by shannon | Dec 1, 2021 | Baltimore SEO
The Importance of Backlink Audit And Its Impact On SEO Strategy!
In the digital age today, a website is the perfect tool to increase your business visibility online. However, the competition has the same tool at its disposal, making it imperative to go the extra mile to stand out and appeal to a massive audience.
One of the best strategies you can adopt is using backlinks and examining their performance through backlink analysis. Let’s dive right into it.
Defining Backlinks
Backlinks are incoming links from other web pages directing website visitors to your site. If another person links to your content, you’ve got a backlink. These links are typically inbound links since they represent another website’s traffic redirecting to your web pages.
One easy way of getting high-authority backlinks is spying on the competition by checking their high-ranking content or social media activities. Alternatively, you could find broken links in the websites of businesses in your niche and offer yours as a replacement.
What is Backlink Analysis?
Backlink analysis is an SEO strategy that involves the comprehensive review and analysis of a website’s backlinks. You can perform backlink analysis on your website, or your competitors to analyze performance and ranking. That helps identify any issues that could potentially improve or affect your website’s search engine rankings.
Steps to Follow During Backlink Analysis
It’s vital to follow these simple steps when performing backlink analysis:
- First, choose the site you want to analyze. Prioritize your site and then check out your competitors’ websites.
- Next, select a backlink auditing tool. Common backlink analysis tools include Google Search Console, Moz Open Site Explorer, SEMrush, and Ahrefs. Each tool has unique features and performs the analysis efficiently. It’s possible to use various tools at a go to enable a more comprehensive backlink analysis.
- If you’re checking out the competition’s website, consider using SEMrush. Its features allow you to compare your website’s performance with up to three other competitor websites.
- Now comes the actual analysis. Here, you enter the website domain into the search bar to initiate the analysis process. The result will be a massive dataset that you can collect and record for scrutiny.
- With the data at hand, an expert digital marketer can help you analyze the backlinks and create an effective backlinking strategy.
Things to Prioritize When Performing a Backlink Analysis
The backlink analysis process involves a large amount of data that can easily overwhelm you. However, you can focus on key information that’ll eliminate the hassle but still offer valuable insight. Some things to look out for include:
- The number of backlinks. Comparing the number of backlinks linking to your site and the competition lets you know your website’s performance regarding authority.
- The content that the referring domains link to. Checking out the content these domains point to gives insight into the high-ranking keywords you can use to generate other content on your website.
- The web pages with the most backlinks. While most inbound links often point to the homepage, other pages could perform better. Knowing which pages have the most backlinks enables you to figure where to focus your efforts on.
Why Perform Backlink Analysis?
Impress Search Engines
Backlink analysis is paramount for any website to rank high in SERPs. It exposes your site to a much larger audience and helps build your domain authority. Getting your content and brand in front of a larger audience may earn you new leads and ultimately increase your sales. At the same time, higher domain authority will boost your general performance in search engine results.
Identify Bad Links
Backlink analysis also helps to identify bad links, including those originating from spammy websites. If Google sniffs out these links, your website may get penalized and lose out on ranking high. It can be pretty tough to overcome such a blow to your SEO efforts. That’s why backlink analysis is critical to identify bad links and disavow them using Google Search Console. Note that even if you have various high authority backlinks, one bad link could affect your credibility! You need to eliminate all spammy links and remain with quality backlinks to show your site is credible, trustworthy, and deserves the top spot on SERPs.
Outrank the Competition
Analyzing your competitors’ backlinks can show why you’re finding it difficult to stay ahead of them and appear at the top of SERPs. Additionally, looking at competitor domains allows you to acquire link-building opportunities for your web pages. Remember that backlinks link back to content, so you can also get content ideas to use in your pages and attract links.
Partner With Expert Digital Marketers
The bottom line is, backlink analysis is a crucial component of your SEO strategy as it offers great insight into your website and competitors’ web page performance. However, the process can be daunting to achieve on your own. That’s where Virtual Surge comes in. We’re a seasoned digital marketing firm with expertise in link building and backlink analysis.
