The online world is often evolving and advancing in technology. SEO is still vital as we all need our online presence to be in front of people searching for relevant keywords to our business.SEO seems to be getting more difficult to achieve, especially when search engines like Google keeps updating their algorithms and today, Google’s algorithms search out for what should be of the utmost quality, professionalism and organically authentic.

Gone are the days of keyword stuffing, article spinning and piling on any backlinks. If you think about it, anything that is published online should be of quality and value, that you yourself would prefer to find, which makes sense as it will in turn bring about the right response – the lead generating response that all of us are seeking.

Right from the start when setting up your website, the most important thing in matching these updates is making sure your site is optimized to the best with quality content and avoiding any poor or “thin” content. This means avoiding keyword stuffing, and posting poor content that offers little or no value to readers. This applies to all content and including your most important landing pages. Therefore quality content is the key in SEO that matches the latest updates of Google’s algorithm.

Gone are the old ways of SEO, although some of the following still apply:

Meta Tags – The relevance of meta tags are however still of vital importance for user experience. They still matter as they are what will get you more click through rates.
Blogging – it has to be better quality blogging. Already a few years ago there was emphasis in quality blogging, the emphasis is more so now and there is a greater push for better quality content. So content is king, still rules. Make your articles useful as well, something that you would want to read. Make them the necessary content that people are seeking, the type of information that’s helpful and relevant.
Ensure that your website is responsive to mobile devices – it means optimizing your site to work well on mobile devices – smartphones, tablets, etc. Google will penalise websites that are not responsive. If your site has been built before 2010, it’s probably not mobile device friendly. Just test it over your own smart phone.
Backlinks – this still apply but only quality backlinks matter now. Quality link building involves things like quality guest content and local directories – anything natural and helpful to web users. This can happen only if you have quality content on your website.
Most website owners, even those who have the bare minimum knowledge about SEO, know that quality inbound links is a key factor in ranking. Links act as indicators so that people on the net can find your site, which provide useful content in one way or another. Useful content can something informative, educational, inspirational, or even just entertaining. In this way, your content earns quality inbound links which indicate to search engines that your site is valued by others.
Quality content helps search engines do their job, attract quality links, initiates more social shares, and reduces bounce rates as they increase time on your site.

It’s better to produce one piece of exceptional content than it is to produce dozens of useless articles just for the sake of doing it. But when it comes to content marketing you can’t afford to rest on your laurels, because if you don’t regularly produce new content, your competitors will outpace you. Your ranking will decline sooner than you know.

Note that freshness of content is also a ranking factor, indicating to search engines that a given piece of writing is relevant, especially when the search query in question is timely or newsworthy. Publishing content regularly can help improve your site’s chances of ranking for these timely queries.

Effective SEO is only possible with high quality content to back your efforts. Content is what help search engines to index and interpret your site, and it in turn bring about user engagement with your brand when it appears in search results, which is something search engines value highly. Investing in quality content creation is the only way to achieve lasting gains in your brand’s organic rankings. To assist you in this, HubSpot has a content creation kit that could be useful to you.

It is proven that customers are more likely to visit the websites that show up first when doing an online search. Having your company’s website at the top of result pages can lead to more customers and potential sells. However, having a company with good search engine optimization can be difficult, especially for those who are not as technologically advanced. There are some things that you can do to help increase your website’s visibility.

One of the most important things you should do is make sure that you are always publishing relevant content. Having quality, relevant content is one of the number one drivers of giving your company higher search engine rankings. You will want to identify a keyword that pertains to each page of your site. This will be something that customers may search for to yield results to things that pertain to your company and what you do.

Once you have identified these key words or phrases, you will want to use that phrase several times on each page. Of course, you still want the page to be written extremely well and do not want to sacrifice good writing to throw in the key words more times. Having poorly written content can actually turn away customers instead of improving your SEO. Of course, you will want to update your content regularly to keep it fresh and have it appear relevant.

A big part of improving your SEO is to have proper metadata on each page. Each page has a space between the tags to insert metadata or information about the pages. This can be a confusing part of designing your website and can start to be difficult to individuals who have not been trained to improving search engine optimization. This is when hiring a professional to help you can be beneficial.

