SEO

Benefits of Local SEO and How to Reap Them

In the ever-evolving digital landscape, it’s important for businesses to optimize their online presence to stay competitive and attract local customers. This is where local SEO (Search Engine Optimization) comes into play. Local SEO focuses on improving a business’s visibility in local search results, and it’s a powerful tool for small and medium-sized companies especially. In this article, we will explore what local SEO is and why it’s important, delve into the numerous benefits of local SEO, and provide insights on how you can effectively implement local SEO to grow your business.

What Is Local SEO?

Local SEO is a targeted approach to optimizing your online presence to increase visibility for location-specific searches. In short, it helps your business achieve a higher ranking on search engines, so it’s easy to imagine why there are so many benefits to local SEO. When users search for products or services in a specific geographical area, Google and other search engines display results that are relevant to that location. Local SEO helps businesses leverage these location-based searches by optimizing their websites, online directories, and other online assets to rank higher in local search results. 

Why Is Local SEO Important?

Local SEO is crucial for businesses of all sizes because it allows them to connect with customers in their immediate vicinity. With the increasing reliance on search engines and mobile devices, people frequently search for products and services “near me.” Local SEO ensures that businesses appear in these relevant local search results, increasing their visibility and driving targeted traffic. By developing a local SEO strategy, small and medium-sized businesses can establish a strong local presence, attract customers who are ready to convert, and gain a competitive edge in their local market.

What Are the Benefits of Local SEO?

Implementing a local SEO strategy can be a game-changer for businesses seeking to attract local customers. There are innumerable benefits of local SEO, so let’s dive into the most significant advantages it offers:

Increased Online Visibility 

One of the most obvious benefits of local SEO is increased local visibility. By optimizing your business for local searches, you can improve your visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) for location-specific queries. This means that, when potential customers search for products or services in their vicinity, your business will have a higher chance of appearing in the top results. 

Improving local SEO can even help your business appear in Google’s 3-pack, which means you show up in the first three results of local searches for a given keyword. And appearing in the 3-pack leads to more information being displayed about your business, including a company description, business hours, and address.

Targeted Traffic

Local SEO helps you reach customers who are actively searching for businesses like yours in their area. This highly targeted traffic is more likely to convert into leads and customers, as these people have a genuine interest in your products or services. 

One of the greatest benefits of local SEO that comes out of targeted traffic is more calls and in-person visits, which can generate more sales. Improving local SEO helps your business rank higher on Google Maps, directing customers to the physical site of your business. Local SEO also attracts more customers to your Google My Business profile, a free platform where you publish your contact info, URL, reviews, and photos.

Enhanced Brand Awareness

As your business ranks higher in local search results, you can expect a boost in overall website traffic. The more visibility you have, the more potential customers will visit your website to learn about your offerings. 

Appearing in local search results exposes your business to a wider audience within your community. SEO local helps to increase brand visibility, allowing potential customers to become more familiar with your business, even if they haven’t interacted with it before.

More Local Reviews

Online reviews and ratings play a crucial role in customers’ decision-making process. One of the major benefits of local SEO is that it helps businesses accumulate more online reviews. Reports show that 87% of consumers used Google in 2022 to evaluate local businesses before making purchases.

When you’re providing quality goods and services, people enjoy leaving positive reviews, which in turn boosts your sales to new customers who read those reviews. And businesses can manage and improve their online reputation by encouraging customers to leave positive reviews, responding to feedback, and addressing any negative comments promptly. Replying to customer feedback quickly and respectfully helps you rank higher on Google and provides a better customer experience.

Competitive Edge 

Local SEO allows small and medium-sized businesses to compete more effectively with larger companies. By focusing on local searches, you can target a specific market segment and stand out from the competition in your area. 

And local SEO benefits your business in smaller markets too. A local SEO plan helps you stand out from local competitors who rely on more traditional marketing strategies and advertising. Potential customers are drawn to businesses with higher SERP results because people can gather more information about a product or service online, which is one of the greatest benefits of local SEO.

Mobile Optimization

With the rise of mobile usage, local SEO has become even more critical. Mobile users often search for nearby businesses using the “near me” option on their smartphones. By optimizing for local searches, your business will have better visibility to capture these mobile users actively seeking local products and services.

By using local SEO, businesses can also connect themselves to the important “shop local” trend. Consumers today are often interested in shopping locally and supporting smaller brands and local businesses. Local SEO can help your small or medium-sized company stand out for people looking to support homegrown businesses.

Higher Conversion Rates

As we’ve discussed, one of the benefits of local SEO is that it directs potential customers to your website or physical store, but it also increases the likelihood of conversions. Conversions refer to the number of users who complete an action a business desires. Such actions include clicking on an ad, filling out a contact form, signing up for emails, or starting a free trial.

People who use local searches are often in a position where they’re ready to make a purchase, or they’re at least further along in the decision-making process. With increased conversion rates, the likelihood of sales is even greater—and having a local SEO plan helps your business get there. 

Cost-Effective Marketing

Compared to traditional advertising methods, local SEO provides an excellent return on investment. It targets customers at the exact moment they are looking for products or services, making it a highly efficient and cost-effective strategy.

By using local SEO, a business can lower its overall advertising costs, while competitors invest in banners, pamphlets, and even local TV ads—a pricey alternative. Local SEO draws instead on online users’ existing buying behaviors, such as using the “near me” option on their smartphones, drastically reducing the cost of advertising.

How Can I Do Local SEO? 

To reap the benefits of local SEO and implement an effective SEO strategy, consider the following local SEO tips:

Optimize Your Website

Make sure that your website contains relevant keywords, location-specific content, and metadata that aligns with your business’s local presence.

Claim Your Google My Business Listing 

Create and optimize your Google My Business (GMB) profile, providing accurate information about your business, including address, phone number, business hours, and customer reviews.

Check Your NAP Information 

Check that your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) information is consistent across all online directories, review sites, and social media profiles.

Localize Content

Develop localized content for your website, including city-specific landing pages, blog posts, and customer testimonials that resonate with your local audience.

Submit to Online Directories and Citations

Submit your business information to popular online directories and local citation sites to boost your visibility and credibility.

Care About Customer Reviews

Encourage customers to leave reviews on platforms like Google My Business, Yelp, and industry-specific review sites. Respond to reviews promptly and respectfully to show your engagement and commitment to customer satisfaction.

Build Local Links 

Build relationships with local influencers, businesses, and organizations to acquire high-quality backlinks to your website, boosting its authority in local search results.

Engage with Social Media

Leverage social media platforms to engage with your local audience, share relevant content, promote special offers, and foster a sense of community around your brand.

Invest in Mobile-Friendly Optimization

Ensure your website is mobile-friendly, with responsive design and fast loading speeds, providing a seamless experience for mobile users.

Monitor and Analyze

Regularly monitor your local SEO efforts with tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Analyze key metrics, such as website traffic, rankings, and customer engagement to refine your local SEO strategy continually.

Consult an Expert

If you’re ready to take the next step in developing a local SEO plan, it’s always a good idea to consult the experts. Professional SEO services can help you take your business to the next level in ways that save you time and energy.

Conclusion

The benefits of local SEO are significant. It’s a powerful, cost-effective marketing tool that can help businesses attract local customers in significant ways. By learning more about SEO and its benefits and following the steps outlined in this article, you can successfully implement local SEO strategies and reap the rewards. All of that adds up to giving your business the competitive edge it deserves.

What Is Semantic SEO and Why It Matters

Search engine optimization or SEO is not something you can keep doing the same way over and over again. Leveraging search engines to optimize your business in connecting with potential customers is an ongoing process that requires new strategies and approaches. Technology changes and how humans use that technology changes too. Your SEO strategy can only remain relevant if you also are changing it up. Semantic SEO is one way to stay on top of your SEO strategy and keep connecting your business with customers via your digital marketing.