Don’t think twice about contacting us whenever you’re ready to create a lead-generating link-building strategy. We’ll work tirelessly to achieve your goals. Reach out to us today!
by shannon | Nov 19, 2021 | Baltimore SEO
Website Optimization For Holiday Season
Holiday seasons are the ideal time for any business to gain a massive target audience and catapult sales. Now is when there’s ideally a spike in online traffic and purchases. That’s why it’s vital to prep your website for the holidays and capitalize on the heavy traffic, gain new customers, build your reputation, and increase your online visibility. One easy way to prepare your business for the peak festive seasons is by optimizing your website for the holidays. Here’s how you can do website optimization for holiday season.
Advertise Your Seasonal Products and Offers
The most basic way of priming your site for the festive season is by featuring seasonal products and offers on your home page. That goes a long way in capturing the attention of your potential clients and keeping them on your website. Ensure that you feature best-selling products and services to increase the chances of sales. You can look at stats from past holidays on products and services that sold well and feature such products to lure previous customers in. It’s also vital to feature any offers for these products or services.
Additionally, create product bundles and sell various products at a single package and price to further create awareness of the services you offer. Remember that each holiday season has its unique colors. These colors play a key role in capturing your audience’s attention. As you advertise your products, ensure that you integrate theme colors associated with the particular holiday. For instance, fall colors such as orange, yellow, brown, and green can be ideal for the Thanksgiving festive season. Later, you could switch to red, gold, and white for Christmas.
Plan Out Your Seasonal Content Strategy
Another way of optimizing your site for a holiday is by updating your content. The content present helps attract organic social media shares and natural backlinks to your website. It can also bring in website traffic and transform the site visitors into actual customers. If your website has engaging, easy-to-read, and relevant content, it’ll make your page have high authority and increase your website rank on organic search engine results pages. As you plan out your holiday season content strategy, make sure that you create content that caters to seasonal needs. You can:
- Research your competition’s marketing strategies and perform surveys on consumer needs. Your sales team can also help determine what’s selling and what’s not. Later, create content on the products amassing a lot of web traffic on the competition’s website and your website.
- Ensure that the content you create complements your products and services. Moreover, it should be customer-centered. A good and effective content creation strategy is generating content that brings solutions to most consumers’ problems. You want your audience to turn to your business whenever they face a challenge.
- It’s also wise to optimize the content by using keywords related to the holiday season. That will make your content rank high and increase your visibility on search engines. Eventually, there’ll be many people clicking on your website to view your content.
Create Your Social Media Marketing Strategy
Social media platforms are ideal avenues to sell your brand during the festive season. The platforms have very large traffic throughout, which you can leverage if you play your cards well. One way of increasing your website visibility is by linking it to your social media pages. That way, your social media followers can easily access your web page when they need what you’re offering.
Your social media campaign team, content developers, and content support team can come up with a campaign that employs a holistic approach for maximum impact and sales during a holiday season. The content developers are particularly crucial, as they’ll create the content that your social media visitors will engage with. Great social media content includes aspects like holiday-based keywords, trending hashtags, and relatable information. That way, you’ll easily improve your exposure on social media and draw traffic to your website.
Ensure That Your Website is Reliable and Consistent
A slow site is a major turn-off in the world today, where fast internet technology stands supreme. The slow-loading website is likely to put off website visitors, and you’ll lose out on potential clients. Therefore, it’s imperative to avoid any form of outage or delays on your website. Also, remember that most people conduct searches on their phones. For that reason, it’s best to ensure that your website is responsive on various devices, besides having a fast loading speed.
Here are some things to do to ensure that your site’s performance is consistent and reliable throughout the holiday season:
- Ensure that your website, social media, and customer support teams are available during the holiday season. It would help to have an efficient staffing routine to cater to any problems when they occur.
