And since big search engines – such as Google – frown on “link building” strategies, we like to focus on link earning. 

What’s the difference? 

https://act-on.com/learn/blog/seo-faq-your-most-common-seo-questions-answered/

Link building is typically associated with shady practices. Examples include working with so-called experts to include your website in directories or similar strategies designed to game the system and get ranked higher. Link earning focuses on creating quality content that earns backlinks from high-authority websites. 

Not sure where to start? No worries! We’re here to share our three favorite strategies to help you earn links and stay on the good side of Google. 

Earn links: Spy on competitors 

A great place to start is to uncover how your biggest competitors earn links. The Moz backlink checker is a great option for pulling backlinks. Or you can use the free version of the ahrefs.com tool. 

Simply plug in a competitor’s website and see what comes back. For example, if you type our website into the ahrefs tool, you can see our top backlinks and their domain rating (DR). The DR gives you a quick backlinks quality check (the higher the DR rating, the higher the link quality). 

Here are a few tips for getting started: 

Organize your list and attack the best opportunities first. Focus on backlinks quality. List your competitors’ highest-quality backlinks so you can focus on those opportunities first. 

Review links from domain names ending in .edu and .gov. These sites have high credibility with search engines. Evaluate the competitor content earning these types of links. What types of content are they creating? Do any opportunities exist for your brand? 

Review the most linked-to content. Evaluate the competitor’s content that is being linked to the most. What makes the content “link-worthy”? Is it content that you can develop? 

Search for pages that have the word “links” or “resource” in the URL. These pages often list resources, and if your site isn’t listed, it’s a great opportunity to pitch inclusion. And here’s a pro tip: Consider creating a resource section on your website. Link to relevant resources that have a high domain rating, and then reach out and let them know what you’ve done. When you do this, share a resource on your website that might fit nicely on their resources page. 

Earn links: Hang out with the experts 

Landing niche-relevant backlinks is important to improving SEO. A great strategy for landing these links is pitching related blogs and podcasts. When you write a guest post or appear as a podcast guest, you typically get a link to your website. 

https://act-on.com/learn/blog/seo-faq-your-most-common-seo-questions-answered/

But how do you do it? Here’s a three-step process: 

Research trending content. Blogs and podcasts with high domain authority get many pitches. As a result, you’ll need to stand out. A smart way to do this is to research what already works well for a company. You can use a tool like BuzzSumo (they have a free version) and enter the company’s URL. It will show you the content with the highest social media engagement. On a side note, it also shows who shared the content, which you can keep track of for future use (influencer marketing, anyone?). 

Create your angle. Did you uncover a company’s most successful content? Great! Use this information to pitch a new angle on a high-performing topic. For example, you might learn that a topic related to AI performed well, so you pitch your SME as a podcast guest, discussing how companies use AI in email campaigns to increase response rates by 20%.  

Write your pitch. Your pitch should be short and straightforward. Consider including the working headline of the guest post or podcast episode in your email subject line. Then, include the following:

1. A short sentence about what you love about the blog or podcast. Make it complimentary, but be authentic and honest. 
2. An intro to the topic you’d like to pitch and why you think it works well for their audience. 
3. The working headline and a 3-4-sentence summary. 
4. A CTA that asks the reader to reach out if they’d like to discuss the idea more. 

If you don’t hear back, follow up in a week. Ask for a response by a specific date; otherwise, explain that you’ll assume they aren’t interested, and you’ll send them future pitches. 

Earn links: Feature influencers in your content 

Are you overwhelmed by sending pitches? No worries, there’s another strategy that is a little easier and can help you grab some quick wins: Feature influencers in your content. 

For example, let’s say that you’re a software company and your target market is B2B content marketers. What publications do they read? Which influencers do they follow? After a little research, you learn that many read MarketingProfs, and Ann Handley is the company’s Chief Content Officer and an influencer. She also wrote a book. 

So you write a blog post titled “7 Lessons from Ann Handley’s ‘Everybody Writes’ That Grew Our Email Subscribers by 30%.” 

But you don’t stop there. Nope. You reach out to Ann (perhaps on LinkedIn) and tell her you were so inspired by her book that you wrote a post about it. 

Now, I’ll stop here because there is an important caveat with this strategy. You must be authentic. If you don’t love an influencer’s work, pick a different one. We used this example because we happen to love Ann’s work! 

With any luck, the influencer will share the link. This strategy lets you double dip because you can also share the post on social media, tagging MarketingProfs in hope that they, too, will share the content. 

And here’s one more idea: Check whether the influencer has a resources page. If they do, and you feel your content is worth inclusion, pitch it. 

Bonus tip: Get your SMEs featured

Journalists and writers create a continuous stream of content, and they need sources to bring that content to life. As a result, they’ll put out a call on Help a Reporter Out requesting a specific type of subject-matter expert. 

You can respond to those requests, putting your SME forward to be interviewed for that publication. And when they are interviewed, you will typically get a backlink. Also, if your audience is B2B, you can check out Help a B2B Writer. Calls for SMEs come from writers working on B2B stories that need sources. 

Remember, before responding to a request, check the DA of the publication to ensure that it aligns with your earned link strategy. 

Earned links: It’s a long game 

Link building isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it task. It’s a continuous and ongoing process. But if you’re deliberate and consistent, then over time, your SEO rankings should improve, and you’ll receive more website traffic and greater results. 

Do you have questions about SEO? If so, we’ve got you covered with our SEO FAQ resource, which takes a deep dive into the most common and confusing aspects of SEO. 

Easy wins. Everybody wants them, right? Especially when it’s your job to attract more organic traffic through search engines and you’re working to improve search engine optimization (SEO). The challenge is that algorithms are a moving goalpost – and hey, let’s not sugarcoat it: SEO is hard. These SEO basics are essential knowledge on your path to better rankings, increased visibility in search results and more traffic.

Just when you think you have it all figured out, the algorithm does an inconvenient reshuffle. Google comes out with the latest Google algorithm update.

And yet, even with this difficulty, you can still target some easier areas of SEO. We’ve highlighted basic SEO tips to help get on the right side of Google and other search engines. 

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a strategy focused on attracting more visitors to your website. More traffic helps you support your audience on their buyers’ journeys, whether that’s providing blog content, downloading an eBook, signing up for your email list, scheduling a product demo, or taking some other action. 

Search Engine Optimization might include keyword optimizing your content, building more links to your website pages, and handling more technical areas (like making sure your website doesn’t load at a snail’s pace). Make sense? Excellent.

Let’s dive into the other SEO basics you can get started with today! 

Pay close attention to your Meta Titles

When you search for things online, the first thing you’ll see in the results are meta titles. Mastering this element is not only basic SEO, it’s an essential component of mastering SEO for beginners. In the example below, the page meta title is “Act-On: Marketing Automation Software”

The meta title is usually the first thing people see when searching for things online. It’s important for search visibility but also for capturing attention in search results. When a user searches for a keyword, you want to show up in the search engine results and do so with a title that’s so enticing they can’t help but click it. 

Here are a few things to remember when it comes to meta titles: 

• Give each page a unique meta title to avoid multiple pages competing for the same keywords. 
• Use your most important keyword in the title, and try to use it early, but do so naturally. 
• Make sure you do a good job describing what the page is about, so the reader feels like “Yes, this is exactly what I’m looking for.”
• Ensure your meta title is the right length to avoid it getting cut off. Aim for less then 60 characters. Use a character length checker when needed.

And while we’re on the topic of how you appear in search results, we can’t talk about meta titles without discussing meta descriptions (those little blurbs that appear under your meta title). And that’s our second tip for improving your rankings. 

Write engaging Meta Descriptions 

If you do a great job writing the meta title, readers will likely skim your meta description and then, hopefully, click your link. That’s why a strong meta title and meta description are essential for your basic SEO knowledge.

We love this meta description example from the Content Marketing Institute:

Meta Title: Don’t Make SEO the Reason for Your Content Marketing

Meta Description: SEO isn’t the best grounding for a new content marketing program. Here’s what you should think about instead.

Consider using curiosity in your meta description, and of course, remember to include your most important keyword in your meta title and meta description to improve SEO performance. Try to keep the length of your meta descriptions to 155 characters or less to avoid them getting cut off.

Avoid keyword stuffing

It’s tempting to stuff pages full of keywords. After all, if one keyword is good, then a bunch must be great, right? Not necessarily. 

What is keyword stuffing? It’s the overuse and misuse of keywords in your content. Before Google cracked down, many marketers crammed far too many keywords into their pages, used them unnaturally, and sometimes just flat-out listed them (separating them with a simple comma). Sometimes they even used tricky tactics, like putting keywords in the same color as the background to hide them! And that didn’t go over well with Google. 

According to Google, keyword stuffing is when you load a page with keywords in order to manipulate a website’s rankings. Instead, Google wants you to provide useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context. So, yes, pick great keywords but prioritize quality and quantity. 

