AMP, or Accelerated Mobile Pages, is one of the most popular tactics used for mobile SEO and mobile website development. This tactic is primarily focused on improving your mobile website’s user experience. It essentially assists users to access pages/content faster and easier.
Although using this tactic is meant to be simple enough, there will always be some challenges that we experience when we’re doing it. This is especially true if we consider SEO and how AMP affects it. Most webmasters and SEOs know how to implement AMP, but not a lot of us know how to PROPERLY implement it to the point that it does not negatively affect any other aspect of our websites. So, how do we properly implement AMP on our website?
What are Accelerated Mobile Pages?
They are simply open-source coding standard for publishers. When implemented, mobile pages are loaded faster; almost instantaneously. The reason behind this is because a lot of mobile websites were loading slowly since they had to load desktop resources even though they were accessed on mobile devices. When AMP pages show up in search results, the page URL has a lightning symbol beside it to inform users that the specific search result is an AMP page.
This is important for mobile users since we don’t always have access to fast internet speed while we’re using our mobile devices. This necessitates that we, as webmasters and SEOs, optimize our user’s experience on our mobile website. The first step is through AMP. Additionally, Google has never failed to reiterate the importance of giving users a great time in search, so if we give them what Google wants, Google rewards us for that through improved rankings. So, here at SEO Hacker, it’s no surprise that we use AMP for all of our clients’ mobile websites and we use a couple of best practices that ensure that our mobile websites are optimized and can perform well in mobile search.
AMP Best Practices for SEO
AMP Page Location
It’s obvious that the AMP page is just another version of a page which means that the only difference between the original page and the AMP version is the implementation of AMP on the other. Everything else is the same. This means that your AMP page should be a child page of your original page.
Google announced a few years back that they are requiring your canonical and AMP pages to match. This means that your AMP page should be canonicalized back to the original page. One of the reasons is because you want to make the relationship clear between the original page and the AMP page for Google.
Another reason, although unlikely, is that the AMP page and the original page has the exact same content inside them. This could be flagged as duplicate content which is why it’s best practice for us to canonicalize the AMP page to the original page to avoid this from happening.
Use AMP for Email Newsletters
Another update to AMP is its integration to emails. The aim is to make emails more engaging and actionable. Through the use of AMP for email newsletters, engagement with the newsletter should increase since it makes the newsletter more interactive for the recipients.
The primary effect for SEO is the increased traffic generated through emails. This increases CTR for your site and it also increases engagements inside your website. Although this isn’t a “known” ranking factor, based on our experience, the higher the number that enters your site, the more chances you have of ranking better. Why? We can attribute it to being a signal to search engines that whatever is inside your website, it answers the user’s query or it satisfies their need.
Optimize Videos in AMP Pages
We all know that we can incorporate videos into AMP pages, but this is not an effective and optimized way of using videos. Why? Because unoptimized videos tend to disrupt the user’s journey inside the page. They tend to stop reading and scrolling just to watch the video or the video obstructs their view of the page.
The best practice for this is to use the dock attribute for <amp-video>. This minimizes the video that the users watch and it allows them to read and scroll the page while simultaneously watching the minimized video. This removes the bad user experience from your page and it also promotes good user experience which is very important for us webmasters and for Google as well. This was an update a few years ago and we’ve been using it at SEO Hacker every time we have the chance.
Key Takeaway
There are a lot of facets included in making an optimized AMP page. Creation is not the last step of the process and we, as SEOs and webmasters, must do what we can to serve great experience to our users while also sticking to Google’s guidelines. The best practices I’ve included here are just the tip of the iceberg and I’m sure Google and other developers will come up with new practices and ideas that can make a user’s search journey more engaging, efficient, and innovative. Do you have best practices when it comes to AMP implementation? Comment them down below!
SEO Content augmentation is one of the tasks that can give blogs the boost that they need. The effort to change your content and promote its authority will gain results either for your rankings, traffic, or clicks. Marketers should know by now that content will help them achieve great heights, especially in their goal towards online visibility.
