Jamie’s Blog

How To Guest Post Like A Pro
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How To Guest Post Like A Pro

How to guest post for SEO like a pro

How to guest post like a pro

In the world of SEO, the two biggest factors for increasing your search engine rankings is good content and backlinks. One link building strategy that has stood the test of time is the classic guest posting method. Why? Because it works.

However, these days guest posting will only work if you do it correctly. Gone are the times where you could just insert your link into any piece of content and start ranking.

In this blog, I will be highlighting some specific strategies to get the most out of your guest post backlinks, and how to guest post like a pro!

Write unique content that adds value

The first one is pretty obvious, but still many people overlook it. You need to ensure your guest post content is unique and actually provides value, both to the website you are publishing as well as the readership that will be accessing your post.

The general rule of thumb is if it isn’t good enough to go on your own website, you shouldn’t be trying to put it on someone else’s website. If you know the content isn’t very good but the website you’re posting to is still willing to publish it, perhaps you should also re-evaluate where you are posting your content.

Address a problem

In my opinion, the best guest posts come under a content marketing umbrella. If you’re just trying to blatantly advertise your service or products on another website, guest posts are not the right way. Instead, you should focus your guest posts on addressing a problem. Using our own web design service as an example, we can come up with some pretty common problems or issues which people may search on Google to resolve.

Some issues can be client-focused such as “how to find a good web design company”, other issues might be related to actual developers such as “how to enqueue custom scripts” etc. The idea is to find a specific problem people in your industry are facing, and write a valuable piece on how to fix such problem.

Present the solution

Now that you’ve found the problem to write about, you need to present the solution. The key here is to present your company, service, product or backlink as the solution. This is the hard part. You need to keep the content marketing tone and try not to sound too sales-focused, not to mention many people will not publish guest posts if they think the backlink is inserted too promotionally. In the end, you need to strike the right balance and work with the publisher to ensure everyone’s needs are met.

The idea of presenting yourself as the solution is to ensure your link is valuable, necessary and provides value in addition to the content. It will also help to boost the click through rate of the link, and the likelihood of your link being clicked is actually an important factor in Google giving weight to a backlink. Things to remember about this:

  • Make sure your backlink is well within the content of the article, ie not in the footer or author bio.
  • Make sure the content around the link actually drives people to click it, ie don’t just include it in a very neutral and benign way.
  • Make sure the content around the link is relevant to the backlinks page. For example, a link to our web design page should include content about web design, development, our brand name etc.

Include the link naturally

Naturally including the link is very important to ensure your backlink looks trustworthy. Essentially, just follow the 3 bullet points above and do not try to force your link into the content. In our example, if we have a paragraph which happens to mention:

 “web design is the process of…” 

It wouldn’t be helpful to hyperlink the [web design] text to our page, as the content is not relevant to our landing page and has no reason to be linked here.

However, if we have a paragraph which happens to mention:

“according to Blue Whale Media, a web design company, …”

This would be very relevant to our landing page as it both mentions our brand name as well as what we actually are. It is useful to the reader to have a link to our page in this text as it provides more information and value about our company and service which is specifically mentioned.

Conclusion

So there you have it, the simple strategies on how to guest post like a pro. It doesn’t sound complicated at all, but actually putting it into practice can raise some issues. But that’s part and parcel of marketing, isn’t it?

If you’d like to learn more about SEO link building, you can read our own guide to link building in 2022.

Why You Should Run Google Shopping Ads
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Why You Should Use Google Shopping Ads

Benefits of using Google Shopping Ads to promote your eCommerce website

Why You Should Use Google Shopping Ads

Google Shopping Adverts are the best method of selling your products online with paid traffic. If you are an eCommerce owner, or a marketer with an eCommerce client, you can’t afford to miss out on Google’s shopping ads.

In this blog by Blue Whale Media, we will be highlighting the reasons why you should be using Google Shopping Ads to promote your online products.

Types of Shopping Ads

Firstly, we must understand the different type of shopping ads you can use. In total, there are three different shopping ads which can help you to promote different type of products or achieve different goals.