Link to high-traffic web pages

Do you have rock star web pages? You know, the ones pulling in far more traffic than the rest? We’ll let you in on a little secret. This blog on effective email subject lines is one of our top performers. But here’s the point: You want to squeeze these pages for all they’re worth. Here’s how: 

1. Understand which pages bring you the most traffic. We love using Google Analytics to find this data. 
2. Link from your top performing pages to your brand-new content. 

When you do this, it helps more people find your new content and is a positive signal to Google for new content rankings. 

And one more thing you should know as part of your SEO basics crash course. If you’re feeling lost about the performance of your existing pages, you can use tools like our SEO audit tool. It generates real-time reports that detail each page’s SEO performance, along with recommendations on how to improve it. 

Create pillar pages 

If you aren’t using pillar pages, consider them in your B2B SEO strategy. Pillar pages make it easier for search engines to crawl your content while signaling that you’re an expert in your niche. Here are a few tips for getting started with pillar pages: 

1. Define a general topic. For example, we’d look for a topic related to marketing automation since that’s what we do at Act-On. 
2. Plug a topic-related keyword into a research tool. We use SEMrush, but other options exist, such as Moz, Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, and Google Keyword Planner. If we type “marketing automation” into a keyword tool, we can find related keywords and begin grouping them. 
3. Create “content clusters.” Staying with the marketing automation example, we may notice keyword groupings around marketing automation, email marketing automation, and lead nurturing. As a result, we could create the following pillar pages: marketing automation best practices guide, email marketing automation strategies for success, and lead nurturing and conversion with marketing automation. 
4. Create related optimized content for each pillar page. Create a pillar page (it’s kind of like a big, long landing page), and then link out to other related pages in the content cluster. 

As you evaluate potential keywords, don’t forget to look for lower funnel keywords. For example, “how to set up a marketing automation demo” or “how to buy a marketing automation tool” are phrases that signal the searcher is close to purchase, resulting in higher-quality website traffic. 

Use ALT tags for images

ALT tags let you add a text description to every page image. They’re an often-overlooked part of SEO basics, but an easy way to optimize your pages. Additionally, they’re important for content accessibility, as they tell users who are visually impaired details about your images via screen reading tools. 

Most content management systems make it very easy to add ALT tags. Sprinkle your keywords in as you write them, but as always, write ALT tags for human readers, not for search engines.

ALT tags are also important for social sharing. A few social platforms, like Pinterest, will use the ALT tag copy as the default description. So make sure your ALT tags make sense in case they are displayed to readers on social media.

Use keywords in the file names

Using keywords as file names is simple and may support better rankings. It helps readers understand what’s in the document – and what’s good for the readers is also good for SEO. 

Just don’t go wild and use multiple keywords in your file names. Ideally, use one keyword, and at the most, two. Here are a couple of examples: 

Good filename: crm-study-ebook.pdf

Bad, keyword-stuffed filename: CRMManagement_BuyCRM_CRMServices_Ebook

Do this well, and you’ll give search engines a little more info about what your content is about, and every little bit helps. You should also use all lower letters and separate the words using dashes.

Don’t forget social media 

Social media might not be an official SEO ranking factor, yet it appears to have an impact, so you should include it in your understanding of SEO basics.

SEMrush recently noted that Google appears to use online brand mentions to influence what terms you rank for. 

As you share content on social media and your audience shares it, traffic to your site improves – and you might even score some backlinks. The number of backlinks, and the quality of those links, also impact SEO performance (more on that shortly). 

So, consider adding social sharing buttons to your content. Share your content via social media. And encourage others to share it, whether it’s your employees, subject-matter experts who you interview, or business partners who work in the same space. 

Build links very carefully

Nobody likes a bad reputation. And shady link-building practices risk earning a bad rap with search engines. 

Smart marketers are cautious about link-building. Google appears to frown on most “link-building tactics.” So avoid any experts who want to submit your site to 500 directory listings or want to “spin” one of your articles and submit it to a bunch of article directories. 

Here are some safe ways to build links: 

• Create a piece of amazing and high-value content. 
• Do unique research and publish it as a report.
• Publish unique, insightful articles on high-authority sites.
• Create the type of traditional business listings expected on sites such as Yelp, your local chamber of commerce, and trade organizations.

And remember, when in doubt, don’t do it. 

Format your content so it’s easy to read

Lastly, if you remember any of these SEO basics, remember to make your content friendly for human readers. Because when humans love your content, so will search engines. Here are a few tips for making your content easy to read:  

• Write short paragraphs.
• Punctuate those short paragraphs with a one-sentence paragraph every so often.
• Use subheaders.
• Use bullet points. See a string of commas in a sentence? That’s often an opportunity for a bullet list.
• Add images every 350 words or so.
• Add quotes and call-outs.

And while there’s no such thing as “easy SEO,” you can use some of these easier tactics to get on the path to improved rankings. Sure, you’ll still need to stay on top of the latest and greatest algorithm shuffles. It’s the nature of SEO, right? But when you write content that is truly valuable to your audience, the impacts are timeless. As a result, the content will continue supporting improved traffic, generate more leads, and get the results you need. 

Want to go beyond SEO Basics?

Yeah, we get it; there’s so much to know! We’ve compiled the most common SEO questions and provided our expert answers.

Hitting the #1 position in search results is every SEO marketer’s dream and low funnel keywords hold the key. With higher traffic and more page views, it’s only reasonable to expect a bump in conversions and sales. However, when that doesn’t happen, it leaves you asking: What went wrong? The answer is simple … not all traffic is good traffic.

We’ll give you an example. 

We have a Yahoo mail blog that has scored high-traffic keywords for almost a decade. At one point, we were in the top five search results for the term “Yahoo mail.” But here’s the question. What is the search intent of those visitors? It’s murky, isn’t it? 

One thing is for sure, though: search intent isn’t aligned with marketing automation, which is what we do here at Act-On. The challenge is that fragmented intent doesn’t deliver targeted traffic. 

And that brings us to strategically aligning keywords with the marketing funnel and, more specifically, low funnel keywords. 

Introduction to Keyword Funnels & Keyword Research

As you probably know, there are three stages of the buyer’s journey: awareness, consideration, and decision. When creating content, you want to align your content with specific stages in the customer journey and strategically choose keywords based on that. 

We’d argue that when you can sprinkle in solid bottom funnel keywords, you’ll get more focused and profitable traffic. Here’s a quick breakdown of the stages to better understand the value of lower funnel keywords. 

Top Funnel Keywords: Awareness

Let’s kick things off with an example. A B2B marketer is struggling to do more with less. At this stage, the marketer is learning, researching, and becoming aware of potential solutions. An example of top funnel keywords she might search include “How to improve marketing productivity” or “How to scale a marketing department.” 

Middle Funnel Keywords: Consideration 

Staying with the same example, the marketer decides she is interested in marketing automation. She narrows potential options by visiting provider websites, reading third-party reviews, talking with peers, and possibly attending trade shows to check out solutions in person. At the middle funnel keywords stage, she might search for “Top marketing automation solutions.” 

Lower Funnel Keywords: Decision

The buyer has finally reached the last stage in her journey. She has thoroughly researched solutions and is close to making a decision. At this point, she might search for lower funnel keywords such as “How to buy a marketing automation solution” or “What to look for in a marketing automation demo.” 

SEO Funnel Explained

Certainly, keywords at all stages of the buying cycle are important — from top funnel keywords to lower funnel keywords. But oftentimes marketers use SEO for the top and middle of the funnel, but not as much for the bottom of the funnel. And the reason we love terms at the bottom of the funnel is that prospects are very close to purchasing. With B2B sales cycles getting longer, this is a critical point. 

So, where do you start? 

First, select a “seed word.” This word is a general term that describes your topic. For the above example, we might select “marketing automation.”  

Type the term into your SEO research tool (we use SEMRush, but there are plenty of others — Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, and more). Look for long-tail keywords, which are expanded and targeted phrases. For example, “marketing automation” is a seed word, but “how to purchase marketing automation tools” is a long-tail keyword. 

In addition to choosing long-tail keywords, you’ll also want your SEO funnel to include words that signal intent to purchase. A few examples: 

• Buy
• Book
• Test 
• Hire 

Here is how those words might be used in a long-tail keyword: 

• How to buy marketing automation tools
• How to book a marketing automation demo
• How to test marketing automation software
• The best way to hire a marketing automation expert 

You get the point. But the key thing to remember is that with these keywords, the audience is signaling they’re very close to purchase. 

Planning & Publishing your Content 

When planning your content, decide where the content fits into the customer journey. Does an asset support awareness, consideration, or decision? Once you do this, you can align the content with the right keywords. 

A few bottom-of-the-funnel content examples:

• White papers
• Comparison/spec sheets
• Webinars
• Demos and free trials 

For example, let’s say you create a webinar featuring industry experts giving their insights about what to look for in a marketing automation demo. The content includes insider expertise, current research, and more. Screams bottom of the funnel, right? 

