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Month: July 2015

How Customer Reviews Bolster SEO Efforts

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If you own a business, a large portion of your internet marketing efforts are probably centered around local SEO. While listings, schema, and other matters are all very important for local SEO, customer reviews can be beneficial for improving your search engine rank and drawing in offline sales.

Better Rankings for Company or Product Name + Review

One study found nearly 85% of consumers read online reviews prior to purchasing products or services from a business. Ultimately, this leads to more searches for a business or product name plus the word “review” and an increased ranking on Google for those keywords.

Opportunities for Backlinks

If someone is rating your business on a blog or business review website, they will likely link back to your site to show their readers exactly what they are referring to and drive traffic to your site. Google’s algorithms will also recognize the increased amount of backlinks and may improve your search engine rank.

More Visibility on Google Maps and Mobile Searches

If you have claimed your Google business listing and have reviews, your business will be visible to users of Google Maps if they are near you. This can contribute to offline sales if your business has a physical location. The quality of these reviews also matters. The relevant business with the highest rating will appear first in a Google Maps search. This also applies to searches made on mobile devices with Google Now.

Increased Conversions

Although reviews can help improve your rank on Google, ultimately reviews will help your business increase the number of conversions made. Reviewers are more inclined to trust peer reviews, and also use reviews as a place to find answers to questions or additional product info not on the website. The extra information and varied opinions nudge people towards making a decision if they were previously on the fence.

Reviews can certainly help your business grow, but if you need help with other online marketing initiatives, reach out to Saba, Inc and learn more about our SEM for San Diego businesses. Give us a call at (858) 277-1717 today!

Must-Know Mobile SEO Updates

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If you have been keeping up with SEO news, you probably know that search engines are continuously changing to provide internet users with easy access to high-quality information. Due to more people accessing the internet from smartphones and tablets, search engines have also made updates to mobile SEO. Here is what you need to know to keep your website ahead of the game.

Google Now Shows Tweets in Search Results

With the size and scope of Twitter continuing to expand, it was only a matter of time before Google began to include live tweets in search results. Google’s algorithm now uses words tagged in hashtags as keywords, so trending events on Twitter could potentially end up on a Google results page. If you don’t already have a Twitter account for your website or business, you may benefit from creating one. Tweeting your blog posts or important industry news with the appropriate keywords could increase your websites’ visitors.

Google Favors Mobile-Friendly Sites

When performing a search on a mobile device, Google will reward sites that are mobile-friendly. While not every site that is optimized for mobile devices will be ranked ahead of other sites, being mobile-friendly will give you an edge over competitors with similar value and content. If you’re site is not optimized for mobile viewing, you may benefit from updating to a theme that works with HTML5 and is optimized for most smartphones and tablets.

Apps Now Show Up in Search Results

If you have an app for your website or business, you will benefit from Google’s inclusion of mobile applications in search results. Search queries on mobile devices will now bring up apps that are relevant to keywords. For example, if you search for San Diego real estate news you may see a number of San Diego news or property listing apps on the results page. This update makes having a custom mobile app an essential part of attracting web traffic.

Without adapting sites for mobile users, businesses are ultimately limiting themselves and unintentionally driving business to competitors. If you need help making your website mobile-friendly, give Saba, Inc. a call at (858) 277-1717. As a trusted online marketing company in San Diego, we help businesses just like yours reach your target audience, drive traffic, and increase sales.

Is Content Marketing Here to Stay?

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Content marketing is a large aspect of SEO and website management, and while the concept and strategies may evolve over the years, there are no signs that it’s going to become irrelevant anytime soon. Wondering if content marketing is here for the long haul? As a San Diego SEO firm that believes content is king, we certainly think so!

You Cannot Force a Consumer to Buy

During most of the 20th century, the primary method of advertising and selling a product was through push marketing. As the market became saturated with ads, people became annoyed with pushy sales tactics and opted to avoid push marketing altogether. The widespread use of ‘Ad Block’ is a prime example of this. Now, content marketing is necessary because it convinces consumers to believe in brands through the distribution of high-quality content. If your content is considered informative, entertaining, or useful, consumers share it within their circles and your products are promoted. This happens without consumers ever becoming annoyed with push marketing tactics.

High Search Engine Ranks Depend on Sharing Content

If your website or blog is consistently updated with new content, you will have more opportunities to share your brand through social media marketing and attract new visitors. According to Google’s current algorithms, if many people click into your site and read your content regularly, you will be rewarded with a higher search engine rank, which will lead to more traffic visiting your site.