  • Product Shopping Ad: this an advert automatically created for each individual product based on the data provided from Google Merchant Center.
  • Showcase Shopping Ad: this is an advert created by grouping a selection of related products together. For example, if someone searches “winter coat for men”, a showcase shopping advert can promote a variety of your winter coat products within a single advert.
  • Local Inventory Shopping Ad: this is similar to a product shopping advert, but more location-focused to promote products from your physical store to local shoppers.

Benefits of Shopping Ads

As the name suggests, Shopping Ads are highly focused on promoting products to ready-to-buy users on Google. Below are some of the benefits as to why Shopping Ads work better than Search or Display adverts in order to drive online sales.

Visibility

Firstly, shopping ads are massively more visible in the search results. Although Search adverts can be accompanied by various different extensions to help the ad stand out more (or at least take up more space on the page), Shopping adverts are simply more eye-catching. With an engaging product image, price tag, and review ratings, Shopping ads are easily able to stand-out on the search results page.

More Clicks

According to a study by Merkle, Google Shopping adverts accounts for the majority of all Google Ads clicks, taking up around 65% of all paid clicks from Google Ads. Additionally, Shopping adverts also account for around 89% of all non-branded Google Ads clicks for retailers. That’s a lot of clicks from qualified searchers!

Return on Investment

For eCommerce websites, Google Shopping Ads will provide a greater return on investment compared to other PPC campaigns. Aside from the previous point of how much Shopping ads dominate the total paid click share on Google, further research has also shown that:

  • Shopping adverts have a significantly lower cost per click compared to search adverts showing on the same search results, in some cases as much as half the price.
  • Shopping adverts have a much better conversion rate compared to search adverts. In some cases, shopping adverts can have a 30% higher conversion rate on desktop and 21% higher conversion rate on mobile.

With these statistics, it’s no surprise then that online retailers will see a greater conversion rate with shopping adverts over other PPC campaigns.

How To Improve Your Local Rankings On Google
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How To Improve Your Local Rankings On Google

How to improve your local rankings in Google's map pack.

How To Improve Your Local Rankings On Google

When it comes to capturing new customers for your local business, you’ll want to make sure your business can rank high for local searches in Google.

Firstly, what is a local ranking? A local ranking is when a Google My Business page ranks in the map listings of a search results page (“map pack”) – it is not about where the website ranks in the organic listings.

In this blog, the Manchester SEO experts at Blue Whale Media will be looking at how businesses can improve their local rankings in the map listings.

Complete Your Business Information

The first step is as simple as it gets – but believe it or not, the amount of businesses that simply do not fill out all the business details is astounding. Some of the most important details you will need to complete for your Google My Business listing include:

  • An accurate & verified physical address
  • Service area
  • A phone number
  • Correct business category
  • Business attributes
  • Business description

All of this information allows Google to understand your locality. If Google cannot accurately understand that you are a local business, how can you expect it to rank you for local search terms?

By utilising a verified address and including a service area, you are clearly outlining your own local area as well as any additional areas you may service.

A phone number can also indicate your business locality. For example, an 01925 number clearly indicates the business is local to Warrington.

Using the correct business category is also important. Google groups local search terms into categories, which are matched against the categories of Google My Business profiles to come up with the most relevant results. This is why when you search something like [restaurants near me], you are more likely to see business listings for actual restaurants rather than cafes or fast food (although these businesses can still show up, they will not rank as high since they are not as relevant.)

Optimise Your Description

Descriptions are very important for optimising your Google My Business profile. The description allows you to write informative, relevant and optimised content around your business. You can use the description to highlight additional keywords and business categories as well as improve relevancy to your locality. For example: a Chinese restaurant would probably like to rank for search terms like [chinese restaurant near me]. Google does not provide any dedicated category for Chinese restaurants, so the business can use the description to highlight its Chinese dishes etc.

When you are writing your business description, it’s important to keep the Google My Business guidelines in-mind to ensure you don’t accidentally break any rules!

Factors That Contribute To Your Ranking

Google officially breaks down the local ranking factors into three key points: Relevance, Distance and Prominence.

Relevance

Relevance is all about how well your Google My Business profile matches the search term. This goes back to optimised descriptions, which allows Google to better understand the business and match the profile to relevant searches.

Distance

Sometimes, the rankings are simply out of your control no matter what. This is the frustration of the Distance factor. As the name suggests, this is purely about the distance between the specified location and the address listed on your Google My Business profile. If no location is specifically indicated through the search query, then Google will use the IP Address as the location instead.