After the webinar, you repurpose the content into a blog post featuring highlights from the event, and you use those bottom funnel keywords (e.g., “How to buy a marketing automation platform”).

It’s also worth mentioning that your bottom-of-the-funnel content should always have a strategic CTA. What do you want your audience to do? Some options for bottom-of-the-funnel CTAs include scheduling a demo or signing up for a free trial. Whatever action you choose, make sure it moves the prospect closer to the purchase finish line. 

Landing More Targeted Traffic

If your marketing goals include increasing website traffic and conversions, integrating lower funnel keywords into your content is a powerful strategy. Sure, you might pass on keywords that have the potential to bring 5,000+ visitors to your site monthly. But are they the right visitors? If not, a keyword that brings 300 targeted, bottom funnel visitors is way more valuable, right?

And we realize that, yes, SEO can be confusing. Consider starting small, experimenting, measuring results, and pivoting if needed. You can also leverage resources like Act-On’s SEO audit tool to more effectively optimize content and improve search engine rankings. And if you need a little extra SEO guidance, check out our comprehensive guide, which helps untangle the most common marketing questions around SEO to get you on the right track to meeting your goals.

For most companies, ensuring their website is safe and secure is a key component of meeting this expectation. Consumers want to know that basic activities such as filling out a form or downloading an asset won’t compromise their personal information. And companies need to ensure that they are using the right tools and fulfilling all the requirements necessary to make this happen. 

At the top of that list of requirements is obtaining an SSL certificate for your website. This certification is a must for organizations that want to ensure the safe transfer of information. 

Chances are you want to know a bit more about SSL certificates before you run off to get one for your website. Today, we’re going to demystify the world of SSL certificates by walking you through why you need one for your website, how to get it, and how the right tools can ensure that you’re on top of the renewal process. 

What Is An SSL Certificate and Why Does Your Company Need It? 

An SSL certificate is designed to verify the identity of a website owner and ensure that all confidential information and data transferred between the user and website owner is encrypted so that it remains private and secure. In doing so, an SSL certificate helps give both companies and their customers peace of mind that all the necessary actions to prevent hackers and scammers from accessing and stealing sensitive information are being taken.

Some of the information that SSL certificates help to protect include: 

• Credit card and bank details
• Name, address, phone number, and social security number
• Medical documents
• Legal documents

In a world where a large percentage of transactions are performed online, SSL certification is a must-have for any organization, regardless of their industry. Even simple (but essential) consumer actions like filling out a form to download an asset can make a website visitor afraid that their data will be misused. Reassuring your customers that their information is secure and will only be used for the purpose you’ve both agreed to will help your organization establish credibility and trust. 

What Are the Requirements for an SSL Certificate and How Do You Obtain One? 

Organizations and website owners can purchase SSL certificates through Certification Authorities (CAs). Organizations can usually purchase these directly from their web host for an additional fee, but they have to remember to renew them on a regular basis.

Currently, there are three different types of certificates — all of which involve their own application process: 

• Domain validated: This type of certificate is the most simple and is only intended to verify the owner of the website. Pretty much anybody with an email can obtain this type of certification, making it a popular choice among scammers and cybercriminals (and much less trustworthy). 
• Organizationally validated: These certificates are designed for websites that deal with transactions that pose a lower level of risk. To obtain this type of certificate, organizations must verify the name of their organization, location, and domain. 
• Extended validation: This certificate offers the highest level of security and is the best choice for organizations handling highly-sensitive information and data. Businesses that wish to obtain this certification must undergo a thorough review process. 

Ultimately, the SSL certificate you choose will depend on the needs of your organization and the level of trust you wish to instill among your audience. 

How Does Act-On Help Make SSL Certification Easy? 

Unfortunately, obtaining an SSL certificate can be time-consuming and usually isn’t on most marketers’ radar. Thankfully, Act-On makes SSL Certification easier than ever. All Act-On customers (with the exception of those on Oregon AWS HA Proxy) can take advantage of our automatic SSL certification process, saving them the time and cost of obtaining a new certification.

The best part is that you don’t have to jump through hoops to implement this service. Our Professional Services team will work with you to collect key information and make sure your SSL certificate is up and running. The certificates are good for 90 days and automatically renew every 60 days — freeing you of this tedious manual task while ensuring that your organization’s website certification is always up to date. 

Act-On Can Help You Improve Website Traffic, Build Credibility, and So Much More!

Ensuring your website is safe and secure is just one component of an effective business strategy. Act-On makes it easy for your team to comply with security requirements so that you can focus your time and efforts on developing and launching marketing efforts that pack a punch and have an impact on your bottom line. 

If you’d like to learn more about Act-On’s SSL Certification process and how we can help you improve website traffic, build credibility, and drive conversions, please schedule a demo with one of our marketing automation experts.

Therefore, SEO includes understanding user intent and how to get helpful, relevant content in front of those users in a way that is easy for them to access. But getting to that point requires a fundamental understanding of where you currently stand — which is why, today, we’re going to discuss how to perform an SEO audit in 4 easy steps. 

But first…

Why Is SEO Important?

SEO can get extremely complicated, as there are literally hundreds of variables at play, but nailing down the fundamentals can help you drastically improve the way that Google and other search engines crawl your site, interpret your content, and rank your pages.

From a 30,000 foot perspective, these variables include (but are certainly not limited to):

Technical SEO

• Page speed
• Crawl errors
• Mobile responsivity
• Secure URLs (HTTPS)
• Duplicate Meta Tags
• Broken links

On-Page SEO

• URL length
• Keyword placement in title and header tags
• Keyword placement within the first paragraph
• Image alt-tags
• Tag modifiers (long-tail keywords)
• Keyword variance
• External and internal links

Content SEO

• Content placement and promotion
• Content layout and structure
• Mix of content types
  • Short-form/long-form
  • Thought leadership/promotional
  • Blogs, webpages, eBooks, infographics, success stories, video, podcasts
  • Evergreen/timely
• Schema markup
• Link-building

There’s so much more to take into account, but focusing on the elements above is a great place to start when conducting an SEO audit.

At this point, a lot of you might already be feeling a little overwhelmed and wondering whether performing an SEO audit is even worth it. 

It definitely is, and here’s why: 

• 67% of all clicks go to the first five organic results on a SERP (1), so ranking above the fold is essential to capturing the bulk of the traffic you’re trying to rank for.
• 70% of marketers say SEO is more effective at driving sales than PPC (2), which should be music to your ears if you’re a modern marketer who would rather not pay for leads.
• That said, PPC can (and should) inform your SEO efforts, as 86% of marketers use data from their PPC campaigns to support their SEO strategy (3).
• Page speed is a vital factor for Google rankings even for the most well-known brands, as evidenced by the BBC losing 10% of users for each additional second their site took to load (4).
• 72% of consumers who perform a local search (e.g., “doughnuts near me”) visited a store within five miles of their location (5).

These numbers underscore the importance of how good SEO helps create great user experiences and customer journeys. When potential consumers can find what they need when they need it and are nurtured through the sales cycle with helpful, non-promotional content, they’re more likely to visit these sites and pages again and again, which increases reputation and ranking (not to mention content marketing ROI). 

Now that we’ve established the value of SEO, let’s take a look at how to establish a working baseline by learning how to perform an SEO audit in 4 easy steps!

*Note, you should perform an SEO audit every 6-12 months to gauge your progress, pitfalls, and opportunities.

1) Crawl Your Website

The first step in any SEO audit is to crawl your website using one of these SEO tools:

• Ahrefs
• SEMrush
• Screaming Frog (free, but with a max crawl of 500 URLs)

All of these tools will crawl your site within a matter of minutes and provide a detailed report of critical errors, such as:

• Broken links
• Duplicate content
• Orphaned pages
• Bad images
• Poor keywords
• Title and header tagging issues
• And much more

After downloading one of the applications listed above, review the crawling criteria, enter your site’s URL, and click start! Pretty easy, right? Not only will your report detail the errors above, but it will also show you how often Google crawls your site and the pages it crawls most frequently. 

You should also manually spot-check your webpages periodically by searching for webpages, blogs, and other digital properties using the keywords you’ve designated for those pages. A good rule of thumb is to check new pages two weeks after launching, make necessary adjustments, and then review your progress again after six weeks to see if additional updates are necessary. From there, you can add these pages to your regular SEO audit cadence. 

Lastly, you need to verify that search engines are only crawling one version of your website. If not, Google and its counterparts aren’t sure which site to crawl, which means they’re not sure which site to present on SERPs. For instance, you might have competing https and non-https site versions or you might have different desktop and mobile iterations.  

2) Time Your Site Speed

Here’s an interesting stat for you: 

Pages that load within two seconds have an average bounce rate of 9%, while pages that take five seconds to load have a bounce rate of 38% (6).

These numbers alone should be enough to make you recognize the importance of having a website with pages that load quickly. We’ve become shockingly impatient in the digital age, so every millisecond matters when it comes to quality SEO. 

