gregalbuto

M Posted 6 years ago

t 9 min read

While SEO and PPC are unique channels that both work well alone, combining insights and data from the two for greater results and more visibility can help your overall digital marketing strategy and help increase your ranks in the SERPs.

What is the difference between SEO and PPC?

SEO (search engine optimization) is the practice of optimizing your online content to rank your website and content pages higher in the organic SERPs (search engine results pages). In order to improve your organic ranking, consider the basics of SEO which includes keywords, keyword strategy, long-tail keywords, meta data, headings and H1 tags, and more.

PPC, or pay-per-click advertising, is a marketing channel where brands pay every time their ad is clicked on by a user. Brands compete for ad position in a real-time auction with bids (the dollar amount they’re willing to pay) and high-quality ad content. The auction winners will appear sequentially from first (top of page) to last (bottom of page). Because of the dynamics of the real-time auction, ads and ad placements are constantly changing throughout the day.

While SEO and PPC are different and work differently, they also have similarities. While SEO often drives more traffic to a site, PPC is still worth looking into for brands that have a budget for it. An SEO vs PPC survey showed that 70-80% of searchers ignore paid ads and skip immediately to organic results. Both SEO and PPC ads focus heavily around optimizing for specific keywords. You can leverage keyword data produced from your PPC ad to improve your SEO strategy and you can utilize SEO to optimize PPC landing pages.

See How You Can Make SEO and PPC Work Together With BrightEdge

Benefits of PPC and SEO working together

Knowing how to use SEO and PPC together is a critical step in expanding your digital strategy to nurture top-of-funnel leads to the bottom-of-the-funnel. SEO helps widen the top of your funnel as it drives traffic on many terms and many topics while paid can be used to drive bottom-of-funnel conversions. PPC is a great channel to generate bottom funnel leads that are more likely to convert through targeted keyword bids. This can include targeting users that have previously clicked on your ads via retargeting.

One benefit of PPC is that you’re not subject to the shifts of Google’s algorithm updates. Your quality score, budget, and competition all factor into whether your PPC ad is displayed and successful, but these are far more straightforward and easier to optimize.

Additionally, pairing a strong SEO strategy with targeted and actionable PPC campaigns will lead to a greater percentage of the real estate on the SERP, as PPC ads will appear at the top of the page with organic results appearing below. These are great opportunities to create different experiences for your audience off of the same query. The organic results may direct visitors to an informational page, while the PPC landing page is focused on converting visitors via a clear CTA.

Finally, sites can gain immediate brand visibility and targeted clicks for ads focused around high-performing keywords. Testing PPC ads before committing to a long-term SEO strategy, or while your strategy is getting off the ground, can help expand your business and help you determine which keywords are worth going after organically.

When to use SEO and PPC together?

There are many reasons to use SEO and PPC together. Some of them include the following:

1. You need to own a few specific keywords in the SERPs (often brand keywords)
2. You’re building brand awareness
3. You’re promoting a product, services, or location launches
4. Reputation management
5. You have the budget to do both SEO and PPC

Combining SEO and PPC isn’t just about gaining the most real estate for your primary keywords. Consider combining SEO and PPC efforts when your brand name is suffering in the organic SERPs and your positive PR or site pages aren’t appearing.

You will find it most beneficial to use PPC and SEO together when you want to maximize your site traffic for a keyword(s) or campaign. For example, if you’re an E-commerce company doing SEO and you want to promote a “red sneakers” campaign, you’d want to create an ad that directly links users to your product categories offering red sneakers. You can link your ad to a page where the filters are already added and send users to all the red sneakers on your site. For SEO in this situation, you’ll want to optimize your red sneakers product or category pages to give them the best opportunity to rank organically underneath your paid ad.

How to use SEO and PPC together?

Running a PPC ad will provide your SEO team with a large source of data and metrics including click-through and conversion rates for better SEO tactics in the future. These steps will help you get started using SEO and PPC in tandem.

1. Optimize your PPC ads and your pages for the same high-value keywords.
2. Look at the strengths of both SEO and PPC and combine them.
3. Track your highest CTRs to see which topics are most popular on your site, optimize their landing pages for SEO, and promote the same topics via advertisements.
4. Remarket and directly target users who have previously visited your site as they’re more likely to convert.