Great content will allow blogs to step up in times when users are searching for brands that are worthy of their time and attention. When I say great content, I’m not only talking about monotonous paragraphs with error-free sentences. Content needs to be enticing for people to read, something that they will receive value from. This is precisely what content augmentation can help you with. Read more about how you can do this below:
Insert Keywords as Seamlessly as Possible
Check your published content if you have inserted the keywords that you want to rank for as naturally as possible. It would be annoying to read an article that is stuffed with keywords that do not paint a reasonable context of what your content is about. Remember that you need your users to derive value from your content and keyword stuffing will prevent them from doing so. Integrate the keywords with fewer stop words between them but insert them seamlessly. With this, you should also eliminate whatever keyword cannibalization might be happening on your blog.
Repurposing Content
In order to attract the audience to your content, consider repurposing it to see how they’re going to engage with it. Text content still has a large potential to reach your audience with the information that they are seeking but for those who would prefer alternative channels for your content, consider making podcasts, infographics, video content or presentations. If you see that your text content is not making good traction based on traffic, rankings, or clicks then repurpose it into something that your audience will appreciate more. For an example of how you can repurpose your content, check out this infographic that we have recently done for our client.
Check Internal Links
Internal links are one of the most neglected elements of SEO. It is part of the best practices for optimization because it does work in boosting your content’s authority. Maintaining a healthy link profile also includes the internal links you have on your site. If you wouldn’t link to your content, don’t expect other sources to link to it. There are instances when the post you publish doesn’t have internal links which will hurt its SEO.
When this happens, what you can do is make a database of all your internal links then collate all of this in a spreadsheet then backtrack from your most foundational landing pages and recent blog posts by date then interlink to the most interesting anchor texts that you have. With the most interesting anchor texts, you should choose those that have the potential to trigger user questions, those selections in your content that need further explanations. This is how internal links will work for you, it will increase user on-page time which is a great boost to your site.
Rack Up the Word Count
Word count is not at all relevant in addressing the quality of content and its faithfulness to search intent. But when it comes to staying ahead of the competition, you would also need to rack up the word count if you see that the search engine honors long-form content for that type of query or a more concise type of format then it’s best that you augment your content to fulfill this requirement.
It is important that you do rank profiling for this, meaning you look at your competitors in the search and see what would work in order for you to stay competitive. The options you have are simple: either add up to the word count or trim it down. As you may well know, lengthy content does not exactly correlate to quality so if you need to trim the words down in order to make way for more elements to your page, then do it.
Augmented Title Tags
When it comes to title tags, this is what you should always remember: never dilute your title tags. This means bombarding your title tags with other terms that do not exactly help build the relevance of these tags. Those terms include brand names, keyword variations, and category names irrelevant to the product title tag. Title tags can increase your click-through-rate at a dramatic pace and it also makes you an attractive result in the search engine pages.
Results of Content Augmentation
If you are curious to know what results you can get from content augmentation, check out how it worked for our clients.
Google Analytics Organic Traffic Increase
Content augmentation has helped in improving the visibility of this page and it even became a featured snippet for a very difficult keyword:
Before we augmented the content, the page was not doing well in terms of organic traffic. But following the tips found here, we have seen great results from it. It amounted to 46.49% of the traffic for the page, and it is still climbing up in terms of traffic.
Content Augmentation for Ranking Increase
Sometimes SEO content augmentation is as easy as improving your content to better serve the intent of the keyword you are targeting for it. With this landing page, we checked the internal links and inserted these into the page. Next, we also did extensive research on what information would be most viable for this type of page. Here is the result:
Key Takeaway
Augmenting your content can help you gain a lot of results for your blogs. Maximize your SEO efforts with this content strategy. Do not let your content go to rest, work on it as long as you are not getting maximum results. This is a great reminder to continue being productive because slowing down your digital marketing efforts will not be beneficial for you. The results are apparent once you integrate this strategy for yourself. Try it and I would like to know your thoughts about augmentation in the comments section below.
With most of us working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve got alittlemore time on our hands that we can spend for something else rather than getting stuck in traffic. We have more time to spend with our family, catch up on our favorite shows, and do some home cleaning. As much as it is the perfect time for leisure, it is also the perfect time to sharpen our skills as SEOs.
There are a lot of free resources online that you could just go right now and finish at your own pace. I’ve curated some of the most notable platforms that are guaranteed to bring value to you whether you are an SEO expert, a business owner, or someone who is just starting out.