Prominence

Prominence is all about how popular or well known your business is. There are a few sub-categories to this ranking factor, which helps to statistically understand what “prominence” actually means when it comes to ranking.

  • Popularity: popularity is judged through backlinks (both to the business profile as well as the website) as well as brand mentions throughout the web.
  • Reviews: the number of reviews as well as your review score both factor into how Google understands your business prominence. 
  • Website SEO: your website’s position in organic search listings are also a direct factor for the prominence of your business. 
5 Powerful Benefits of PPC Advertising
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5 Powerful Benefits of PPC Advertising

The 5 most powerful benefits of PPC advertising with Google Ads

5 Powerful Benefits of PPC Advertising

There are many different benefits to PPC advertising with Google Ads. Some benefits may be more compelling to specific businesses or campaign goals. One thing’s for certain: when done right, advertising your services or products with Google Ads can work very well – and bring in a lot of money.

In this blog, Blue Whale Media will be highlighting the 5 powerful benefits of running a PPC advertising campaign for your business.

Business Goals

Google Ads campaigns can be used to achieve a range of different business goals and objectives. When setting up a new campaign, you can set some predefined goals which will include features to help you reach those objectives. You can also manually optimise and change campaign settings & features to reach these goals more clearly. Some achievable business goals that Google Ads can help with include:

  • Online sales
  • Lead generation
  • Website traffic
  • Brand awareness

Measurable & Trackable

Google Ads are designed to be measurable, so you know exactly how successful your campaign is and whether you are meeting your business goals or not. 

For website goals, you can link your Google Ads account and Google Analytics account together to share important metrics. This allows you to view how your paid users interact with, navigate through and take actions throughout your website. For an eCommerce website, this is especially important as it allows your website to share details such as product purchases and revenue generated from paid users – allowing you to calculate an accurate Return on Ad Spend for your Google Ads campaign. 

Quick

Google Ad campaigns are quick to achieve results. The actual process of setting up and managing a campaign is not necessarily quick, but the fact that you can have your website positioned at the top of the search results on Google with one click of a button is very convenient. Additionally, it’s very easy to make quick additions to the campaign which could vastly improve the performance – things such as adding in negative keywords, changing ad copy, adding new extensions etc.

Control

In a Google Ads campaign, you have control over absolutely everything. Some of the key aspects of controllable targeting include:

  • Keywords: with the three options of broad match, phrase match and exact match, you can have your advert to be as inclusive or exclusive to your keywords as you need.
  • Gender: you can increase and decrease bids, or advertise exclusively to, users based on their known gender.
  • Age: you can increase and decrease bids, or advertise exclusively to, users based on their known age range.
  • Device: you can increase and decrease bids, or advertise exclusively to, users based on the device they are using.
  • Location: you can have your adverts appear to users in specific locations, from entire countries down to individual postcodes and even radiuses around a geographical position. Locations can also be used to exclude users, or increase/decrease bids in specific areas.
  • Audience: you can increase and decrease bids, or advertise exclusively to, users based on their pre-defined audience grouping. This includes the ability to target parents, homeowners, jobseekers etc.
  • Affinity: you can increase and decrease bids, or advertise exclusively to, users based on their previous browsing history. This allows you to target people who have extensively researched iPhones, people who are interested in video games, people who have been browsing for cars etc.

The control you have over each individual target setting is above and beyond, it’s not a simple “on and off” switch. You can:

  • Segment each and every metric by each and every option highlighted above. This can highlight how people of different ages engage with your adverts etc.
  • Increase your bids per setting. Perhaps users in one city are more likely to convert than users in another city, so you can increase your bids for users in the better location.
  • Reduce your bids per setting. Perhaps desktop users are not converting as much as mobile users, so you can decrease your maximum bids for users on desktop devices. You can completely eliminate a specific setting by reducing your bids by -100%.

Combine With Other Marketing

One of the most powerful strategies for advertising with Google Ads is retargeting. You can combine the likes of Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel to create a remarketing list which can be imported into Google Ads. This can allow you to show exclusive adverts to those users who have already interacted with your website previously.