In short, PPC is more about converting bottom-of-funnel and triggering a conversion event like a sale. Leverage PPC when you want your audience to be well-informed of your brand and products from the organic searching they did during top-of-funnel research. On the other hand, organic is about optimizing all pages on your site, whether informational, transactional, or educational, and to do so with multiple goals in mind including generating top-of-funnel site visits. Use them both together to achieve as much real estate in the SERPs as possible.

gregalbuto

M Posted 6 years ago

t 9 min read

What is mobile SEO?

What is mobile-first indexing?

How do I optimize for a mobile-friendly site?

1. Write with shorter sentences that are easily digested on a small screen
2. Make sure the font on your mobile site is large enough to be legible
3. Test whether or not your site is mobile-friendly using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test
4. Compress images and use next gen formats in order to decrease page load time and keep users on your site

What about AMP?

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) was first announced in 2015 as a framework implemented on content-focused sites in order to speed up the time it takes for pages to load, simplify the design of the pages, and provide an overall better UX for site visitors. 

1. Adding AMP HTML is simpler when you have experience with regular HTML. If you don’t have experience in HTML, here is the AMP HTML markup you should use on your site.
2. AMP JS is a JavaScript framework that handles asynchronous loading. However, Google does not allow third-party JS in the critical path.
3. AMP CDN (Content Delivery Network) that will cache your AMP pages and make immediate performance optimization. 

What is the smartphone Googlebot and how do I optimize for it?

1. Use the same content and meta robots tag on both mobile and desktop pages
2. Don’t lazy-load primary content so Googlebot can load all important content
3. Let Google crawl your resources and avoid blocking with disallow directives

bcoughlin

M Posted 6 years ago

t 9 min read

What is an HTTP status code?

List of the five HTTP status code levels

• 1xx Informational response - You won’t really see 1xx level status codes as they’re only a confirmation of a receipt of your request. I think of these as a server’s way of saying “let me look into that for you.” Generally, is not available to see.
• 2xx Success - This is what you want to see. You made a request, it was received, understood, and accepted.
• 3xx Redirection - You requested one URL and the server provided an alternative address for your browser to request instead. These are not necessarily bad, but they need to be handled properly from an SEO perspective. There are 3 main 3xx-level HTTP status codes you’re likely to encounter:
• 301 Moved permanently - 301 permanent redirects are extremely important for SEO performance, especially during website migrations or restructuring. Any time you’re “moving” or “moving and/or modifying” an important URL from your website, you should implement a 301 permanent redirect for that URL, ensuring that a browser is redirected to the new location or if you moved and/or modified the content in the destination URL that you redirect the browser to the most similar page on your new site. As they are “permanent redirects,” 301 redirects help preserve page equity so your URL still ranks. This happens because a 301 redirect communicates to the search engine that it should update its index to the new URL and to pass on any external links to the old URL to the new URL. 
• 302 Found/Moved Temporarily - Sometimes a website needs to redirect a page for a short period of time, perhaps to coincide with a promotion, but they don’t want Google to change which page appears in search results. For example, you may have a page which gets a lot of traffic from Google for keywords related to “Specials” or “Clearance”, but on Black Friday you want to send customers to a special Black Friday page. 302 redirects allow this. Remember, the page you’re redirecting to likely won’t be indexed, so don’t leave your redirect up for too long or you may start to see ranking declines or your temporary URL become the new ranking URL. Search engines can and will treat a 302 temporary redirect as a permanent 301 redirect if it is in place for too long. 
• 307 Temporary Redirect - The 307 redirect is an HSTS Policy. It tells the browser that any and all URLs for the website that you are browsing have been moved from HTTP to HTTPS and that any HTTP link that you encounter should be converted to an HTTPS link. In practice, it prevents browsers from requesting HTTP URLs from your site. A 301 redirect should be used in order to communicate to a search engine that you have moved from HTTP to HTTPS.
• 4xx Client Error - 400 level status codes can indicate a problem, especially if a large number are discovered. There are three main types of 400-level status codes:
• 403 Forbidden - 403 response codes signal a “Forbidden” status, indicating that the server can be reached and process the request but refuses to take any further action. There are several possible root causes for 403 responses, including but not limited to ad blocking browser extensions and firewall settings on the user’s computer.
• 404 Page Not Found - The most common type, 404 status codes can be caused by a wide variety of things, but often a URL either changed and wasn’t redirected, or a link was updated incorrectly. 404 status codes are sometimes an appropriate code for a URL. 404s are typically used when a site no longer wants a page served and the content is no longer valid. An example would be when a company no longer carries a product and there are no related products to redirect the browser to. In cases when a new page could be a replacement, the 404 would be incorrect and you would want to redirect the URL to the new replacement content.