SEO is a marketing strategy with the purpose of improving your ranking on search engines and increasing the organic search traffic to your website. It is a strategy to boost your digital footprint as a brand along with strengthening the digital connection between you and your clients or potential clients. It seems simple enough, but you need to apply technical know-how, strategic thinking, and creativity to get the most out of your SEO. Incorporating a strategic process to create and organize structured content can make your SEO marketing more effective. Semantic SEO can help you do that.

SEO is more than keywords and backlinks. These are vital components, but they do not make up a full strategy. Putting together an effective SEO strategy merits a deeper dive. Semantic SEO is a marketing strategy that leverages search engine technology to meet your SEO marketing goals. It uses keywords and backlinks as components within a larger model of structured content that can drive your marketing forward through increasingly sophisticated search engines.

 With this in mind, let’s take a look at:

• What semantic SEO is
• How semantic SEO works
• How it differs from other SEO methods
• The process of creating semantic content
• How to optimize your structured content and data
• How to use a topical map to strengthen your efforts
• The benefits of semantic SEO 

How Do You Define Semantic SEO?

Semantic SEO is a method for creating and organizing your web content so it provides better search results and a higher search engine ranking. The emphasis is on structuring your content to build authority on a particular topic and outperform your competitors on essential keywords within your industry. Semantic SEO incorporates a process for building web content, so it has more meaning and topical depth. This in turn makes it better understood by search engines to provide users with relevant information in relation to their search criteria.

 As one of the goals of digital marketing is to boost your ranking on a search engine results page (SERP), you want your company to rank high on that SERP when a user searches for certain terms about a certain topic that falls within your industry know-how and expertise. The web content you create needs to be optimized to gain that higher ranking. SEO is the means to that end. To optimize your content so a search engine works for you and your business, you need to create content that appeals to the most used search engines. Semantic SEO is a method for building meaning into your web content that search engines understand and respond to.

 The most used search engine in the world is Google, with 80% of the search engine market. In the US, Bing and Yahoo take up the next two spots in the market, respectively. These popular search engines use semantic web data embedded within web pages to analyze the content on those pages and provide better, more relevant search results for users. Semantic SEO leverages how this analysis takes place by structuring your web content so search engines read it as being of high quality and having relevant meaning. This in turn helps your business rank higher on Google and other popular search engines. 

A semantic search engine promotes quality semantic content. The goal of a Semantic SEO strategy is to create that semantic content and assist Google in better understanding what content is on your site so Google notices it, promotes it, and connects you with your customers and clients. 

How Semantic SEO Works 

More than a decade ago, Google and other search engines began using artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) on their platforms to continue to develop better and better ways to understand a user’s search intent. These search engines began to employ a semantic analysis to better understand a user’s intent and return more relevant SERPs. As search engines became more sophisticated, so did SEO strategies. SEO changed from simply embedding keywords into web content to creating a common schema structure for describing web pages. Semantic SEO uses this schema structure as a foundation for content creation.

 The semantic analysis used by Google and other popular search engines takes deep learning and NLP into consideration. It strives to understand human language at a deeper level in order to provide better search results for users. Google’s ranking algorithm is much more advanced than it has ever been, and it is only going to continue to advance. Semantic SEO helps you match up with this advancing technology by considering this deeper learning and NLP used in Google algorithms. This consideration is an important strategy if you want to rise above your competitors with your digital marketing.

How Does Semantic SEO Differ from Other SEO Approaches?

A search engine is only as good as the results it provides users. Google would not have 80% of the search engine market if it was not providing users with a SERP that is useful and relevant. The content that is promoted by Google needs to be deemed usable for users of Google. Their business depends on providing relevant and useful search results. Your web content needs to be structured so it appeals to how Google determines quality content. This means that the single keyword approach to SEO is insufficient.

 To understand a user’s search intent, search engines require context. Semantic SEO improves website traffic by providing context through meaningful metadata and content with clear intent. From the perspective of the search engine, the connection between a user’s query and your content needs to be straightforward, with no room for guessing. Content that is organized around context and not just a word is much easier for a search engine to evaluate. You want the evaluation of your content to be high in quality, uniqueness, and meaning.

 The search engine is not only looking for keywords in the content to gain understanding and find the meaning and relevance of a web page. Content is not just about the words that are used to create it because human communication is not just about the words either. How we use the words we use or why we use them is what complicates human communication and understanding. Context, tone, and manner of expression matter, as well as the paragraph before and after. It all works together to impact meaning. Semantic SEO encompasses this more human-like approach to understand web content and rank it appropriately.

 Your job in Semantic SEO is to structure your content to give it more depth and meaning so Google can find it, understand it, and give it a higher search ranking. Better understood content is just better content and ranks more often and higher up on SERPs. So what is this structured content and how do you create it? 

How Semantic SEO Content Is Structured

Google is built to discover the intent of a user’s search and organize information found on the web to produce a SERP. Google does this by connecting entities related to the topic being searched. Semantic SEO structures content in much the same way. Creating organized content to clearly connect entities on a topic is the foundation of semantic SEO.  

What’s an Entity?

If structured content is organized around topics and entities, it may be useful to define an entity. To do this, it can be even more useful to use the definition used by Google to describe this building block of semantic content. Google defines an entity as anything that is “singular, well-defined, and distinguishable.” This can be anything tangible or intangible, including a color, an idea, a date, a place, or even a person. It is what is described in your content. 

Structured Content Equals Topical Authority

Semantic content is created using a relevant architecture that focuses on the depth of meaning and topics instead of words. Semantic keywords derive purpose from a user’s search intent on a particular subject or topic. All necessary entities and connected terms and facts that belong to a given topic are presented in hierarchical structure to build topical relevance and factual accuracy. 

Semantic content is not about answering a single question about a singular subject. All the questions that may be asked, needed, or belong to a topic are considered and presented in a hierarchical structure. In semantic SEO, not only one possible search intent is met by the content, but all possible search intent is met. This creates more topical authority and better, more comprehensive content for users. It also supports different types of content, including text, visuals, applications, videos, surveys, and downloadable files. 

Topical Authority Equals Better Strategy

Semantic SEO organizes content around a user-journey experience instead of randomly generated individual content searches. By producing topically relevant content for the search intent for a specific topic, a company can gain:

• Brand awareness
• A consistently high search engine ranking
• Connections within a subject network

This all equals an SEO strategy that can put you ahead of your competitors. 

Writing Content Using Semantics

Writing content from a semantic point of view requires tailoring from a broader range of topics and the use of semantically relevant terms and phrases. It takes some strategic thinking because it is necessary to explore the interconnectedness between relevant entities. It takes creativity to then write content that makes straightforward connections seamlessly.

One way to think about it is to take the role of the user. Let’s consider you are searching for a paint roller. The search engine can then determine the topic of your search is home improvement. This may then bring up related topics of paint, wallpaper, paint brushes, home color trends, home improvement stores, and businesses that specialize in interior design, home repairs, or even landscaping. The user now has a whole list of relevant results around the topic of home improvement. Now if your business happens to be interior design, creating content that connects to home color trends, the best paint rollers for interior walls, or insights on specialized home repairs gives you topical authority in home improvement. All those connections are how semantic content works.

Semantically relevant terms and phrases help users understand a topic. When writing content using semantics, you are creating a vocabulary of terms and questions surrounding a given topic. You are strategically thinking about all user queries and subheadings of a topic and placing them in a hierarchical structure.

Remember that Google understands topics through quality and depth. Context for each entity is created through connection to other entities. Linking assets allows Google and other search engines to contextualize information retrieval and improve keywords searches. 

In the end though, content needs to be ultimately written for the user and not the search engine. Above all, clearly, well-written content that is organized and comprehensive will rank well on the SERP. 