Google Digital Garage is a free platform by Google that offers more than a hundred free courses. The course topics range from digital marketing to web development and career development. Some courses were created by Google themselves while some are from popular universities. All of these courses are free and there also certification courses that are available.
Inside the Google Digital Garage, there is also a section for webinars that you could register for. Right now, Google Digital Garage is also offering free training for those that are affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. You could see it under the “Remote Work” section.
Google Skillshop is another free training platform by Google but is more catered for people who are looking to learn how to use Google products such as Google Analytics, Google Marketing Platforms, Google Ads, Google My Business, and Waze ads.
These courses are designed by Google product experts themselves and it comes in with free certification that you could add on your resume.
Moz has a whole library of SEO courses for those who are just beginning to learn SEO or those who are already experts and would want to know more. Moz courses cost from 49 dollars to 595 dollars but right now, in an effort to help those that are affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, Moz has opened its library to everyone for free until May 31. Accessing Moz Academy is easy. Just create an account or use your existing Moz account (you don’t have to be a Moz SEO tool used to access this) and use their promo code “wegotthis”on all of their courses.
SEMRush’s free learning platform has courses that are perfect for learning the fundamentals of SEO. SEMRush Academy also includes courses on how to maximize SEMRush tools that is beneficial if you are a SEMRush user. These free SEO courses come with an official SEMRush certificate which is a great addition to your resume since SEMRush is one of the most popular SEO software in the industry.
Shopify is one of the most popular e-commerce platforms in the world and they are offering courses on setting up an e-commerce site through Shopify, SEO for e-commerce, and growing your business.
The COVID-19 pandemic just showed how important it is to have an e-commerce website with most physical stores unable to operate due to quarantine. This is a great opportunity if you are a business owner to learn more about how you could transform your business digitally.
Hubspot, popular for their inbound marketing, sales, and CRM software, also has a huge library of courses and certifications. You could find a wide variety of topics about SEO, inbound marketing, content marketing, copywriting, sales, and even design. All of their courses and certifications are free.
Hubspot Academy is a great platform if you want to be a well-rounded online marketer and the certifications also help in improving your career. If you are a business owner, inbound marketing is a strategy that you should highly consider in your marketing strategy and training your team through Hubspot is a great way to start.
WordPress is one of the most SEO-friendly platforms if you want to build a website and Yoast is one of the most popular SEO plugins for WordPress. Yoast Academy has lessons on SEO and how to use WordPress for beginners. Some of the courses are free but some paid courses are accessible as well through a free trial.
I started the SEO Hacker blog to share all of my learnings from my experiments when I was learning how to do SEO for myself. 10 years later, I am blessed to still be writing and sharing my learnings through this blog. But aside from the SEO Hacker blog, our team also created an SEO school if you want more in-depth lessons. We have a lot of free courses available. All you have to do is register and you can access them immediately.
Key Takeaway
All of these resources that are listed are free and easily accessible with your laptop through the internet. These are all self-paced courses that you could finish at your own time. This gives you no reason to make an excuse to learn more and sharpen your skills.
Choosing what we do in our free time is crucial in our personal growth and career growth. We might feel like we have more time in our hands with everyone working remotely, but we still only have 24 hours a day. It is always best that we do something productive with our free time and continue to add value to ourselves.
The past month has created a difference in the digital marketing industry wherein more and more businesses are realizing the importance of going digital because of its availability amidst the crisis. Us, as SEOs now have the responsibility to expand our knowledge of strategies and techniques that help us win the SEO game.
That being said, link building is one of the foundational strategies that all SEOs must know and do. There are different facets to this strategy, but one is often undervalued or abused that it leads to problems in our SEO. I’m talking about anchor texts – a simple factor that all webmasters and SEOs know. But what is it about anchor texts that make them important to our overall SEO ventures?
What is Anchor Text?
It’s simply the highlighted, clickable text in a hyperlink, usually found inside the body of content of a webpage. You commonly see it as the underlined, blue words such as this one linking to our compilation of the best SEO tools for 2020
Here’s what it looks like in code:
Different Types of Anchor Texts
Anchor texts have different types to them that you must know for you to fully utilize them to help with your SEO
Branded – This is the anchor text that uses your brand name. So, for us at SEO Hacker, this is what it would look like:
Exact Match – This includes the target keyword for your page in the anchor text. If your keyword is “link building strategies”, that’s what the anchor text should be.
