attacks
While most changes in SEO rankings develop organically through changes in traffic, content or keywords, you should never underestimate the ability and the will that others have to proactively attack your SEO rankings. The easiest way in which to do this is through so-called black hat SEO activity designed to prompt search engine penalties, such as keyword stuffing and buying spam links.
Be vigilant. Watch your backlink profile and look out for low-quality links that seem to come out of nowhere, taking care to eliminate them as they come up.
2. Proactively Seek out Multiple Listings to Expand Your SERP Presence
If you can claim multiple listings on the same search rankings page, it will strengthen your position immeasurably. There are a number of ways in which you can achieve this. You could be lucky enough to become eligible for Google Site Links, which automatically gives you four to six links under your primary search results, all linking back to internal pages on your website. Unfortunately, Google has not revealed its qualification criteria for this, so you either get linked or you don’t. You could also optimise multiple pages on your website so that they qualify to come up on the same search list. Make sure this works with your existing SEO strategy first, however.
3. Keep up the SEO Best Practices
Whatever other tactics you may be working on, you should always be focusing on building excellent content and building great links. Never let that slip and you will always be in the best position to maintain your search rankings.
WSI OMS can help you plan, execute and monitor virtually unassailable SEO strategies. Contact us to discuss your digital marketing objectives.
by Francois Muscat | Oct 21, 2019 | SEO
By its very nature, SEO is a competitive sport. You’re not working alone in a vacuum to improve your search result rankings; you’re working to do better relative to your competitors. Improving your rankings is a delicate balancing act because you need to be able to keep your head down and constantly focus on improving your own content and SEO strategies, while at the same time, keeping an eye on what your competitors are up to. You should never devote too much or too little time to one or the other. Here, in order of priority, are the most important things you need to do to improve or maintain your rankings:
• Always Work to Perfect and Increase Your Content
Both quantity and quality of content are essential to attracting visitors to your site. Keep your eye on the ball and keep honing your content to a fine point, while also building up its scale. Remember that, at the end of the day, search engines reward great content.
• Rethink Your Keyword Strategy Constantly
This is the frontline of your attack, so to speak. You need to do your research and use a more responsive approach. Focus on search queries that yield the highest total traffic. You may want to push keywords that remain effective, while allowing lower-ranking ones to slip to your competitors. Check the traffic data regularly and adjust accordingly.
• Watch the News
While focusing on your content and monitoring keyword traffic fluctuations, also watch the news and trends in the field of SEO. This is a growing and shifting field, with new insights and techniques being added all the time. Read blogs like this one, consult with SEO experts and use the information to sharpen your tools.
• Watch What Your Competitors Are Doing on Their Sites
Visit your competitor’s websites every day. If you notice a change in their SEO activities, you should definitely dig deeper. Take a look and see what the changes are doing to their search rankings. Maybe they’ve hit on a new optimisation technique. See how you can adjust your activity accordingly.
• Monitor Your Backlink Profile – And Your Competitors’ Too
Negative SEO activity can destroy your rankings and strategy. And, by checking up on your backlink profile, you can monitor whether or not this has become a problem for you and take appropriate action.
When it comes to your competitors, check out their backlink profile to see if you can pick up on any new linking partners and strategies that they might be using to get an edge on you.
While you shouldn’t spend too much time away from your own creative endeavours, it pays to be alert and fully aware of what is going on elsewhere in the field in which you’re playing.
WSI OMS can help you plan, execute and monitor competitor-beating SEO strategies. Contact us to discuss your digital marketing objectives.
by Marelise da Silva | Oct 4, 2019 | SEO
Writing an article about writing – and then creating a meta description of an article on meta descriptions! It doesn’t get much more “meta” than that. The fact that you’re reading this gives us some hope that we take our own advice and our meta description did its job. With that said, let’s take a deeper look at those simple but tricky 160-character lines we call meta-descriptions.
It should be easy, shouldn’t it? It’s only a few characters. You’re only summarising a topic you should know everything about by now. How hard can it be? Well, as we all know, writing a good meta description is actually trickier than it sounds. You say exactly what you need to say, but then the character count is too high. You shorten it, but then it’s not quite capturing your subject any more. SEO shouldn’t be your main objective here. What a good meta description does is drive clicks and conversions. All the more reason to get it right!
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Getting Your Meta Descriptions Right
It helps when you keep in mind that a meta description serves two functions:
- To sum up the content of the page at a glance, and
- To give a click-inspiring call to action.
Here are tips on how to write the perfect meta description:
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Keep it Subtle with a Gentle Nudge
The call to action doesn’t need to be hard-sell either, a direct imperative like “Click here to find out more!” is good enough. Most meta-descriptions work subtly and without force. It’s best to remember that all you are doing is describing the page. If your brand and your title tag are attention-grabbing enough, most of your work is already done for you. The reader is already enticed – now all you need to do is give them a gentle nudge with that small amount of essential information they need to prompt the click-through. Arouse their curiosity and simultaneously promise to satisfy it.
