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As a fairly technical discipline, there are many tools and software that SEOs rely on to help with optimizing websites. Below are some commonly used free and paid tools:
Google Search Console – Google Search Console (formerly known as “Google Webmaster Tools”) is a free tool provided by Google, and is a standard tool in the SEO’s toolkit. GSC provides rankings and traffic reports for top keywords and pages, and can help identify and fix on-site technical issues.
Google Ads Keyword Planner – Keyword Planner is another free tool provided by Google, as part of their Google Ads product. Even though it is designed for paid search, it can be a great tool to use for SEO since it provides keyword suggestions and keyword search volume, which can be helpful when doing keyword research.
Backlink Analysis Tools – There are a number of link analysis tools out there, the two primary ones being AHREFs and Majestic. Backlink analysis tools allow users to analyze which websites are linking to their own website, or the websites of competitors, and can be used to find new links during link building.
SEO Platforms – There are many different SEO platforms that bring together many of the tools that SEOs need to optimize sites. Some of the most popular include Moz, BrightEdge, Searchmetrics, and Linkdex. These platforms track keyword rankings, help with keyword research, identify on-page and off-page SEO opportunities, and many other tasks related to SEO.
Social Media – Most social media sites don’t have a direct impact on SEO, but they can be a good tool for networking with other webmasters and building relationships that can lead to link building and guest posting opportunities.
Understanding how search engines work is only the first step of the process in improving a site’s search rankings. Actually improving a site’s rank involves leveraging various SEO techniques to optimize the site for search:
Keyword Research – Keyword research is often the starting point for SEO and involves looking at what keywords a site is already ranking for, what keywords competitors rank for, and what other keywords potential customers are searching for. Identifying the terms that searchers use in Google search and other search engines provides direction on what existing content can be optimized and what new content can be created.
Content Marketing – Once potential keywords are identified, content marketing comes into play. This can be updating existing content or creating brand new pieces of content. Because Google and other search engines place a premium on high-quality content, it’s important to research what content is already out there and create a compelling piece of content that provides a positive user experience and has a chance of ranking highly in the search engine results. Good content also has a greater chance of being shared on social media and attracting links.
Link Building – Because links from external websites (called “backlinks” in SEO parlance) are one of the core ranking factors in Google and other major search engines, obtaining high-quality backlinks is one of the main levers that SEOs have. This can involve promoting good content, reaching out to other websites and building relationships with webmasters, submitting websites to relevant web directories, and getting press to attract links from other websites.
On-Page Optimization – In addition to off-page factors such as links, the improving the actual structure of the page can have tremendous benefits for SEO, and is a factor that is entirely in the control of the webmaster. Common on-page optimization techniques include optimizing the URL of the page to incorporate keywords, updating the title tag of the page to use relevant search terms, and using the alt attribute to describe images. Updating a page’s meta tags (such as the meta description tag) can also be beneficial– these tags don’t have a direct impact on search rankings, but can increase click-though rate from the SERPs.
Site Architecture Optimization – External links are not the only thing that matters for SEO, internal links (the links within one’s own website) play a large role in SEO as well. Thus a search engine optimizer can improve a site’s SEO by making sure key pages are being linked to and that relevant anchor text is being used in those links to help improve a page’s relevance for specific terms. Creating and XML sitemap can also be a good way for larger pages to help search engines discover and crawl all of the site’s pages.
Semantic Markup – Another SEO strategy that SEO experts utilize is optimizing a website’s semantic markup. Semantic markup (such as Schema.org) is used to describe the meaning behind the content on a page, such as helping to identify who the author of a piece of content is or the topic and type of content on a page. Using semantic markup can help with getting rich snippets displayed in the search results page, such as extra text, review stars, and even images. Rich snippets in the SERPs doesn’t have an impact on search rankings, but can improve CTR from search, resulting in an increase in organic traffic.