Keyword Variations – Unlike exact match anchor texts, you use variations of your keywords as the anchor text. So, if you have a link going to a link building guide page, you might use “link building strategies and techniques” as the anchor text.
Generic – This includes generic CTAs for anchor texts such as “click here” or “check us out”
Bare Links – You simply use the URL of the page you’re linking to as the anchor text as well
No Text – This happens when an image is linking to your page, but there’s no set alt text to serve as the anchor text.
Alt Text – Unlike the “No text” type, you’ll be using the alt text of the image as the anchor text if the image is linking to a specific page.
Why Anchor Text is Important for SEO
Google and other search engines use the anchor text to understand the context of the linked page. So, through the link I made above regarding the best SEO tools for 2020, you can understand the link as me telling you as the user AND the search engines that the page I linked through will contain information on the best SEO tools for 2020.
It’s that simple yet it’s important as well. Take for example inbound links to your site from other websites. The anchor text helps search engine crawlers understand what your page or site is about and it also signals to them how other websites understand your site as well. Of course, you have limited control over how links to your site are built, most especially if you were not the one who built those links, but what you can control are the internal links on your website.
SEO Best Practices for Anchor Text
Be Concise and Comprehensive
Your anchor text shouldn’t encompass a whole sentence. The best anchor texts are the ones that can fully express what the linked page is all about in just a few words. Additionally, using a whole sentence as your anchor text is also disruptive for the users that see it. Some questions you should remember when creating a concise and comprehensive anchor text:
How do I express what the linked page is all about?
How do I summarize it to a few words?
Keyword Density
We all know about the Penguin update. They cracked down on websites that used spammy link building tactics, one of which is keyword-stuffed anchor texts. So, it’s important for you as a webmaster or SEO to decide on how you can incorporate keywords into the anchor text without it seeming unnatural and spammy.
My recommendation is to just describe the linked page – plain and simple. If the linked page’s content is properly optimized, you won’t have to worry about stuffing keywords in the anchor texts of the links you build since the keyword is already the topic of the linked page. This make it look more natural and safe. This also applies to internal links since the repeated use of the same anchor text inside a website can also look a bit spammy for Google.
Relevance
Lastly, make sure your anchor texts are relevant to the linked page. Don’t use an unrelated anchor text for linking since this could possibly affect your SEO. If you’re linking to a page about SEO, don’t use a random anchor text such as “cars for sale”. Even if the page contains a small part about how SEO can help sell cars online, the anchor text is misleading and irrelevant to the whole context at best.
Link relevancy is also a factor considered by search engines nowadays. HOW related is the linked page to the source page and how does the anchor text express that correlation? An extremely relevant link with a great anchor text can improve your SEO by leaps and bounds. Let’s use the example above. Using “cars for sale” as your link’s anchor text is bad, but changing it to “SEO helps sell cars online” is the better way of manipulating the link. But do remember, this will only work if the link you created is relevant to the source page it’s coming from. So, using “SEO helps sell cars online” as an anchor text, the content where the link is located should be talking about how to sell cars online or any other related topics.
Key Takeaway
Anchor texts seem simple enough, but there are a lot of facets you have to consider to take advantage of its capability to improve your SEO efforts. SEO necessitates constant improvement and innovation – without these, you’ll have a hard time staying on the first page for a long time. Noticing how important small details are is one of the greatest ways for us to come up with innovative ideas to test out. What about you? Do you have experience with the improper or proper optimization of anchor texts? Comment it down below!
The Coronavirus pandemic has greatly affected businesses on a global scale since no one remains unscathed by the economic effects of the virus. One thing stays the same is that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an investment that will generate growth for businesses, no matter what niche they belong to. This is why we are going to talk about how an SEO company and a small business can team up together towards success.
For small businesses, it can be difficult to navigate this crisis without hard-hitting tools at their disposal. Social distancing is all the rage right now and businesses that primarily deal with engagement are now suffering from loss of opportunities for growth. But this will not go on forever. Everyone is hoping for a better condition of the world soon which means there are many people who would welcome your business as soon as you have recovered. All the more reason for small businesses to envision their resurgence from this pandemic, right?
