SEO Begin

Official Chrome security extension is biased against small websites. Flags sites if they’re not a big brand.

The post New Chrome Security Extension Flags Small Sites as Suspicious via @martinibuster appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

In this video, Ross breaks down various technical link building strategies his company uses or their clients when they have NO assets at all. So, that means no content to speak of to generate the link. You will discover ways to build links without content!

LinkedIn unveiled a brand refresh which features a slightly different logo, a new color palette, and a custom font.

The post LinkedIn Gets a Brand Refresh to Make it Feel “Warmer” and More Inviting via @MattGSouthern appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

Every business should have a local SEO strategy if they don’t want to miss out on high-intent qualified leads and this is especially crucial for local businesses who need to target people in their city or region.

The priority of local businesses is to secure high ranking positions in a particular location. With that said, it’s important to note that the nature of SEO is not stable, it keeps on changing. So, it would be best if you think of actionable and effective ways to strengthen your local SEO and secure high rankings.

When done correctly, local SEO can help you generate more high-quality traffic, leads, and conversions. In addition to this, it can also help you compete with big brands and stay relevant in the competition.

This post will guide you with four effective tactics to strengthen your local SEO strategy. Let’s get started.

1. Optimize your “Google My Business” page

One of the obvious yet the most important tactics to strengthen your local SEO strategy is to optimize your Google My Business page.

Listing your business with Google My Business makes it easier for people to discover your business. Once listed, your business will show up on Google Maps when users search for businesses like yours.

This will also help your business to rank better in search engine results. Your business can also appear on the sidebar of Google search results pages when Google verifies your business as legitimate. You should follow the below tips to optimize your Google My Business page and strengthen your local SEO:

• Perform a hygiene check to your Google My Business listing.
• Make sure that you provide detailed, accurate, and up-to-date information about your business.
• Add your business’ logo, relevant images, exact location, payment methods, the services or products you offer, and hours of operation.
• Encourage your customers to add their feedback and ratings.
• Always be quick to respond to your customer reviews.

These tips and tricks will help you strengthen your local SEO and generate more high-quality leads for your business.

2. Optimize your local business listings

Local directories are one of the most common places where users search for local businesses. So, you should add your business listings to all popular directories in your niche.

These directories often rank high in Google search results for local search queries. Anyone who checks these directories can be redirected to your website or business if you optimize your listings. This will not only help you increase your organic search traffic but will also help you get qualified leads.

Update the name, address, and phone section

These are the most important elements of your Google My Business listings because these will provide your contact details to potential customers. It is crucial that all of your details are accurate and updated, otherwise, you might lose potential, high-intent customers.

Also, ensure that there are no misspellings and avoid using abbreviations or anything confusing. If there is any change in your contact details, update all of your listings accordingly.

Also, ensure that these details are consistent across all listings. Otherwise, people might get confused and won’t know which one to trust.

3. Optimize your website content for local keywords

You should optimize your website content with keywords that are relevant to your local customers too.

You can use Google’s Keyword Planner to find relevant yet local keywords using the location filter. The tool can help you identify the most popular and relevant local keywords that you should target.

Once you have a list of local keywords, you should include them in your website content, meta descriptions, titles, and URLs.

However, you need to examine the competitiveness of your potential list of keywords before you use them. For this, you can use tools such as SpyFu to see if your competitors are also using these keywords. If the same keywords are strengthening your competitors’ local SEO, they might work well for you too.

However, a word of caution, never over-use keywords. That’s because keyword stuffing might make your website content seem spammy. Make sure that you evenly distribute your keywords throughout the content and add them in a way that they seem to fit in naturally.

For instance, Focus Booth, which is a famous photo booth in Toronto, uses their location-based keyword “Toronto photo booth” wherever possible.

As you can see in the screenshot below, they have mentioned the location of their business exactly at the center of their landing page. Similarly, their meta title also starts with the same local keyword.

Source: Focus Booth

4. Ask your happy customers to give positive online reviews

Positive reviews influence 68% of consumers to use your local business?

This suggests that positive reviews can help you attract new customers. So, go ahead and ask your happy customers to share positive feedback. You should also encourage them to give good ratings to your business online.

91% of millennials trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. So gaining positive reviews for your business online can help your brand appear as more trustworthy.

Always provide quality services to your customers. It will encourage them to become your brand advocates, write more positive reviews, and recommend your business to their friends and families.

Positive reviews can help you earn the trust of your target audience and drive more qualified leads. Here are some tips to motivate your customers to write good reviews for your business:

• Always make sure to ask for a review in person once a customer avails your services.
• You can also send them a text message or an email after the purchase, asking your customer to give a review.
• Always reply to customer reviews as soon as you read them. Thank your customers for positive reviews and encourage them to visit again.