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Keep it Conversational and Natural
You want to get your primary keyword in there. But, never in such a way that it looks like you’ve shoehorned it in.
Also, remember to ensure that you are not just creating clickbait that will annoy a reader by promising something your content doesn’t deliver, i.e. let your content match the description.
Finally, remember that Google may truncate your description in the search results, so even though you are writing 160 characters, get the main information out in the first 120 at the very most.
Contact WSI OMS for more essential information on great online marketing.
by Marelise da Silva | Sep 26, 2019 | SEO
Keyword cannibalisation can cause serious problems for your SEO strategy. The main problem is that, when you realize that you have low traffic to your website, you may not be able to identify whether keyword cannibalisation is indeed the problem. If you can make a positive diagnosis, you may not be able to know what to do about it. The purpose of this short blog is to help with both of these.
• How Do You Identify Keyword Cannibalisation?
There may be several reasons why your page is not getting the hits you need, and cannibalisation is only one of them. The best way to determine if this is the problem is to make use of one of the tools designed for this task. Ahrefs, SEMRush and SEOMonitor will all do the trick. Each of these packages will tell you if you have any cannibals and where they are, although Ahrefs appears to be the fastest and most accurate.
• Once You’ve Identified the Problem, What Do You Do About It?
There are a number of actions you can take to eliminate your cannibals. The simplest may be the 301 redirects. This entails simply redirecting all your search engine click-throughs to only one of the pages marked with the cannibalised keyword. This will keep the search engines happy and avoid redundancy and confusion.
You could also use canonical tags that reference one page to the other. You may find that one page is more specific, while the other covers the same topic in more general terms. You can then use a canonical tag to reference the general one to the more specific one. Both pages thus still exist, but they are no longer eating into each other’s SEO impact.
You may instead choose to consolidate your content so that you combine two pages into one, eliminating any unnecessary content, as well as your cannibalised keywords.
WSI OMS is an expert in content marketing and SEO. Contact us for help to create, strategise and leverage the perfect keywords for SEO.
by Marelise da Silva | Sep 16, 2019 | SEO
Partnership marketing is something that almost every single business can do (and do well) regardless of its budget. Partnership marketing is not about creating a legal arrangement with another person or business. Rather, partnership marketing involves collaborating with another business or influencer, so that you both get an opportunity to reach the other audience in some way. Many times, teaming up with a partner can get you the same reach that would have cost a lot more through traditional advertising methods.
For partnership marketing to be effective, you need to be thoughtful about the type of partners you pursue. You’re not looking to collaborate with any business. There are several types of businesses that could be worthwhile collaborators, such as businesses that share the same target market but have different offerings, businesses that are local to you and could potentially draw foot traffic, competitive businesses in different locations, or competitor businesses in the same location that are able to refer overflow customers or have a unique point of differentiation from your business.
Every business invests in marketing to its audience in some way. As you know from your own business, a lot of hard work goes into building a client base, nurturing leads and retaining customers. If a business is isolated and it is marketing and functioning in a silo, the only benefit to be gained comes from reaching an audience with its own voice. If two businesses partner together, however, they stand to gain exponentially without spending much more time or money on marketing by gaining exposure to each other’s audiences.
Some of the methods that you can consider include social media shares, verbal testimonials, newsletter mentions or guest blog posts on each other’s sites.
Need help with your SEO, digital marketing or partnership marketing strategy? Then contact WSI OMS today.
by Marelise da Silva | Sep 2, 2019 | SEO
Google E-A-T quality standards revealed a huge part of the Google search algorithm. Basically, every top-ranked website follows these criteria because Google loves their content. E-A-T is an acronym that you need to learn in order to boost your SEO efforts.
• E Is for Expertise
If you are a leader in your industry, you need to showcase this on your website. For a digital marketing agency, certificates and badges such as those that are given to Google Analytics Qualified Individuals, are great to put on your website. Other options are the Udemy database, which offers a variety of digital marketing courses and certificates, or the HubSpot Academy.
• A Is for Authoritative
When it comes to building an authoritative website, you need to focus on two things, quality and quantity.
1.Quality
From a search engine point of view, a quality link is one from a famous person. For example, if Neil Patel mentions you in a video or links to your website, it will boost your authority.
2.Quantity
Quantity is the opposite. If a lot of people share your content and a popular blog post on your site shows there were 1 228 shares on Facebook, this will also boost your authority.
If you are just starting out, it may be easier to focus on quantity instead of quality. Start to participate in social discussions on YouTube or Facebook, join some expert groups and so on. You need to put in the time and effort, as well as consistently engage online, to make this work.
• T is for Trustworthy
Just ask yourself – who do you trust?
Contact WSI OMS for more help with your digital marketing efforts.