There are several aspects to improving SEO that can be difficult, with the metadata being one of the most confusing aspects. You will need title metadata for each page of your website. Then you will need a description metadata that is a textual description that a browser will use in your page search return. Finally, you will need a keyword metadata that is search phrases that are commonly used when someone wants to find a similar website to your own.

If you already own a company, there is a good chance you do not have time to go through your website and improve these metadata titles. Also, if you are not extremely knowledgeable about creating the perfect metadata, the keywords and phrases you are using may not be accurate for your website. There are many professional SEO firms that can handle writing this data for you and optimizing your website as a whole. Though these companies obviously cost you money, they can give you more customers in return which can help pay back the money spent.

Another feature that SEO friendly companies have is that they have several quality links. You want to avoid using terms like “click here” because they are not very search engine friendly. You want these keywords to be rich and improve the overall rankings of your page. This is another area that a firm can help you with as they will be more knowledgeable on creating valuable links that are optimize your page.

Overall, there are many technical aspects that come with optimizing the search results for your website. These aspects can become very time consuming and difficult to understand the average individual, especially when you are trying to run a business as well. Often, you can do some of these website enhancements on your own, but hiring a firm can be a better option. Though you will have to budget in getting a firm’s help, it will lead to better SEO and give you more customers.

The Importance Of Local SEO

Local SEO is an essential part of your SEO strategy, especially if you’re a smaller to mid-sized company that relies on the business of local customers. There are many different strategies that you can implement, from optimizing your content using keywords to submitting your NAP (name, address and phone number) to various local directories. To help organize, streamline and track all of your local SEO efforts, you should make use of these local SEO tools.

The following are 15 different local SEO tools that you might find extremely useful, some of which are available at a small cost and some of which are free also.

1. Google AdWords Keyword Planner

This tool works for strengthening your local SEO keywords. During the keyword research phase, you can identify the traffic for specific keywords as well as find new local keywords based on local searches. The Keyword Planner tool even lets you conduct research based on geographic regions. Not only it is a useful tool to have for your local SEO keyword efforts, it’s free to boot, and arguably one of the most useful free SEO tools available as well.

2. SEOProfiler

The most powerful local SEO tools that you can put in SEOProfiler, as it includes features such as a website audit tool, website page optimization, a link disinfection tool that identifies bad backlinks, the ability to identify strong local keywords and even customizable PDF reports.

3. Moz Local

Moz Local is a basic local listing management tool that allows users to manage local listings as well as claim and verify listing submissions. The tool also works with data aggregators to help push listings, making sure that your business is visible. Additionally, the tool will scan through your citations and notify you of any errors that it finds which could be hurting your local SEO. Moz Local will give you a rundown on what kind of categories you’re listed under and what type of media is used for your citation.

4. BuzzStream

BuzzStream is a tool for earning local backlinks as it can help you identify and build relationships with local influencers to help drive word-of-mouth traffic as well as boost local awareness of your brand. The tool is also effective for content promotion and digital PR.

5. SEOPressor

SEOPressor is a tool that scores your site’s overall SEO strength and provides guidance and recommendations for how you can improve it, which will in turn help with your local SEO even if it’s not specifically built for that. Particularly useful is its audit feature that will notify you of any pages that need to be optimized in certain ways, it’s a feature that has earned SEOPressor as one of the best SEO tools for small business.

6. Whitespark Local Citation Finder

The most full-fledged local listing management tool that you can invest is Whitespark Local Citation Finder. In addition to basic local listing management, the tool finds where you should list your business to improve local SEO rankings. It also boasts a number of additional features, including the ability to collect customer feedback and online reviews, monitor local search rankings by a city, discover create link opportunities and more.

7. Synup

Synup is useful for submitting your NAP to local directories. It’s a tool that allows you to easily manage your local listings as well as review and analyze your listings and NAP data. It’s one of the most comprehensive directory lists that you can have and it will allow you to check listings to see if you have existing credentials on them, to add your NAP to listings and fix incorrect data on existing listings.

8. Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog helps to audit and index the website’s HTML and Meta Data in addition to helping you find any broken links to avoid hurting your local SEO rankings. There are advanced features available as well, but for a price.

9. Serplify

Serplify is web software that will help you to achieve a page one ranking on Google’s results pages by adding domains and locations you want to rank for and automatically adding thousands of optimized unique pages of content for every keyword, as well as automatically mass indexing, optimizing and syndicating your content.