Content Demonstrates Your Credibility

While your primary goal is to perform your job well and serve your clients, content marketing will draw in consumers by showing that you know what you are doing. As long as the internet is a tool that is available to a great number of people, creating and distributing your knowledge through content is the best way to demonstrate your credibility. This can be done through informational videos, how-to guides, or editorials about industry news. Sharing this useful content can increase your reputation within your industry and its consumers.

Have questions or need help developing a content marketing strategy for your business? Call Saba, Inc. at (858) 277-1717 and speak with a friendly online marketing expert. We specialize in SEO, PPC, and social media marketing, and we also offer web design and development. Request a free website audit and consultation today!

The Role of Web Design in SEO

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From social media marketing to keyword research, there are plenty of things that can be done to increase the traffic and conversion rate of your website. While these aspects of SEO and brand promotion are important, the design of your website can mean the difference between success and failure. By designing your website in a manner that allows Google’s crawlers to easily access all content, you will improve your chances of receiving a top spot in search results.

Use HTML 5 Carefully

HTML 5, the most up-to-date version of the webpage markup language, is often praised for its flexibility and ability to create beautiful webpages. While many websites with HTML 5 are visually appealing, they are often heavily oriented around CSS and Java. In general, these are bad SEO practices that limit the content that Google can view. Instead, opt for a simple and responsive design that is based on standard HTML. Google may reward you with a higher search engine rank by prioritizing high-quality content over stylish effects and graphics.

Use the Same URL for Mobile and Desktop Versions

Some webmasters have made the mistake of using separate URLs for mobile and desktop versions of their sites. Not only does this make it more difficult for people to access your website, but it also harms your SEO efforts by splitting your total visitors and keywords across multiple sites. Responsive design is the most trusted way to prevent this problem. This will keep all of your web content on one URL while making your site compatible with most devices.

Place Prominent Links in Accessible Locations

If a link to one of your pages or external content is clicked frequently, you should make sure it’s in a highly accessible location. Navigation menus are one of the best options for this. If you move a popular link to a less accessible location, it could undermine your SEO efforts.

Web design plays a large role in the search engine rank of sites. By following tried and tested design practices, you will ensure that your site works with search engines.

 

Could you use a professional hand creating your website? Reach out to the experienced San Diego Web Design and SEO company, Saba, Inc.  Even if you aren’t starting from scratch, we can provide a complimentary website audit to help you revamp your site.  Call us at (858) 277-1717 today!

Top 5 Things People Forget About Local SEO

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Right now, Local SEO is the hot topic in internet marketing. As more consumers have mobile access to the internet and seek out the professional products and services that they need on the go, the market for local search is bigger than ever. In order to help you better understand local search and effective search engine optimization, here are some things to keep in mind.

1. Consistent, Accurate Listings

You need to ensure that you are listed in the right directories, not just any directory. Also, be sure your company information, contact details, and other provided information is uniform across various listing directories. If your basic contact information is different on each directory, you’re hurting your SEO efforts and losing valuable exposure. Plus, having incorrect or missing information just looks unprofessional.

2. Maximize Information

You need to fill in as much of the directory listing as possible with optimized content, local keywords, and other useful information. Every listing is different, and not every directory will require the same information. Make sure you utilize each directory to the fullest extent to help build brand exposure.

3. Social Media Marketing

You need fully implemented social media accounts. If you have to outsource to a San Diego SEM company, that’s fine. Just make sure that you are actually creating effective social media accounts and have a solid social marketing strategy in place. You can’t just put up a Facebook business page and walk away. You need to maintain an active social media presence at all times, and on the right channels to reach your targeted local audience.

4. A Space for Customers to Leave Reviews

Having reviews from other customers or colleagues can help your credibility with local customers. People like firsthand insight about a business, so the more reviews you have, the better.

5. Get Hyperlocal

Neighborhood search is still evolving, as Google can’t quite figure out how to incorporate neighborhoods and areas that locals might know, but that aren’t relevant to the rest of the world. Feel free to start integrating local keywords and neighborhoods into your website content, blogs, and other content to optimize for hyperlocal search once it becomes a full-fledged tool. Even if Google doesn’t know that Bird Rock is an area in San Diego, your audience probably does. Capitalize on that.

Want to know more about optimizing your site for local visibility? Reach out to Saba, Inc. and schedule a complimentary website audit and consultation with one of our online marketing experts. Call us today at (858) 277-1717. We look forward to hearing from you!

Minimize Click Fraud & Avoid Wasteful Spending

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Since advertising has become an effective means of revenue for bloggers and website owners, there has been an increased amount of click fraud. Click fraud occurs when people intentionally follow your advertisements to bring in revenue for the hosting website. If you’re the owner of the pay per click advertisement, this can mean that a portion of your ad budget is being wasted on web traffic that has no intention of purchasing your products or services. Fortunately, there are several things you can do to minimize click fraud and avoid wasteful spending.