Optimizing Your Content for Semantic SEO

Better, higher quality content is better understood from a search engine perspective. It is also what users respond to the most. Your content needs to contain relevant and in-depth information for your intended audience. Matching keywords to queries was how SEO began, but it has been evolving beyond that for over a decade. Optimizing your SEO content means creating meaningful content that focuses on quality information and connects concepts and ideas around relevant topics. Optimization considers:

• User intent
• Topics and entities
• Topical depth
• Structure
• Competition 

A Few Pointers in These Areas to Optimize Your Content 

User Intent

Understand the intent of the search and analyze user intent or likely intent. There is a connection between what a user is searching for and how a search engine understands what a user is searching for. If you start with a topic, you can derive all the entities of a search intent and impact search volume. List queries used to investigate a topic hierarchically and match corresponding content with search intent. 

Topics and Entities

Cover your topic by figuring out entities and subheadings that a search query focuses on. You can then find opportunities to add related concepts. List all entities within a subject and determine the number of separate contents created on a topic.  

Topical Depth

Determine how much of a subject to cover in your content. The trick is to create topical depth and cover all the relevant points within your content to provide all the information a user would want to know. 

Structure

Structure the markup to the page to add structured data and information about different entities. Analyze and create good title tags, headings, and alt text of images. Determine anchor texts to link to. Create and specify meta tags, headings, keywords, and anchor text URLs.

Use different forms of keywords to improve relevance and topic authority. You can mention different entities on a page and add in internal links. Link hierarchy contents to each other. 

Competition

Examine your competitors’ pages in SERP layout. Take a look at the function and content of competitor web pages to glean how they are connecting concepts and entities. 

Topical Maps and Entities in Semantic SEO

Since getting your content to rank higher in search engines is not about web pages and keywords, but relationships between entities, it is important to map out these topical relationships. One way to do that is through a topical map.

 A topical map is a blueprint for breaking down your topic into categories and entities. It can help you define the content you need to create to position your company’s brand and topical authority.

This blueprint creates an architecture that reveals the relationship between ideas and concepts, not just words. It is through these interconnections that content takes on depth of meaning. It also helps support straightforward intent. It can help you know both what to write about and how to structure it. 

 A topical map can help you:

• Clearly visualize interrelated concepts, entities, and ideas covered on a website
• Find opportunities to add content 
• Better create content that is relevant, interconnected, and meaningful 

How to Create a Topical Map

The main purpose of a topical map is to build topical authority for your company’s brand. A topical map is a process of research, organization, and creation. Research keywords within your topic to find all the relevant talking points, then organize that data into topic clusters. From these clusters, create content that matches up with the search intent of your topic keywords, then build out relevant internal and external links.

This type of content model becomes an essential tool for your semantic SEO in creating high-quality structured content with depth of meaning. It is a win-win for content creation as it gives your audience rich, in-depth content but also gives search engines that straightforward connection to understanding your content for a higher ranking. 

The Benefits of Semantic SEO

Now that you have a better understanding of:

• The meaning of semantic SEO and how it works
• How it differs from other SEO methods
• How to create, structure, and optimize structured content
• How to improve your efforts using a topical map

Then you probably also have a better understanding of what the benefits of semantic SEO can be for your digital marketing strategy. The benefits of semantic SEO cannot, however, be understated. Structured data is more interesting and compelling from a digital marketing perspective. If you want to boost your digital marketing outcomes, structuring and strategically organizing your content to be understood from the search engine’s point of view is imperative. That’s what semantic SEO does. Your digital marketing will produce better results by employing it. 

These better results include:

• Increased users
• Increased organic traffic
• Increased page views
• Increased session duration

 This all adds up to an effective strategy that supports the growth of your business. By helping search engines better understand your content, you provide users with more relevant information. You can then more easily turn a search user into a customer or client. A great semantic SEO content strategy can give you a strategic advantage over your competitors. 

Why It Matters

A semantic SEO strategy creates richer, higher-quality content within a structured model that elevates your company’s digital identity. It highlights relationships where ideas, information, and concepts become more important to better target users interested in your business. Semantic SEO leverages what makes semantic search engines effective to boost your digital marketing efforts and make them more effective. That’s what matters most.

What Is ChatGPT and What Are Its Benefits

The hype is real. Chances are you’ve heard about ChatGPT. Maybe it has made it into your reading or conversations, either at work or casually, and if not, chances are it will soon. It is an advance in AI technology that cannot be ignored. So, what is it? And more importantly, what are its benefits and business applications? 

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence (AI) large language model chatbot developed by OpenAI, a San-Francisco based AI research laboratory founded in 2015. It is owned by both a non-profit and for-profit arm with Microsoft being a large investor. The ChatGPT chatbot was released by OpenAI in November 2022 as an AI communication program prototype. Knowing that though, hardly answers, what’s ChatGPT? Let’s break down the acronym to gain a deeper understanding of this AI technology advancement. 

What Does the GPT Stand for in ChatGPT?

GPT stands for generative pre-trained transformer, which is more than a mouthful, but it can help answer the question, what it is? It refers to what it does, how it does it, and how it is built.

G is for Generative

Generating text is the purpose of AI ChatGPT. When prompted by a user, it generates new text based on patterns and associations that it has learned. These responses are in a form of natural language processing (NLP), which basically means that ChatGPT is designed to communicate with humans in a way that sounds natural to humans.

P is for Pre-trained

Open AI ChatGPT was trained or taught on an enormous amount of material gathered from the Internet. This pre-training allows ChatGPT to generate responses that can be understood without needing to be trained more.

T is for Transformer

This is a technical term referring to the specific architecture or design that makes ChatGPT capable of handling long-range discussions. It can detect dependencies in text, which is a technical way of saying that it can produce natural sounding language and carry out a long-range dialogue.

ChatGPT: A Recap

ChatGPT is a communication program that generates text using a large language model. It was trained with a mass of material so it can respond to a vast range of questions, converse on a huge array of topics, and quickly generate text that feels familiar to humans. The versatility and human-like responses of ChatGPT is a leap forward for chatbot technology. Knowing all of that begs the question, what’s ChatGPT good for? 

ChatGPT Benefits for Business?

ChatGPT functions as a conversational human interaction. It not only answers questions but can continue the dialogue through follow-up questions. It also can acknowledge mistakes and decline inappropriate requests. Its responsiveness and ability to generate text quickly and seamlessly elevates its business uses. For example, it can be good for blogging – but let’s be honest, it doesn’t have the most important part – the human touch.

Efficient and Cost-effective Scalability

ChatGPT can communicate with a large number of people all at once making automation and scalability more affordable and more doable.

24-7 Availability

ChatGPT is quick and responsive around the clock, expanding customer support without a lot of added costs.

Multi-Lingual

ChatGPT is trained in many languages and can respond across multiple countries and regions, easing language barriers across borders. 

Customization

This is a big one. ChatGPT can be trained with specific data for a specified business or industry, making its responses customizable. The voice, terminology, and tone of interactions can align with a business’s brand, culture, and image. 

Personalization

Beyond customization, ChatGPT can reach a level of personalization not present in prior AI chatbots. It can remember a user’s past interactions and preferences, allowing for more accurate and individualized responses to support customer relationships. 

Integration

It can be integrated with other business tools and platforms, such as CRMs, e-Commerce and social media platforms, and virtual assistant software. This allows for more seamless workflows across multiple departments and channels. 

Better Business Analytics

ChatGPT gives businesses the ability to access and process data in real-time, allowing for more timely and accurate information. Better data equals better information equals better decision making. 

Is ChatGPT Good for Business Applications? 