- Put in place an emergency plan for any unexpected website performance issues.
- It would be prudent to perform a load test for your website to test its ability to handle the high traffic it’s likely to experience during the holiday seasons.
- Avoid adding new features or functionality to your website until the holiday season is over, as that may affect functionality.
Contact the Digital Marketing Experts
The online visibility of your webpage during the holidays is vital to amass a huge audience and increase business. There’s so much to think about, from optimizing your site to creating content and anything in between. But that shouldn’t be a problem. You can always trust expert digital marketers who have substantive experience with internet marketing matters.
Virtual Surge is a full-service digital marketing agency that serves global businesses. Call us to inquire about our services.
by shannon | Nov 7, 2021 | Baltimore SEO
The Impact of Social Media in SEO
The relationship between social media and SEO remains quite oblivious to this date. Although most business owners recognize the importance of being active on social media platforms, some often fail to acknowledge its impact on other digital marketing efforts. A strong social media presence can enhance the impact of other online marketing activities, SEO included.
Despite that, understanding this relationship can be quite difficult, which is why you should read on to understand the history between social media platforms and SEO. By the end of this article, you may also learn how it can affect your business’s SEO strategies.
The History Between Social Media and SEO
A website’s social media page may fail to have a direct impact on its search engine rankings. The situation can be more complicated. Essentially, nobody outside Google truly knows what the search algorithms can or can’t do. Most people often rely on public announcements for this information. In 2010, Danny Sullivan acknowledged that Google had social signals that help in ranking organic results. This theory was further confirmed by the former leader of Google’s webspam team, Matt Cutts. He modified his findings claiming that the search algorithm doesn’t treat social media profiles as ranking signals, but rather as independent organic search results.
Two years later, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, Gary Illyes, agreed with Cutt’s point of view. In light of this information, it’s evident that social signals can impact organic search rankings, although not directly. However, websites that rank high organically most probably have a strong social media presence based on the content published across various platforms. Therefore, while Google will rank websites with impactful social media profiles, these profiles don’t directly affect how low or high they rank. As a general rule, the entire website should perform well for it to rank highly.
How Social Media Helps SEO
While it may not directly impact your website’s search engine rankings, you can use social media to improve your SEO.
- It Can Boost Content Performance
Social media platforms are a great way to share any content related to your business products. If you post content on your website without sharing it on any other platform, you may be wasting the resources you used to create the content in the first place. Social media sites provide a wider audience than you would have if you used your website alone to share content. Essentially, if you have more people viewing and engaging with your site’s content, you’re likely to obtain more positive user signals, which can benefit its search rankings.
- Social Media Profiles Can Rank for Search Terms
As a business owner, you’re probably more concerned with how your website ranks than how the social profiles rank. If potential customers search for your company using branded search terms, there’s a chance that your business’s social media accounts may rank alongside its webpage. Although the audience may be interested in learning about what your company offers through the website, many people may also want to see what you publish on social media. Social media accounts can provide a different perspective of your business alongside additional information about your products and services to clients that need it.
- It Can Attract More Traffic to Your Website
The ultimate goal of having an SEO strategy in place for your business is to increase its online visibility and attract more traffic to its website. However, focusing on improving the site’s search rankings may be the best, if not the only way, to attract more visitors. Staying active on social media and posting content relevant to your audience can also improve the traffic to your website. Social media helps tap into a wider audience, including customers who may not have discovered your company through an online search but require the products or services it offers.
If you’re using SEO for the first time, it can help you attract more visitors than search engines. SEO can take a long time before it starts bearing positive results. While the wait may prove worthwhile eventually, you may not get the traffic you need right at the beginning.
- A Good Social Profile Can Build Trust
Consumers today are overwhelmed with alternatives when it comes to making purchasing decisions. However, while having many businesses to choose from may be a great thing, it has also made it harder for customers to find a reliable service provider. Clients expect a legitimate business to have a social media presence and may label a company without one as untrustworthy. If you use SEO to boost your company’s online reputation and build trust with your potential customers, having a robust social media presence can be a powerful asset.
