Saba Digital Marketing

Questions to Ask Your Future Online Marketing Team

When you are hiring an online marketing firm in San Diego, you should do your research ahead of time so you can be sure that you are getting the services and support that you need. While you certainly need to know the company’s basic services and rates, there are some questions that often go unasked that are important to determine a firm’s legitimacy and fit for you.

What Tools Do You Use to Track Progress?

This question will give you some insight into what your online market team will do with regards to analytics, but it will also demonstrate their credibility. If the firm gives vague details or cannot give you a clear answer, it’s a good assumption that they are not a valid company. A credible company will explain their analytics tool, how they determine success, and when they’ll provide reports to update you on the progress.

How Quickly Will my Website’s SEO Improve?

If you are working with an online marketing company and are interested in SEO services, asking this question is a test to determine a firm’s trustworthiness and credibility. If the SEO team states that they will greatly improve your website rank within a few days or even a couple weeks, you should be skeptical. Most search engine algorithms do not allow websites to improve rank in this short amount of time, so it is likely that answers like this are pure sales talk. A credible San Diego SEO firm will set a month by month timeline of their goals to improve your SEO.

Can I See Some Examples of Your Work?

One of the best indicators of an effective online marketing firm is an example of previous work. If your potential online marketing team can show you cases of how they expanded a website’s traffic by over 50% in less than three months (or another figure within a reasonable time frame), you can bet that they have a top-quality system of optimizing your website. You should also pay attention to the kind of website that they worked on. Internet users react to various kinds of websites differently, so the same results should not necessarily be expected all the time.

Interested in learning more about online marketing? Perhaps you’re looking for a new company to help you succeed in the future. Whatever the reason, reach out to Saba, Inc. at (858) 277-1717 and request a free consultation and website audit. Along with SEO services, we provide PPC services, mobile app development, and web design and development for San Diego businesses and companies throughout the nation.

How to Determine the Value of SEO Services

If you have invested a portion your business capital into search engine optimization for your website, you probably want to know if it is actually worth it. Fortunately, you can determine the actual value of your search engine optimization services by calculating your anticipated and actual return on investments.

Prior to calculating your return on investment values, take note of the amount of money that you have used for San Diego SEO services. Your return on investment should be higher than this amount if you are to experience a profit. For example, an SEO investment of $35,000 should yield a return of at least $180,000 to be considered effective.

Calculating Return

To calculate your anticipated return on investment value, you will need to know the average number of monthly visitors on your website, the conversion rate for your website’s e-commerce, and the average value of all orders placed by customers. To calculate how many sales you need to make to break even, you should plug your investment and other values into this calculation:

SEO Investment/Average Order Value

This will provide you with the number of orders that you need in order to prevent money loss. In order to generate a positive return on investment, you will need to have a much larger number of orders at equal or greater order value. For the next step, you will need the number of orders needed to break even and your e-commerce conversion rate:

Number of Orders/Conversion Rate=Traffic Needed to Break Even

If possible, you should increase your traffic beyond this value by a great amount in order to receive a positive return on investment. Take this value, increase it to your expected traffic in a month, and multiply it by your average order value. Plug all of the values into the final calculation:

Anticipated Return on SEO Investment=(Anticipated Revenue of SEO Investment – SEO Investment/ Cost of SEO Efforts

A value of 100% is optimal, while a value such as 20% is very poor. You should use this value to determine if your SEO services are worth investing in.

Start Investing Today

If you’re interested in learning more about SEO services for your business, reach out to Saba, Inc. and request a complimentary website audit and consultation. We are an experienced SEO company San Diego businesses trust, and we offer a wide range of services in addition to SEO including PPC, web design and development, and mobile app development. Call (858) 277-1717 for more information.

The Importance of Link Building for SEO

If you are trying to promote your website’s ranking on Google and other search engines, San Diego internet marketers say that link building may be one of your most effective strategies for search engine optimization. To put it simply, links from blogs and other locations of the internet to your site are recognized by search engines. These links demonstrate the importance and credibility of your website.

Google’s algorithms use links (among other things) to determine the popularity and value of your website. For example, a website with 400 external sources linking back to it may be deemed more credible than a blog with only 1 external source linking back to it. As a result of this, Google will reward the credible site with a higher search engine ranking. In turn, this will increase the website’s traffic. As you can see, link building is vital to the success your website.