It is difficult to not ask if ChatGPT will replace your work or the work of others. Will it replace programmers or writers? Can it replace search engines? These are all valid questions, but instead of concentrating on technology replacing current work, it is beneficial to concentrate on how it will transform what you do and help you do it better. 

A Task Guru

Can ChatGPT write essays? Yes, basically, and a whole lot more. As a research tool, ChatGPT can distill a lot of information into readable chunks through conversational dialogue. As a task tool, it can generate emails, essays, website pages, resumes, social media posts, articles, code, detailed descriptions, outlines, and lists. The accuracy and usefulness of these materials, however, requires human discernment to glean understanding, insight, and analysis. User prompts and questions also need to be shaped to generate usable content. 

Revolutionized Customer Service

The applications for consistent and responsive customer service using ChatGPT are widespread. Revolutionary possibilities include:

• Frequently asked questions covered quickly and effectively
• Personalized recommendations and conversations
• Real-time insights
• Fast, accurate, and relevant answers to customer queries

Enhanced Customer Experience

A chatbot trained to understand human intent can support a seamless customer experience that can be automated, relieving repetitive tasks and queries. The result is reduced labor costs and more effective and flexible support teams.

Predictive Analytics

The ability to spot and report on trends in real time puts predictive analytics and fraud detection at your fingertips, speeding up recommendations and implementation. 

Supply Chain Management

Imagine how much better you could manage supply chains with the ability to refine predictive demand, track inventory, and pinpoint bottlenecks in real time. 

Personalized Marketing

Personalized marketing becomes more reliable with the ability to:

• Analyze large amounts of customer data
• Evaluate customer sentiment with social media channel monitoring
• Weigh customer responses in real time
• Examine market trends more rapidly and accurately 

How to Use it?

ChatGPT is currently free for users in the interest of continued development, but will eventually become a paid application. You can use ChatGPT through a web app by first creating an account and registering your email. Some parameters for free usage do apply. 

Character Limits

The ChatGPT character limit is based on a maximum number of tokens, which translates as words, punctuation, and symbols in a text response. The number of tokens depends on the platform or application ChatGPT is running on. 

Login Issues

There have been technical issues for users including the ChatGPT login not working. If this happens, try to:

• Verify that servers are available
• Confirm you are using a compatible browser
• Disable VPN use
• Check you are not using a browser extension 

Server Issues

With the large number of people using ChatGPT, it is not running optimally. You may receive an error message when trying to login or instead of receiving a response. If you get a ChatGPT internal server error message, you can:

• Make sure you have verified your email after registering
• Log out and log back in
• Clear your cache and search history

A paid subscription, ChatGPT Plus, is available and is more reliable with faster response times. 

Limitations of ChatGPT 

AI technology is advancing rapidly. ChatGPT is a useful tool to accomplish any number of tasks, but it is not without limitations.

Generation Vs Reliable Insight

ChatGPT can generate the words of an essay in a distinctive style, but the content may not be reliable or accurate. It may even be inappropriate. ChatGPT generates a coherent response based on the material it was trained on, but it does not truly understand the topic. It does not think, it generates. It cannot critically analyze information. The sentences will be readable and grammatically correct, but not necessarily with any deep insight. 

Internet Search Vs Pre-trained with Data

ChatGPT does not search the Internet for information. It uses the information it learned from the Internet. (Remember, P is for pre-trained). This leaves room for error. It was also only trained on data through 2021. So, as sophisticated as ChatGPT appears, it does not know who played in the 2022 world series or that there was recently a very large earthquake in Turkey or that Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. 

ChatGPT AI Alternatives

It certainly is not the only AI chatbot out there. Advances in AI technology continue to be developed and deployed. Researching and testing this technology and exploring its uses and applications is advantageous.

What is ChatGPT?: Not the Final Question

Discovering how to apply it to your business applications means more than just answering what it is. Learning to weave it into workflows can make businesses more flexible and responsive. Advances in AI technology are going to continue. ChatGPT is an AI leap, but it is not the last one. Learning how to leap to your benefit will prove important now and into the future.

Leading Global Teams Successfully

Many companies have embraced the power of a global workforce. Having team members from different national and cultural backgrounds brings a variety of perspectives and approaches to solving problems, eliminating obstacles, and achieving goals. But leading global teams brings a unique set of challenges along with the benefits. Whether you are outsourcing an aspect of your business or managing an internal team with international members, your management approach makes a big difference.

When you look at how to manage international teams, there are several potential pitfalls. However, the benefits of working in a global team make the work of circumventing those potential issues well worth the effort.

Why Take Your Team Global?

There are several reasons you may find yourself managing a global team. As previously mentioned, the diversity of thought that comes from team members that emerge from different cultures can ensure you don’t get trapped only approaching a task from a single direction.

Leading global teams can also help your budget. Depending on exchange rates, you may be able to pay team members a competitive rate while saving money in the long run. And with time zone differences, you could potentially have your team work on a task for 24 consecutive hours without forcing anyone to stay past their normal work hours— saving a bundle on overtime without missing deadlines.

When you open yourself to managing an international team, you also open yourself up to a massive talent pool when you look for new team members. Instead of restricting yourself to candidates in one location or who are willing to move to your location, you give yourself the opportunity to hire incredible team members that you would otherwise never hear from.

Going international with your teams also opens up new markets to you. Once you have a presence in a country or region, it’s just a short step to expanding your offerings into that area. 

How to Lead a Successful Global Team

In many ways, leading global teams is not that different from managing a team that is entirely in-office. You just have to be much more deliberate and intentional when using the effective management tools that have served you well in the past.

For example, the most important tool when you examine how to manage international teams is clear communication. But what would qualify as clear communication for an in-office team would likely not cut it for an international team.

That’s because you are likely working with people for whom English is not their primary language, so slang, industry jargon, or something as little as speaking a touch too quickly can derail the message you are trying to get across to your team.

Taking steps to simplify and streamline what you need to say to your team can work wonders. Here are more tips for leading global teams:

Acknowledge Cultural Differences

This is hugely important. When you understand and acknowledge cultural differences, you ensure that every single member of your team feels seen and appreciated. This doesn’t only apply to national or ethnic cultural differences— it also applies to international differences in corporate culture.

Some cultures place a heavy priority on seniority and hierarchy in the workplace. Some foster much more open dialogue between the rank and file and management. By understanding where your team members come from, you can take steps in meetings to ensure that you are hearing from everyone.

Learn the national and religious holidays of your team members and how those days are celebrated. This will help you when scheduling deadlines and distributing tasks. Your team members will really appreciate it if they don’t have to constantly remind you that they have a holiday coming up.

Communication, Communication, Communication

When leading global teams, communication is so important that it has to be mentioned again! Good communication with an international team starts with using clear, effective language, but it goes further than that.

When you have a good understanding of the cultural norms for communication that your team members are used to, you can define team structure in such a way that everyone feels comfortable contributing.

The medium you use to communicate is also important. Don’t only rely on email. Using a project management platform with communication functionality helps ensure that the people who need to know about a project always get updated when progress is made.

Only using email can result in over-full inboxes or excessive reply-all threads. Additionally, if you forget to CC someone on an email, they could miss lots of key information. By making your project management platform your primary method of communication for task completion updates, you keep everyone on the same page.

Of course, you don’t want to fall into the trap of only communicating via text-based application. Schedule video conferences regularly. It helps teams feel more cohesive to put faces to names and engage in a little unstructured small talk before getting down to business.

When scheduling these meetings, take time zones into account. Do your best to get everyone on the call during their normal work hours. It won’t always be possible, but the effort will be appreciated.

Make It Easy to Share Resources

Your team members should always be able to access the materials they need to do their jobs. That includes documents and information tied to current and previous projects as well as information like corporate values and your mission statement.

After all, part of leading global teams is establishing who you are as a company in a way that every team member from every nation and background can embrace. 