A great example of this is if a user landed on your website, had a look at your product (a red coat in this example) and then leaves the website without buying it. We can create a new campaign to target this type of user – who views a product but does not add to cart or purchase – and utilise dynamic adverts to highlight that specific red coat product when they are next searching in the search results. Or you can use a Display campaign and target them with the product whilst they are browsing other websites. 

A powerful method of convincing these people to come back and purchase the product is to offer an exclusive, time sensitive discount. According to research, 47% of shoppers would sacrifice their privacy for a better deal. By putting your product back in front of the user, with a new reduced price, you are sure to bring in more conversions!

Businesses That Benefit The Most From Local SEO
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Businesses That Benefit The Most From Local SEO

The businesses that will benefit the most from Local SEO services

Businesses That Benefit The Most From Local SEO

There are two main types of SEO for businesses: national and local. National means ranking for your main keywords without any locational input or map listings. Local SEO means ranking your website for location-specific keywords, and/or ranking the Google My Business profile in the map pack listings. Which one you should go with depends on your business, target audience and budget.

In this blog, we will be taking a look at which type of businesses are best suited for Local SEO and why.

Hospitality Businesses

Businesses in the hospitality sector are probably the biggest winners in Local SEO. When it comes to searching for bars, restaurants, cafes etc, distance is one of the most important thing to people. These businesses will always serve a geographically targeted market. That’s why it’s so important for hospitality businesses to invest in Local SEO to ensure their business can appear high in the map packs. 

Customer reviews are also very important for hospitality businesses. Reviews are shown very prominently in the search results, especially in the map pack listings. By having both a high number of reviews as well as a good overall review rating, your business will be able to establish instant credibility with searchers. Not to mention that reviews are a factor in ranking for local searches. 

Tradespeople

Tradespeople are another sector of workers who can benefit from Local SEO. Think of plumbers and electricians. People searching for these kind of services are normally quite time sensitive: it’s not about who can help them, but when someone can help. Similar to hospitality, tradespeople’s customers will also be almost exclusively local. 

With the likes of plumbers and electricians, people are just looking for a good person to provide the service asap. They usually aren’t interested in browsing your website and finding out a lot of information before calling – this is why a lot of tradespeople websites are quite basic, they don’t need to invest in the visuals of the website as much as other businesses do. That’s why Local SEO is so important, they need to get their business in front of people who are looking for their services on a “here and now” basis. A map pack listing with the company name and phone number is all they need.

Franchises

Franchises in any sector will have to keep Local SEO in mind if they want to rank for all their areas. Local SEO for franchise includes both map listings and landing pages.

Firstly, you need to submit a Google My Business profile for each location in your franchise. An important thing to remember here is to keep the business name the same for each profile. For example, “Nando’s Warrington” and “Nando’s Manchester” would be incorrect – they should both just be named “Nando’s” with their differing business addresses submitted. Follow the same advice if you are listing these businesses on websites such as Yelp.

Secondly, you should create a locational page for each location you serve. This doesn’t have to be a full blown landing page, you can just have a simple contact page for each location which includes that location’s specific phone number, email address, address and a link to the Google My Business profile. This helps to gain extra visibility in the search results both in the map pack as well as organic results. 

Real Estate

Real estate companies will garner a massive majority of their organic traffic from Local SEO. Unlike the other sectors on the list, realtors won’t be targeting the map pack for their rankings. Instead, real estate websites will create unique landing pages for each location with descriptive content on the area. 

For example, realtors won’t get much traffic from keywords like “real estate agent in Manchester” etc. But they will get traffic from keywords like “homes for sale in Manchester” etc. This is where Local SEO for real estate comes into effect. Each property listing and landing page should come with descriptive content about the local area, nearby amenities etc which will push the local rankings.

How To Boost Your PPC Marketing With Content
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How To Boost Your PPC Marketing With Content

How To Boost Your PPC Marketing With Content

How To Boost Your PPC Marketing With Content

People buy people. No doubt many people, especially marketers, have heard this saying at least once in their lifetime. In simple terms, “people buy people” is just an illustration of relationship marketing – actually building a relationship with your potential customer, presenting yourself in a good manner etc. Today, this saying is still holds true, but in a slightly different manner. In 2022, we’re looking at:

“People buy brands.”

Not as catchy, I know, but it works very well for marketers. In this blog, I’ll be highlighting how you can sell your brand to consumers by combining PPC marketing with content marketing.