• Soft 404 – Technically not an official HTTP status response, “Soft 404” is a label Google uses for pages that are missing but the server incorrectly responds 200 OK. These are often due to incorrectly configured servers which respond with 200 OK instead of 404 Page Not Found. Fixing Soft 404 errors is often similar to a normal 404 error, by identifying the broken link and either updating it or 301 redirecting the broken URL to a relevant location.
• 410 Gone - Less common, 410 status codes indicate a page has been intentionally removed. This will remove a URL from a search engine’s index quickly and is considered a permanent removal, so be careful when employing these and always double check with your analytics and SEO specialists to ensure it’s the right option. 410 responses are usually the result of a URL being published temporarily, building little to no value, and not needing of a redirect.

• 5xx Server Errors - 500-level status codes aren’t issues with the specific URL, but the request to your website’s server. These can cause major problems, when bots encounter 5xx errors they slow their crawl rate automatically as they believe the load being created could be negatively impacting the site's ability to serve your customers. If your site is experiencing large amounts of 5xx status codes it could indicate that your server has a capacity issue or the site consumes a lot of resources and should be optimized. to ensure search engines and people can access your website,:
• 500 Internal Server Error - This is the generic server error status and doesn’t give you additional information beyond the server error.
• 503 Service Unavailable - These errors should be deliberate, such as a website being down for maintenance, and indicate the error is temporary.
• 504 Gateway Timeout - 504 errors indicate your server is responding too slowly. These can be caused by connectivity issues or bugs in your website code.

How to find HTTP status codes and identify problems

Get a demo of ContentIQ and BrightEdge Today!

HTTP Status Code Cheat Sheet

gregalbuto

M Posted 6 years ago

t 9 min read

How should law firms do SEO?

The legal vertical is one of the most competitive in search, and for good reason. Paid advertisements and aggregator sites including Avvo, Justia, and Super Lawyers fill the first half of the SERPs for a majority of the industry’s top keywords including specialty terms like “attorney for dui” and “attorney for divorce.” Because of this, it is important for law firms to differentiate themselves from the competition through their organic strategy.

Big law firms can combine PPC and SEO together in order to maximize visibility in the SERPs. This is something we’ll get to a little later.

For smaller local firms, leveraging local SEO is critical. Outranking the aggregators, news sites, and big law firms for industry keywords is difficult. Optimizing pages for local search opportunities, is key to ensuring small firms can compete in organic SERPs.

What are the benefits of law firm SEO?

A whopping 96% of people seeking legal advice use a search engine and 74% of consumers visit a law firm’s website to take action. Because of this, the competition to gain organic ranking for law-related terms is high. Regular optimization, site audits, and technical SEO efforts will result in increased traffic to your site and boost your visibility within the SERPs.

Gaining the top organic rankings while practicing law firm SEO can result in more leads, opportunities, customers and overall growth. It is important and valuable for law sites to be seen as trusted by consumers and search engines. Google has increased its focus on trusted websites. Being recognized by search engines as a trusted site will increase visibility. As organic traffic increases so should potential leads. This is where conversion optimization becomes the primary focus. Optimize your site with a form fill or a consultation request on a home page, at the end of a blog, or near an attorney’s bio in order to get the potential clients’ information. 