What About Outsourcing?

Another way your team may expand globally is by outsourcing certain tasks. As an example, let’s look at what happens when you outsource SEO tasks to an international team. Search engine optimization is very important in this day and age, but not everyone has a team that can handle it in-house.

When you find an organization like WiRe Innovation that has an international team to handle both technical SEO services and SEO content writing services, you may find yourself asking how you can manage the team and keep them inspired.

The key is to embrace the unique opportunities that such international SEO services present. You get a team working in several countries to ensure that your backlink portfolio is crisp and clean and that you aren’t presenting any broken links to potential customers. Also, you get to learn a lot of new things that are happening in the SEO sector, for example – programmatic SEO.

You also get a team of writers that are ready to embrace your company’s perspective, values, and style of communication. 

Much like managing your own global teams, managing an outsourced team comes down to communication. In this case, most of your communication will be with your account’s manager. However, if you make comments on the draft of a piece of content, you may have the pleasure of talking to a member of the writing team.

But when you outsource your SEO in this manner, the heavy lifting of understanding the team’s cultural differences and structuring inter-team communication is done for you. It allows you to focus on your own teams.

It’s About Results

In the end, results are the most important thing. Whether you are outsourcing an aspect of your business or leading global teams within your own organization, effectiveness and efficiency are always going matter.

If working with international teams were ineffective, it would not be as common as it increasingly is. Your team members from different backgrounds may work and think differently than you, but if the job is getting done and the quality is high, there is nothing to complain about.

As the manager of a global team, your job is to take the different approaches of your team members and bend them toward a common goal. That requires understanding who they are, how they work and where they come from.

And that isn’t so different from managing a team with no remote members. The biggest difference is the number of time zones you have to factor in to your meeting schedules.

Leading global teams requires more diligence and intentionality around how you communicate and structure your meetings. Otherwise, people are people. They want to feel valued and they want to feel understood.

With empathy for team members who may be working in a second language and strong communication skills and structures, your international team will deliver for you. 

Remember to put faces to names when you can, understand those cultural differences, and make sure everyone has what they need to succeed and you will be making a world of difference to your team.

Programmatic SEO guide 2023: Basics and Challenges

Time to program your way to the top

 

Programmatic SEO is the future of search engine optimization. Ambitious much? Well, there is a good reason for that.

It is based on data and metrics that help to optimize your content. It’s a methodical, data-driven approach that helps you fully understand the user intent behind keywords and creates dozens of pages of high-quality, optimized content.

In this guide, we’ll show you what programmatic SEO is, how it works, and why it’s the future of SEO. 

We’ll also give you some tips on how to get started with programmatic SEO.

What is Programmatic SEO?

As a business, it can be hard to make consistent web content your customers find informative and helpful. That’s where programmatic SEO comes in. It allows you to create large numbers of pages using specialized code with the help of keywords you select or input to tell the program what type of pages to make for you. 

These new types of pages will be created in real-time, meaning they’re always up-to-date with the latest information on your topic.

Programmatic SEO is one strategy that can help you create a lot of landing pages with similar content and keywords in order to grab the attention of potential customers.

There are so many different ways to optimize your content for search engines and improve efficiency:

• Keyword research: Helps you identify new keywords to target.
• Competitor analysis: Keeps an eye on your competition and helps you adjust your strategy accordingly.
• Rank tracking: This helps you track your progress and monitor your rankings.
• Link building: Automates link-building tasks such as link prospecting and outreach.

If you’re looking to improve your SEO game, programmatic SEO could be a good solution for you.

Basics of Programmatic SEO

Programmatic SEO is the process of using automation to manage and optimize your website for search engine visibility. The goal of programmatic SEO is to increase your website’s organic traffic and improve your search engine rankings.

There are a number of ways to automate your SEO, including using tools like SEM Rush and Ahrefs, as well as hiring an agency or consultant.

When it comes to automating your SEO, there are a few things you need to keep in mind:

• Make sure your website is well-optimized before you start automation. This means having high-quality content, a responsive design, fast loading speeds, and more.
• Research the right keywords for your business and make sure they’re included in your website’s content (including title tags, meta descriptions, etc.).
• Monitor your website’s progress regularly so you can adjust your programmatic SEO strategy as needed. This includes tracking your organic traffic and keyword rankings over time.

Programmatic SEO Benefits

Programmatic SEO can help you save time and money while improving your SEO strategy. Here are some of the benefits of programmatic SEO:

Improved Quality

Programmatic SEO can also help improve the quality of your results. This is because it allows you to scale your efforts quickly and efficiently. When done correctly, programmatic SEO can help you achieve better results in less time than traditional methods.

Greater Flexibility

Another benefit of programmatic SEO is that it offers greater flexibility than traditional methods. With programmatic SEO, you can customize your approach to fit your unique needs and goals. This means that you can tailor your strategy to match your budget, resources, and goals.

Better ROI

Finally, programmatic SEO can provide a better return on investment than traditional methods. This is because it helps you achieve better results in less time while freeing up your resources to focus on other aspects of your business.

How to do Programmatic SEO?

In this article, we will give you a basic overview of how you can create a programmatic SEO strategy.

Search for keywords

There are many different types of keywords to look out for. Search engines like Google and Bing may penalize your site if you have spun content, so be sure to pick good words that fit naturally in a sentence.

Head terms

To maximize your chances of ranking well for a particular keyword, a good place to start is by including broader keywords. For example, with Tripadvisor, an important term might be “hotels” while with Yelp it might be “restaurants” or “bars.”

Keywords are search terms that users type in Google, and they can hold a lot of search volume. Some tools like Google Trends can help you find the keyword’s search volume, or you can use related searches to figure out what kind of keywords they are. These head terms are often associated with modifiers, which brings us to our next type of keyword.

Modifiers

Semantic keywords are keywords that are related to your head terms but are specific and offer more options for search engine optimization. Searching for these words will probably yield higher search volume and success rates. This category is split into two types: primary and secondary.

If you’d like to keep your keywords organized, make a list of all your head terms and modifiers.

Search the web for possible competitors

To find out the sites that are achieving the best results, type your keywords into Google. Those will be your competitors.

Once you’ve identified your competitors, you can use a keyword tool to find out which keywords they rank for and how many times they come up in search results.

Create high-quality landing pages

Programmatic SEO is all about scaling landing pages. One of the best strategies for doing this is to create landing pages around keyword-related search intent. Remember, though, that you don’t define what search intent people are looking for – Google’s algorithms do that. Spend some time analyzing SERPs to understand which keywords are ranking and what the search intent behind them is. One way to do this is to look at the “Searches related to” section of the SERPs.

Programmatic SEO challenges: How to fight them?

When it comes to programmatic SEO challenges, there are a lot of things to consider. Sometimes the results include generated pages that won’t be helpful for your site. They can also be harmful to your website.  So programmatic optimization is a subtle craft that needs to be used wisely.

Some of the biggest challenges faced when using programmatic SEO include:

Crawlability

When your website has thousands of pages, it’s important to figure out what pages should rank highest in search. If Google can’t find the page, it can’t rank it. 

It’s also important to establish an internal linking pattern so that the search engine always knows where to find more information about specific topics. For best results, each page should be properly categorized and accompanied by a sitemap.

To help crawlers find new pages, make sure you create an HTML sitemap. A sitemap can be the most effective strategy on a large-scale website that has millions of pages. 

The best way to organize the site in categories is to establish a logical structure using hierarchical navigation. You might also want to include your priority pages first… that way they’re most likely to get noticed.

Not having enough content

A lot of SEO programmatic landing pages are based on visuals. There are images, videos, and graphics, but don’t forget the descriptive text. 

The descriptive text has a huge influence on ranking. Without enough text, Google will treat content on your page as thin content, leading to a lower scale because inadequate content for Google is low value. 

