Search engine optimization best practices and SEO strategy. Grassroots SEO from the ground up, including local SEO and mobile SEO. #SEO

content marketing

4 Simple Steps To Keyword Optimization

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4 Important Keyword Optimization Tips

After choosing your most profitable keywords, you need to carefully position them in and around your article. The goal of Google and other search engines is to deliver relevant, high-quality and up-to-date information to readers. The following keyword optimization tips will help you create the desired content.

keyword optimization

1. Create Interesting Content

Any interesting content will capture the eyes of the readers. Part of what will make your content interesting is to provide relevant and current information. You can make any topic interesting by being creative in your writing. Think about the questions and problems that your readers may be having and provide real solutions and answers. Do not get a great keyword and just write your content with it. Instead, write with a purpose and aim at helping your readers. This will give them a reason to continue reading your article and visit your site again.

2. Focus on Long Tail Keywords

Long tail keywords are key phrases that are longer and more specific. Even though these keywords receive less traffic, they have a higher conversion value because they are more specific. They are also good at pulling targeted results in the search engine results pages. It is also easier to rank for long tail keywords than common keywords. Long tail keywords are a guarantee that your content will be more relevant to readers. As a result, your site will get more targeted and quality traffic.

3. Use Keyword Variations

Potential visitors will use different keywords and key phrases to search for information on the internet. In order to target many visitors, use variations of your keyword in and around your article. You can use the singular and plural form of your keyword. In addition, synonyms are other keyword variations that you should utilize. Semantic keywords and semantice keyword phrases are critical for grassroots search engine optimization.

It is important to write keyword focused articles so that each page has a dedicated keyword. This will ensure that your content is relevant to more people and also eliminate the chances of having repetitive content. Writing keyword focused pages is important because it helps search engines to rank your pages based on subject matter, instead of just on keyword density.

4. Be Consistent

Keyword optimization and SEO in general is a continuous process. You should analyze your keywords consistently to ensure that they remain relevant to your visitors. Search engines keep on growing and changing their strategies and therefore your site should adapt to such changes. Similarly, you need to remain relevant all the time because people change the way they look for information on the internet.

The above keyword optimization tips will help you optimize your website for search engines. Implement them together with other SEO factors and you will realize an increase in your site’s performance. Your organic traffic will grow steadily and your site will get higher rankings in search engines.

content marketing

What Is Internet Marketing

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Definition of Internet Marketing

Internet marketing is also referred to as online marketing. Internet marketing refers to advertising and marketing efforts as a process of promoting a brand, products or services over the Internet. Internet marketing is very broad in scope referring generally to promotional activities that are done via a digital medium or “online”. Internet marketing strategies are typically used in conjunction with traditional types of advertising such as radio, television, billboards, networking, newspapers and magazines. Internet marketing added complexity in consumer engagement moving away from a linear marketing approach with one-way brand communication to consumers to a newer non-linear marketing strategy referred to as Omni-channel. Omni-channel marketing moves beyond one-to-one information exchange to one-to-many or one-to-community information sharing.

internet marketingAn example of omni-channel internet marketing can be applied to a professional services vertical like legal. Legal consumers often research their legal options online well before contacting a law firm. These legal consumers are increasingly using the Internet to research into laws, legal resources, legal aid, and do-it-yourself options before researching the types of law firms that can help them. Once they understand their need is best served by hiring a law firm, these consumers then look up law firm rating and reviews, seek legal information from their social networks, compare local legal options, and search for law firms near them.

The Different Channels of Internet Marketing

Effective Internet marketing commonly deploys multiple channels to reach the most audience as possible. The objective is to place your brand and value proposition in front of many potential clients in the places where people spend their time online. There are multiple online marketing channels available in the legal space namely;