If you receive a negative review, you should apologize for the discomfort and try to solve their problems politely and professionally. For instance, when you type “electricians in Seattle”, you can see a list of local businesses along with their ratings.

Source: Google

4. Create a mobile-responsive website

The use of mobiles is increasing significantly, and so is the number of mobile searches. The credit goes to the increasing accessibility and availability of high-speed internet.

According to Statista, the expected number of mobile users will reach 4.68 billion in 2019.

52.2% of all website traffic came from mobile devices in 2018. Also, this percentage is likely to increase further.

Source: Statista

That’s why you need to design and develop responsive websites to improve user experience on mobile devices.

Using a responsive website design can help you get an edge over your competitors and can also improve your local SEO. You should follow the below tricks to create a mobile-responsive website:

• Always optimize your images and videos to reduce page load time.
• Carefully plan your website layout and navigation menus. Make sure that it is easier for visitors to find what they are looking for.
• Improve page load speed. If your web page takes longer to load, it will be unable to hold a user’s attention.
• Add social media sharing buttons to your product pages and blog posts. Make sure that it is easy for visitors to share your content in their circles.

You can use tools such as Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to examine whether or not your website is mobile responsive. This tool can help you improve the mobile responsiveness of your site by providing you with valuable suggestions.

Source: Google

5. Strengthen your social media presence

Social media does have an impact on your presence in search engine results. Let’s discuss this in detail.

Establishing an excellent social media presence can help your brand to appear as more credible and trustworthy. Social media could also serve as a great source of backlinks and high-quality traffic.

You need to be very active on your social media handles. Proactively promoting your business on social media can help you increase your brand awareness and reach. This can help you attract more people to your brand, products, and/or services.

However, you should always post content that is relevant and useful to your audience. If they find your content valuable, they are more likely to follow you and visit your website. They can also share your content with their social networks.

Promoting your business on social media is an effective strategy to increase your brand’s visibility and traffic. It can also positively impact and strengthen your local SEO strategy in the long run.

Final thoughts

It is important to take time to develop an effective local SEO strategy. However, at the same time, it is also important to keep an eye on the recent SEO trends. That’s because the SEO industry is evolving fast.

You should always stay up-to-date about the latest SEO trends and capitalize on them to stay ahead in the competition.

Follow the actionable tactics we’ve discussed above to strengthen your local SEO strategy and rank higher in local searches.

Do you know of any other ways to improve your local SEO strategy? If so, please feel free to share them in the comments section.

The post The ultimate guide to strengthen your local SEO strategy appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

We talked to our PPC team, as well as dozens of PPC marketers at several conferences we attended this spring and came up with a list of 39 tools that make the lives of paid advertising pros easier. The list of tools will help you save time, lower ad costs, manage accounts, get more leads, create attractive ads & landing pages, and automate some laborious tasks you may have considered unavoidable.

Leading song lyrics site Genius.com has accused Google of stealing its content and publishing it in search results.

The post Google Accused of Scraping Content from Song Lyrics Site ‘Genius’ via @MattGSouthern appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

Google’s John Mueller answered the question of what can be done when broad core algorithm update affects traffic.

The post Google’s John Mueller Discusses June 2019 Update Recovery via @martinibuster appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

Google’s John Mueller predicts that dynamic rendering will only be a temporary workaround for helping web crawlers process JavaScript. Eventually, all web crawlers will be able to process JavaScript, Mueller believes. So in a few years’ time relying on dynamic rendering may not be necessary. Mueller made this prediction during a recent Google Webmaster Central hangout when a site owner asked if there’s any reason why they shouldn’t use dynamic rendering. Here is the question that was submitted: “We’re thinking of the option to start only serving server-side rendering for bots on some of our pages. Is this an accepted […]

The post Google’s John Mueller Predicts Dynamic Rendering Won’t Be Needed in a Few Years via @MattGSouthern appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

A healthy and quality backlink profile can help you stay ahead of the competition. After Google rolled out the Penguin algorithm in 2012, it became clear that the quality of backlinks matters, not just their quantity. The more is not the merrier anymore. 

Luckily, over the years, it has become easier to analyze and monitor backlinks thanks to a number of specialized tools available on the market.

Through the use of such tools, you can dissect any backlink profile and discover where the competitors reverse engineer their SEO strategy to generate new backlinks. Plus, you can find out what kind of content performs best for obtaining certain types of backlinks or social engagement.

This post focuses on five tools agencies can take advantage of to benchmark the link quality of their clients against competitors, keep an eye on specific backlinks, and discover opportunities to partner up with other websites to reach the set SEO goals.