SEO and Small Businesses
According to a survey by The Manifest, only 30% of small businesses in the United States have an SEO strategy in place for their marketing efforts. This is a mediocre amount for the rest of the businesses that do not see SEO as an investment seeing as this digital marketing effort is the most affordable way to increase your brand’s visibility nowadays compared to paid advertising.
And once you rank first organically, you have higher chances to stay on the first page rather than paying for your slot in the search engine results, and then get kicked off by the competition because they have outbid you or their copy is better than yours.
Organic ranking is holistic and it is fueled by quality and relevance. Here at SEO Hacker, we strongly believe in the potential of small businesses to grow in the digital market. Heck, this blog that you are reading now used to be a space for a guy who just wants to write about his experiments and strategies for SEO. Today, it has grown into a full-scale business, and we are now ranking first for the toughest and most sustainable keyword in the country, SEO Philippines. If I can do it, so can you.
Growth can start out simply, without the extravagant display of complex strategies. If you are now well-convinced about SEO as a viable investment, I would advise you to go back-to-basic.
While we are looking at recovery in the near future, considering an investment in SEO is one of the ways to cope with the losses of small businesses. How is this going to work? Read on below about the foundational strategies that will help small businesses thrive in the digital market:
Banking on keyword strategies will go a long way in your pursuit of digital marketing success. When it comes to solid keywords, search intent is the key. Make sure to target keywords that can help you create content for people and not search engines. Content will help your business succeed if you serve the right audience. Long-tail keywords will be most beneficial not only for small businesses but for those industries who are looking for their site visitors to convert.
People around the globe have been staying at home during this lockdown. They have more time on their hands to surf the internet using their smartphones. This is also a primary consideration since you can reach your audience this way. The key metric in ensuring success in mobile optimization is to increase mobile usability by fixing errors detected in Google Search Console. Site speed is also a big factor so make sure to optimize for this as well. Prepare an initial diagnosis of your speed and fix issues according to the recommendations.
Small businesses that would like to do “DIY-SEO” can always start with content. Write with passion about your industry and stand out in that niche. You can be easily viewed as a blog of value if you are writing about knowledge transfers for those who are interested in what you do. Foundational content can thrive with search intent as its support. Make sure that you are not too methodological in your approach to content since your audience would want to read engaging content that they can use to their own advantage.
Once you get the ball rolling on the content that you will feature, you will also need backlinks for your site. It is important that you spend more time promoting your content than that you used to create it. Links with the anchor text that you would like to be known as an authority for will help you achieve digital marketing success. Backlinks are essential for small businesses because this is one of the best ways to increase brand awareness. If people are seeing your name as an authority in the industry, it’s only natural that they would want to do business with you.
Key Takeaway
An SEO company for a small business is the most ideal setup in generating ROI in the digital market. But for those who would like to try their hand at doing SEO for themselves, these are some of the quick strategies that you can use for starters. The ones I listed here are nothing that you haven’t heard before but many small businesses are on the path of educating themselves about digital marketing and how they can use this for their business especially in times of crisis.
How does SEO help your business grow? Comment it down below!
The past few months have been rough as the infectious COVID-19 continues to plague the world. Countries affected are implementing lockdowns to prevent further spread of the virus and the economical effects are massive. Businesses are in crisis mode; some are able to continue to operate but with limitations while some have to completely halt operations.
A few weeks ago, I published an article onHow the Coronavirus is affecting searchand the negative effects of COVID-19 are evident for some industries. Due to companies losing profits, the service industry is massively affected and digital marketing companies are no exception
Fortunately,our team here at SEO Hackerwas able to adjust accordingly to this crisis but I was curious to know how my fellow digital marketers are doing during these times so I asked them a few questions to further know how digital marketing companies are doing.
Work Setup
One of the advantages of working in the digital industry is that most of the resources that you need to operate are accessible through the internet. That is why most companies, as well as our team, have transitioned to working remotely.
David Langton’s team atLangton Creative Group Ltdmakes use of various tools to make it easier for their team.
“We are set-up remotely with access to our server and catalog of past and present work. So much is available via cloud-services that working remotely is not as challenging as it once was. We meet weekly via Zoom to touch base and coordinate work schedules.”