Producing regular content that appeals to your audience, will drive repeated visitors to your site. This will develop a reputation as a thought leader. One way to ensure your content is targeting the best keywords for your firm is by using Instant and Data Cube to conduct your keyword research. You can also leverage Data Cube to research your competition for law keywords to see where they may be outranking your site. Below are examples of law-based keywords with high search volumes found via Instant.

Get a demo of BrightEdge Instant!

Law firm SEO strategy

Since it’s nearly impossible to outrank the aggregator sites, it’s vital for law firms to rank on the aggregator sites. Use the keywords you choose to rank for as headers and in any images you attach on the aggregator site. Write unique content for the aggregator site that isn’t already on your site. 

For small law firms with only one location, focus SEO efforts on local search. Optimize location pages and be sure to have a Google My Business page. Choose specific, long-tail keywords to optimize for that include “near me” or the city where the firm is located. For example, “attorney for dui near me” or “attorney for dui in Miami.”

All law firms should separate services pages, whether you have one or multiple. For each service you offer, detail what your legal teams offer clients and link to other pages on your site that include more information. For example, if you specialize in legal counsel for company-wide benefits for employees, create a landing page for that information and link to another page that offers information on how clients can get started with employee benefits themselves. Separating services pages allows you to expand the layers of your site. You will drive more traffic to your site with multiple pages you have the opportunity to rank for rather than one page with all of your services information.

Law firm SEO also includes client reviews. Offering potential clients a look into how you interact with current or past clients will better help both your SEO and your reputation. Reviews signal to Google that your site has authority and is trustworthy for visitors which can influence your ranking. Additionally, it’s good for users who are considering your services.

Combining PPC and SEO 

Leveraging PPC and SEO will drive more visibility to your site and increase your traffic. Utilizing paid ads while also optimizing for the organic SERPs can help you gain visibility right away and later. PPC is a great way for you to gain visibility right away and SEO is a method to gain traffic overtime. Not only does running ads on search engines work well, but also, running them on aggregator sites will benefit you as well. When an aggregator site ranks, your site ranks, too. You can specify ads based on your geographic area and the categories in which you practice law. 

Paying for advertisements on aggregator sites can help you to avoid the high prices seen in the law vertical on Google Ads. Avvo offers monthly ad subscriptions that can be more affordable than Google Ads. Specifically, for keywords relevant to law SEO, the CPC of a Google Ad can be costly. However, Google Ads have the benefit of being extremely focused – down to the zip code and modified for focused terms – and can benefit your site more so than an Avvo ad would. 

Utilizing Google Ads for visibility on high-ranking, impactful keywords is a marketing tactic big law firms should leverage. If a small law firm has the budget, spending on PPC in order to stay competitive for specific keywords may be a wise approach. Used correctly, Google Ads can help small law firms target specific keywords, in specific areas.

Avvo receives over 1.3 million organic visits each month. While there is huge visibility here, Avvo might not be ranking for the keywords that are important to you. Avvo’s monthly subscription is less costly than Google Ads but leveraging Avvo is likely to show you less of a conversion rate than Google Ads. Google Ads has a 3.75% conversion rate while Avvo only has a reported .0083% conversion rate. 

Overall, Google Ads will provide your firm with more visibility, more leads, and more ROI if you have the funds to spend on paid ads. If you don’t have as much to spend, aggregator ad sites, like Avvo, are a good source of lead generation. However, the best source for high conversion rates is still SEO - leading with a 14.6% close rate. If you decide to invest in paid advertisements, optimizing for organic results with SEO efforts is still very important to your overall strategy. Strive to leverage PPC and SEO together in order to gain as much visibility as possible.

What else can I do to rank for lawyer SEO terms?

Another SEO tactic to utilize is building link authority. Find out where your competitors are linked to and work to gain links on those same sites. Also, work to gain link building opportunities where your competitors don’t have any. 

While guest blogging isn’t as strong of a link building tactic as it was in the past, it is possible to gain audience trust and credibility as a thought leader by writing guest posts on sites that are trusted and respected. Relevant sites may include law school websites, blogs with extensive information on law topics (Attorney at Work), or well-rounded and respected publications like The Wall Street Journal.