Use Specific PPC Words

False clicks on your advertisements are inevitable, but you can reduce their impact on your budget by improving your return on investment. By using very specific keywords in your pay-per-click advertisements, you will be targeting a group of people that are more likely to follow your advertisements out of interest. You can find these top-quality keywords by performing keyword research and surveying past customers. You may also find that including a geographic keyword can narrow the group of visitors that see your advertisements.

Track the Behavior of Users

You can keep track of click fraud by monitoring user activity through analytics. Some key indicators of click fraud are multiple click-throughs and few bounces, clicks from a single browser, and multiple clicks from a single IP address. These signs can help you identify click fraud and save budget funds.

Set a Budget

To prevent money loss from funds set aside for PPC advertising, you should set a detailed budget at multiple levels. First, you need to determine the value of your keywords and set a rate for each click. Once this is done, you should set a daily budget. A daily budget will turn off your advertisements once you’ve exhausted the funds that you have set for a single day. This will ensure that you do not cut into your profits if click fraud gets out of hand.

Have questions about marketing your brand or business online? Reach out to Saba, Inc. We offer PPC management, as well as social media management, web development and design, and search engine optimization for San Diego companies. Call us at (858) 277-1717 and request a free consultation with one of our online marketing experts.

The Psychology of Search Engine Marketing

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While it is easy to view each of your website visitors as a statistic, you should understand that each one is a person that arrived at your site through a unique psychological process. By getting inside the heads of your visitors, you can discover how to increase the potential of your SEM and pay-per-click marketing efforts.

Understand Consumers

Keep in mind different groups of people will think of certain keywords when they are searching for a particular service or product. By paying attention to the age group and gender of your target audience, you can discover the keywords that will draw in the customers. This can increase your conversions and long-term profits. To better understand your target audience, you can learn from your existing clients and customers. Through direct conversation or surveys, ask them how they came to your site and be sure that they answer you in a detailed manner. You can compare all of the information you receive to discover trends that can be used to improve your internet marketing efforts.

Create Engaging Content

As a general rule, people like to be entertained. You should take advantage of this by including photos, interesting facts, or humor in your content. This is especially useful on social media platforms where you will quickly be rewarded with shares and re-tweets for your wit or entertainment value. People are also more likely to remember an image than a dry line of text, so include some great photos that are relevant to your business.

Write Content for How People Search

When people enter a query into a search engine, they are not always using the one or two keywords that you anticipated when you wrote your most recent article. Instead they are using the keywords along with a chain of question words like ‘how’, ‘what’, and ‘why’. Writing tags and keywords in question form can help improve your SEO efforts.

Learn Why People Share Content

Carefully analyze your target audience and anticipate why they may share your articles with friends, coworkers, and family members. Many people share content because it is entertaining, relatable, or supports a cause they believe in.

By examining the psychology of consumers, you can increase website traffic and conversions. Get ahead of the competition by constantly thinking of what your audience may be thinking.

Interested in Learning More?

Learn more about SEM and SEO for your business by calling (858) 277-1717 and requesting a free consultation and website audit from the internet marketing experts at Saba, Inc. In addition to online marketing, we also offer website design and development and social media management.

Top Things to Look for in an SEO Company

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If you are looking for an SEO professional to help you improve your search engine marketing efforts and drive traffic to your website, you should perform the appropriate research before trusting a particular company. This will ensure you receive top-quality search engine optimization services with a satisfactory return on investment. Here are the top things to ask yourself when considering an SEO company.

Do They Have Experience?

As the business of SEO services continues to grow, many individuals will create SEO companies for the sole purpose of profiting. These companies may only have limited experience in web design, keyword research, and other aspects of search engine optimization, so it may be wise to choose a San Diego SEO company with an established reputation. By checking out a company’s about page and client reviews you can gain a solid understanding of their experience. In general, the company with the most experience and positive reviews is your best option.

Do They See More Than Just Numbers?

Some SEO companies get so absorbed in numbers and statistics that they forget about your goals. This a major red flag when choosing an SEO company. When you meet with the representative of an SEO company, you need to figure out if they will help you with branding, targeted marketing, and other important areas. Analytics is a large part of SEO, but it is not everything. Be sure your SEO professional can see the larger picture before you place the success of your website and business in their hands.

Are They Informative?

A reputable SEO company understands that their clients are not SEO experts. Because of this, they will inform clients about what needs to be done and how they will get there. They will make an active effort to inform clients about keyword research, local SEO, and other SEO topics that will help them reach their business goals. You should be sure that your SEO professional will provide this information before you finalize any hiring contracts.