1. SE Ranking

Source: SE Ranking

SE Ranking offers a complete range of tools designed to help you stay on top of your entire SEO workflow, including backlinks.

With the Backlink Checker tool, you can discover all incoming links to any website, regardless of whether it belongs to you, a client, or a competitor.

Along with the full list of backlinks, referring domains, and Do/NoFollow links, the tool provides data on the backlink’s status, specifies the anchor text, the date the link was last seen and added on, the destination URL, and the Domain Trust score. Plus, you can add filters to conveniently sort the data.

The entire list of backlinks can then be added to a website in a single click where the data can be further analyzed. That’s where the other backlink tool comes into play.

Source: SE Ranking

The Backlink Monitoring tool enables you to work closely with the backlinks that have been added to a website, and get daily reports on any changes. This is where all the day-to-day backlink management tasks are performed.

By connecting Google Search Console, the list of backlinks will constantly get updated automatically. Otherwise, you will have to use Backlink Checker every now and then to pull up an updated list of backlinks.

Furthermore, you can switch between tabs to get an overview of the backlinks, see all the anchor texts, and set up a Disavow file to signal to Google what backlinks you don’t want it to take into account when analyzing the reference weight of the website.

Now, in addition to the parameter data provided in the Backlink Checker tool, the Backlink Monitoring tool offers a lot more information on each backlink, such as Google Index Status, Moz DA, Referring IP, Country, External Links, Alexa rank, and Social shares. This data gives you a good grasp of the backlink profile at hand.

Besides providing an array of backlink parameter data by default, the Backlink Monitoring tool gives you an opportunity to specify additional information on each backlink via custom parameters that need to be filled out manually, such as Source, Price, Anchor type, Category, Backlink manager, Setting up dates, Validity period, and Notes. Doing so will give you a convenient way to go through large amounts of data.

All in all, the tool provides comprehensive data, the interface is very clean, modern, and definitely not an eye-ache to look at. On top of that, the white label feature along with automatic reporting makes it easy to communicate with clients.

What else comes with the package

• Website audit
• Keyword rank tracker
• Keyword suggestion tool
• Competitor research
• Page changes monitoring
• Social media management
• Keyword Grouper
• Lead generator
• Search volume checker
• Index status checker
• Page changes monitoring
• API

Pricing

It’s a paid tool (starting at $39/month) but it offers a free 14-day trial. The Enterprise package suitable for agencies is available for $189/month.

2. LinkMiner

If you’re looking for a backlink analysis tool that’s specifically designed to help you find backlink building opportunities, LinkMiner is the right solution for you.

Just like other backlink analysis tools, LinkMiner also enables you to check the backlinks of any imaginable site, including your clients’ and their competitors’. Naturally, it also has a lot of other useful features.

With LinkMiner, you can analyze up to 50 backlinks a day at no cost regardless of the access level. And when analyzing such backlinks, you can click any one to get an instant preview of that website along with the highlighted anchor text, referring website title and URL — and decide whether or not it makes sense to replicate the backlink.

Furthermore, the service automatically breaks backlinks down into groups based on their category like Q&A, blog, forum, making it easier to spot new backlink opportunities and tag your favorite backlinks for later use. LinkMiner also provides a number of third-party metrics such as Citation Flow, Trust Flow, Do/NoFollow attributes to help you evaluate a link’s strength.

The provided third-party metrics can be a great way of analyzing the backlinks and determining the most valuable ones. Plus, the system will notify you if any backlinks break or go missing, but it’ll be up to you to reclaim the link from the site owner.

As for LinkMiner in general, it has some flaws that are a result of the tool being too simple for experienced SEO specialists, but it’s great if you’re just starting out with building links, so be sure to give it a go.

What else comes with the package

LinkMiner is a part of the Mangools SEO suite which also includes:

• KWFinder
• SERPChecker
• SERPWatcher

Pricing

It is a paid tool (starting at $44/month) but it offers a free 10-day trial. The Agency package is available for $79.90/month.

3. URL Profiler

URL Profiler is a powerful software-based SEO tool that can pull bulk data from sites at a domain and URL level. Considering the fact that there are plenty of SEO tools out there like Majestic, MozScape, Ahrefs, Google, MY Addr and Copyscape, to name a few, URL Profiler was designed to group such tools to provide comprehensive insights under one roof.

The tool can actually be used to perform a number of SEO tasks that include the audit of content, social media, and Google penalties, link prospecting, keyword rank tracking, and, most importantly, backlink analysis.

URL Profiler analyzes the quality of backlink profiles, allowing you to quickly go through a huge number of links by analyzing various data such as location, link type, and the anchor text for spamming and unnatural use of keywords.