To understand where you’re currently at with site speed and how that number compares with your competitors, use Google’s PageSpeed Insights. Simply click here, enter your URL, and click “Analyze.” After just a few seconds, Google will provide a report detailing your site’s speed on both desktop and mobile. Scroll below the fold for valuable optimization opportunities and diagnostics, then team with your webmaster to make the necessary changes for maximum performance.

Here are a few suggested best practices to increase your site speed:

• • Optimize your code by removing unnecessary characters, comments, formatting, etc.
  • Compress your files to reduce the size of your JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.
  • Eliminate render-blocking resources that require executing HTML parsing.
  • Reduce multiple redirects between pages to avoid additional waiting time via the HTTP request-response cycle.
  • Activate your website caching so that return visitors don’t have to wait to reload images, CSS, and JavaScript.
  • Use content distribution networks to store copies of your site at multiple data centers, providing faster access to diverse users.

3) Check Your On-Page SEO

Once you’ve crawled your site and identified major issues, it’s time to resolve your on-page SEO challenges. The most common examples involve:

Site Hierarchy and Structure 

The overall structure of your website will impact your SERP rankings (for better or worse) because, as a navigational blueprint, it’s the defining feature of the user experience. So, it’s important that you lay out your site in such a way that makes it easy for users to find what they’re looking for and for Google to understand what to crawl and how to crawl it. This means building or updating a site using: 

• Intuitive and simple logic that allows every user to reach their destination in 3 clicks or less
• 3-7 primary navigation categories
• 5-7 secondary navigation destinations
•  HTML or CSS code
• Consistent URL structures

If your site’s structure isn’t intuitive, the user experience will suffer, which will be reflected in key metrics that impact SEO (click-through rate, bounce rate, time on page, etc.). Further, Google rewards websites with great structure by creating sitelinks on SERPs that lead to key product, blog, about, and contact pages, so a well-structured website is crucial if you want to guide your target audience through every step of the buyer journey.

Duplicate Title and Header Tags

As we’ve discussed before, repurposing content is okay — encouraged, even! Duplicating content, especially in the form of title and header tags, however, places you on extremely dangerous SEO ground. 

If you’re using the same tags on multiple pages, you’re giving search engines mixed messages that they’re unable to interpret, which means they’re going to crawl and rank whichever page they deemed to have better SEO. So, for example, if you’re using the same tags on a product page (high conversion value) and a blog page (less conversion value), it’s possible that the blog page might rank higher than the product page. Not good, folks. 

To fix the problem, go to the “Search Appearance” section in the Google Search Console and click “HTML Improvements.” If you have duplicate tags, they’ll show up here. Then, just hop into the backend of your site and make on-page copy adjustments as necessary. But be considerate and intentional as you do so. Title and header tags are a major SEO contributor, so make sure you’re using relevant keywords that are proven to resonate with your audience.

Or, if the page(s) with a duplicate title tag is outdated and no longer relevant, you can set up a 301 redirect to the newer, more relevant page. 

Missing Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions don’t directly impact your SERP rankings, but delivering an optimal user experience that improves key performance indicators (clicks, time on page, etc.) definitely does. And since adding expressive meta descriptions that clearly introduce the content on the page significantly improve the user experience, they likewise have the power to improve SEO. 

Therefore, every page on your website needs to have a unique and vivid meta description that: 

• Is roughly 150 characters long
• Includes a close variant of that page’s primary keyword 
• Gives an accurate preview of what the user can expect when they click on the SERP link. 

If you don’t include meta descriptions, users will be less likely to click on your link and more likely to bounce if they do because they won’t be prepared for what they’re presented with. Any way you slice it, failing to include a meta description will hurt your SEO efforts.

Primary and Secondary Keyword Placement

While not quite as important as they used to be, keywords remain the lifeblood of your SEO initiatives. As such, you need to designate a primary (or focus) keyword for each page and also determine secondary keywords to use throughout your copy, header tags, and alt-text. To help search engines decipher the main purpose of the page, you should include the primary keyword in your title tag, H1 tag, meta description, and the first body paragraph on the page. 

In the past, lazy content creators were able to sneak one past the goalie by stuffing their pages full of keywords to achieve higher site rankings. But this made for some pretty funny (i.e., terrible) copywriting and a horrible user experience, so Google updated its algorithm to not only ignore keyword stuffing but also actively penalize people who tried to use this black hat tactic.

4) Review and Update Link and Backlinks

The links on your site should align with your overall site structure and hierarchy, helping users navigate smoothly from page to page to learn more and explore your solutions to their needs, interests, and pain points. However, pages that are moved or deleted will result in broken links, which is one of the most common reasons for a high bounce rate — not ideal for SEO success. 

To check for broken links, head back to the Google Search Console and look for any “crawl errors” on your dashboard. You should be greeted with a full list of broken links that you can fix by either updating to a new destination or removing entirely. 

In addition, external websites that link back to your content (backlinking) can vastly improve SEO, especially if those sites already have good authority with Google. For example, a backlink from Nike is going to be far more beneficial than a backlink from your uncle’s cobbler shop in rural Delaware. 

This SEO phenomenon is known as “link juice” and actually seems to carry more weight than good and relevant keyword usage. Basically, when a page with good authority links to your page, they transfer some of the goodwill they’ve built with various search engines to that page. It’s a “Standing on the shoulders of giants” kind of thing, but they’re friendly giants who appreciate your hard work, so it’s all good.

You can use Ahrefs or SEMrush to perform backlink audits that will reveal your link profile, opportunities for more and better links, and even competitive analysis. If your analysis indicates that you’re not where you need to be with this SEO strategy, here are a few helpful tips to get more backlinks (and more link juice):

• Create and distribute useful content
• Develop content for specific audience segments
• Seek out guest posting opportunities with industry leaders
• Explore co-marketing opportunities with your industry partners
• Mention brands you admire in your content and on your social media profiles
• Quoting memorable brand leaders in your content (with proper attribution, of course)

Achieving good backlinks is easier said than done, but it’s well worth the effort if you have the time and resources to commit to executing a long-term backlinking strategy.

Act-On’s Audit Tool Can Expedite the Process With More Actionable Insights

Now that you know how to perform a quick, easy, and actionable SEO audit, what are you waiting for? Start improving your site’s performance today, and watch the relevant, high-intent traffic come rolling in! Better yet, before you do, reach out to one of our marketing automation experts to learn more about Act-On’s SEO Audit Tool.

If you’re not quite ready to have that discussion, but you’d like to keep reading about the importance of SEO and how to improve content engagement on your digital properties, please download our eBook, “Personalizing the Web Experience: The Key to Better Customer Interaction and Engagement on Your Website.” In it, you’ll learn why personalizing your content is so important, how to customize your content for your various audience segments, and how machine learning can help place the perfect asset in front of the right user at the ideal time!

But why exactly is having a solid website so important to the customer experience? To start, this foundational asset is where many of your prospects and leads first go to become acquainted with your brand and offerings. A poorly designed website that is difficult to navigate is sure to leave a bad taste in their mouths and motivate them to look for answers to their questions elsewhere. 

Your website is also where leads are able to gather critical information that enables them to narrow down exactly what they need and keep progressing through the customer journey. So, even if your bad website manages to capture a lead’s interest, poor navigation and user experience design might discourage them from doing business with you as they finalize their decision. 

Today we’re on a mission to help you get your website in excellent shape. Keep reading to learn 3 common website pitfalls to avoid and what you can do to fix them. 

HTTP Error Codes Ruin the User Experience and Damage Your SEO

One of the worst things that can happen as a customer navigates a website is encountering an HTTP error code. For leads that are navigating your website, encountering an HTTP error code (such as a missing web page) creates a disruption in the customer journey and can result in them missing out on critical information that would have helped them make an informed decision. Even worse, if this is the first time a prospect attempts to visit your website, encountering an error code could motivate them to simply navigate away, resulting in a total loss of opportunity.
But the customer experience is just part of the equation. Too many error codes can seriously wreak havoc on your SEO, making it nearly impossible for potential leads to find you in the first place. If your competitors are showing up in that #1 or #2 spot on a search engine results page (SERP) and your website is not listed until the second page of the search rankings, you’re at a severe disadvantage. 

Taking action to fix any existing errors will improve your SEO and guide customers to the information they need. 

How to Fix HTTP Error Codes: 

Unfortunately, HTTP error codes actually don’t tell you much at all about what is wrong with your website. So, unless you’re a seasoned web developer and know the ins and outs of your website, these errors can make you feel pretty helpless. 

To be clear, not all codes should signal an alarm, but you should take action when you encounter those ranging in the 400s and 500s. Here’s what they mean for your website and what you can do about them. 

400s (Page Missing or Not Found)

Http error codes in the 400s refer to pages that are currently missing from your website or completely gone. The two most common errors you are likely to encounter are 404 errors (Page Not Found) and 410 errors (Missing). 