Additionally, they also use some of the free time they get from working remotely to produce more materials. Langton said, “Currently, we are using this time to create new case studies, update our website and address some long-term marketing goals.”
But working remotely is a huge adjustment for some companies that are used to having their team together in one office. Taylor Cimara, Principal and Strategic Director ofDigital Third Coastsaid that communication takes the most adjustment needed.
“Our entire team is working remotely and has been since March 13th. While we let employees have flexibility in working from home, we’ve never had to have the entire team work remotely for an extended period of time. Communication is the biggest change – many more intentional touchpoints with the team, and more mindfulness with management and what everyone is going through individually at home.”
However, for some companies, working from home isn’t really new. Some digital marketing companies run their operations remotely even before the quarantine. For Juan Pablo Diaz, Founder ofKrows Digital, business is just as usual.
“The quarantine didn’t have much impact on our day-to-day work as we have been working remotely since the early days of the company. We usually meet once or twice a week in a shared open space in Tokyo but now we prefer to do our meetings through Discord.”
Juan also sees something positive in the situation. Having their meetings online actually makes their meetings more productive. Juan said “In a way, it is actually a good thing for us as we tend to always talk about many things that are not relevant. Doing online meetings forces us to get straight to the point and to prepare our report presentations”.
Speaking of positivity, Graeme Barlow’s team over atIversoftfound a way to keep things fun and transition their office culture to their now fully remote workforce.
“We are fortunate to have a pretty fun culture in our office and it’s been absolutely amazing to see what people have done to bring that virtual. From pet photos to gaming hangouts to hosting video social hours, it’s been fantastic to see how we’ve translated the atmosphere from an open office to a remote equivalent.”
How Their Clients are Affected
The impact of the COVID-19 varies from one industry to another. Some may experience gains, but most industries are expected to suffer from the crisis.
According to Nate Nead, CEO ofSEO.co, their clients that are in the retail industry were hit the most. Nate said,“Client budgets have definitely shrunk quickly, regardless of size. Clients hit the hardest have been local clients in retail, while larger, national clients have been more engaged, but are proceeding cautiously.”
The tourism industry is one of the most affected as well with people being forced to stay at home. Amy Draheim ofABD Creative LLCdiscussed that their clients are suffering from the crisis.
“Our hotel clients are experiencing extremely low occupancy. They’ve redeployed their housekeeping staff to high touch areas, and focus on deep cleaning instead of daily tidying for travelers who are still traveling (few and far between). Our restaurants are only offering delivery/take out services, and have laid off most of their employees as a result. Business is slow across the board.”
Similar for Brogan Renshaw ofFirewire Digital, clients are being affected across the board but their team was quick to react and give solutions to their clients.
“Approximately 30% of our clients’ businesses have been significantly impacted by COVID-19. A further 20% have been partially impacted by a drop in revenue.
As the crisis was in its early stages we were proactive and offered all our clients the opportunities to pause and reduce contracts for a period of time. We wanted to be on the front foot and reduce any stress or anxiety for our clients. I would rather see clients come out the other side of all this and still be operating and for them to know we helped them get through it.”
However, for Erika Thomas’ clients atCoveted Portfolio, there are clients that are looking to take advantage of the situation and are shifting their focus on transitioning to e-commerce.
“Some are experiencing a delay in launching their brands and physical locations in this current market, some are still “guns blazing” to take advantage of this very unique time for e-commerce. It really depends on who they are and what they can offer at this moment”.
Did They Lose Clients?
During these times, some companies are forced to cut their marketing budgets to allot the money for payroll and other operational expenses. This means digital marketing companies are in danger of losing contracts.
Aliza Sherman, CEO ofEllementaand Spark the Creative, has lost clients but made quick adjustments with their pricing to retain some clients.
“We’ve lost most of our clients. To maintain the ones we still have, we’ve reduced our fees drastically, looking at the long term relationship. We’d rather make sure we all stay in business than trying to gouge clients in the short term. If we can all support one another and weather this crisis, we’ll be stronger and thrive in the long run.”
I could say this is a good strategy because some companies are still looking to continue their digital efforts amidst the crisis. Those who can’t afford the same budget they had before may look for alternatives. Bernie Clark ofMajux Marketinghas the same thing in mind.