Search engines such as Google use an algorithm or set of rules to determine what pages to show for any given query. These algorithms have evolved to be extremely complex, and take into account hundreds or even thousands of different ranking factors to determining the rankings of their SERPs. However, there are three core metrics that search engines evaluate to determine the quality of a site and how it should rank:
Links – Links from other websites play a key role in determining the ranking of a site in Google and other search engines. The reason being, a link can be seen as a vote of quality from other websites, since website owners are unlikely to link to other sites which are of poor quality. Sites that acquire links from many other sites gain authority (called “PageRank” in Google) in the eyes of search engines , especially if the sites that are linking to them are themselves authoritative.
Content – In addition to looking at links, search engines also analyze the content of a web page to determine if it would be relevant for any given search query. A large part of SEO is in creating content which is targeted towards the keywords that search engines users are searching for.
Page Structure – The third core component of SEO is page structure. Because web pages are written in HTML, how the HTML code is structured can impact a search engine’s ability to evaluate a page. Including relevant keywords in the title, URL, and headers of the page and making sure that a site is crawlable are actions that site owners can take to improve the SEO of their site.
The search engine optimization process involves optimizing each of these core components of search engine algorithms in order to rank higher in the search results.
Search engine optimization is a key part of online marketing because search is one of the primary ways that users navigate the web. In 2014, over 2.5 trillion searches were conducted worldwide across search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, and Yandex. For most websites, traffic that comes from search engines (known as “natural” or “organic” traffic) accounts for a large portion of their total traffic.
Search results are presented in an ordered list, and the higher up on that list a site can get, the more traffic the site will tend to receive. For example, for a typical search query, the number one result will receive 40-60% of the total traffic for that query, with the number two and three results receiving significantly less traffic. Only 2-3% of searchers click beyond the first page of search results. Thus, even a small improvement in search engine rankings can result in a website receiving more traffic and potentially business.
Because of this, many businesses and website owners will try to manipulate the search results so that their site shows up higher on the search results page (SERP) than their competitors. This is where SEO comes in.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art and science of getting pages to rank higher in search engines such as Google. Because search is one of the main ways in which people discover content online, ranking higher in search engines can lead to an increase in traffic to a website.
In Google and other search engines, the results page often features paid ads at the top of the page, followed by the regular results or what search marketers call the “organic search results”. Traffic that comes via SEO is often referred to as “organic search traffic” to differentiate it from traffic that comes through paid search. Paid search is often referred to as search engine marketing (SEM) or pay-per-click (PPC).
Before you dive right in and publish something on social media, let’s take a step back and look at the bigger picture. The first step is to think about your social media strategy.
What are your goals? How can social media help you achieve your business goals? Some businesses use social media for increasing their brand awareness, others use it for driving website traffic and sales. Social media can also help you generate engagement around your brand, create a community, and serve as a customer support channel for your customers.
Which social media platforms do you want to focus on? The major social media platforms, mentioned above, are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and Snapchat. There are also smaller and up-and-coming platforms, such as Tumblr, Tik Tok, and Anchor, and social messaging platforms, such as Messenger, WhatsApp, and WeChat. When starting out, it’s better to pick a few platforms that you think your target audience is on than to be on all platforms.
What type of content do you want to share? What type of content will attract your target audience best? Is it images, videos, or links? Is it educational or entertaining content? A good place to start is to create a marketing persona, which will help you answer these questions. And this doesn’t have to be fixed forever; you can always change your strategy according to how your social media posts perform.
To help you create a great social media strategy, here are our long-form, step-by-step guides on creating a social media strategy and social media marketing plan.
2. Planning and Publishing
Social media marketing for small businesses usually starts with having a consistent presence on social media. Close to three billion people (3,000,000,000!) use social media. By being present on social media platforms, you give your brand an opportunity to be discovered by your future customers.
Publishing to social media is as simple as sharing a blog post, an image, or a video on a social media platform. It’s just like how you would share on your personal Facebook profile. But you will want to plan your content ahead of time instead of creating and publishing content spontaneously. Also, to ensure that you are maximizing your reach on social media, you need to publish great content that your audience likes, at the right timing and frequency.
There are now a variety of social media scheduling tools, such as Sprout social, tweetdeck, hootsuite, Buffer Publish, that can help you publish your content automatically at your preferred time. This saves you time and allows you to reach your audience when they are most likely to engage with your content.