Maximise SERP Visibility

Firstly, PPC and content both allow your website to increase SERP visibility. As we know, PPC marketing allows you to put your page at the top of search results for a fee per click. Having great content on your page also allows it to rank organically. Ideally, you want your brand to show up at the top in both set of results. By having your brand appear at least twice in the search results, it subconsciously shows the user that your brand is the authority when it comes to their chosen search topic.

Target Mobile Users Who Can’t See Your Organic Page

Anyone searching Google on mobile will know how hidden the organic results are. Depending on the search term, you can find yourself scrolling past multiple paid ads, various map listings and even a knowledge panel before finally seeing the first organic result. If your business is reliant on mobile users for traffic (retail businesses especially) then you need to invest in PPC marketing to reach these users, even if you’re ranking #1 organically.

Remarket to low-intent leads

Content marketing is great for selling to people without actually selling anything. By providing useful resources such as how-to guides and product reviews, you can target people who have yet to decide whether they want to purchase your services/products yet – these are known as low-intent leads. By combining your content marketing with other forms such as social media or GoogleAds, you can put your business back in front of these people when they are further into the sales journey. This is known as remarketing. As you are already a familiar brand to these users, you are far more likely to convert them into paying customers.

How SEO Works In Different Industries
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How SEO Works In Different Industries

How SEO works for websites in different niches and industries

How SEO Works In Different Industries

Search Engine Optimisation is here to serve one purpose: drive more organic traffic to your website by ranking higher for your keywords. Unfortunately, the art of actually implementing is not as simple as its definition. It’s even more difficult when you realise SEO strategies will differ depending on the industry of your business and the goals of your website.

In this blog, I’ll be highlighting some key strategic differences for implementing SEO in various business industries.

Shared Strategies

Firstly, let’s just highlight the core concepts of SEO which will always be important regardless of the website:

  • Keyword research – you always need to make sure you’re trying to rank for the right keywords.
  • Content – content should always be relevant, readable, meaningful and high-quality.
  • Backlinks – backlinks will always be used to rank your website and pages, although backlinks are more important in some industries compared to others.
  • Website speed – you should always be trying to ensure your website loads fast for your users.
  • Website structure – your website structure should always be organised to easily differentiate main pages, blog posts, products etc.

eCommerce Websites

Driving search traffic is vital for eCommerce websites – there’s always going to be people searching for your products, and if you target the right keywords they are very likely to purchase your products without having to do much convincing.

Many eCommerce websites are image-focused to quickly showcase their products to the visitor. However, a page filled with images and no content will do nothing for your SEO. When it comes to optimising your eCommerce website, product descriptions and product category descriptions are immensely important. Not only do these descriptions provide the necessary relevance that search engines are looking for, they also provide great opportunities to internally link to relevant categories and product models. 

However, no one wants to read 5 paragraphs of text when they’re browsing products to buy – so how do you please Google with content without hurting user experience?

Your optimised descriptions and content can be hidden until toggled such as text accordions or a “read more” button etc. This way of organising the text will still count towards your SEO: anything included in the HTML document of a webpage is counted by Google for ranking purposes.

For more tips about writing content for eCommerce websites, you can read our blog here.

Physical Business

For “physical business” I am only including local businesses where the goal is to drive people to the physical business location as opposed to website conversion. For example, restaurants, cafes, shops etc.

The most important thing for these businesses is the Google Map Pack. This is the section of the search results where Google lists around 3-5 local businesses relevant to your search term. Arguably, being listed in the map pack is far more important than appearing as #1 in the website results. Think about your own searches – if you search something like “Chinese restaurants near me” are you more likely to click a business listing or a website result?

In order for a business to improve their local listing rankings, they need to invest in local SEO and optimise their Google My Business page:

  • Business address.
  • Business hours, including special hours on days such as Christmas, Easter, New Years etc.
  • List your business in the correct category.
  • Ask for customers to post reviews.
  • Create additional business listings on other business directory websites.

You can read more about optimising your Google My Business with this helpful blog from Search Engine Journal.

Health/Medical

SEO for a healthcare or medical website is one of the most difficult niches. Because healthcare and medicine is such a sensitive topic to write about, Google has to be very careful in ranking medical websites – as these search terms can have a big impact on a user’s physical health and wellbeing. 