  • Display Advertising – Online Display Advertisement highlights promotional messages, value propositions, or ideas to the legal consumer on the Internet. Display advertising can be found on a wide range of digital properties like advertising blogs, interstitial ads, legal directories, and ads on the search engines.
  • Email Marketing – While email marketing in comparison to other forms of digital marketing is inexpensive, this channel of communication may be perceived by recipients to be intrusive and irritating especially to new or potential customers. This is an older channel for digital marketing.
  • Search Engine Marketing – also known as “pay-per-click” or PPC. This channel primarily focuses on text ads displayed along side relevant organic content. PPC can also include visual display, click to call, mobile ads, and local ad display within maps. When used in combination with social media and organic optimization, paid search can deliver effective results.
  • Social Media Marketing – social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Google+, etc.) are closed ecosystems, users must proactively join and the information is usually only viewable when users are signed into one of these social networks. Users typically provide the content that makes the channel what it is. One example is Pinterest, which is an image channel known for food and fashion. People “PIN” (add) pictures of their favorite food or recipe and share it with others. The more content a user ads, the more engagement they drive to their page. Facebook and Twitter are prominent in the legal space. The ability to effectively create a user profile for paid promotional targeting is the primary reason social media is valuable.
  • Search Engine Optimization – also known as SEO is a method of optimizing content (text, images, voice) to improve relevance for search engines with the objective of having that content display more frequently and prominently is search engine results pages. Since SEO is process of refinement over time and the results do not require payment to a search engine, search engine optimization is considered free or “organic”. SEO is not free, the best SEO companies and services often bill thousands of dollars per month or more to firms that engage with their services to increase performance. The primary benefit of SEO is that each action (click) is not billable by the search engines, so once a web page is fully optimized, it can drive value for an extended time for no cost.
  • Press Releases – PR, or press release is a content marketing method of communication directed at members of the news media for the purpose of announcing something considerably newsworthy. A press release is typically written and delivered electronically via email, but can also be done as a video release.
  • Video Advertising – digital video is an increasingly popular medium for online marketing. The format is widely used in social media as well as stand-alone channels like YouTube because video is readily available to be shared by the viewers, adding to the attractiveness of this platform. Video can be a highly engaging format for brands, however the quality of the video and the style of the message are critical for success as this type of advertising is considered disruptive to normal viewership. Video advertising that has entertainment value is more likely to be shared, as pleasure is the strongest motivator to share videos.

The most successful online businesses use as many channels as possible to reach out to potential clients and customers. It is increasingly important that your business reach consumers where they are most often online, and Omni-channel marketing offers this opportunity, as it’s “always on, everywhere”. Businesses that seek this long term communication relationship by using multiple channels and using promotional strategies related to their target consumer as well as word-of mouth marketing are the one that will grow their presence and revenues.

The Digital Ecosystem

Without proactive Internet marketing, a website is not much more than a digital billboard in a desert. In today’s digital ecosystem, a website acts as a conversion platform, a place where you send your audience to view your value proposition and engage with your brand. By itself, a website is nothing more than passive marketing. In legal online marketing, a firm’s website acts as a validation of legal credentials and a list of potential legal services offered with multiple ways to communicate with the firm (via email, phone, chat, and social media). To reach the maximum audience, proactive marketing channels need to be used to drive traffic to the website.

digital-ecosystem

In the digital ecosystem audience acquisition can come from paid and organic channels in content marketing, premium publishers, social media, and traditional marketing. Content marketing examples include articles, press releases, or blogs posts. Premium publishers in the legal space include directories like FindLaw, Super Lawyers, AVVO, and state bar associations. Local includes chamber of commerce, better business bureau, local city and county bar associations. Social includes posts in Facebook, Tweets in Twitter, and paid social advertising. Paid includes PPC text and display ads, and inclusion in content networks. Traditional includes networking events, speaking engagements, radio, T.V., magazines and newspapers. Technical includes SEO, code platforms, https, semantic markup, and conversion rate optimization and page speed enhancements. The acquisition channels may vary, but the impact is measurable with website analytics.

While there are many ways to increase traffic to your website, the two principal ways to acquire and drive potential consumers to the website is with paid promotions or organic marketing. Both of these channels require investment of time, effort, and money, however organic traffic is more commonly viewed as a source for long term sustainable growth. In business verticals that are highly transactional in nature, paid search marketing is one of the best ways to ramp up business success online.

google-panda_google-penguin

Understanding The Internet

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Understanding the Internet

Paraphrasing the definition of the Internet; “The Internet is the global system of interconnected computer networks that use the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to link devices worldwide. It is a network of networks that consists of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet

google-panda_google-penguinThere are two principal naming conventions on the Internet, the Internet Protocol Address (IP address) and the Domain Name System (DNS). The IP address links networks much like a phone number can reach another phone number. An IP address even looks like a phone number, for example; 69.167.6.95 is an IP address for a virtual private network. Domain names are designed for use by people to easily remember the “address” of an IP. In the example listed above, the domain name for the IP address is vyprvpn.com. Most web browsers display the uniform resource locator (URL) of a web page above the page in an address bar. URIs symbolically identifies the address of a web server or database. The URL is commonly referred to as the domain name of a website. A typical URL could look like (http://www.example.com/index.html), which indicates a protocol (http), a server hostname (www.example.com), and a web page or file name (index.html).