How to Build Links

You can increase your chances of other sites linking back to your website by creating top-quality, authoritative content in your area of expertise. If you publish rare information about exercise science, it is likely that credible sources such as Competitor Magazine and Runner’s World will use your information and credit you with a link. This can have a positive effect on your SEO efforts. You may also build links by enlisting the help of some blogs related to your website’s topic. Ask a blogger to review your product or write a guest blog for them and link back to your site. This can prove to be an effective way of building links over time.

Not All Links Are Equal

While links are certainly beneficial to your website’s search engine optimization, you should take special care to ensure that links are credible. When links are created from your website to external sources, you should be sure that those sources are credible. Linking to untrustworthy websites can actually harm your search engine optimization efforts because Google may lower your website’s rank.

Link building is an important aspect of SEO, so you should make every effort to do it effectively. Your efforts will be rewarded with page views and potential sales. If you need help with your online or SEO efforts, reach out to Saba, Inc. We provide SEO San Diego businesses trust and offer complimentary website audits and consultations. Call (858) 277-1717 and get started today!

Using YouTube to Promote Your Business

If you are a San Diego business owner or webmaster who is trying to get a brand recognized, video content may be a tool that you can take advantage of. On average, a keyword search on Google returns a results page that consists of over 50% videos. Of these videos, about 90% come from the social video sharing site YouTube. By pushing your website or business content in the form of YouTube videos, you can improve your San Diego SEO while tapping into diverse audiences.

How to Make YouTube Work for You

Creative Content

If you think of video content from a pure business perspective, you may think that commercials and advertisements are your best options. This could not be any further from the truth. In today’s online world, consumers are very wary of hard sales tactics and prefer to find content that is either informative or entertaining. Instead of advertising your product or services, create instructional videos on something related to your business. If you are a professional in a trade or area of academics, you can also provide commentary on relevant current events. Creative video content like this keeps the audience interested, so you are more likely to gain more traffic at your main website.

Engage Viewers

Some of the most successful YouTubers create content like entertainers even if their subject matter is informative. An example of this is John Green, a person who creates informative academic videos that use entertaining graphics and a bit of comedy. This makes viewers laugh while they learn, so John Green continues to gain followers while he promotes his brand. You can do the same by engaging viewers with personality while offering informative content.

Networking

As with any successful business venture, networking is a necessity. Team up with other YouTubers to create collaborative videos. This will increase your subscribers and potential website visitors. You can also contact bloggers that write about the subject matter in your videos. Offer that you will promote them in your videos if they share your videos in some of their posts. Many bloggers will be happy to engage this kind of mutual relationship, so give it a shot.

If you reach a large degree of success on YouTube, you can wield quite a large amount of marketing power. This can be used to direct traffic to both your website and business. For more information about San Diego social media management or YouTube engagement, reach out to Saba, Inc. at (858) 277-1717 and request a complimentary, no-obligation consultation and website audit. Our professional and experienced internet marketers can provide you with the tools and advice needed to increase your brand’s online visibility, leads, and sales!

What is Google Web Designer?

If you are a business owner that is striving to connect with the online market, you probably know that having a well-designed website is large part of SEO and promoting your brand. Google Web Designer is a fairly new tool that can be useful for these purposes.

What is Google Web Designer?

Google Web Designer is a web design program that was released in August of 2014 for the purpose of providing webmasters and business people with a means of creating professional-grade web content.

Features

Google Web Designer utilizes HTML5 to create content centered on interaction. It provides the option to utilize animation and other engaging features to keep visitors interested in your site while delivering information through blog posts and other content. This program also allows web designers to integrate sites with many other Google products such as AdWords, Google Drive, Maps, and Double Click Studio.

Websites created using this program can be fully interactive through various aspects such as tap area, frame, YouTube videos, and an image gallery. When used with smart devices, websites can also react to motions such as swiping, tilting, rotating, touch, and shaking. Called ‘events’ by Google, these motions can trigger a variety of options that can be customized. There is also a large degree of flexibility in terms of pages and navigation. Both 3D and 2D objects can be created to make your site even more unique. Google Web Designer can be downloaded on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Benefits

  • A wide range of flexibility that is not available in many template-based web design tools
  • No coding experience required
  • Access to complex features such as motion interaction
  • Free to download

Disadvantages

  • Complicated for beginners
  • Limited options for advertisements

If you feel like you need professional help in creating your website, don’t hesitate to reach out to the affordable and professional San Diego web designers at Saba, Inc. and bring your vision to life. Call us at (858) 277-1717 and request a free website consultation today.