In order to rank your medical website, you need to focus on EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness). This is about proving your expertise as a real medical professional, which can be achieved in various methods:

  • For example, if you’re a GP with your own website, you need to have your website included on the NHS’s official online GP listings. 
  • If your medical websites include blog posts, you need to include a descriptive author bio which clearly shows who has written the content and what qualifies them to professionally write about medical topics.
  • Utilise real images of your staff, office/practice, equipment etc. This serves to show your business and staff are actually real, as opposed to random people from Shutterstock.
Page Experience Update For Desktop Search Results
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Page Experience Update For Desktop Search Results

Page Experience Update For Desktop Search Results

Page Experience Update For Desktop Search Results

Back in November 2021, Google announced their plans for bringing the Page Experience update to Desktop search results. Now, the rollout for this update is quickly approaching. The rollout is to begin in February 2022, and is expected to be fully completed by March 2022. In both cases, Google will announce the rollout and the completion of the roll out on their Google Search Central account.

But what will this update actually do, and who is affected? Read on as I look to explain the Page Experience Update for Desktop Results and answer your questions in this blog.

What will this update change?

This update is simply incorporating ranking signals that are already live for mobile search results. Google had already launched Page Experience as an update back in June 2021, but this update only impacted mobile search results. By the end of March, desktop search results will also begin ranking websites with these same page experience signals.

The Page Experience signals themselves will be the infamous Core Web Vitals, HTTPS Security, and Absence of Intrusive Interstitials (annoying pop up ads, for example.)

You can read Google’s full guide on Page Experience signals here.

How big of an impact will this update have?

Google has consistently reminded people that the original Page Experience update was very minor and page experience as a ranking signal is pretty much only a tie-breaker. Google has again told us that this Page Experience update will be the same, in that desktop search results are very unlikely to see any major changes as a result of this update. Just because your website is faster doesn’t mean your content is better – good content will remain the key ranking factor in the search results.

Despite Google’s own announcements of how small of a ranking signal this will be, we can expect to see numerous SEO’s promote hysteria about website speeds just like they did in the previous page experience update.

Will my website be affected?

It is very unlikely that your business website will see any ranking shifts because of its website speed. If you already know that your website is considerably slow to load, you should already be looking to fix that for the sake of your users.

You can also check your page experience signals in the Google Search Console report. Currently (as of 12th January) this is only available for mobile signals – but Google does plan to implement a report for desktop page experience signals before the update starts to roll out.

Update: Google has now added the desktop page experience report for your Search Console properties. You can view this report by clicking here.

Conclusion

To conclude:

  • The page experience update for desktop search results is set to roll out in February 2022.
  • It is expected to take around 1 month to complete.
  • You can view your page experience signals in your Google Search Console account.
  • These new signals will be very small and mostly a tie breaker – you should not expect massive ranking changes for your websites.
4 SEO Tips To Implement For The New Year
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4 SEO Tips To Implement For The New Year

4 actionable SEO tips to implement for 2022

4 SEO Tips To Implement For The New Year

In the New Year spirit, many people are making their new year resolutions and thinking about how they can change things about themselves or their lifestyle. As a digital marketing agency, we know something that is always changing – apparently, it changes multiple times in a day. That thing is SEO – the world of SEO is constantly evolving, whether it be in small changes or big updates.

In this blog, we will be highlighting some actionable SEO tips you can implement for the new year!

1. Aim for Higher Quality Backlinks

Links are one of the most important factors for ranking higher in SERPs. The higher the quality of links, the better.

This is why you should not focus on quantity when it comes to linkbuilding. Instead, you should aim for quality and be more patient about it. Let’s put together a comprehensive list of backlinks strategies to help you with that:

  • Guest posting: when you create content for someone else’s blog and get a backlink from them in return.
  • Social media: sharing your content on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and getting likes and shares in return.
  • Influencer marketing: reaching out to influencers with relevant audiences and asking them for a share.
  • Link baiting: creating content which will naturally attract links from other bloggers or websites.

2. Overhaul Content to Adapt for Changes in Search

Google is constantly changing, and content creators need to be aware of this. With Google’s updates, it’s important to re-evaluate how you structure your content in order to stay relevant.