3. Listening and Engagement
As your business and social media following grow, conversations about your brand will also increase. People will comment on your social media posts, tag you in their social media posts, or message you directly.
People might even talk about your brand on social media without letting you know. So you will want to monitor social media conversations about your brand. If it’s a positive comment, you get a chance to surprise and delight them. Otherwise, you can offer support and correct a situation before it gets worse.
You can manually check all your notifications across all the social media platforms but this isn’t efficient and you won’t see posts that didn’t tag your business’s social media profile. You can instead use a social media listening and engagement tool, that aggregates all your social media mentions and messages, including posts that didn’t tag your business’s social media profile.
Engagement is more than just marketing. It’s lending a helping hand when things go awry, keeping the conversation going when problems are solved, and spreading the good word about what we’re up to and where folks can come say hi.
4. Analytics
Along the way, whether you are publishing content or engaging on social media, you will want to know how your social media marketing is performing. Are you reaching more people on social media than last month? How many positive mentions do you get a month? How many people used your brand’s hashtag on their social media posts?
The social media platforms themselves provide a basic level of such information. To get more in-depth analytics information or to easily compare across social media platforms, you can use the wide range of social media analytics tools available.
5. Advertising
When you have more funds to grow your social media marketing, an area that you can consider is social media advertising. Social media ads allow you to reach a wider audience than those who are following you.
Social media advertising platforms are so powerful nowadays that you can specify exactly who to display your ads to. You can create target audiences based on their demographics, interests, behaviors, and more.
When you are running many social media advertising campaigns at once, you can consider using a social media advertising tool to make bulk changes, automate processes, and optimize your ads.
As usual, Wikipedia is a disappointment when trying to define social media marketing.It simply says, “Social media marketing is the process of gaining website traffic or attention through social media sites.”
Wow, who would’ve thought, right?
I’d like to take a swing at defining social media marketing myself:
Social media marketing is the process of creating content that you have tailored to the context of each individual social media platform in order to drive user engagement and sharing.
You gaining traffic is only the result of social media marketing. What do you do to get that result? Create content that works well on each platform.
Naturally, however, each platform is different. On one, blog content is the master. On another, video dominates. And on another still, pictures win the day.
That’s why I’m going to show you the differences between the top 12 platforms and how you can leverage each.
As you’ll see, each platform requires a slightly different strategy.
Because here’s the thing: Everyone wants their content to go viral.
But, to do that, the content must be engaging so that people want to share it. Your content must be so good that it makes the user want to tell all of his or her friends about it.
Otherwise, your social media strategy will fail.
You’ll have no shares, no viral content, and no traffic back to your site.
Overview
Even though you hear about the same few social networks all of the time, that doesn’t mean there aren’t any others out there.
All versions aggregate around 200 services, but from version to version (which they usually update every 2-3 years), the creators remove over 100 social media platforms and add another 100.
The world of social media is changing incredibly fast. So when you’re just starting out, start with the ones that have been around for years.
Betting on “the next big thing” can pay off if you’re right. But, if you’re just getting started on a social media strategy, you can’t afford to not have a Facebook page or a Twitter account since we’ve already seen how effective they are.
Let’s look at some key social media terms.
Content: Content is whatever you are posting. It can be a Facebook status update, a photo on Instagram, a tweet, something to pin on a board on Pinterest, and so on.
The graphic already showed you that content comes in many different forms and that you need to custom-tailor it to each platform. What’s even more important than content, though, is context.
Context: Everyone knows that if content is king, then context is god. You can have a great joke, but if you place it somewhere inside a 3,000-word blog post, very few people will see it. On Twitter, however, that same joke as a tweet might crush it.
And, the opposite is also true. Packaging your entire blog post into one tweet is hardly possible, so try a good call to action with some relevant hashtags instead. And that brings us to hashtags.
Hashtags: By now, they’re a very common form that people use to add meta information on almost all social media channels. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest all use hashtags to let you describe the topic of your content or mark it as part of current trends.
They make your content easy for users to discover and therefore more likely that they’ll share it.
Shares: Shares are the currency of the social media world. Shares are all that matters on social media.