A Basic Overview of Paid Search

Paid search, also know as pay per click (PPC), is a common advertising model used throughout the online market. In contrast with methods that pay websites for simply hosting ads, paid search only requires payments to websites when visitors click on the advertisement and visit the advertiser’s website. This advertising model offers a large range of benefits to the advertiser.

Low Financial Risk

Since websites are only paid when visitors go to the advertiser’s website, the advertiser does not pay for ads that do not attract attention. Instead, the ads that are paid for all have the potential to increase sales or drive traffic. In most cases, a single sale can offset the cost of hundreds of clicks, so the financial risk is very low for the paid search model, so long as the account is set up correctly.

Brand Recognition

The presence of your website in search results is enough to increase brand recognition. However, it is important that your website has high-quality content and only opens in a visitor’s browser as a result of them clicking the advertisement. Pop-ups and invasive advertisements are frowned upon by most internet users, so using such methods can have a negative effect on your brand. Paid search advertising also promotes your brand simply by being on a webpage. Even if they are rarely clicked, your advertisements can leave an impression on visitors and they may recognize your business’ brand in the future.

Established Advertising Networks

There are many established advertising networks that you can become a part of to spread your brand across the internet. Google AdWords is the largest network and will spread your paid search advertisements across all sites that are linked with Google AdSense, a common source of revenue for bloggers and website owners. With high-quality content and honest ads, you can drive traffic to your site and profit greatly from sales.

Have other questions about how to market your business or brand online? Reach out to Saba, Inc. Along with PPC services, we specialize in social media management, web design and development, and search engine optimization for San Diego businesses and companies throughout the United States and Canada. Call us today at (858) 277-1717 and request a free consultation.

Today’s Top Online Marketing Trends

In an online world that is becoming increasingly connected to innovative people and companies from across the world, it is more important than ever to keep your marketing skills ahead of the game. Learn the online marketing trends of today to improve your business’ or blog’s online presence.

Social Media is Changing

The use of social media for online marketing has been a topic of discussion ever since Mark Zuckerberg’s founding of Facebook. Like all useful and innovative tools, social media changes rapidly. Those who wish to take advantage of it must utilize all of the social media tools available on a variety of networks. Business owners can make their brand far more recognizable if they effectively use Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ for online marketing.

Content Must be Mobile

If you have been paying attention to the purchasing habits of people across the world, you know that smartphones and tablets have become more popular than ever among almost all age groups. Both young children and the elderly are using mobile devices to browse the internet and perform tasks in their daily lives. This opens up an opportunity to promote your content on a new playing field. If you create a mobile app or responsive version of your website, you will be ensuring that people are able to view your content and promotions.

Social Impact and SEO are Related

In the past, your contents’ impact on social media and its search engine ranking were not necessarily related. As Google and other search engines continue their goal of providing users with high-quality content, the presence of your content on social media sites may affect your site’s credibility and reputation. For example, an article that has been shared 3000 times on Facebook may have a higher search engine rank than an article that has only been shared two times.

Have other questions about how to market your website in today’s new online world? Reach out to Saba, Inc. at (858) 277-1717 and speak with an online marketing expert. We specialize in SEO in San Diego and also offer a wide range of other internet marketing services including PPC, web design and development, social media management, and more. Schedule your free consultation today!

Are Subdomains Bad for SEO?

If you are like many dedicated webmasters, you may have considered transitioning content such as a blog to a subdomain of your primary website. This may seem like a simple and easy way to consolidate existing content, but too many subdomains can have a negative effect on the search engine rank of your primary domain.

For example, if you have high-quality content on your primary domain that has a large readership, transitioning this content to a subdomain can cause your website’s rank to fall rapidly. It is highly recommended that you do not move any of your most successful content away from your primary domain. In most cases, utilizing subdomains is harmful for SEO purposes.

When a Subdomain Makes Sense

However, there are some cases in which using subdomains can improve your search engine rank. If you have an established website that has existed long enough to create a large amount of content, you may be able to use subdomains to prevent some of your less successful articles from lowering your search engine rank. A low-quality article such as a reproduced how-to guide, for example, can prevent your website and its high-quality articles from receiving the attention that it deserves. An alternative to removing these poor SEO articles is to transition them to subdomains. This will ensure that Google’s algorithms do not identify your entire primary domain as low-quality and harm your search engine rank.