10. Local SEO Checklist

This tool will ensure that you can boost your local SEO rankings. As this tool offers 40 different options that detail specific tasks to help you optimize your site and increase your ranking by developing your blog, your on-page SEO, your social media and more.

11. Upcity Free Website Analyzer

UpCity is basically an SEO report card. All you have to submit your website as it will analyze every aspect of the page, giving you an overall score out of 100 that compares your page to your competitors.

12. ReviewTrackers

ReviewTrackers is a tool that tracks the customer reviews of your business. It plays a big part in your local SEO strategy, not to mention your reputation, which makes this tool very useful. Basically, it collects online reviews and feedback from over 70 review sites that you can use to determine your brand’s reputation as well as awareness.

13. Copyscape

Nothing will hurt your site more than copied content. Duplicate content is a way to damage your ranking, for regular SEO and local SEO. Put your content through Copyscape to make sure it’s completely original and it avoid plagiarism, whether it’s content duplicated from your own site or content duplicated from another source outside of your site.

14. PageSpeed Insights

The rate at which your web pages load will have a huge impact on your local SEO rankings. The slower your pages load, will less likely visitors are to remain on your page. This can have a big impact on your bounce rate, which could hurt your rankings. PageSpeed Insights will not only review the load times of your site but also make suggestions on how to improve it.

15. Ahrefs

Ahrefs can help with your local SEO strategy by providing a detailed backlink profile for any website you want. This allows you to see who is linking to your site, what anchor text they’re using for backlinks and how strong your backlinks are. It also allows you to check the strength of your competitor’s backlinks. The tool is used by thousands of users throughout the world.

SEO is incredibly important to the success of your online marketing efforts, because of this, a lot of marketers implement various SEO tools including local SEO tools, some of which can be found for free, in order to track, measure and analyze their SEO efforts. You may already even be using some of the more common SEO tools, such as Google Analytics. However, it’s important that you don’t forget about your local SEO efforts as well.

Have you heard about local search engine optimization? Do you know what it entails? Do you know why you need it? What about the benefits? Local search engine optimization services are overflowing with valuable benefits that your business can enjoy when marketing online. We have put a few of the benefits down for you below so you can see how making use of local search engine optimization services can help boost your brand visibility and increase your website traffic moving forward.

The first benefit you will find is that you get to reach your local audience. If you are marketing online and you aren’t focused on your offline marketing efforts, then you probably aren’t reaching your local clients. In order to do so, you want to include local search engine optimization services into your marketing campaign, so that local clients can find the services or product you provide, enabling them to choose your company over going further afield and choosing a national or even an international company.

Next you will find that local search engine optimization is an algorithm that was introduced by Google to help clients in your local area find product and services nearby first before searching further afield, ideal for those using mobile devices while out and about. That being said, when someone searches for a product or service you provide in your area and you haven’t made use of local SEO then you aren’t going to have a good ranking and they may not even find your company. Local search engine optimization services will help you improve your local ranking to ensure you reach your audience with ease and confidence.

Next you will find that your brand is boosted online. Remember these days when advertising and marketing online you are competing against thousand of other companies from around the world who are selling the same products or services that you are. In order to dominate your market and increase your ranking you want to incorporate local search engine optimization services so that your brand is boosted and noticed by your audience, ensuring you are the first company that they contact when they need a product or service that you supply.

In addition to this, your website traffic will increase. Think about it. When you are searching online, how many pages do your search? Most people only look at the first page and some will move onto the second or even the third page. This means in order to boost your website traffic and generate more clients visiting your site each day, you must be on that first page and this means having a service that you can rely on and trust.

The great benefit of local search engine optimization services is that you get to reach a wider audience, which means more people get to see and know your company name. You want your brand to be visible at all times and the more people you reach the higher your chances are of online success.

With local search engine optimization, one of the benefits is that if you introduce mobile friendly websites and searches your chances of success are increased even more. Speak to your local search engine optimization service provider and see if they can assist you with local SEO and mobile friendly services so that you re assured to reach your audience,e boost your brand and increase your website traffic accordingly now and moving forward.

Ensure you work with the best local search engine optimization company that you can trust and that will provide you with superior quality services and support.