People will keep talking to you about impressions, click-through rates, and potential reach. But none of these tell you whether people actually pass on what you have to say.
When people engage and interact with your content, that’s good. But, when they share it, that is the time when you celebrate.
A great tool to measure shares and the overall impact of content are BuzzSumo, Hootsuite, Sproutsocial
The more shares, the more people love your content. It’s the best form of engagement that people can have with it.
Engagement: This is a general term that means that people interact with the content that you produce. It can be a like, a recommend, a comment, or a share. All of these are good, but the shares are where it’s at.
Now that we’ve covered some definitions, let’s take a look at some social media marketing trends for 2018.
I don’t think I need to tell you how big social media is.
Social media isthe fastest growing trend in the history of the world.
This sector has grown faster than the Internet itself.
Within the first ten years of being publicly available, the Internet managed to gather roughly 1 billion users.
If you think reaching nearly one in six people on the planet within ten years is fast, then I agree with you.
But, how about reaching one in five within nine years?
Since opening up for everyone to sign up on September 26, 2006, Facebook just crossed 2 billion monthly active users as of quarter two of 2017.
Even though the world population has grown to over 7.5 billion, by now, one out of every four humans on this planet has a Facebook account.
Facebook, quite literally, is beginning to take over the world. 75% of people in Lagos use the platform, and the percentages for similar states are equally staggering.
In some ways, Facebook is a country of its own. It’s larger than any other country in the world, and one could even argue that it’s more connected.
And that’s just Facebook.
We haven’t even taken into account the usership on all the other platforms.
By the end of that analysis, we’d likely have trouble keeping count.
But don’t mistakenly believe that people are only using these platforms once a month just because that’s how most people go about measuring the stats.
In reality, people are using these platforms every single day. And they use them not just once per day, but multiple times.
People check, check, and check again.
In fact, we’re so addicted to our mobile phones and the social media apps on them that there’s now a word for our obsession.
Nomophobia is the fear of not being near your mobile phone.
With such widespread use, social media presents an incredible marketing opportunity.
If you’re not using social media marketing already, you’ll either have to learn it now or lose in the long run.
In this social media marketing guide, I’m going to walk you through the 12 most popular platforms.
I’ll give you an overview of each one, show you how to build a successful social media strategy for them, and point you to some of the best places to learn even more.
Below is a table of contents, so you can quickly jump to whichever platform interests you the most.
We have identified these best practices to help you create meaningful and relevant content. Each piece of content should:
Reflect your organization’s goals and user’s needs. You can discover your user’s needs through conducting market research, user research, and analyzing web metrics.
Understand how user’s think and speak about a subject. Content should then be created and structured based on that. Doing this will also help you with search engine optimization (SEO).
Communicate to people in a way that they understand. Embracing plain writing principles helps with this.
Be useful. By being purposeful in the content that you include, omit the needless.
Stay up-to-date and and remain factual. When new information becomes available, update your content or archive it.
Be accessible to all people. You have a responsibility to make sure that all people can access and benefit from your information.
Be consistent. Following style guides, both for language and design, helps people understand and learn what you are trying to communicate.
Be able to be found. Make sure that users can find your content both through internally through navigation and also externally through search engines.
Help define the requirements for the overall site. Content should drive design, structure, etc
Producing compelling and sustainable content means that you need to understand and follow the content lifecycle. Erin Scime identifies that there are five stages in the lifecycle. In general, content lifecycles include the following:
Audit and Analysis: Content stakeholder interviews, competitive analysis, objective analysis and evaluation of the content environment (site, partner content, sister, parent sites)
Strategy: Determine topical ownership areas, taxonomy, process/ workflow for content production, sourcing plan, voice and brand definition
Plan: Staffing recommendations, content management system customization, metadata plan, communications plan, migration plan
Maintain: Plan for periodic auditing, advise the client, determine targets for success measures.
Several of the deliverables related to each of those phases overlap with the deliverables of other fields, including information architecture, user research, project management, web analytics. Instead of thinking of who owns each deliverable, it’s important to think of who contributes to each and how those different contributions come together to define the final product. There’s value in including multiple perspectives on deliverables.
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