Advice from Our SEO Experts

Outside of the above method of deflecting search engines’ attention from low-quality articles, the use of subdomains should be avoided. Instead, you should make use of subfolders for blogs and other related content. Unlike subdomains, subfolders always take the rank and credibility of your primary site. This also works the other way around; the rank and credibility created by subfolders is passed on to other aspects of the primary site.

As with many things, subdomains are not always bad for search engine optimization, but they should be used sparingly with a particular purpose in mind. Have other questions about search engine optimization? Call (858) 277-1717 and request a complimentary, no-obligation consultation with a professional San Diego internet marketing expert from Saba, Inc. and find out how to maximize your potential in the online world.

Hit by Google’s “Quality Update”?

If you are among the many people that strive for high search engine rankings in order to draw traffic to your website or an SEO in San Diego, you probably want to listen up. After a series of major website rank changes in the Google search engine, Google has announced that their system of assessing website quality has changed. This ‘quality update’ has caused many popular websites to fall in rank, while others moved to higher spots on search result lists.

The update to the search engine’s quality-assessment algorithm was not announced or even acknowledged by Google when it first came out, but Google has now confirmed that changes have occurred. According to the company, the recent update only affected the primary algorithm and not the filters such as Penguin or Panda. Despite this bit of information about the update, no one outside of Google knows exactly what has changed about the algorithm. Any information that Google has provided is a teaser at best.

Since nothing has been confirmed by Google, there are various theories surrounding the change in the quality-assessment algorithm. It is possible that open-source information sites such as WikiHow and HubPages are losing rankings due to questionably credible information, but there could also be other unknown factors at play. To complicate matters, some open-source information sites have gained rank while others have been demoted by several spots. In other words, most of the non-Google information about the ‘quality update’ from search engine marketers is purely speculative and may or may not be completely inaccurate.

If you were impacted by the ‘quality update’, do not panic. You will have plenty of opportunities to improve your website’s ranking in the future, but you should take Google’s advice of making your site more informative and unique from others. You can do this by posting rare information that cannot be found on many other sites. High-quality information will increase the value of your site and Google will reward you for this in the search engine.

Have other questions about how to recover from the Google quality update? Perhaps you’re interested in increasing your businesses online visibility. Whatever the reason, reach out to the professional San Diego online marketing experts at Saba, Inc. Call us at (858) 277-1717 and schedule a free consultation!

2015 Title Tag Guidelines

Title tags are an important component of ranking websites in SERPs, and Google and other search engines are constantly changing the title tag requirements. To help you create your new title tags, Saba, Inc., a trusted San Diego search engine optimization company, shares some tips for converting your tags into the most useful snippets for user-friendly websites.

  • Know Your Character Limit

    Search engines truncate titles that exceed a certain length. For instance, Google shortens long title tags to a snippet containing an ellipsis. If you want the title tag that you created to appear in search results, keep your text around 50 to 60 characters.

  • Keep It Simple

    The most effective tags contain important words (or keywords) in a short format, such as ‘Starbucks coffee.’ If these powerful phrases are placed near the beginning of the title tag, then it helps the ranking of the search. A brief and concise title tag helps to secure a click.

  • Brand Your Title Tags

    Branding is useful in selecting title tags. For instance, in the example of ‘Starbucks coffee’ as a tag, the name of the company, Starbucks, is so well known that searchers often will use Starbucks as their only keyword. In the case of a local coffee shop, such as Dana’s Coffee, an ideal title tag stresses ‘coffee’ first and ‘Dana’s’ second. The difference lies in brand awareness of a nationally known company versus a known company of smaller repute.

  • Know Your Business Goals

    Positivity is important in constructing title tags, because the snippet is the first exposure to your brand from a new user’s search. Continuing our example, consider the emotional impact. If your object is to hang out with friends, the title tag ‘fun coffeehouse’ may generate a click, and if your goal is to study or work, ‘internet coffeehouse’ appeals to you.

  • Avoid Keyword Stuffing

    Placing ‘coffee,’ ‘starbucks coffee,’ ‘Starbucks coffee,’ or ‘starbucks coffeehouse’ as title tags on multiple pages of a website may appear spammy to search engines. As with all search engine marketing techniques, it will be important to do extensive keyword research so you can diversify the title tags of your website.

Have other questions about custom title tags, descriptions, and SEO? Reach out to Saba, Inc. and schedule a complimentary, no-obligation consultation with one of our San Diego SEO and internet marketing experts. Simply dial (858) 277-1717 today!

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