February 2017 - Saba Digital Marketing

How to Spot an SEO Phony

Posted on February 27, 2017 by admin@saba4321

There’s no denying the importance of a prime placement on Google’s search engine results pages, given that over 3 billion searches are performed each day. If you need help optimizing your content to appeal to some of those searchers, there are plenty of reputable SEO agencies in San Diego who can help. However, there are also some shady ones. Here’s how you can spot an SEO phony.

Guarantees of First Place Placement

Even with the right combination of paid and organic search, there’s no way to “guarantee” a first place spot on search engines. It should be an instant red flag if you get any promises of immediate results.

Use of Rapid Link Building Techniques

You may see a spike in your rankings when different links point back to your site. If these external links aren’t from reputable sites, you’ll be penalized. It takes time to generate quality links.

Little or No Online Presence

It’s highly unusual for reputable SEO experts or agencies to not have an easily accessible website. It’s also odd if they have little or no client reviews and comments or social media activity.

Detailed SEO Questions Can’t Be Answered

Most SEO phonies only have a basic understanding of what it takes to maintain online visibility. If you can’t get clear answers to more detailed SEO questions, it’s not worth your time, effort, or money to continue the conversation.

They Initiate Contact

Very few SEO pros will actively contact potential clients out of the blue, especially with mass emails. Also be wary of emails that state your online reputation is bad or your online rank has fallen. No real agency is going to do this kind of research for someone who hasn’t actually contacted them.

Experienced professionals at Saba SEO will be honest about your ranking and work with you to boost your visibility. We believe in long-term commitments and trusted partnerships with our clients and offer tailored support for their SEO needs. Call 858-951-1717 to schedule an appointment and let us create an online marketing plan for your business.

4 Reasons SEOs Are Important in a Social Media Campaign

Posted on February 24, 2017 by admin@saba4321

The “new” approach to search engine optimization involves placing an emphasis on keyword intent and searching a user’s needs. As a result, Google is paying more attention to the content distributed on various social media pages, which means you may have to focus on SEO if you’re launching a social media campaign. Here are 4 major benefits of using SEO in social media marketing.

1. Spread Your Message Faster

By incorporating SEO elements into your social media campaigns, you can attract attention to your social content. Google and other search engines also look at social media signals to determine the content that sparks conversations and encourages people to comment and share. All this commenting and sharing can get your message to the masses faster.

2. Reach New Audiences

Without amplification, well-crafted, relevant content may not do you any favors. SEO can amplify your message across various platforms. With carefully selected keywords and strategic links, you can also reach out to new and more receptive audiences.

3. Boost Brand Awareness

Brand awareness is often the primary goal of social media campaigns. Google lumps your content’s amplification with brand awareness into what’s termed “co-citation.” If you succeed with both goals, Google will consider your content and your brand more trustworthy.

4. Take Advantage of Social Indexing

All major search engines now incorporate social media profiles in their indexing efforts. The most noticeable example of this is the Twitter posts that show up on Google results pages. By mixing in SEO with your social campaigns, your social content can be just as prominent as the other content related to your business.

With social media being used as a tool to distribute content, it’s easy to see why SEO should be a part of any social campaign. Experts at Saba SEO can help you choose social media platforms likely to resonate well with your intended audience. We can combine SEO and social media to create an effective marketing plan for your business, track results, and make changes if needed. Call us at 858-951-1717 to schedule an appointment.

3 Marketing Options That Are Better and Cheaper Than PPC

Posted on February 22, 2017 by admin@saba4321

Pay-per-click advertising is like a double-edged sword. It can direct more traffic to your site, but it can also be a costly endeavor, and you may not even see relevant results. San Diego internet marketing experts discuss 3 marketing options cheaper and more effective than PPC.

1. Email Marketing

Due to the widespread use of mobile devices, people can check their email from anywhere. With the right strategy, an email marketing campaign can generate more interest than PPC. It’s a far more personal approach to marketing, and it can include specific offers based on recipients’ previous purchases to further generate interest. It can also be cost-effective if you put together well-researched lists.

2. Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing involves partnerships with people who are genuinely interested in your offer. These individuals also have a significant online following, which means many of their followers can consider any recommendations they make. Although you’ll have to share some of your content with influencers, it can lead to long-term and mutually beneficial arrangements.

3. Organic SEO with Relevant Content

The long-term payoff with organic SEO can be cheaper and better than what you’d get with PPC. A successful SEO strategy involves producing useful content and putting it in front of your intended audience. You may be tempted to revert to paid campaigns when you think organic SEO isn’t working. However, the problem is often a lack of understanding of how customers are searching for your products or services online and what type of content they consider relevant.

Another cheaper alternative to PPC is a pre-roll ad that pops up on YouTube before a video starts playing. Unlike PPC, you won’t have to pay for each view if viewers click “Skip” after watching five seconds of your ad.