Internet Defined

Many people use the terms “Internet” and “World Wide Web” interchangeably, but the two terms are not synonymous. It is common for people to say they are “online” or use “the Internet” when they are actually using a web browser to view a website, which is a collection of web pages. The Internet is a global set of web pages, documents, images, computer data, including graphics, sounds, text, video, multimedia and interactive content and other resources, logically interrelated by hyperlinks and referenced with Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) or domain names.

With the advent of software tools readily available, publishing a web page, a blog, or building a website involves little initial expense and many free services are also available. Most professional businesses require a web presence to succeed today. Publishing and maintaining large, professional websites with attractive, diverse and up-to-date information is remains a difficult and expensive proposition. With the high frequency of changes to search engines, the advent of mobile devices and the numerous code bases in use today, the most successful legal websites require daily updating and maintenance.

The Internet Is Bigger Than Google

Google as a search engine is at its base level nothing more than a database of people, places and things. In this digital space, the common technical term for people, places, and things is entities. Google is an entity library that currently uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to provide the best user experience. Even with the best design, the best graphics and the best content on a website, without pro-active Internet marketing, a website by itself is nothing more than a “book” on a shelf. If you think of a website as a “book” within the Google library, the objective of internet marketing is to move the “book” onto the best sellers list for that particular category. The website and the domain have no value until the site attracts an audience. Domain value increases as audience and authority grows over time. This is where Internet marketing comes into play.

mobile

Make Your Mobile UX Better

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How to Make Your Content Work On Mobile

The mobile experience (mobile UX) of your website is crucial to its success. This is because of the increasingly device agnostic approach of most technology users. They want to have the same experience, get the same information, and achieve the same tasks, whatever device they are on. Understanding mobile user behavior is crucial in a solid mobile SEO strategy.

Making your content on mobile as good as possible starts with design. The tips for mobile UX here are mostly about content creation, but there is a crossover between the design of your mobile website and the creation of content. This is unavoidable, so you will have to consider and work on both. This means making sure your mobile design, functionality, and navigation are as good as they can be.

Functionality, in particular mobile UX, is essential. Ideally, you shouldn’t have any functions on your website that only work on desktop devices. You also have to test the typography settings of your website, making sure it is easy to ready on mobile.

In addition, make sure the links and navigation work well on mobile. Remember that text links are harder to use on mobile than on desktop, simply because fingers are clumsier than mouse pointers.

mobileCreating Content That Works On Mobile

You should think specifically about mobile users when creating content. This might sound obvious, but it is a principle that is not always acted on. An example is a blog post that looks great and is easy to read when on a computer but doesn’t work very well on mobile. You should always think about the mobile experience.

To do that you have to understand who your mobile users are, and what they want to do. This includes identifying how they will find or access your site (for example; through a Google search), and what pages they will enter from. Will they make a purchase on your mobile website? Do they want to find information, or do they want to contact you?

Getting Content Right On Mobile

In many cases, you will have to adjust your style of writing for mobile. Most advice for writing on the web includes breaking up the text with paragraphs, headings, and lists. This applies on mobile too, but paragraphs should be even shorter. A good guide is to keep your paragraphs to 50-100 words.

Finally, think about how you will position the call to action on mobile. Does this meet the same requirements you have on desktop devices? This includes being high on the page and visible with zero or minimal amounts of scrolling.

Mobile devices are here to stay, so every website owner and content creator has to think mobile first or at least as much as they think desktop.

Benefits Of A Unique Value Proposition

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Finding a Unique Value Proposition For Your Business

In most free markets competing businesses are always looking for an edge. If you’re not watching your competition then you consider the need to become aware of what the competitors are doing. But even with the stress and worry of competition in your line of work, there are positive sides to having so-called business rivals such as learning from them and surpassing them. Separate yourself from the ordinary with a unique value proposition (UVP) that resonates with your target audience. A compelling brand message will insure your message is heard.