For 404 errors, a common practice is to create 301 redirects, but many organizations make the cardinal sin of simply sending visitors back to the homepage, which confuses the heck out of both Google and your users. To avoid disrupting the customer journey, make sure that you redirect users to relevant content. For example, if the page missing originally linked to a blog called “The 10 Best Running Shoes Under $100,” then you should try to link to another piece of content that discusses affordable running shoe options. 

410 errors refer to a page that is missing and does not redirect visitors to another resource on your website. The best way to deal with these is to remove any remaining links on your website that point to pages with 410 errors to avoid sending visitors and bots to information that is no longer available. 

500s (Server Error)

Error codes in the 500 range usually mean there is an internal server error or that the server is unavailable. These errors prevent both search engines and potential customers from finding you, so it’s important to determine their cause and resolve any issues as soon as possible. 

Because 500 errors are a bit more complex, a good place to start is working with your web developer to find the root cause. But, let’s say you’re a one-to-two person marketing team without an in-house web developer; there are still resources available to get to the bottom of this problem. I myself had a 500 internal service error pop up on my personal website and was unable to even log in to my instance of WordPress.org. I contacted the lovely people at my website hosting provider and they fixed my problem in only a matter of minutes. 

Your Website Lacks Keywords and Language That Resonates With Your Audience

Failing to have the right keywords is another common website pitfall that impacts the visitor experience and your SEO. When your website isn’t packed with keywords and optimized to rank high in search, your target audience may never know you exist or that you can provide solutions to some of their greatest challenges. 

But, let’s say that your potential customers do manage to find you despite your low search ranking, failing to have top-ranking words or phrases can still put you at a great disadvantage. If the language that permeates your website doesn’t resonate with the terms and phrases your visitors use on an everyday basis, they might not be able to see the value in what you have to offer. 

The lesson here is that being able to speak the language of your audience is key to creating a seamless customer experience that allows your potential customers to find you, understand how you can solve their problem, and easily convert when they’re ready.

How to Fix Poor Keywords and Messaging

Knowing who you’re talking to is the first step toward building a website that speaks to your audience. Before you begin putting pen to paper and developing your website headlines and copy, start by building out your customer personas. 

Why is this step so important? Having an idea of who your prospective customers are and what is important to them in the decision-making process will make it that much easier to map your website and create relevant content. When you know your customers, what they do, and what their pain points are, you can get more targeted with your communications. 

Once you have a general idea of who your customers are and what content they’ll be searching for, it’s time to flesh out your efforts by making sure you’re using the right keywords and phrases. Performing keyword research and making sure that the headlines and content reference the terms and phrases your audience is searching for will tremendously improve your SEO and engagement on your website. If your visitors can find you and understand what you’re trying to say once they’re on your website, they’ll be more quick to understand your value, know what you want them to do, and keep moving down the sales funnel. 

You don’t have to have an in-house SEO person or hire an outside agency to get you started. Act-On’s SEO Tool can help you ensure that your landing pages are fully optimized with high-ranking keywords so that you can put your best foot forward and make a good impression with both search engine bots and leads. 

Guide Your Audience to Valuable Content 

It makes sense to put key information front and center on your website, but too many organizations are afraid that doing so will make them seem desperate and scare their customers away. The truth is quite the opposite –– hiding valuable content on your website will only encourage your visitors to navigate away and cause you to miss out on some amazing opportunities.
Even organizations that are eager and willing to promote their products, services, and messaging are misplacing content, and that’s largely due to their failure to understand the customer journey. Your website should be structured in a way that is intuitive, and key information shouldn’t be more than one-to-two clicks away from any given position on the site. Understanding your customers thought process –– how they’ll arrive from one piece of information to the next –– will help you create a website that is intuitive and efficiently guides customers to the answers they’re looking for. 

How to Fix Your Website Content Placement 

To avoid this pitfall, start by reviewing your customer personas. Consider the types of content each of your ideal audience groups are looking for and the best way for them to arrive at that final destination (whether it’s filling out a form or scheduling time to talk to one of your experts). 

To continuously optimize the customer experience, it’s important to review and analyze your data. Looking at how pages on your website are performing will tell you a lot about how customers are enjoying your website and whether your pages are serving you well when it comes to generating engagement and driving conversions. 

For example, Google Analytics can tell you if there are certain pages that have a particularly high bounce rate. While this could sometimes indicate that your visitors have gotten the information they need, that is rarely the case. Unless you notice some sort of conversion coming from the page, such as filling out a form or scheduling a demo, chances are your visitors have simply hit a dead end. If you want to get as detailed as possible with your efforts, Act-On’s Data Studio can save you the pain of toggling between platforms by consolidating your website and campaign data all in one place and giving you a full view into the customer journey. 

Finally, you can further optimize the website customer experience by providing targeted content recommendations as visitors navigate your website, effectively guiding customers to where they need to be if they do happen to stray. Act-On’s Adaptive Web tracks customer behavior to provide tailored content recommendations as visitors browse your site. This solution is great because it allows you to get very targeted with your recommendations without the lift usually involved in implementing other similar solutions. 

Your Website Is Only One Piece of the Puzzle

Your website is important, but it’s only one piece of the customer experience. If you truly want to create a cohesive customer journey from beginning to end, you have to consider how your website fits alongside your other marketing efforts. 

These tips will put you on the right path toward optimizing your website, but there are so many other things you can do to ensure it’s set up in a way that helps you meet your goals. If you’d like to learn more about how to leverage your website to increase engagement and drive conversions, check out our eBook “Personalizing the Web Experience.” 

And, if you’re ready to focus on the bigger picture and learn how you can leverage your website to align with other marketing tactics, we invite you to talk to one of our marketing automation experts. They’ll be more than happy to show you how marketing automation can help you consolidate and innovate all your marketing efforts.

We live in a digital age where our customers know that the solutions to their pain points are a quick search away and have become accustomed to receiving fast and reliable service from their chosen vendors. That means that companies have to be willing and ready to deliver relevant content, information, and solutions at a moment’s notice to capture their target customer’s attention and generate conversions. 

However, when your website is not optimized to match your users’ needs, providing customers with the type of experience they have come to expect becomes much more difficult. If customers have to wait too long to get what they want and need or can’t find what they’re looking for, they’ll likely look for solutions elsewhere. But failing to optimize your website to match customer preferences doesn’t just affect bounce rates; it also impacts order size, customer satisfaction, SEO rankings, and your ability to gain conversions. 

In other words, if you’re not seeing the results you want, it might not necessarily mean that it’s time to overhaul your marketing strategy. The solution to your demand and lead generation goals could be as simple as taking the steps necessary to make your website faster and create a more enjoyable browsing experience for your customers. 

Today, we’re going to walk you through 5 things you should focus on to do just that. 

1) Measure the Speed of Your Website and Optimize Accordingly

Your site can have the best content, SEO, and design, but all it takes to make your bounce rates skyrocket is a slow page loading time. Your target customers want quick answers to their most pressing questions, and having to wait around — even if it’s only for a second or two — can motivate them to look for a solution elsewhere.  

The good news is that even if your page load time is very slow, there are tools that can help you measure performance and determine the best course of action. To start, you should check out Think with Google’s Test My Site tool. This handy tool will help you evaluate your website and give you pointers on what you can do to optimize it for speed. You can even generate a report so your team can review recommendations and collaborate to develop an appropriate plan of action. Google Analytics is another essential tool for reviewing the performance of your website on an ongoing basis. Analytics actually has three different reports related to speed.

To view them:

• Log into your account
• Go to “Your View” 
• Click on the“Reporting” tab
• Select “Behavior”
• Click on the section that says “Site Speed” 

Of course, you shouldn’t wait for your website speed to decrease before taking action. Following these best practices will help you keep page speed fast and avoid a complete website overhaul in the future: 

• Optimize your images: Create images according to the maximum size you’ll need them for. Save them in a web-friendly format and at the minimum size that will still render properly.
• For WordPress sites, keep plugins to a minimum: It’s easy to feel like a kid in a candy store with all the cool plugins available on WordPress. However, you should aim to keep plugins at a minimum and only install those that will be most useful to you. Check your plugins on a regular basis to see if they still work, and disable and delete them if they don’t. 
• Minimize redirects: Do you (or your staff) create, redirect, and then delete lots of pages? Consider breaking this habit. Any more than a couple of redirects can significatly slow a site. 
• Set up Google PageSpeed on your site: It’s free, Google approved, and highly effective at helping you optimize your pages.

2) Optimize Your Website Content for SEO

You can’t begin to provide your customers with an enjoyable website experience if they don’t make it to your website in the first place. SEO – and your ability to speak the language of search engines and, most importantly, your consumers – is essential to helping you drive qualified leads to your website. Using appropriate keywords that will help your content rank higher in Google Search and are relevant to your industry and customers will help individuals who are interested in what you offer to find you more easily. 

One thing to keep in mind with SEO is that not all keywords carry the same weight. Using tools like Moz and Google Keyword Planner can help you determine which keywords are trending with (and matter most) to your audience. Make sure to embed these keywords naturally in content that is housed on relevant pages throughout your website. 