“We have had a few clients who have been forced to put projects or initiatives on a temporary hold. We are lucky enough to have not lost any accounts so far, but we have been getting calls from businesses who had to leave their previous agency because of an over-reliance or singular offering of paid media. Nobody wants to dump tens of thousands of dollars into Google Ads or TV right now, so if that was your agency’s sole offering or the large piece of your previous agency’s strategy, you’re going to be looking for a new agency that focuses on a more balanced strategy.”
Some companies have handled the situation well. They didn’t lose any clients but contracts are put on hold. This gives them faster recovery once the COVID-19 crisis is over. Monica Smith, CEO ofMarketsmith, believes that this is a time to have empathy for their clients and be good partners.
“We have not lost any clients at this time. We are working with our clients to be the best partner we can be. If that means extending their terms or allowing campaign shifts and pauses we are committed to that. We specialize in bringing companies up during challenging times – we are working on strategic plans and initiatives for each client to make that possible”.
What is Their Plan Moving Forward?
We don’t know for sure yet when this pandemic will be over but it is important to be positive and make plans moving forward. We’re also not sure yet how the world will look after COVID-19 but I’m pretty sure it’s not going to be business as usual.
Erico Franco, Senior Manager atAgencia de Marketing Digital, managed to negotiate with their current clients but they are still looking for prospects to keep their business going.
“We are cutting costs and negotiating with our already customer to see what we can do to help them and so not losing the account. We keep trying to prospect new customers even a lot of them don’t want to talk now. We don’t know how long this crisis will take but we are trying to prepare to the worst and keeping moving forward and in a positive way.”
Olga Gonzales, CEO ofPietra Communications, believes this is a good time to expand their agency’s capabilities.
“Our agency is known for our print and digital placements, but the virus really has taught us that digital is the basket to put more eggs in. Therefore, we will be looking into more ways to expand our capabilities, and continue to focus on growing editorial relationships here in “think outside the box” ways. “
On the other hand, Khaeleelah Jones, founder and CEO ofCareful Feet Digital Agencyis innovating that would allow them to tap more companies.
“We are in the process of creating a tool that automates many of our services, so we can offer our services at a lower price point, for companies of all sizes and budgets. It allows us to scale and democratize access while continuing to offering higher-cost boutique services for those companies that should need it.”
Because of the COVID-19 crisis, Clement Conor, COO ofSmartboost, believes that companies will realize more the importance of having an online presence once the crisis is over.
“We would like to educate the market that a digital presence is now an essential aspect of the business. Transitioning your business to a digital platform now can be useful and will likely make your operations more cost-efficient. A lot of our clients will realize first hand that their ROI online is a lot better than you see with traditional marketing.”
Key Takeaway
COVID-19 has caught the world off-guard and I’m really glad to see other digital marketing companies are able to go through this crisis. It’s amazing to see that digital marketing companies are doing what they can to help their clients and I pray that we can all recover from this crisis. It is really important that we all stay positive during these tough times.
If you own or work in a digital marketing company, let me know how you’re doing in the comments and I would love to talk about it.
Sitemaps – properly optimized websites have them to since they’re integral to having a proper indexing process for your site. If you have a properly set-up sitemap, it also assists crawlers to better navigate your website thereby giving your site better visibility in the search engines.
As simple as it may seem, there are a lot of technical aspects that webmasters and SEOS should understand about sitemaps. It’s not as easy as generating it once and forgetting about it. This is one of the most important aspects of improving a website’s search visibility. So, I took it upon myself to enumerate some best practices we do at SEO Hacker to ensure that a website’s sitemap is fully optimized and is massively contributing to the site’s SEO/search presence. Let’s start.
“a file where you provide information about the pages, videos, and other files on your site, and the relationships between them. Search engines like Google read this file to more intelligently crawl your site. A sitemap tells Google which pages and files you think are important in your site, and also provides valuable information about these files: for example, for pages, when the page was last updated, how often the page is changed, and any alternate language versions of a page.”
In simpler terms, a sitemap is a file you create to assist and inform search engine crawlers the BETTER way to crawl your website. This includes the pages that you believe should be included in the search results since they’re informative and can potentially answer a user’s query.