Google is constantly changing, updating and adding new algorithms in order to serve the best possible results to users. As a webmaster and/or content creator, it’s important to understand what these algorithms are looking for in order to maximise your search visibility. In 2021, the biggest change was the two Product Reviews Updates. These updates were brand new algorithms added to Google, which changed the way in which they ranked eCommerce websites – specifically affiliate eCommerce blogs. To sum them up, these updates were looking to reward product review blog posts which were high-quality: in that they were unique information, clearly showcased that the writer had actually used the product they were reviewing, and gave readers multiple marketplaces to buy the product.

This is just one example to highlight the importance for content creators to constantly be aware of what Google is looking for, otherwise you’ll find your website falling down the endless list of search results. 

3. Perform an SEO Audit

You should have a professional Manchester SEO agency take a look at your website and perform a technical SEO audit. A website SEO audit will uncover the technical performance and issues within your website. It’s important to remember that not every website is trying to achieve the same goals, so the issues found in an audit should be categorised by priority depending on what the business is trying to get from their website. 

A dedicated SEO consultant will be able to perform a full SEO audit of your website and then prioritise the key issues which will have the biggest impact on your SEO.

If you’re looking for a quick and free website audit, you can check our website audit page here.

4. Publish More Regularly

Publishing regular blogs will give your website greater opportunities to appear in the search results. That doesn’t mean you should just go crazy and start publishing 100 blogs every month, each piece of content should still be unique and valuable for both search engines and users.

Frequent publishing can attract more organic traffic in various ways, such as:

  • Newer content is more likely to go viral and achieve more readership.
  • Regularly publishing blogs shows your website is active to both users and search engines.

By publishing a lot of content about the same topic, you are showcasing that you/your brand/your website is an expert on the topic. This contributes towards your EAT – Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness.

The 5 SEO Priorities To Start Your New Year With A Bang
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The 5 SEO Priorities To Start Your New Year With A Bang

Top 5 SEO strategies to prioritise in 2022.

The 5 SEO Priorities To Start Your New Year With A Bang

SEO is an important part of the marketing strategy for any company. Whether you are a business or an individual, search engine optimization provides many benefits to your website.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has always been an important part of online marketing – it is one of the most cost-effective methods for bringing in traffic that converts into revenue for your business or organization. For companies new to SEO, this year is a great time to get started with it because it continues to grow in importance as more people turn to the internet as their go-to place for information.

1. Make Your Content Discoverable

The phrase “content is king” was coined almost 20 years ago and still holds true today. This means that if your content is not easily discoverable, then you are severely limiting the potential reach of your marketing campaign.

Therefore, as a first step to marketing your company’s content, it is important to become as search engine-friendly as possible. To do this, use appropriate keywords and tags in your titles and descriptions.

2. Optimize Your Content For Mobile Devices

It’s time to rethink the way you connect with your audience. In this digital age, using a mobile device is becoming the primary way people access the internet. If you have not optimized your site for mobile devices then now is the time to do so.

  • Optimize videos for mobile devices
  • Create a responsive website
  • Reduce loading time
  • Remove unnecessary content from web pages

3. Use Relevant Keywords

This strategy is about using relevant keywords in your content to make sure that you are getting the right kind of traffic. This includes going into detail about the benefits and features of a product or service. This will result in a better understanding of what a customer is looking for and what you can provide them.

4. Optimize Your Website Speed

The Google mobile-friendly update has made mobile page loading time a ranking factor, which means that website owners should start optimizing page loading speed.

There are various ways to optimize your site speed for your target audience. These include making sure your images are compressed and also optimizing the size of other assets on the site. The following techniques can also help you to improve page loading speed:

  • Minify HTML & CSS Files
  • Use asynchronous scripts
  • Reduce redirects
  • Enable compression
  • Enable browser caching

5. Focus on Quality Links From Relevant Websites

The fifth SEO strategy is to focus on quality links from relevant websites. Backlinks are a very important factor for ranking your website in the search results, but it is all about the quality rather than the quantity.

High-quality link building is about achieving contextual backlinks, from a relevant resource or authority, in a natural manner. For example, a backlink from a WordPress blog to a web design company will be highly relevant and impactful. On the other-hand, a backlink from a random business directory with an anchor such as “sponsored by” is unnatural and not relevant, so it will not achieve anything.

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