If you use WordPress, you can also use the Yoast plugin to ensure that your meta-descriptions, images, URL, and pages are optimized as a whole — improving your chances of showing up higher in the search rankings. More importantly, in doing so, you’ll ensure that you’re speaking the language of your consumer at all times. 

Act-On’s SEO Audit Tool lets you optimize pages on your website and special landing pages built within the platform. This way, you can ensure all your pages can easily be found by search engines and your audience alike. 

3) Optimize Your Website to Align With the Customer Journey

Nothing is worse than having great content but putting it somewhere on your website where your audience simply can’t find it. This mistake will not only prevent you from engaging your customers and seeing results, but it will also frustrate users as they try to find the resources they need to make an informed purchasing decision. 

When laying out your website, consider the multitude of customer journeys that might exist for your target audience and plan accordingly. Consider what matters most to your customers or what they’ll likely be looking for before embarking on their journey, and put those items front and center on your navigation bar. Think about the subsequent actions that your leads are likely to take and arrange your pages accordingly, making sure links to any information they need as they progress through the customer journey are only a click away.

If you’re an Act-On customer, our Website Visitor Tracking tool gives you insight into the behavior of individual visitors. This allows you to better understand how leads are interacting with your website based on a variety of factors — such as industry, role at their organization, and product interest. These insights not only help you relay useful insights to Sales when the time comes to talk, but also give you an opportunity to see if there are certain aspects of your website (such as specific content and CTAs) that are resonating with your customers — and others that are not. 

4) Provide Customers With Personalized Recommendations Everywhere They Go

While you can structure your website to account for numerous customer journeys, there are always customers that go off the beaten path. This is especially common when you’re dealing with top-of-funnel leads that simply don’t know what they want or need to begin with. They might be engaging with anything and everything on your website trying to find a solution.

In these situations, your job is to reel them back in and get them to focus. The best way to do that is to take note of any specific trends in their browsing behavior and serving them relevant content that matches these interests.

Act-On’s Adaptive Web solution is an easy-to-install plugin that can help you do both these things with minimal effort. This AI-driven website personalization solution provides your visitors with targeted content recommendations as they navigate your website and you learn more about them. This tactic improves engagement and time on site, allowing you to keep great opportunities from slipping away. 

5) Provide Clear and Easy to Complete CTAs

All this work to create an enjoyable website browsing experience is only worth it if you’re able to motivate your visitors to convert. But this is only possible if they’re clear on what you want them to do and can complete that action easily and efficiently. 

Follow these best practices to ensure that you capture an email, secure a meeting, or drive a sale.

• Place Your CTAs Where Customers Can See Them: Your leads can’t complete an action if they can’t find your CTA to begin with. Placing your CTAs where they easily catch your customers’ eye is key to driving conversions.  
• Ensure Your CTAs Are Clear and Concise: Your CTAs should convey to your customers what you want them to do and what they’ll get if they follow your prompt. Phrases such as “Download Our eBook” or “Talk to an Expert” clearly and briefly communicate the offer your customers can expect to receive once they hand over their information. 
• Make It Easy for Contacts to Complete Your Request: Including too many fields in your conversion forms might lead your prospects away from the page. Implementing Adaptive Forms is an easy and effective way to capture the information you need to nurture your customers without overwhelming them. These forms use progressive profiling, which means they take into account the data you’ve already collected, enabling you to limit form fields while capturing new information with every conversion. 

If you’d like more tips on how to craft CTAs that convert, check out our recent blog post.

Make Sure You’re Equipped to Engage With Customers Beyond Your Site

Creating an enjoyable customer experience on your website is just the first step toward gaining conversions and nurturing qualified leads into loyal customers. If you want to keep the momentum going once your audience leaves your site, you have to use the contact information you’ve captured to continue to engage and educate your customers as they move down the sales funnel. 

Act-On enables you to do just that by providing the tools and resources you need to capture important customer insights and deliver a tailored customer experience. We empower you to nurture customers via automated nurture campaigns, social media, and customized landing pages. Our platform even equips your sales team with valuable information to help them seal the deal when the time comes to talk business. 

Interested in how we do it? Schedule a time to talk with one of our experts to learn more. Or, if you’d like to learn why Gartner named Act-On a Visionary in the 2019 Magic Quadrant for CRM Lead Management, download the full report below!

Whether you’re a marketer or your organization’s webmaster, you’re probably heavily invested in your website’s performance. After all, it is one of the most important tools your company has at its disposal to help attract and nurture prospects and customers alike. 

When you’re website is performing at it’s best, it helps you rank high in Google search — which allows new leads to find you easily, empowers you to nurture them through the customer journey, and helps you gain valuable insights to close the deal. But for your website to do all this, it’s essential that you continuously optimize it and fix any issues preventing you from achieving the results you want.

Google Search Console offers you reports and data about technical aspects of your site, messages from Google, and graphs to track your site’s performance in search. These insights and reports are extremely useful when you know what to do with them. But we completely understand that, despite the wealth of information and resources available within this tool, navigating Search Console can be pretty intimidating if you’re new to the world of website optimization. 

That’s why we’re on a mission today to help you demystify this tool so you can better understand and leverage it. Keep reading to learn more.

Before You Start, Make Sure to Validate Ownership of Your Site

If you’re new to Google Search Console, you’ll need to validate the ownership of your site before you start using it. After logging in with a Google account to Google Search Console, you’ll see a button that says “Add Property.” Click the button to start your authorization process for each version of your site (http, https, www, and non-www versions). Once you’ve validated all versions of your website, you can then authorize other users at your organization to be added to your account.

Website access to execute authentication may vary depending on your role at your organization. That’s why Google gives you five handy ways to work around any possible access or knowledge gaps that might exist. You can authenticate your site for Search Console by:

• Uploading an HTML file to your site (the Google recommended path)
• Adding a meta tag to your site’s homepage
• Logging into your domain name provider
• Using Google Analytics (if you’re using the right code)
• Using Google Tag Manager (if you have Tag Manager installed and in the right place). 

Navigating Your Website’s Dashboard on Search Console

Once you’ve authenticated your website, you’ll be able to access your site’s dashboard by logging into Google Search Console’s homepage. Below are some key features you should pay extra attention to. 

• Recent Messages: This leads you to an inbox where you can find all messages that are directly from Google. These messages include suggestions on how to improve your website’s performance and notifications about spam or malicious activity found on your site. Keeping on top of these suggestions and notifications will ensure peak site performance. 
• Manage Property: This section allows you to add/remove users or delete a property. Website owners or admins can provide access to others on a full or restricted basis. Restricted will allow for read-only access, while full allows you to submit and make changes on the website owner’s behalf.
• Website URL: Clicking on the URL links will take you to the dashboard where your data is for that particular website property. You should pay extra attention to the areas below when you navigate to this section of Google Search Console.
  • New and important: This will show you any new messages you receive from Google. 
  • Crawl Errors: Clicking on “Crawl Errors” will show you a list of any pages on your website where an error occurred while Google tried to crawl it. 
  • Search Analytics: This section will show you the number of clicks and visits to your website during the past 28 days. You can play around with dates to view and compare your website performance over time.

Key Google Search Console Data to Help You Leverage Your Website

There are a lot of data and resources available within Search Console to help you optimize your website, so it can be hard to know where to start if you’re new to the platform. Thankfully, Google understands this problem and provides you with a navigation menu — conveniently located on the left of your screen when you log in — to help you quickly access the tool’s most useful features. The four sections in this menu (described in more detail below) provide the information you need to analyze performance, identify security risks, and fix any issues.

• Search Appearance: When your website appears in a related search, there are a lot of things that can influence whether that user clicks your website link over another. The Search Appearance section of Google Search Console will show data to help you decide which changes to make to your website to improve your ranking and website visitor traffic. 
• Search Traffic: This section shows data for the traffic generated from search (desktop/mobile/tablet), the performance of your website when users don’t click, and the geographic location of the person performing the search. 
• Google Index: This section will help you identify and understand any issues Google has when it comes to understanding what your website is about and how it should show up in search. This is important because if a search engine has issues understanding and analyzing information on your website, it can result in reduced traffic or, sometimes, no traffic at all.
• Crawl: While indexing is the process of finding, analyzing, and storing information, crawling is the process a search engine executes when it discovers pages on your site. This section shows data detailing issues, if any, that Google has encountered when visiting and crawling your website. This section also allows you to indicate to Google and other search engines which pages to crawl and which to avoid.

How to Put the Information and Resources in Google Search Console to Good Use

The plethora of information available at your fingertips in Google Search Console can indicate good and bad news about your site. As you examine and familiarize yourself with each of the sections we outlined above, you’ll want to monitor them regularly to learn more about items that might need to be fixed on a site you manage. We’ve highlighted a few ways to leverage this information to get you started. 