Since there’s a lot of data to work within this tool, it is up to your knowledge and experience to select the metrics that you value most.

Once you fill everything out, the tool produces an Excel file with multiple sheets containing a detailed analysis of every specified URL. You can look at the link score together with its explanation, view a list of URLs on Google’s blacklist, automatically get the contact info of all the sites you want to reach out to, and a number of other metrics.

With the power of this data, you can make informed decisions regarding every single backlink. To facilitate data analysis, you can customize the settings and look at URL and domain data separately to have a clear grasp of why certain URLs rank higher.

To sum up, URL Profiler is a tool for advanced SEO professionals as there’s a learning curve newbies will have to go through. Moreover, if you’re already using a number of the biggest SEO tools on the market, then URL Profiler is a what you need as it puts everything in front of you in a single data-rich, but, unfortunately, boring interface.

What else comes with the package

• Keyword tracking
• Analytics
• Data export
• External integrations
• Link tracking
• Data import
• Multi-user

Pricing

It is a paid tool (starting at $19.95 + VAT/month) but it does offer a free 14-day trial. The Agency package is available for $64.95/month.

4. Monitor Backlinks

The name is an instant giveaway, but, either way, Monitor Backlinks was designed to help professionals check their and their competitors’ backlinks.

With this tool, you can find and keep track of backlinks, and Google keyword rankings on autopilot via email notifications. So, whenever a competitor successfully uses a keyword to obtain a new quality backlink, you’ll have a chance to act quickly and not let your clients fall behind.

Monitor Backlinks gives you an overview of your backlink profile, providing details on the domains that are helping your SEO efforts, and those that are not. Additionally, the tool sends out reports full of insights on the competition, highlighting what keyword resulted in a high Google rank, as well as backlink data. With data like that, all that’s required from you is to reverse engineer the process to devise a solution that works for your clients.

The tool is aimed at helping you build a strong backlink profile and come up with an SEO strategy to foster business and traffic growth. To help you achieve this, the tool is packed with the most critical SEO metrics that give you all the data you need in one neat interface.

The graph in the dashboard deserves a special mention. It allows you to measure keyword-based site traffic dynamics, as well as the efforts to build a healthier backlink profile. Such graphs provide information to clients that they can easily visually comprehend without doing any digging.

What else comes with the package

• External link count
• Backlink status
• Import/Export
• Bookmarklet
• Expiration date
• Disavow links export
• Tags and notes

Pricing

It is a paid tool (starting at $24.90/month) that offers a free 30-day trial. For agencies, you can request a custom quote, if you want to control more than 10 domains ($187.43/month).

5. Mention

The last tool from this roundup is a web and social media brand reputation management and monitoring solution called Mention. Evidently, unlike the other tools described here, this one isn’t a backlink analysis tool per se.

In fact, we included it in the list because it can really help you get good topical backlinks by notifying you of all online mentions you’re interested in. Say someone is discussing a client’s brand, product, service, or content, but doesn’t link out — join in on the conversation and request that a link to the target website be added.

The tool can easily keep track of keyword-based mentions in over 40 languages across billions of sources online in real time. But what you want to be on the lookout for are articles that mentioned your client but did not link out to the site. Plus, the tool’s influencer discovery features can assist you in finding popular people who can help you get the word out.

Fortunately, you don’t have to do this work manually. Set up to receive daily email alerts of all mentions on that day, or, alternatively, get notified via the desktop/mobile app. Plus, you can get laser-precise results by filtering them by sentiment, location, and gender.

The best part for agencies is that all the data, reports, and mentions can be white-labeled with the client’s logo and sent to them automatically.

What else comes with the package

• Filter out online resources you don’t want to track
• Share alerts with clients and assign tasks to colleagues
• Get notified about priority alerts
• The service studies your behavior to hide irrelevant alerts

Pricing

It is a paid tool (starting at $29/month) but it has a free 14-day trial that allows you to track 500 mentions for 3 search terms. The Enterprise package is available for $600/month or even more.

Summing up

Although all of these tools aren’t free, they offer some type of cost-free trial. For this reason, we’d recommend trying them all out before choosing one solution for your backlink analysis and monitoring needs.

The bottom line is that you should consolidate the data from all these tools to get a clear picture of your clients’ and their competitors’ backlink profiles. Even some of these solutions with huge amounts of data are lacking in user-friendliness and design, and may even provide different crawl depths, index stats, and other valuable metrics for the same URLs.

So, if you’re serious about backlink analysis, it’s best to start using several of the mentioned tools and deciding on those that suit your needs most as you go along.

The post Five backlink analysis tools agencies should try out appeared first on Search Engine Watch.