Why You Should Use Sitemaps
Aside from the benefits I already mentioned, some other benefits of using sitemaps are:
Last Updated or Modified – If you regularly publish content on your website, there will be instances where you update old, informative blog posts to make it fresher and increase its value. Through sitemaps, you can give signals/information to the search engine crawlers about the pages that you just updated or modified. This tells them that the particular pages contain new information that should be taken into consideration when they rank those specific pages.
A More Holistic View of Your Website – Sitemaps are files that can contain a massive number of URLs. This means that if you have a massive website, you won’t have trouble having most of your pages crawled and, hopefully, indexed by search engines. One example would be for e-commerce sites that have hundreds to thousands of pages for their products.
Crawler Navigation and Discovery – Since crawlers use internal and external links to crawl the websites in the world wide web this poses problems for webmasters that are not well-versed with proper internal linking structure processes and proper link building tactics. Through sitemaps, these webmasters can inform crawlers that their pages exist – even if no other page is linking to it. But I strongly recommend constantly improving your website’s internal linking and link building processes since it’s more beneficial for SEO.
Sitemap Best Practices
Since we now all know the importance and benefits of having a sitemap, here are 3 sitemap best practices we do at SEO Hacker to ensure that our client’s sitemap is a stepping stone for SEO success:
1. Dynamic Sitemaps
A dynamic sitemap is a type of sitemap that possess a set of rules that allow them to update themselves whenever you make changes to your pages. This is extremely helpful for large websites or publishers that regularly update a large number of pages since a dynamic sitemap automatically updates itself when a rule is followed.
Dynamic Sitemaps are also easier to access and crawl for search engine bots/crawlers and are relatively safer from being corrupted.
2. Plugin/Tools
As I’ve mentioned, sitemaps are important which is why developers around the world and even Google produced tools and plugins that assist webmasters and SEOs with sitemap generation and management.
For WordPress websites, the Yoast SEO plugin already has a built-in XML sitemap generator which is used by a large number of webmasters. You can also install Google XML Sitemaps to create them as well.
After creation, it’s a best practice to submit the generated sitemap to Google Search Console. Click the “Sitemaps” button in the sidebar of your Google Search Console property, then just put your sitemap URL Slug in the space provided and click submit.
3. Priority Pages
In sitemaps, there’s a Google protocol where you can give scores to your page between 0.1 to 1 – 1 being the highest. Pages that have higher scores are given priority in crawling and they’re also more regularly crawled than lower scored pages.
The best practice here is to assign higher scores to pages that are more regularly updated or more important pages. Having these pages crawled more often by Google is important since you want Google or other search engines to SEE and KNOW what changes you made and how those changes added more value to the page.
Since it’s up to you as the webmaster to assign these scores, you need to remember that it’s not a best practice to give ALL your pages the same score to give priority to all of them. Google crawlers are constantly improved and they also function through algorithmic processes. This means that they’ll have a harder and longer time understanding which pages are regularly updated as compared to other, static pages.
4. Avoid Noindexed Pages
Putting noindex tags in your pages means that you don’t want those pages showing up in the search results. This could encompass a lot of pages such as log-in, checkout, resource, or WordPress pages. This is self-explanatory but avoid including pages that you’ve labeled as noindex in your sitemap.
Your sitemap should contain only the pages that you WANT to show up in the search results which is why intentionally or accidentally including noindexed pages in your sitemap is contradictory and causes errors in your Google Search Console coverage report. This is easily avoided by being mindful of the pages included in your sitemap and by doing regular sitemap check-ups.
If one way or another, you included a noindexed page in your sitemap, this is what it would look like after you validate the appropriate fixes:
5. Link to the Sitemap
This is a simple practice that we’ve been doing as long as I can remember. After generating a sitemap, we always link the sitemap in the website’s footer to make it a sitewide link. This is just an additional measure for crawlers to find the sitemap. Since we want it to be visible all the time whenever search engines crawl our website
Key Takeaway
Us webmasters and SEOs need to understand the importance of sitemaps and how it brings about massive benefits to our websites. It’s already considered a foundational strategy to set-up and optimize a sitemap for most SEOs since they’re a big help for improving search visibility and presence.
Use the best practices I’ve mentioned to step up your sitemap processes and thereby improve your overall SEO efforts. Do you know any other best practices for sitemap generation and optimization? Comment them down below!
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