Messages & Manual Actions

Google tends to share good and bad news with us in the messages section of Google Search Console. While helpful tidbits about how to improve performance might show up, there are also other messages Google might share.

For example, Google may notify you if your site has a manual webspam action against it; this notification indicates Google has found your site to contain malicious spam or violate Google’s Terms of Service, resulting in pages (or your entire site) being demoted or taken out of Google search completely. Instances like this can have a serious negative impact on your ability to attract new customers and generate ROI from your website. That’s why it’s important to stay on top of any messages you receive and take manual action when needed. 

Search Appearance: HTML Improvements

As Google crawls your website, it finds information in specific areas, such as meta titles and descriptions, that indicate what your page is about and influence SEO. In HTML Improvements, Google outlines specific meta data that may be duplicated, is too long or too short, missing, or non-informative to help you optimize your website pages. 

Search Analytics

Some of the most important information you’ll use to analyze performance can be found under Search Analytics. In this section you’ll: 

• Find out how many clicks from search engine pages occurred during a specific time period. Keep in mind that Google Search Console limits data to 90 days.
• Gain an understanding of the number of site impressions(times a website appeared in Google search results) your website has received recently.
• Be able to monitor your website’s click-through rate, which is the ratio of users who clicked on your website’s listing to those in total who saw it the search engine results page (SERP).
• Learn your site’s average position for specific keyword queries.

These metrics can be graphed in easy-to-read charts illustrating upward or downward trends. Google Search Console reports information about the specific keywords or landing page your site ranks for with these metrics, too. 

To make sure your website is always in its best shape, look for the following:

• Keywords or landing pages that see large dips in impressions, click-through-rates, or clicks
• Keywords that show a large decrease in average search position
• Keywords or landing pages that differ greatly in performance between mobile, desktop, or tablet views

Index Status

The number of pages you currently have in Google’s index should reflect the amount of content you publish and pages you keep live on your site. By examining the Index Status section of Search Console, you can discover increases or decreases in the total number of indexed pages over time. If you don’t know why a large increase or decrease happened when analyzing this information, it might be time to investigate.

Crawl Errors & Stats

As a search engine discovers pages on your site, it can encounter a few issues as it tries to gain access. In the Crawl Errors report, you’ll be notified of issues such as Server Errors, Soft 404s, and 404 Not Found pages for both mobile and desktop, which indicate the following errors on your site. 

• Server Errors can be caused by issues with your hosting provider. The crawler may experience an issue if your hosting provider goes down and pages cannot be found.
• Soft 404s are errors resulting from URLs not existing on your site. In these instances, the pages don’t exist and your site isn’t showing a 404 error.
• 404 Not Found notifications are errors indicating a page does not exist. It shows the user a 404 page and indicates the page is no longer there. 

Crawl Stats indicate the rate at which a crawler is finding pages, pages crawled per day (high and low), the time it takes to download your page, and kilobytes downloaded in total. It’s important to analyze these stats over time for better insight into sudden spikes in traffic or time it takes to crawl your site, both of which could indicate issues that are worth investigating in more detail. After all, if search engines experience issues crawling your site, they very well could miss important information your prospective customers need to see.

Sitemaps

Every website should have a sitemap. If yours does not, I highly recommend building one today. A sitemap shows a search engine all of the pages on your site in a format that is simplified and easy for a bot to read and understand.  

In Google Search Console, web property owners can submit their sitemaps and monitor the number of pages submitted and subsequent pages Google indexes. Any errors encountered with the sitemap are shown in this section. Take note of large differences between the number of pages submitted and the number of pages indexed. A large difference may indicate an issue and should be investigated.

Security Issues & Other Resources

Spam is prevalent online, and the security of your website could be at risk if it is not managed correctly. Google takes precautions and communicates if they discover any indication of spam or security threats on your site. If Malware is detected, Google Search Console will indicate it in the Security Issues section. Be sure to monitor this area regularly and check out the other resources available, too.

Optimizing Your Website Takes Time and Effort

Search Console is an amazing resource for anyone managing or overseeing marketing activities related to a website. Without this useful tool, you’re missing out on in-depth information to help you improve the amount of traffic you get from organic search and, as a result, failing to capture great leads that help drive ROI. 

Optimizing your website, however, is only part of the equation. If you want to learn how you can do more with your website to engage visitors and keep them moving through the sales funnel, download our eBook, Personalizing the Web Experience: The Key to Better Customer Interaction and Engagement on Your Website (also linked below). In this useful guide, we’ll walk you through what you can do to engage and inspire visitors to convert once they’re actually on your site. 

The reason duplicate content is so tempting is that it seems so simple. No one will ever know, right? Wrong. The absolute most important player in the digital marketing game, Google, is already hip to what you’re trying to pull and will show no mercy.

Okay, but aren’t we shooting for brand consistency across the board, here? 

Sure, of course we are. But plagiarizing yourself (or far worse, plagiarizing others) because you don’t have the time or creativity to replicate good work with unique messaging isn’t brand consistency; it’s laziness. And in marketing, as in all things, laziness can have serious consequences. 

Brand consistency isn’t about repeating specific messaging over and over again; it’s about establishing a universal tone, voice, and perspective across your internal and external communications. Therefore, we should look at duplicate content as the proverbial hot stove: don’t touch it, and you won’t get burned. 

But what exactly is duplicate content? How can it hurt your SEO efforts? And what are some good alternatives for repurposing effective, well-written content?

Let’s find out!

What Is Duplicate Content and How Can It Damage Your SEO?

In simplest terms, duplicate content is any content that appears on more than one web page with a unique URL. If you’re saying the same thing and using the same words on multiple pages, you’re a duplicate content offender. In fact, one study showed that nearly 30% of web pages include duplicate content (1). This is problematic for several reasons.

Any content that Google deems “appreciably similar” will make it difficult for search engines to determine which page is serving up the most appropriate content when users search for those topics. Specifically, duplicate content makes it hard for search engine crawlers to understand which page they should rank higher based on query results — and, oftentimes, they’re not even sure which version (or versions) should be included in their indices. As a result, none of the pages housing this duplicate content will rank as high as they could if the content wasn’t duplicated. This can wreak havoc for your organization, your various web properties, and, of course, your potential prospects (who won’t be able to find the information they’re looking for).

Another unintended negative consequence of duplicate content is that it can damage your link equity (sometimes referred to as “link juice”) — a search engine ranking factor based on how the ranking authority of one page can potentially transfer to a separate page when the “larger” page links to the “smaller” page. When other sites want to link to your content, they have to choose which page to link to, which means you’re not getting the full benefit of referral traffic to your preferred page.

Let’s say a major trade publication knows that your manufacturing company is a pioneer in your industry and wants to link to a services page on your site that explains a complicated process in a way that is concise and easy to understand. However, about a month ago, you decided that the page was so well written, so insightful, and was driving so much traffic that you should repurpose the page to write a blog. 

On its face, this is a great idea. We strongly encourage repurposing content whenever possible.

The problem is that you didn’t take that topic and rewrite it as an evergreen article with a new and original take; you copy and pasted the entire thing and published it on your blog. Now you essentially have two of the exact same pages on your website, which not only means that Google will struggle to determine which should rank higher but also that the aforementioned trade publication might link to the blog rather than your service page. While you definitely want your blog to rank highly, your service pages will provide far more value to your bottom line (that’s what they’re designed to do, after all), which means you just squandered a golden opportunity to leverage that glorious link juice!

How Does Duplicate Content Happen?

In many instances, like the hypothetical scenario outlined above, duplicate content occurs as a result of a basic lack of knowledge around SEO best practices. However, it’s rarely intentional and can happen in a number of different ways.

• Internet Plagiarists: When people steal and repost your content on their pages, Google might not know which one to index or reward and mistakenly grant higher page rank to the imposter.  The problem is that most people never realize there’s a problem. There are literally trillions of web pages out there, so you can’t monitor them all. If you find your content verbatim on another site, however, you should reach out to the webmaster to ask them to remove the content. If they do not, you could consider legal action.
• Different Versions of the Same URL: This occurs when you have multiple pages of the same page but with different variations of your URL parameters. For instance, in addition to your standard URL for a given page, you might also have one with a unique URL slug that signifies that a certain piece of content is print-only.
• Different URL Prefixes: If you have both “www” and “non-www” prefixes or “http” and “https” for pages with otherwise identical URLs, you have a duplicate content issue on your hands.

Whether duplicate content is intentional or not is irrelevant. It causes SEO issues that directly influence your traffic, leads, and buyers, so you need to clean up these problems before they snowball into something worse. 

If you suspect you’re having issues with duplicate content, you need to assemble your web and content teams to work together to streamline URL naming conventions and parameters and also identify pages and blogs that need to be re-written.

Speaking of which, instead of continuing to duplicate your content and shoot your SEO efforts in the foot, let’s learn a few simple tricks for how to repurpose all that great content!