Lastly, building citations will be important for any local firm. In order to do so, make sure your NAP (name, address, phone number) is correct and in proper format. Make sure you’re not already listed on the sites before submitting your citation. If you already have a citation listing on a site, double check to make sure it’s accurate and updated otherwise the point of the citation is lost.

SEO strategy for law firms is unique as the competition is high, there are massive aggregators in the space and there is more to consider than the typical product or services site. Ranking for law-related terms is beneficial and worth the hard work to get there. Be sure to regularly create new content and optimize keywords that have strong growth and resonate with your audience.

gregalbuto

M Posted 6 years 1 month ago

t 9 min read

As states rolled out social distancing orders, BrightEdge began a deep dive into the digital world and the shift in search behaviors. We discovered that SEO is more important now than it ever has been before. We also discovered where search trends are headed in the future. In this installment of our series on SEO now for the B2B tech industry, we’ll look at how B2B tech companies are handling the transition to online operations. Visit these pages for our previous installments on education, finance, and retail.

What is going on with B2B tech?

Since the start of the pandemic, B2B tech organizations have worked to adjust their marketing and sales strategies in order to attract more of their customers online. Buying behaviors have shifted, as well as search behaviors, and while some B2B tech companies saw a pull back, like CRM products and services, others saw an increase in interest. 

McKinsey conducted a survey across 11 countries and found that B2B tech companies saw digital interactions were two to three times more important to consumers than sales interactions. Digital marketers at B2B tech companies are vital to the success of their business right now. Producing high-value, editorial content and offering a gateway for other businesses is likely to assist in continuing traffic to your site. 

In our research, we found that B2B tech companies are currently either rebounding or stabilizing, depending on which category they fall under. Data Center and IT Networking are both rebounding, while IT Security and Collaboration are stabilizing. You can see what’s happening with the B2B tech industry and other industries below.

Tech companies should transform their marketing strategy to include cross-channel marketing techniques that work in today’s digitized world and shift focus from traditional marketing to digital marketing. Because in-person events have been postponed or canceled, companies can move conferences and major events online. Rather than spending advertising budget traditional ads, brands can leverage digital marketing opportunities in SEO & PPC channels during this time.

BrightEdge recently coordinated our own digital marketing efforts to drive leads and opportunities for our research webinar SEO Insights, Opportunities, and Performance in an Era of Uncertainty. We brought together industry-specific research to educate our audience on how search insights have changed. We discovered just how many consumers were looking for digital education and we saw great results.

What content is resonating with consumers in the B2B tech category?

IBM discovered that video content is resonating the most with their audience. Tanu Vijayavargiya, Global Digital Analytics Lead at IBM says consumers are interested in the touch and feel of being virtually present. IBM utilized BrightEdge Instant to research what video content to create and understand new opportunities to pursue during the COVID-19 crisis.

Virtual demos, webinars, and how-to videos can all increase your organic traffic and keep consumers interested in what your business has to offer their business. 

What should strategy look like for B2B tech?

As a B2B marketer, it will be instrumental to leverage a virtual strategy for events, your sales cycle and post-sales support. Vijayavargiya says B2B marketers should prepare for a true sense of digital economy– an economy based on digital technologies for economic ventures and personal interactions. Whether your organization is digitized or not will determine the overall impact COVID-19 had on your business.

B2B companies have seen very slight decreases in interest throughout the pandemic and in fact, we estimate they’ll see an increase in spend in the coming weeks. 

Companies, like IBM, understand that finding keyword intent and spending budget accordingly for keywords with intent is critical during this time and will likely remain critical in the coming months. As people continue to navigate through their pain points, creating content with high intent, long-tail keywords will help drive consumers to your content – especially more specific posts related to your business. Utilizing keywords through your content that will produce high intent is important to the success of your content. 

In order to see success during this time, businesses should strategically leverage SEO. Consider using SEO to improve your performance for the more expensive keywords your company’s vertical. As newcomers and your current competition shifts to the digital marketplace, expensive keywords will quickly clean out your PPC budget. Use this time to focus on a content strategy that attracts users and conversion rate optimization tactics to convert them.