At Saba SEO, we can utilize various online engagement strategies and brand visibility techniques to craft a tailored marketing plan for your business. Whether it’s PPC management or organic SEO, we can boost your search engine results and website traffic. Call us at 858-951-1717 to schedule an appointment.

Top 7 SEO Mistakes to Avoid

Posted on February 20, 2017 by admin@saba4321

Optimizing your content for search engines isn’t as simple as picking and choosing a couple of keywords or phrases. It involves an assortment of techniques and a solid understanding of what Google likes. Avoiding a few SEO mistakes can help you achieve better results with your efforts to connect with customers online. San Diego SEO professionals discuss top 7 SEO mistakes to watch out for.

1. Leaving Your AdWords Tool Set to ‘Broad’

Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool can help determine the keywords likely to perform well. Change the default “broad” setting to “exact” to fine-tune your results and filter out useless information.

2. Using Industry Jargon for Your Keywords

Just because you refer to your kitchen appliances as “household electronics” doesn’t mean others do so too. Effective SEO management strategy involves picking and choosing your preferred keywords based on what the average searcher is likely to type.

3. Hosting Blog On a Free Server

Many free hosting sites don’t offer enough options to fully customize your blog. Instead of using such sites, you can invest in a reliable web host and install self-hosted version of platforms like WordPress. Pay the fee to be able to use your own domain name.

4. Having Different Content for Desktop and Mobile Websites

If you’re designing both desktop and mobile versions of your website, keep the content very similar. Optimizing each site differently will result in different traffic patterns and can minimize your ranking results.

5. Overdoing the ‘SEO Copy’

Some website designers have a tendency to include text loaded with keywords and text links for the purpose of ranking well. Trying this trick will likely get you in trouble with the Big G. Make sure to write for humans and add your keywords and links naturally within your content.

6. Targeting the Exact Same Audience with Paid and Organic Search

Paid advertising is an effective way to connect with your audience, but it’s not meant to target your organic traffic. Dive into your stats to see what’s working with your organic search efforts and use PPC to supplement weak spots in your results.

7. Thinking Google Won’t Notice Anomalies

You can get a spike in traffic by submitting your site to multiple spam directories or buying external links from unreliable sources. However, don’t assume Google won’t question a sudden boost in your traffic. In other words: if it feels wrong, don’t do it!

Once you’re flagged for a Google violation, it can be a real headache trying to resolve the issue. Be proactive and watch out for possible SEO mistakes by keeping an eye on your stats and looking for any unexplained traffic dips. If you believe you’ve made some SEO blunders, consider working with Saba SEO to pinpoint the problem sooner rather than later. Call us at 858-951-1717 to create a tailored SEO recovery plan for your business today!

SEO Agency Success Stories

Posted on February 17, 2017 by admin@saba4321

SEO can seem more like an obscure theory until it’s actually used in real world situations. There is often something to learn by looking at how various SEO agencies in San Diego and other cities manage unexpected situations affecting online visibility. These success stories emphasize the value of working with a reliable agency.

1. Overcoming a Competitor’s Advantage

One agency had a client in Atlanta losing out to a competitor when they could no longer count on traditional yellow pages advertising. To make things worse, the client’s main competitor was already having success with its online strategy. The agency put together a new online engagement plan involving organic SEO, paid search, and a conversion strategy, which resulted in more attention from online searchers and more leads.

2. Frustration Over Lackluster Paid Search Results

Paid campaigns can become expensive and difficult to justify if the ROI is low, and a client faced this dilemma when seeking help from an SEO agency. The solution was to target less competitive keywords and drive traffic to the company’s website by boosting their ranking and targeting a few carefully selected competitive keywords. As a result, the client saw a spike in email requests.

3. Dealing with an Unfamiliar Google Penalty

Seeing an unfamiliar Google penalty is a reason for concern. Even after making attempts to clean up forums and remove anything remotely suspicious, Google still insisted there was an issue with user-generated spam. The SEO agency came up with a comprehensive approach to spam protection, which included restrictions on how many posts new users could contribute and switching user-generated links to “no-follow.” They sent a letter to Google detailing their efforts and the penalty was removed.

As a reputed SEO agency, Saba SEO can help clients manage unexpected situations that cause a dip in traffic or a drop in rankings. Our team can find solutions to your SEO concerns and undue stress. To learn more about our services and how we can help, call us at 858-951-1717.

SEM Tactics to Market Apps

Posted on February 15, 2017 by admin@saba4321

New mobile apps are entering the market every day, making it critical to have a solid, multi-pronged plan for ensuring app discovery. The following few tactics can produce impressive results for businesses marketing their apps.