In a Nutshell
Every effort you make online to improve the presence of your business should work in tandem. Social media and SEO have individual benefits for businesses. However, when used together, they can prove to be more effective in helping you achieve your digital marketing objectives.
If you would like more information about how social media can help your SEO strategies, reach out to the online marketing experts at Virtual Surge.
by shannon | Oct 19, 2021 | Baltimore SEO
The Perfect Way To Optimize Images For Your Website
Image optimization may typically involve making images look good, load quickly, or easy for search engines such as Google to index. Essentially, it’s a process that entails saving and uploading images without compromising their overall quality.
While the whole exercise may seem complicated, you can use various image optimization plugins and tools to compress images automatically up to 80 percent, without any fluctuations in the image quality.
You may enjoy various benefits when you optimize images you upload and share on your business website. Here’s how image optimization can help you.
- It can increase the loading speed of your website.
- Your website’s SEO rankings may also improve.
- Image optimization can guarantee a higher conversion rate for leads and sales.
- It can reduce the cost of backup storage.
- It can also mean less storage and bandwidth acquisition expenditure.
Given the above advantages, below are some tips you can use to optimize images for your website.
Start by Choosing Quality Images
You don’t need expensive photography equipment to have quality images to use on your website. There are many stock photo sites that you can use to download free images for commercial use. Some of the popular options include;
- Barn Images
- Unsplash
- Pixabay
- Little Visuals
- PicJumbo
- SplitShire
Alternatively, there are a few tricks you could use to make your images look well-lit and professional without the need for sophisticated camera equipment. That’s if you don’t know how you can obtain images from a stock photo website.
If none of the above options seem viable based on your needs, you can use free online tools to optimize your infographics and images with font overlays. Additionally, an exceptional logo design can serve as an optimized image for your company’s website.
Select the Appropriate File Type
There are different types of image files, including PNG, GIF, JPG, and SVG formats. However, website images often comprise JPG or PNG formats. Each format presents a different set of pros and cons. That said, below are some of the tips you should keep in mind.
- You should always save photographs as JPGs.
JPG formats, also known as JPEGs, can accommodate all the colors in an image in small and efficient file sizes. A JPEG image can help you avoid having an enormous file, which you may get if you saved your photograph in PNG format.
- Always save graphics in PNG format.
Graphics typically include logos, images with a lot of text, designs, and infographics. While PNGs offer a higher quality image than JPEGs, they come with larger file sizes. Essentially, PNGs often feature images with lots of colors and crisp lines that allow you to zoom in without compromising the image quality.
PNG files also support transparent backgrounds, which can come in handy if you’re planning to use a logo. Experts in site optimization recommend using PNG format files in 24-bit format rather than eight-bit due to better image quality and a wide array of supported colors.
Resize Your Images to Enhance Site Speed and Appearance
When looking for images for your website, you should strike a balance between the resolution and file size. Essentially, always remember that the higher the image’s resolution, the larger the file size.
For instance, if you upload a photo from your phone or a DSLR camera, the resolution, height, and width dimensions may be higher than what you may need. While this may be a great option for print or desktop publishing, it may not be suitable for your website.
With that in mind, reducing the file dimensions can help reduce its size. You can use image-editing software to downsize the images you’d like to use. For instance, you’ll have to choose a JPG format with dimensions of 1,200 × 795 pixels if you were planning to utilize an image that’s about 1.8 megabytes with dimensions of 4,900 × 3,200 pixels. It can reduce the file size by up to 94 percent.
Name the Image File Appropriately to Help Achieve Your SEO Objectives
Many people rarely give much thought to the names they assign the image files on their website. You should pay attention to how you name the files before uploading them to your website since it can make the photos easier to manage.
Past that, based on where the images appear on the internet, using the correct naming can boost the efficiency of your SEO strategies. To guarantee consistency throughout your website, take note of the following tips.