Easy Solutions to Your Duplicate Content Problem

Don’t worry, intrepid marketers. Just because you have piles of duplicate content on your site doesn’t mean that you can’t work together to solve the problem. Here’s how!

Create 301 Redirects to Preferred Pages

The fastest and easiest way to solve your duplicate content problem is to simply create a 301 redirect. A 301 redirect is the process of forwarding a user who clicks on a link to your preferred page. 

So, again, in our hypothetical mentioned above, rather than just deleting the blog, which will lead to a 404 error (not a great move from an SEO or user experience perspective), you can create a 301 redirect. This way, when users click on the blog, they’ll be immediately forwarded to your services page. They’ll still receive the same helpful information but on a page that is more likely to lead to further engagement. They likely will never know the difference, and everybody wins!

If only part of the page contains duplicate content, simply consolidate the original material and point your users to a single page.

Point Toward Original Content Using Rel=Canonicals

Similar to a 301 redirect, a rel=canonical is a great way to alert search engines to your preferred page, even if the content is “appreciably similar.” Essentially, using a rel=canonical classification tells the search engine that all pages with duplicate content are basically copies of the original URL and that all the link juice associated with these pages should be attributed to that original URL.

Placing a rel=canonical is a fairly simple process. All you have to do is add the attribute to the HTML of all subsidiary pages and add the URL of your preferred page. This will tell the search engines everything they need to know and, like a 301 redirect, will also pass along all link equity to the original URL.

Put Pen to Paper and Rewrite Your Content

Throughout this blog, I’ve been careful to draw a distinction between “repurposing” content and “duplicating” content. Duplicate content is reusing content verbatim, whereas repurposing content is reusing that content in new and innovative ways with fresh copy that explores the subject from a slightly different angle or perspective — or by using a slightly different voice or tone. 

Great content is great content and should be repurposed whenever possible. But your copywriters need to understand your different audiences and how they engage on your different channels (web, social, email, etc.) to achieve best results. This will require a periodic review of your buyer personas and industries and that your writing staff is able to create content for each audience using appropriate messaging for each segment.

At Act-On, we always follow the “Rule of 4,” which states that “for every piece of content, there should be four ways” to use it. For instance, if you write an eBook, you could then use that content to:

• Write a blog series supporting each section of the eBook and designate your primary call-to-action (CTA) to direct to the eBook landing page
• Promote the eBook on all social media platforms and encourage employees and colleagues to share it through your shared social media module
• Include the eBook (and related blogs) in your newsletter
• Identify previous blogs that are generating good traffic and update the CTA to direct the user to the eBook landing page
• Create a pop-up or featured content section on your home page (and related product or service pages) that links to the eBook landing page
• Host a webinar built around the content of the eBook
• Rewrite the content for different audiences and industries, making subtle but impactful changes along the way to ensure maximum engagement
• Create an infographic highlighting the key points, statistics, and quotes in the eBook that you can use digitally and as part of your events marketing strategy

The list could go on and on, but the important thing to understand is that content assets should never live in a vacuum. Re-use to your heart’s content but do so with purposeful intentions, fresh copy, and a creative outlook!

Act-On’s SEO Audit Tool Can Help You Eliminate Duplicate Content

No matter your skill set, experience level, or the size of your marketing team or organization, duplicate content is bound to pop up at some point — it’s unavoidable, especially as businesses attempt to scale. 

The trick is to implement best practices and processes to help minimize these instances. Execute period content reviews of all your digital properties and assign team members appropriate tasks based on the outcome of those reviews. 

For instance, while your webmaster should be focusing on applying rel=canonical attributes or noindexing certain pages to prevent search engines from listing them in search results, your writers should be repurposing content and helping out the web team by implementing 301 redirects. 

There are a lot of useful sites out there to help you perform great SEO research and review of your various digital properties (SpyFu, Moz, SEMRush, and Ahrefs among them), but Act-On’s SEO Audit Tool is one of our most dynamic features and can help you solve your duplicate content issues. With SEO best practice guidelines readily available, you can use our SEO Audit Tool to analyze any page with a functioning URL (including your competitors) and then use that information to make critical improvements.

To learn more about how learning and following SEO best practices can improve the quantity and quality of your leads, please download our eBook, “How to Attract More Prospects.” (See that? Repurposing content in action!) 

Or, if you’re ready to learn more about Act-On’s powerful and dynamic marketing automation platform, please complete this brief online form.

Thankfully, appearing first in search rankings isn’t the only way to get your content noticed by your target customers. An even better way to get your content in front of your audience is by earning a featured snippet spot in Google search. Unlike the list of search results that usually appear below this highlighted content, featured snippets provide a more thorough answer to a user’s search query. When you achieve a featured snippet, Google will literally feature a snippet of the body of your content that it deems valuable enough to highlight as a quick overview that addresses the problem at hand — as you can see below.

Achieving a featured snippet is actually better than attaining that coveted #1 spot because it emphasizes your content in a unique way and puts it right where your audience will see it. Unlike a simple meta-description, this improves your chances of catching your audience’s attention and getting them to click through. 

Now that you’ve learned what a featured snippet is, you might be wondering what you can do to increase your chances of getting your content featured front and center. Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered! 

Today we’re sharing a few tips that will help you on your way toward improving your SEO, as well as your odds of getting a featured snippet on Google. 

Aim to Answer Questions That Are Relevant to Your Audience

Featured snippets provide a quick and easy answer to a user’s question. Therefore, you should aim to structure pages on your blog and website in a way that provides brief and concise answers to the key phrases/questions your target audience is looking for. 

There are a variety of ways that you can accomplish this. To begin, you can look for opportunities to revise your existing website content to answer commonly asked questions related to your product or service. Start this process by looking at your analytics, using Google Keyword planner, or typing in various industry-related searches into Google to see what keyphrases appear. Based on the insights you gather, create a list of key phrases and keywords that your target audience constantly searches for. Then, using this list, look for product and solution pages that you can revise to address and answer related questions. 

Another way to answer your audience’s most pressing questions is by creating unique explainer pages or blog posts. These types of pages go into detail about a specific topic by covering a variety of related questions — and can drastically improve your chances of landing your website content in that featured snippet spot. By going into a lot of depth on a specific topic, you can increase your keyword usage, which helps with SEO. And you can also show both Google and your audience that you’re an expert in your field and know what you’re talking about. 

Provide Information in a Useful Way

How you answer questions is just as important as answering them in the first place. Thought leadership can be invaluable in helping you secure press coverage and stand out on social media platforms such as LinkedIn. Unfortunately, this type of content doesn’t deliver the type of straightforward information your audience is looking for during a quick Google search.

If your goal is to get your content highlighted in the featured snippet box, you should aim to create detailed and informative content pieces that provide clear and concise answers to commonly asked questions. Unless you’re referring to a term that is unique to your organization, try your best to stick to definitions that exist within your field or industry and receive a lot of traffic.  

Format Your Content in a Way That Is Easy to Consume

You can’t expect to get noticed by Google or have your target audience read what you have to say if your content isn’t formatted in a way that is easy to follow and consume. This is crucial for any type of content but particularly important if you want to rank high in Google search and have your content appear in a featured snippet box. 

To start, a good rule of thumb is to include your question as an H1 or H2 tag within the body copy of your content. This will help Google easily know which keywords and topics are covered on each page of your website. Furthermore, it will help your audience easily find what they are looking for, which is particularly helpful if their question only relates to a specific part of a much broader topic. 

How you format your answer is equally important. While strategizing the best way to present your content, consider whether it’s easier for your audience to consume as a paragraph, list, or table. In many cases, the type of question being asked will probably provide you enough guidance to decide the best way to format your answer. For example, if your question is “What is content marketing?”, you’ll probably want to provide at least one paragraph answer that defines the term. Whereas a chart might be more appropriate if you’re answering the question “What type of content do I need to nurture my leads?” 

Make Sure to Include Relevant Keywords

Whether you’re trying to appear on the first page in the search rankings or land in that featured snippet spot, you have to make sure your content is relevant to your audience. Writing copy that includes high-ranking keywords is good practice for SEO and will ultimately motivate your target audience to click through. 

Aside from helping you rank higher in search and getting your content in the featured snippet box, including relevant keywords enables you to create content that is valuable to your audience. Using everyday language will help you relate to your audience, increase their confidence in you, and help them see value in what you have to offer. Ultimately, the goal is not only to get your audience to visit your website but to motivate them to keep clicking through and provide you with the contact information you need to begin the lead nurturing process. 

Review Your Content Marketing Strategy to Achieve Featured Snippet Positioning in Google Search

It’s important to remember that good content marketing (and marketing in general) involves so much more than driving visitors to your website. Effective content goes beyond good SEO practices. Whatever content you create should provide value to your customers, engage them in a way that makes them want to learn more about what you do, and effectively guide them from one stage of the sales funnel to the next. 

If you’d like more tips on how to create a content marketing strategy that helps you attract, nurture, and convert your target customers, please check out our eBook, “6 Best Practices for Creating a Content Marketing Strategy.”