The best thing to do is to have both – good text helps interpret data better, and graphic content provides a more attractive experience for users.

Original content

When creating content on a large scale, you can fall into a severe trap if you create duplicate content. There are a number of causes for this problem; some are identical to others and some are quite close. Identical content is a common issue because you create content following the same pattern for every page.

There are two types of this content: internal duplicate content, which shows up on one domain but not elsewhere on the same website, or external duplicate content, where two websites have either the same or similar content on their respective pages that Google needs to choose between. 

To avoid this problem as much as possible, use an online duplicate content checker and see how Google analyzes your web page so you can address it accordingly.

In conclusion

I hope this article on programmatic SEO has given you a better understanding of what it is and how it can help your business.

 Programmatic SEO is a great way to automate your SEO tasks and save time, which is why more and more businesses are turning to it. If you want to increase your online visibility and attract more customers, then programmatic SEO is definitely something you should consider. 

We know a bit about SEO ourselves and if your business needs some re-wiring, we will be happy to help in reaching your goals.

Future of SEO in 2022: SEO Trends to Know

SEO is constantly evolving, and to be successful with your SEO strategies, you need to stay on top of the latest trends in order to ensure your content strategies are effective. Search Engine Optimization is extremely critical to attract consumers to your online platform. If you are still relying on SEO strategies and tactics that you’ve used for years, it’s probably time to evolve to better understand the environment today. 

Many of the older strategies aren’t as effective in the landscape of SEO today, and some of these strategies can even negatively impact SEO. This is why it is imperative that you continue to adapt to the future SEO trends. To ensure that you will be able to make the most significant impact in 2022, here are the future SEO trends.

Shift to Long-Form Content

In order to create relevant content and a strong digital content strategy that captivates website visitors, you will need to shift to a long-form content strategy. Long-form content has proven to be the most popular, drawing in the most traffic and shares compared to short-term content. Long-form content is about 3000 words or even more. By moving your focus to developing quality, long-form content can greatly improve your search rankings. Long-form content does, however, need to keep the reader engaged to be successful, which is a lot more challenging with more words.

So how are you supposed to keep readers engaged? To accomplish this, it is very important to break your content up into sub-sections, utilizing H2 and H3 subheadings that make your content easily skimmable and scannable. You want to eliminate big chunks of text that is usually pretty intimidating for readers to look at, especially if readers are viewing your blogs on a small screen. The goal is to basically make your readers browse through the article. It should also be very easy to share with a clear call-to-action which will improve your SEO even further. To do this, include sharing links that are easy to follow with a click of a button. 

Accomplishing this task isn’t easy, and many companies tend to hire a high-quality content writing service to develop this long-form style content.

Refining page speed

Page speed is one of the biggest factors in successful SEO and determines core web vitals. More and more users are using the Internet on their smartphones or laptops. Therefore, it has become very important that businesses provide a fast and seamless website experience. Google recently launched its Core Web Vitals as its newest ranking factors. This new technology analyzes how long it takes for the largest element to load, how long it takes for elements on the page to respond to clicks, and how many elements move on the page while it loads.

Google is basically looking at how long it takes for users to start interacting with your business’s content once they land on the site. Since page speed will be a prominent factor in site rankings, it is essential to audit your page speed often. By consistently checking your page speed, you will be able to implement any needed updates and avoid feeling overwhelmed if your page speed is dragging your content down.

Artificial Intelligence Will Play a Bigger Role in SEO

Artificial intelligence, otherwise known as AI, is continuing to change how users interact with content online. Because of this, artificial intelligence will play a large role in how to create relevant content strategies and future SEO trends. AI will begin to dictate how content is ranked in the future. A prime example of this is Google’s AI algorithm that is called RankBrain, which is set to become the most important ranking factor in Google’s search engine results pages in 2022. This new release from Google left many wondering how their SEO would be affected. What is the best way to cater your SEO strategy to work with this new artificial intelligence algorithm?

Google hasn’t shared a lot of details yet on how RankBrain exactly works, but it seems that user experience is one of the most defining factors in ranking content. The amount of time visitors spend on your website and the click-through rate will be telltale signs of how RankBrain will prioritize your content. This means that it is critical that you develop extremely well organized and helpful content for your users so that they are left captivated and engaged, and therefore the click-through rate and time spent on your website will increase. 

Mobile-Friendliness is Critical

Now more than ever, it is very important to make sure your content is mobile-friendly. According to Google, it is a large ranking factor and has been since 2015. Today, it is best to optimize your content for mobile devices as it is the most prominent way of looking at content online for users. Google even rolled out mobile-first indexing back in 2019, which basically means that the search engine prioritizes the mobile version of a website when it ranks the content in order. The primary version is the mobile version over the desktop version, as it is estimated that 75% of internet users access the internet solely through mobile devices.

Google makes it very easy to figure out if your mobile site is effective with its free mobile friendly test. This test will help you figure out what issues you should fix with your mobile site, which will help you rank higher. Tools like these are extremely helpful in fixing mobile user issues that could be negatively impacting your SEO. You need to ensure that your mobile content is optimized to be successful in creating a mobile friendly site.

Future SEO Trends Should Include Video

Video is so prominent in effective SEO. Online video platforms have become increasingly popular over the last couple of years and will continue to become more and more popular. If you haven’t already, you should develop an SEO strategy that incorporates some kind of video aspect. Many businesses have already begun using platforms like TikTok and YouTube to involve consumers and users. Voice search has even become a popular way of searching for content online, and appealing to these future SEO trends will give you success in your SEO strategy.

By developing optimized video content, you can have a successful and effective SEO strategy moving forward. To optimize your content, you can focus on the video channel description by adding an overview that is user-friendly to your video content. Don’t necessarily cram your video descriptions with a bunch of words, but a few user specific keywords or even hashtags can help push your content to its intended audience.  

First-party data hub with SEO traffic

Companies like Google are beginning to retire the third-party cookies, which means that it is crucial for businesses to build out their first-party data hubs. By building out first-party data hubs, your company will be able to obtain and create tailored marketing initiatives to drive company revenue without relying on cookies. Search will play a significant role in building the data hubs as your business can create its online presence through search engine optimization. Then, you can utilize those attracted users and turn them into leads using email newsletters, remarketing techniques, and other digital marketing initiatives.

With cookies coming to an end, it is essential not to wait to develop your first-party data hub, as it will play a massive role in the success of your SEO strategy.

Fulfilling Google’s EAT Principle

Google continuously emphasizes that content quality is crucial for successful ranking, and this won’t change for future SEO trends. Many are still left wondering what exactly quality content means and how to achieve it. The easiest way to improve the quality of your content to match SEO strategy is to follow the EAT principle, which stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. According to Google, these factors determine a web page’s quality, and businesses need to be aware of how to utilize these effectively while developing their content.

The biggest thing you can think of while creating quality content is thinking about the user. Who is the user, and what are they looking for? What is the user search intent? Who would most likely be your target audience? This will help you better understand what kind of content you should be creating to appeal to your target audience’s values. By fully understanding exactly what your target consumer is looking for, you will develop content that is intriguing to your readers and will encourage more clicks. Don’t forget to also focus on the trustworthiness aspect of your content by backing up your facts with reputable sources.

Successful SEO in 2022

By following these future SEO trends, you will be set up to have a successful search engine optimization strategy. Ensuring that your content is thoughtful and beneficial to the user while creating a seamless and simple user experience will bring you more traffic in 2022. 

 

Important SEO tips and tricks

Understanding SEO services is crucial for maintaining a strong online presence and drawing consistent traffic to your business website. If you are looking to increase brand awareness, the first step is to understand that thousands of people are looking for content just like yours every day, and the way that you can help them find it is through SEO strategy. Many people overlook SEO strategies because they think that by putting their content online, it will be noticed. But you are competing with tons of businesses, and to really stand out from the crowd, you have to know how to optimize your content. 