- Try sticking to lower case letters and numbers from zero to nine.
- Avoid using punctuation marks and leaving spaces in between words.
- Consider using hyphens instead of underscores.
In Conclusion
If you need to optimize images for your website, there are four easy ways to do it. They include choosing the right image quality, selecting the appropriate file type, resizing the images, and using the proper file-naming technique.
If you need assistance in image optimization for your site, don’t hesitate to contact the digital marketing professionals at Virtual Surge. You’ll get personalized solutions to meet your SEO needs.
by shannon | Oct 9, 2021 | Baltimore SEO, Digital Marketing, Marketing, Posts
The Best and Easiest Way to Optimize Google My Business
Some search engine marketing strategies can be costly and challenging to implement. That’s why Google My Business listing can be an invaluable asset to your business.
Studies show that four in five people use search engines to find local information. It has also been discovered that half of all individuals who use online resources to search for a local business visit the company they choose within 24 hours.
Google My Business (GMB) is a free tool that businesses with a brick-and-mortar address can manage their online presence in various search engines.
That said, a GMB listing or page can help your business appear on Google Maps and rank better on search engine results pages. If yours is a local business, GMB has additional features to enhance your company’s local listings and improve its ranking in local searches.
Due to its effectiveness in expanding a business’s digital reach, GMB has become a popular online marketing tool for most local establishments, increasing competitiveness. To help your company stand out, you can rely on the following tips on how to optimize your Google My Business page.
Create Your Google My Business Profile
The first thing you can do to optimize your GMB page is to create a company profile complete with detailed, accurate, and up-to-date information. In that context, you should ensure that you’ve filled out all the required fields on your listing, which include;
- Company name
- Phone number
- Physical address
- Website
- Category
- Description
- Hours of operation
- Questions and answers section
- Photos
- Additional fields that may appear based on your industry.
By providing the information requested by Google, it becomes easier for potential customers to find and contact your company for transactional purposes. Your company also stands a chance of ranking higher on the Google results page.
Select a Specific and Relevant Business Category
The category you choose for your business is quite essential as it helps Google determine on which online searches your business’s listing will appear. Google offers a list of available categories, which you’ll have to use since you can’t generate your own.
If you can’t find a specific category that fits your business’s description, try selecting a general classification that accurately captures your company’s profile.
Add High-Resolution Images of Your Business
Image optimization can be a cost-effective way to expand your online reach via your Google My Business listing. Google claims that companies that add their photos on their GMB profiles can get 42 percent more requests for their directions on Google Maps than businesses that don’t. Similarly, it acknowledges that such businesses may also get 35 percent more clicks on their websites.
That said, you should consider using high-definition images to provide customers with a glimpse of what to expect from your company. To do this, you can add your business’s logo or photos of the sales team, office, or anything that can showcase your offerings. As a bonus tip, you should also try developing a 360-view interactive tour of your company for potential clients.
Past that, to ensure that your photo looks just right on your GMB page, you need to follow some predetermined specifications for uploading images. These specifications have been detailed below.
- Your images should be in PNG or JPG format.
- The images should be sized between 10 kilobytes and 10 megabytes.
- The minimum resolution for each image should be 720 pixels tall and 720 pixels wide.
- Use only high-definition photos, without significant alterations or excessive filter use.
Provide a Local Contact Number
Besides ensuring that you’ve provided a consistent phone number across all of your company’s digital listings, you should also offer a contact number that features your local area code.
This helps Google identify your company as a locally owned and operated service provider. Past that, you should ensure that the number you use on your GMB page is the same one on your business’s website or in the landing pages you may include in your listing.
Monitor Your GMB Question and Answer Section
The GMB Q and A section is arguably one of the great features for local search marketing on Google. Here, your potential clients can pose questions regarding your company, and you can provide real-time answers to their queries.