Whether you’re spending this time fixing technical errors on your site or strategizing your digital marketing approach, SEO will help drive the results you’re seeking both now and in the coming months. We recommend refreshing your knowledge of SEO and the BrightEdge platform as SEO continues to be an ally. Dive into search results innovations, like Instant, that you may not have had the time for yet and develop a plan of action for your digital approach moving forward.

gregalbuto

M Posted 6 years 1 month ago

t 9 min read

As businesses use their digital presence to communicate with consumers, the keyword “SEO” hit a new high in April 2020 with 1.5 million monthly searches. Brands are leveraging SEO more than ever to increase organic traffic over the last few months and for good reason. 

Digital marketing became fundamental for business success as brick-and-mortar locations closed. People, especially business owners, are fearful of what the financial industry and their personal finances will become going forward. A PwC survey showed that 71% of people who responded have a concern of “financial impact, including effects on results of operations, future periods and liquidity and capital resources.”

Where are people concerned when it comes to wealth management?

BrightEdge Instant shows us that “wealth advisor” and related keywords saw an increase in search volume beginning in February 2020 and continues to see a rise.

It’s not surprising that people became increasingly interested in financial advice during these uncertain times. Dimensional Investing spoke with six top advisory firms about how they’ve been working and communicating with clients since the pandemic began. Partners from the firms have expressed constant communication, exercising empathy, and remaining calm while working with new and current clients.

Norm Mindel, Partner at Forum Financial Management, expressed that clients were considering making a mistake by going to cash and selling stocks as an immediate solution. While there is typically a small search volume for “go to cash”, it did see a 320% spike in searches in March 2020.

As it is still unknown when businesses reopen and what the job market will look like following the crisis, people are looking at their financial options. 

What happened to the financial industry in March 2020?

BrightEdge research discovered that from a financial standpoint, interest spiked. The impact of COVID-19 and a shutdown turned consumers attention to stocks and the impact it has on 401ks and retirement plans. March 2020 saw a stock market crash that Forbes called “the 19th worst in history” as it was down 12.5% in one day. March 2020 also saw some of the best days in stock market history. March 24 saw a 9.4% lift and was ranked 9th best in stock market history for one day. This could all be reason as to why Instant saw headlining volatility between February, March, and April.

Consider where the financial industry is headed

BrightEdge research shows that there are four stages industries are navigating through in response to the pandemic. They include rebounding, accelerating, recovering, and stabilizing. Based on our research, Wealth Management is recovering and Stocks are currently in the stabilizing stage.

Utilize Instant as you drive organic results for finance specific keywords

In March, The keyword “stock market” saw a 231% spike in monthly search volume at over 11 million from its three million monthly searches in February. 

“Stock exchange” and “stocks to buy” also saw a lifted monthly search volume in March and then an immediate decline in April. People became interested in industries that may have seen plummeting results at the start of COVID-19 but have plans to increase in the future. 

For example, there was a 1,256% increase in search volume for “airline stocks” between February and March. As nearly all travel ceased in March, airline stocks took a nosedive. According to S&P Global Market Intelligence, shares of United Airlines Holdings lost 48.8% in March. Consumers know that as time goes on, travel will pick back up and airline stocks will level out. They understand that now is the time to invest.

Similarly, “zoom stocks” saw a 1,256% increase in search volume. Because of the immediate demand for virtual interactions, and in turn immediate need for video communication, people took an interest in purchasing Zoom stocks as well as Microsoft Teams stocks. 

In March, companies, including Nationwide, Facebook, and Zillow all discussed either working from home through the end of the year or working from home permanently. Because of this, there is a need for cloud communication platforms that offer video collaboration to employees and business owners.

As businesses begin to open and work to find some type of financial normalcy or recovery, it is important to remember that SEO efforts can assist you in doing so. Utilizing SEO rather than PPC will benefit your business in the long run. Spending budget on keywords and advertisements for now will get you immediate results but as the world starts to perk up, SEO will prove to be more beneficial as buying behaviors normalize.
 
For more information on SEO in an era of uncertainty, check out our most recent research webinar, SEO Insights, Opportunities, and Performance in an Era of Uncertainty with BrightEdge, L’Oreal, and IBM experts.