In most specific markets you will find the business that failed and from which you can learn what not to do, and businesses that are stagnating from which you can also learn what not to do or what you can improve and offer to your target customers in order to not slag behind within the mediocre crowd. This is where, when and how you will find a unique value proposition for your business and overtake your competition. While the competition is left in the dust, unaware of what even happened, you will be miles ahead of them already and working on that head start to move on further and further to the satisfaction of your target customers.

content marketingHow To Craft A Unique Value Proposition

Unique value propositions are sometimes difficult to come up with but they are always there as long as you pay attention to the throbbing beat of demand, desire, needs and wants of your target customers. Which variable of a product, service is most valuable to them in a specific scenario? Which priorities does your specific narrow targeted customer have at present or the near future? You want to put yourself in their shoes and think like they think so that this mindset and will power to work together with your customers sets you apart from the rest of the businesses that are competing with yours out there.

Make sure that your newly discovered unique value proposition sets you aside from your competition so that your targeted customers notice you and the benefit your business offers them and their needs. Be sure to make your unique selling proposition is easily understood; with a unique angle to it that delivers the promise of a solution to a need, desire, problem, want, ache of your customer.

What Is Your UVP?

Can you think of anything you can offer right now to your customer that your competition is not? Can you think of a benefit you can create in the near future that is valuable to your end customer? Can you find knowledgeable experts that can help you with creating a solution, a product? Can you look outside the average boxes of stalled business minds? Are you running your business for yourself or your end customers? The core, heart and soul of any business are your customer and their satisfaction. An unsatisfied customer will fire your entire business in less than a minute so set aside any ego trips and realize that businesses are a two-way street always and without the customers and their needs, wants, desires there is no great business out there.

If you’re offering the same thing exactly the same way as everyone else then somebody is completely unnecessary in the market and will struggle long term consequences of being stuck in the average pool. You are not average, and there is no need to be under the false illusion of safe business when you can strive and achieve so much more in tune with your target customers.

It’s not about if you will find a unique value proposition, it’s about when will you decide that you want to find it and develop it. Keep in mind at all times that even failure on your path to overcoming your competition is a success in disguise and a test to see of what you are made. The leaders in the marketplace constantly refine assess the competitiveness of their unique value proposition, validating that it remains meaningful with potential buyers or clients. Is it time to take a closer look at your offer?

lead nurture

Why Response Time Matters For Intake

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What is “Response Time”?

How quickly you respond to a customer inquiry to an intake form or request for information is commonly referred to as “response time” and has widely been acknowledged as a key contributor to a successful online sales or professional services intake process. The best intake support and CRM systems provide response time as a key performance indicator as part of a comprehensive management report. The response time KPI helps to identify both response times on individual inbound requests as well as response time averages for individual personnel or intake teams.

lead nurtureWhy Is Response Time Such A Critical Success Factor?

In traditional selling or networking a commonly held perception is that, “you don’t get a second chance to make a good first impression”. This sentiment holds true with an online inquiries as well. Speed plays an even more important role in the digital world, because the ease of submitting forms often means that an individual can submit multiple requests before they may even receive an initial response. With this knowledge, your intake or response strategy should be designed to develop and implement a process that makes your brand stand out as a clearly better and unique place to do business. When and how well you respond to the customer’s initial request for information is always the first and most important step in a successful online intake process.

Professional Services Succeed With A Focus On Response Times

Your intake process is simply an online version of a “meet and greet”, something sales professionals and networkers have been taught for many years. In the physical world, you know instantly what a professional greeting should look and feel like. Any great management leader would shudder and cringe if one of his or her people were to greet a walk-in visitor with nothing more than a “Can I help you?” Professional sales development training frequently recommends that we want to welcome the walk-in client as we would a valued guest. In the legal world, these clients are frequently filled with apprehension and anxiety, not knowing what to expect or what outcomes they may face. It becomes significantly more important to put them at ease by introducing ourselves, exchanging names, and starting to build some rapport. Not surprisingly, we need to do exactly the same thing with the online client! While our communication methods are going to be different, our objectives are essentially still the same. Developing a rock solid intake process with a focus on response times will only benefit your business and make you stand out among the competition.