That said, failing to monitor this section and respond to customers’ inquiries can lead to misinformation about your business. It may even affect your company’s reputation negatively both online and on the ground.
Contact a Full-Service Digital Marketing Company
If you need local search engine marketing strategies, look no further than Virtual Surge. We have extensive experience implementing SEO tactics, reputation management, web design, and coordinating SEO audits.
by shannon | Sep 22, 2021 | Baltimore SEO, Posts
Trending Topics For Content Creation
In this digital age, it has become easier than ever to discover what’s got people buzzing in your locality, country, or even the world at large. The term trending has become synonymous with popular online content. It doesn’t matter where the piece of content comes from or the format it’s in. If a similar article is viewed, reacted to, and shared consistently, digital platforms will often note it and sometimes prioritize it.
Knowing how to find trending content can help you grow your craft and achieve better marketing outcomes as a content marketer. This is because finding trending content involves looking for topics or issues that people are already interested in.
You can use this knowledge to benefit from the online traffic the content generates, irrespective of whether you’re sharing it yourself or integrating it into your work.
However, finding trending topics for content creation can sometimes be quite hectic. Therefore, regardless of whether you’re looking for quality blogs or viral social media posts, below are some of the few ways you can use to get what you’re searching for.
Social Media Trending Sections
Today, content creators can rejoice that social media platforms appreciate that people enjoy knowing what’s popular around them. Most social networking sites feature their trending sections, often including a change option at the top of the list of trending topics.
This option allows you to adjust the trends around various fields, making it easier to find popular content around the topics you’d like to focus on for your brand. A survey by the Pew Research Center discovered that approximately 62 percent of American adults received their news from social networking sites.
With that in mind, rest assured that speaking with people about trending topics on these platforms could help you gain significant common ground with your brand’s audience.
News Sites That Cover Trending Topics
Contrary to popular belief, many of the internet’s leading news sites that focus on trending topics can be a great way to find out what’s popular locally or worldwide.
As you browse the internet searching for inspiration for your next content, some of the topics that may pop up on sites such as BuzzFeed and Reddit may not be relevant to the message you want to communicate with your brand. However, such sites may have subsections that can help you find content that can resonate with your audience.
Although you may need to shift manually through the web pages to determine which topics deserve your attention and those that don’t, you’ll eventually find exactly the kind of content you’re looking for. These sites can also help you discover breaking stories in real-time instead of waiting for two or three days after their appeal has worn down.
Google Trends
Google is arguably the premier provider of digital marketing tools, offering online marketers robust products such as Google Analytics, Google AdWords, Google Blogger, and Google Webmaster Tools. The company also has something extra for content marketers, Google Trends, a reliable alternative for anyone in need of trending topics for content creation purposes.
All you have to do is type the topic you’re looking for in the search box and evaluate the amount of online traffic it’s creating. If you can’t find anything actionable, the site allows users to perform country- or sector-specific searches to improve the targeting of the results.
To make an in-depth analysis of the results, you can click on the country or state names to receive completely localized outcomes. This can help you land significantly targeted keywords that can help you find content that focuses on your market base.
Social Mention
Social Mention is an intelligent tool that evaluates content across wide-ranging digital platforms. This means that it doesn’t limit its activities to major networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
Instead, the tool goes through over 100 other sites, including YouTube, FriendFeed, Digg, and sites that host user-generated content to discover trending topics. Upon submitting a query, Social Mention may provide a list of influencers who regularly post on one or more digital platforms about the issue.
In most cases, these individuals achieve their titles as influencers since they have many followers and a high level of audience engagement.
Contact the Best Digital Marketers Around You
With advances in technology constantly transforming how businesses interact with their customers and their performance in the industry, it’s high time for you to consider finding effective online marketing solutions.
However, as a business owner, you’ve probably realized that time may sometimes make it difficult for you to manage your business while concentrating on remaining competitive. Therefore, to enable yourself to focus on improving your brand’s performance, you should consider hiring digital marketing professionals at Virtual Surge.