1. Make Sure Your App Is Actually Useful to Consumers

When it comes to increasing app downloads, the first step is to design an app that serves an important purpose for your market. Many apps are developed with little more than the company’s marketing goals in mind. Whether your app is built to entertain, help people organize their lives, or make vital tasks easier, if it serves a purpose it will generate attention.

2. Use Social Media to Introduce Your App and Stay Connected with Users

Social media is the perfect medium to connect with audience during the formative stages of your app marketing plan, and for staying connected with app users. If you want your mobile application to receive and maintain top ratings, you should respond to user inquiries and address user problems in a timely fashion. Social media management keeps you abreast of complaints and allows for the rapid and transparent solutions modern consumers demand.

3. Join Ad Networks

Ad networks allow you to monetize your app. This way, even if your mobile app is free, you can still collect revenue from the ads users will view when using your product. Ad networks can also help market your app by exposing it to mobile phone users through banners and other applications.

4. Offer Rewards to Loyal App Users

Getting people to download your app is only one part of the marketing process, especially if the app is designed for Android devices and offered in the Google Play store. Optimizing an app for Google Play is accomplished by optimizing app usage. The more often people use your app, the higher its placement will be in the available app selection. Depending on the nature of your mobile product, rewards can include additional lives or resources in a game, special discounts on services or products, or even high-value, industry-specific information only made available to those with daily app use. Once people know they can gain something by simply using your application more, usage will go up and overall visibility will increase.

If you want your mobile application to reach out to customers, Saba SEO can help. Our team can develop search engine marketing strategies to promote app discovery among users. Call us at 858-951-1717 to learn more on our approach to SEM.

Picking the Right Social Media Mix for Your Customers

Posted on February 13, 2017 by admin@saba4321

With more than 3 billion social media users worldwide, active real-time engagement is a must for businesses today. Most of the users are at Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, but there are plenty of niche platforms that are just as effective. The key to effective social media engagement in San Diego is to pick the right mix of platforms for your customers, and here are 4 tips to do just that.

1. Know Your Target Audience

Adults usually prefer Facebook and Pinterest while younger customers gravitate towards Twitter, YouTube, and Snapchat, but don’t base your decision on these stats. Dive into your demographics to see what forms of engagement your customers prefer. If you’re already active on social media, use your existing stats to see where your customers tend to go most.

2. Experiment and Test

Facebook and Twitter often work well together, but you may have more success with niche platforms like Instagram. Do some experimenting and testing to see which combinations give you the most traffic and conversions and focus on engagement, not just how many followers you have.

3. Use Your Content as a Guide

Choose a platform which works well with your products and services, by using your content as a guide. If you have a lot of product pics and videos, Pinterest, Instagram, and YouTube are helpful. Twitter’s 140-character limitation usually works better if you regularly send out alerts about upcoming deals and specials. For business-to-business interactions, you can start with LinkedIn.

4. Stay Active on Social Media Platforms

Rather than trying to be on all forums, stick with accounts you can stay active on. Tools from HootSuite, Buffer, SocialFlow, TweetDeck, and SproutSocial can make this task easier. Post fresh, relevant, and appealing content on each of your preferred platforms, watch your stats to see where you’re getting the most engagement, and focus your efforts on those channels.

To learn more about social media mix and how to boost customer engagement, call Saba SEO at 858-951-1717. As an experienced SEO agency, we help our clients boost website traffic through tailored social media marketing strategies.

Is PPC Your Best Strategy for SEM?

Posted on February 10, 2017 by admin@saba4321

Search engine marketing (SEM) is everything you do to garner the attention of your market via search engines, which includes pay-per-click (PPC) marketing and search engine optimization (SEO). PPC can drive your website to the very top of search results pages within a nominal amount of time. Most companies are not able to wait months on end for SEO to accomplish the same results organically. But is PPC a sufficient standalone strategy for SEM? Here’s what San Diego PPC management professionals have to say.

SEO and PPC Go Hand in Hand

The best SEM plans are multi-dimensional and include outreach on a vast range of platforms. SEO campaigns include social media outreach, link-building, blogging, article writing, advertising videos, and more. There’s simply no way consumers won’t stumble across your business if you’re being diligent in each of these areas. Unlike PPC, SEO builds and proactively protects your commercial image. While PPC simply announces your company’s presence, various SEO strategies tell consumers what your company is all about and strategically shape public opinions. This makes your company better protected against both warranted and unwarranted reputation attacks, and helps move consumers through the purchasing process by educating them and by establishing trust.

Top Reasons to Invest in PPC

Business owners need to know there are no organically ranked businesses present above the top of the fold of Google search page results. If you’ve attained first page placement solely through SEO, web users will have to scroll down to see your listing. Thus, PPC ensures optimal amount of visibility, when targeting consumers on the go who are more likely to use the very first listings they see.