It takes quite a bit of research and experimentation to stay on top of your SEO strategy as it is constantly evolving with new best practices, but there are many helpful tools, tips, and tricks to guide you through the process. If your SEO is done right and combined with other technical and marketing strategies, it can help your business succeed with strong rankings and front page landings on Google search. In fact, did you know that the front page of Google search receives 95% of all web traffic? It’s crucial to keep your SEO intact and on strategy for a successful business.

Using SEO strategy and getting a better grasp on how it works can totally change your ranking on Google. Some of the tips below will help you improve your online strategy and master the art that is SEO. 

Create Commanding Content

Develop content that is relevant and useful for your target audience that is even better than the content that is already out there for a specific set of keywords. A lot of the time, this means writing commanding or authoritative content in a long-form that comes from a reliable source and can compete with professional publications. 

To write valuable and engaging content for your target audience, you have to have a solid understanding of who your target audience really is. To do this, take time to understand your target consumer and their persona. What is your target audience’s demographic, psychographic, and even geographic location? What do they like to do, or where do they live? Once you have an understanding of who this consumer is, you will be able to understand what they will most likely be searching for and can form your content around their search. 

Develop a Varied Content Marketing Strategy

There is no specific one-of-a-kind trick that will keep your site in the top position since Google uses multiple factors when ranking their websites. By creating relevant content that is varied, it will help your audience find it quickly. It is also great if the original content has links to your social media content and the other way around. Many people find content through social media these days. It is best practice to intertwine your different marketing channels with inbound links. The more opportunities there are that lead to your website directly, the better. Make sure you are looking for keywords and topics that are currently trending to increase your chance of being found amongst the many other websites out there.

Don’t forget to audit

Auditing your competition is crucial to make sure you are optimizing and creating relevant content. The search engine rankings for a website change based on about three things. The most important is the site’s own optimization. Once you nail this, the second component is the site’s positioning compared to its competitors’ positioning. Lastly, the searcher’s intent makes up the third component to decide website ranking. With this being said, if you can figure out how to improve the website besides your competitors, making it more relevant in the consumer’s mind, you will move up in the search rankings. This is where understanding your consumer better than your competitors comes in.

Spend time on long-form content

Long-form content with an average of about 1,800 words makes up the majority of content on the first page of Google for any keyword. Comprehensive long-form content is the quickest and most tangible fix to improve your SEO. It can be done through FAQ or specific headers that include targeted key terms throughout a website.

Create readable content

While this may seem painfully obvious that you should create content that is appropriate and relevant to your audience with the correct keywords, many overlook this and just pile on content that they deem will be popular. If the content is not filled with clear and concise writing that makes sense for the viewer, no one will see it. Don’t get caught up with super technical requirements, but it is important to have strong readability, not just a keyword-focused page. The content should be interesting and very relevant to your brand. Don’t mislead consumers with clickbait headers, and make sure that your keywords are used properly. 

Pillar articles

Google can get confused on what to prioritize when there is a lot of content. Pillar articles are very detailed articles depicting how to do something. These can help Google figure out what you are talking about. Also, if you include a table of contents at the beginning of the articles that link back to different parts of the post, Google will favor this and rank your content higher among the rest.

Elaborate meta descriptions and titles

You should try to maximize the character limit for meta descriptions and tags using qualifiers or even adding the current year of the article. Common successful qualifiers include words like “shocking” or “important” that will draw a reader in. The more robust your title and meta description is, the more likely it has a chance to rank in a higher spot on the first page if you nailed the rest of the SEO strategy. The goal is to make the search engine algorithm and your consumers view your content as relevant.

Knowing your market

SEO is not a standard technique and never will be. It all depends on your audience and market and will differ widely between different markets. You should think about all the different kinds of content Google serves, whether it be carousel cards, answer boxes, or local results, and optimize to each kind of result. Always put yourself in the customer’s shoes. How will they search for it?

Niche Optimization

Extensive keyword research against your competitors will open your eyes to the missing search terms on your site. To do this successfully, it is essential to be critical and realistic. This should act as a gut check to make sure you have good content and relevant meta tags to the specific search terms. If you notice keywords or terms that do not rank well, build pages with excellent content to optimize those words.

Don’t forget user experience

While SEO factors like keywords and tracked links are still very important in ranking, Google is now emphasizing user experience more and more. So what does this mean? Does your website have a high-speed loading page? What about an appealing design? Is it mobile-friendly for your customers? By focusing on UX, you will have happy visitors and a strong SEO as an added bonus.

SEO strategy is crucial

SEO won’t go away. In fact, the higher you rank on Google, the more traffic you bring to your website, and the more business you bring in. It is so important to have a strategy behind your SEO. Without knowledge of how SEO works, you can not see success in your website ranking for a long time, but you can hit that first page by tweaking a few things and doing some research. These days, it is so crucial to spend time on your SEO, and by following the tips in this article, you will be set up for success. 

WiRe Innovation is a Proud Five-Star Agency on Clutch

Now more than ever, client satisfaction plays an integral role in helping businesses and service providers establish credibility. Anyone can market and consistently post what they can offer, but having your clients speak for your work is priceless. That’s why we at WiRe Innovation are extremely proud to be a five-star rated company on one of the go-to review platforms for business services, IT, and marketing.

WiRe Innovation is a Minnesota-based, full-service digital agency that provides a plethora of services that will help you conquer your market. We love to call ourselves jacks-of-all-trades and a one-stop-shop for web development, design, search engine optimization, marketing consultation, and more.

Established in 2016, our company is filled with fresh ideas and new perspectives that help drive profitability and sustainable growth.

We genuinely value our clients’ success because we believe that their satisfaction is the greatest trophy for us. It is with absolute pride that we share one of our most recent reviews on Clutch.

Formidable SEO Players

Located in the heart of Washington DC, Clutch is an independent B2B review and market research platform dedicated to the IT, marketing, and business services sectors. Clutch is home to a huge collection of client reviews, agency rankings, and data-driven content geared towards helping clients learn more about B2B spaces.

 

Earlier last month, an analyst from Clutch conducted an interview with Doug Thompson, the CEO and President of TEAM IM, an information management company. TEAM IM enlisted our services back in January 2018 and our relationship is ongoing. In his review, Thompson provides an overview of our services and illustrates the magnitude of our impact.

According to our client, the WiRe Innovation team helped improve their SEO performance significantly. Prior to our engagement, they barely had any concrete SEO strategies, and now, they are able to convert their users. When asked about what was the most impressive thing about our engagement, this was what they had to say:

“They’ve dramatically improved our rankings and have increased our brand visibility by enabling our products and company to secure first-page rankings on Google. The number of customers coming to our site and submitting our forms has been substantial as well, leading to an increase in our traffic.” — Doug Thompson, CEO and President, TEAM IM

Another client we have worked with since October 2019 is SunOpta. SunOpta is focused on helping make the planet and its people healthier through plant-based foods & beverages, organic ingredients, and organic foods & beverages. They hired us for website updates and redesign. Rob Duchscher, Chief Information Officer of SunOpta said, “Not only have they’ve recreated our website and made it mobile-friendly, but they’ve also put our site on the map. They have increased our traffic substantially compared to our old site. Korey’s firm is quite knowledgeable from an SEO standpoint and our site’s analytics reflect this in the number of clicks we are receiving. ”

We are so humbled and grateful for these amazing words. Creating positive outcomes for our clients and seeing how happy they are with our services motivates us to work harder and keep improving.

TEAM IM and SunOpta are just two of our many satisfied clients! If you are curious about what our other clients say, visit our profile on Clutch to learn more about our past projects.