Are Their Strategies Current?

With big updates to search engine algorithms occurring on a semi-regular basis, it is of the utmost importance that SEO companies use methods that address changes. For example, many SEO professionals state that iFrames are poor for SEO because web crawlers were previously unable to access web content within them, but this is no longer an issue. SEO professionals who use outdated information like this should be avoided because they are no longer relevant for your purposes.

Looking for a top SEO company to help guide your online marketing efforts? Schedule a complimentary consultation with Saba, Inc. We believe in honesty, transparency, and have more than a decade of experience in SEO and online marketing. Call us today at (858) 277-1717. We look forward to speaking with you!

Creating a Pinterest Marketing Strategy for Your Business

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Many business owners and webmasters know that social media can attract visitors and increase conversion rates, but they often only focus their efforts on Facebook and Twitter. By using Pinterest as part of your social media marketing campaign, you can show off your products and insight while increasing conversions. Here’s what you need to do to create a Pinterest marketing strategy for your business.

Decide on Your Brand

If you use Pinterest or social media to promote your product, you will find that marketing a brand is far more effective than hard sales tactics. In general, internet users are put off by sales posts, so you should decide on a message and promote it through informative or entertaining posts. If you wish for people to associate your brand with a positive message, focus on creating uplifting and inspiring posts.

Use a Logo

Pinterest is driven by images and snippets of information on a virtual pinboard. Because of the platform’s emphasis on visual media, you may benefit by adding a small logo or watermark to the images that you post. This will increase the recognition of your brand by people on Pinterest and from across the web. If you decide that this is a good tactic for you, use a simple logo that represents your company well.

Create Informative Posts

One of the best ways to promote your product on Pinterest is to show how it can be useful in making life easier or more enjoyable. If you know of a creative way to use your product, share it on Pinterest and people may buy your product to try it for themselves. This will also increase your credibility since consumers and Pinterest users will view you as a source of valuable information.

Summarize Content

Pinterest offers businesses the opportunity to share information from their main website in the form of posts. By capturing the gist of a new article or blog post in a short summary, you can share your message with Pinterest users and draw them to your website. Be sure to include links to your website whenever posting content in this manner.

Whether you plan to use Pinterest, Facebook, and/or Twitter to promote your business, consult with an internet marketing company in San Diego to develop the best social media strategy for your business. For more information or to request a free website analysis and consultation, call Saba, Inc. at (858) 277-1717.

The Evolution of SEO

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In today’s world, getting a website on the first page of Google’s search results can be the difference between success and failure. With that in mind, search engine optimization (SEO), or the process website owners and San Diego SEO companies use to improve a site’s ranking for targeted keywords, has become absolutely vital.

However, as Google and other search engines have grown more sophisticated, so too has the practice of SEO. When the first search engines were just getting off the ground, SEO involved little more than filling out a form and providing a brief description of the site. Since then, there have been three major stages in the development of search engines and SEO.

1) Keywords and internal links

The SEO tactics that many people are familiar with today—like cramming keywords into headlines and content—became popular after search engines started software that crawled through the web and archived sites automatically. To rank well, site owners needed to design their pages with that software in mind, ensuring that their content was keyword rich and their internal links made the entire site easy to archive. Web crawlers allowed search engines to discover websites more efficiently but sites could easily improve their ranking simply by using their keywords as often as possible, which led to a lot of bad content at the top of the search results.

2) Link building

Google ultimately found a way to fix that problem. Google realized that when someone links to a piece of content, that link is like an endorsement, so more links indicated better content. Links from quality sources, like major newspapers, were even better. Once Google factored that discovery into their algorithm, content creators had to shift their focus away from simply using a lot of keywords and start thinking about how to get people to link to their sites.

3) Creating buzz

Link building was only the start though, as Google has continually strived to improve its ranking algorithm by taking new factors into account. In addition to looking at the links a site receives, Google now considers a site’s entire web presence, from its advertising to its mentions on blogs and social media. To get a boost in Google’s rankings today, website owners need to get people talking about their content, and they can also be punished for trying to rig the rankings by publishing spammy, unnaturally keyword-heavy content.

Google has shifted the SEO paradigm in recent years. Although SEO is more complicated than ever, the guiding principle behind any SEO strategy should be creating content with people in mind, rather than Google.

Interested in learning more about online marketing or search engine optimization? Reach out to Saba, Inc. and speak with one of our friendly San Diego internet marketing experts. We offer complimentary consultation, free website analysis, and are happy to answer any questions you may have. Give us a call at (858) 277-1717. We look forward to hearing from you!

 

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