Consumers and Sponsored Listings

Most consumers are able to distinguish between sponsored and organic listings. Those who have the time and the ability can scroll past the top ads on the page. With a combination of SEO and PPC, your business can be virtually impossible to miss. Moreover, these two SEM methods can share a symbiotic relationship where each campaign reaps ongoing benefits from the other.

Controlling Your SEM Costs

The foremost concern when implementing a PPC campaign is overall affordability. It’s rarely feasible for small business owners to actively target high-interest keywords all of the time. This can either lead to unproductive clicks exceeding the marketing budget, or to more traffic and business than the company can manage. A blend of SEO and PPC is often an affordable and practical choice, especially when these two plans are individualized to the goals, needs, and spending abilities of the business.

Saba SEO can help you create a blend SEO and PPC strategies to boost your rankings and expand your online outreach. Whether you need to plan or enhance your sponsored or organic listing, give us a call today at 858-951-1717.

Analyzing Your Local Competitor’s Keywords

Posted on February 8, 2017 by admin@saba4321

Analyzing your competitor’s keywords is one of the quickest ways to identify effective strategies for your niche, as well as valuable link-building opportunities. Keyword analysis also makes it easier to find high-interest keywords not already being heavily targeted by businesses serving the same market. A reputed San Diego SEO agency discusses a few ways to identify and analyze your competitor’s keywords.

Use Keyword Analysis Tools

This doesn’t have to be an arduous and time-consuming process, as there are several innovative tools to do all the hard work for you. With these analysis tools, you only need to key in your competitor’s website URL and search for the terms the website organically ranks for. You’ll get a comprehensive list of rank positions to compare against your own SEO campaigns. Given how simple and easy it is to do, there’s never a good reason not to leverage a competitor’s SEO success to further your own. Companies should be mindful of the fact that this tactic is used by several top-rated SEO firms.

Assess Keyword Density

You can take this process a bit further by learning more about the onsite optimization strategies your competitors are using. After you’ve identified the most effective keywords in their campaigns, check their onsite content to determine keyword density. This gives you an idea of how often you should use similar search terms in your own content.

Identify Consumer Interests

One of the major benefits of keyword research is the ability to gain greater insight into the minds of your targeted customers. This can be helpful if you’re facing difficulty moving past your own use of industry jargon to structure campaigns, which reflect how your targets actually speak. By identifying long-tail keywords, you can learn more about the questions your prospects currently have and create needs-specific content to increase traffic.

Determine Which SEO Mediums Are Working Best

In addition to learning more about how often keywords are used, you can also identify exactly how these are being used. You may find your competitors using top-performing keywords more frequently in photo captions, link-building, and video descriptions, rather than in articles and blog posts. Not only does this provide more insight into what’s working with search engines, it also gives a better understanding of the content your targeted market is currently pursuing.

The team at Saba SEO provides tailored search engine optimization strategies to help businesses expand their outreach. Get in touch with us at 858-951-1717 and we can help you analyze keywords better.

5 Tips on Selecting the Right Keywords

Posted on February 6, 2017 by admin@saba4321

Nearly 20 billion searches are performed each year, leading to answers to questions, product selection, and access to blogs, websites, social media pages, videos, and images. If you are trying to connect with these searchers, you’ll definitely want to know what keywords to select.San Diego SEO experts suggest five tips to get you started.

1. Think Like Your Customers

Make a list of words or phrases somebody looking for your products or services would use during a search. Be as specific as possible by selecting terms relevant to your business without being too broad. For instance, using “Italian pizza shop” instead of “pizza shop” may place your business on search pages related to Italian food.

2. Use Your Free Google Tools

With Google Insights, you can check local trends and compare search volume to determine if you’re on track with your keywords. Identify relevant search results with Wonder Wheel by entering different keywords. If you’re planning paid campaigns, AdWords’ Keyword Planner tool lets you know how competitive your keywords are.

3. Think Long-Tail with Your Keywords

Group your keyword selections together based on relevancy. Long-tail keywords make up about 70 percent of all searches, and allow you to target customers better at different points in the buying cycle. With groups, you can benefit from popular and lesser-searched, meaning less competitive, keywords at the same time.

4. Check Up on Your Competitors

Be aware of your competitors’ keywords to determine what’s working for them and what words or phrases they may be overlooking. Look at their meta tags by using free tools such as SEMRush and Alexa and create your own unique tags.

5. Analyze and Compare Results

Once you’ve selected possible keywords for either paid campaigns or to determine their impact on traffic, test two versions of the same page with different keywords. Another way to analyze and compare results is to make a spreadsheet and track results for each keyword.

Whether you are searching for the right keywords for your business or need assistance in managing a paid campaign, you can rely onSaba SEO. Take a look at our services or give us a call at 858-951-1717 to learn more about how we can help optimize your website.