The entire WiRe Innovation team sends their utmost appreciation to all our clients. Their support and trust allow us to keep doing what we do best.

Speaking of what we do best, WiRe Innovation also ranked highly on Top Design Firms, a new B2B website that compiles insightful information for browsers. According to their team’s findings, our company is among the top 100 search engine optimization companies for 2021!

This is wonderful news! We are excited to see more opportunities and unlock more milestones moving forward.

Let’s talk about innovation. Bring us your challenges, and let’s collaborate to create amazing solutions! Reach out to our team to get started. Send us a message, and we can discover new pathways to success together!

 

Shopify SEO: The Power of Digital Marketing in E-commerce

During COVID-19 pandemic, E-commerce is the safest form of retail available since you can do it at the convenience of your own home. This has resulted in its growing popularity. Today, Shopify is one of the biggest names in the E-commerce industry, and there are numerous reasons for this popularity. For instance, this platform has excellent shopping cart security, 99.99% uptime, and 24/7 available support. 

Shopify is also entirely SEO optimized. In order to see the full significance of Shopify SEO, all you need to do is take a look at some of the most interesting statistics and facts on this list. This will also reveal the full impact on merchants’ success on this platform. You can also see how various digital marketing methods and principles can be applied in E-commerce.

In May 2020, Shopify Had 66.6 Million Visits

(Source)

The first outcome of excellent SEO services is growing organic traffic. In 2020, Shopify.com had record traffic of 58.84 million visits. The number of vendors on Shopify is growing simultaneously with the number of potential customers. This means that while there is a bigger potential customer pool, the competition is also getting more challenging by the minute. For this reason, vendors are researching how to optimize Shopify SEO more than they ever have before.

Shopify is The Most Popular in English-Speaking Countries

(Source)

The vast majority of Shopify’s audience comes from the largest English-speaking countries, according to some of the latest surveys. Let’s take a closer look at Shopify SEO in numbers to see the breakdown of their audience. 

As many as 36.62% of all Shopify users come from the US alone. Other audiences include the UK at 5.78%, Canada at 5.74%, Australia at 3.92%, and India at 3.38%. While English is not the primary language in India, it is a second language in the region. 

The Average Conversion Rate from Organic Traffic is 3.6%

(Source)

To increase conversions, merchants use these Shopify SEO tips in order to drive more organic traffic. According to a survey from 2020, the average conversion rate on Shopify is merely 1.3%. However, this is all conversions across the platform. In terms of the conversion rate on organic traffic, the number goes up to 3.6%. This is almost three times the value. The main reason for this could be the fact that the majority of these people already qualify as easy pickings (in terms of marketability).

Average Time Before Full-Page Loads is 4.9 Seconds

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The average time before the full-page loads on Shopify is 4.9 seconds. However, the delay until the content becomes available is just 2.3 seconds. Why is this so important? First of all, people online have a very limited attention span. Loading time can drastically improve with the help of technical SEO. Onsite optimization of your marketplace is counted amongst some of the Shopify SEO best practices. According to some estimates, you have between 2 and 9 seconds to capture someone’s attention online. Other surveys indicate that your audience might start leaving if the page fails to load in 4 seconds.

Image Optimization Is Still Relevant in 2021

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All E-commerce platforms rely on images to enhance their categories. However, high-resolution images and images in some uncommon formats may slow down your loading speed. This is why one of the rules of Shopify SEO for beginners is to always optimize images. Factors which matter are:

• Dimensions and product angles
• File size
• File type
• Thumbnail optimization
• Proper use of sitemaps
• Testing images before use

The thing worth keeping in mind is that this effort is a combination of making the product presentable and not allowing the size of the image to slow you down. It’s about achieving the same effect by using fewer resources.

Shopify Struggles with Duplicate Content

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One of the toughest challenges that Shopify faces is the problem with duplicate content. Why is this such a big issue? Well, by default, Shopify allows each product page to be rendered in two different URL paths. These URLs can be canonical and non-canonical.

• Canonical URL path: /products/
• Non-canonical URL path: /collections/.*/products/

Still, this is not interpreted as duplicate content. There are three reasons why a page is classified as duplicate. First, it can be an actual duplicate of a product page. Second, it has an identical description of a product. Lastly, the platform can get ‘confused’ by two different versions of the page.

Optimizing your site structure for SEO is always a high priority. However, the Shopify URL structure for SEO requires a bit more finesse. First, the content on pages needs to follow a logical hierarchy of categories. Characters used in every URL need to be standardized. When making internal links, anchors need to be descriptive. The same goes for file names of images. At the end of the day, every Shopify merchant is responsible for their own store’s navigation. This way, search engines will have an easier job of finding all of your content.

The Importance of Meta Descriptions

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Writing a meta description isn’t exclusive to the SEO on Shopify, but it is still relevant for driving organic traffic. There are two hard rules to writing a good meta description on Shopify. The rules are – it needs to be shorter than 155 characters, and it needs to contain a focus keyword of the page. This leads to superior SERP, better traffic, and a higher conversion rate.

As far as some useful tips for writing these descriptions go, there are two or three things to pay attention to. First, you should start with a question or a dilemma that the visitor has. Second, you need to promise an answer and increase its trustworthiness by using an authoritative title. Examples of this are expert, specialist, or veteran. You can also imply or mention that the answer is a result of a survey or an elaborate scientific process. Since this is a matter of technical SEO writing skills, hiring professional writing services can drastically improve your SEO effectiveness.

Electronics and Technology Are the Most Appealing Categories on Shopify

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From the standpoint of Shopify SEO, it’s also relevant to mention that the majority of Shopify users show interest in the category of computers, electronics, and technology. As far as subcategories go, the most popular ones are programming and developer software, as well as graphics, multimedia, and web design. Due to their popularity, these categories are also the most competitive and the hardest to rank in. Therefore, merchants interested in joining these fields need to invest more heavily in their digital marketing strategies.

Making Your Pages Quicker to Index

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SEO experts use structured data (schema markup) to make their pages easier to crawl, organize, and display content. Any page online has two types of audiences – humans and robots. In order to be understood by websites, you need to use language that these bots understand. By communicating to them via the proper form of data, you can get indexed quickly and get ranked a lot sooner.

This, however, can be a double-edged blade. While working on their pages, people often restrict access to the site through the robots.txt file. Sometimes, if they forget to revert the process, their pages may remain invisible to Google bots. As you can see, some examples of bad Shopify SEO are merely a result of a mistake rather than a faulty or inefficient SEO tactic. This is also why the approach to onsite SEO needs to be thorough and systematic.

Shopify SEO Takes Patience

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One of the biggest problems that those new to Shopify SEO encounter is the lack of immediate results. Search engines index sites regularly; however, your site won’t be indexed right away. The simplest way to speed up this process is to independently submit a sitemap to Google Search Console, thus saving everyone’s time and effort.

There are some other factors that may explain why your store isn’t indexed already. So, before you just assume that your efforts aren’t giving results, you need to make a Shopify SEO checklist with some potential complications. For instance, you might have recently migrated from another platform. While it’s not impossible to keep your rank even after the migration, this requires a lot of work involving technical SEO processes that you may have failed to complete, such as a 301 redirect plan. Having a password on your online store may be another obstacle. 

In Conclusion

As this platform keeps expanding, staying competitive will keep getting harder. This is why the only way to remain competitive is to learn how to use and utilize Shopify SEO properly. The rules of technical SEO are quite similar to other platforms. 

The biggest technical difference is the one regarding canonical and non-canonical URL paths. The rest, consisting of a proper meta description, adequate image optimization, and SEO outreach, is the same as any other E-commerce platform. 

If you are not sure how SEO can help your Shopify website thrive – we are happy to help! Contact us today and schedule your consultation.