by Robert Long | Apr 7, 2023 | Online Business, Online Marketing Articles, SEO Related Articles, Social Media Marketing
Relationship Building
In the world of SEO, it’s not always what you know, but sometimes it’s also who you know. Building relationships with influencers, industry leaders, and complementary businesses can open doors to valuable backlink opportunities.
- Networking with influencers and industry leaders: Attend conferences and webinars and engage on social media platforms. As you foster these connections, you can collaborate on content or secure endorsements from respected figures in your niche.
- Partnering with complementary businesses: Identify businesses that complement yours and work together on co-marketing initiatives, cross-promotional content, or co-hosting webinars. Request to write an article or provide a link to one on your blog and ask if they will link to it.
- Guest posting opportunities: Offer to write high-quality content for relevant websites in your industry. In exchange for your expertise, you can include a backlink to your website within the content or author bio. Just be sure to target reputable sites, as guest posting on low-quality sites can backfire.
Creating Linkable Assets
If you build it, they will link (well, at least that’s the hope). By creating valuable and unique content, you can entice others to link to your website naturally.
- Producing high-quality, unique content:
- In-depth guides: Write comprehensive, well-researched guides on topics relevant to your industry.
- Infographics: Design visually appealing infographics that distill complex information into digestible visuals. Share them on social media and encourage others to embed them on their websites.
- Case studies: Demonstrate the value of your products or services by showcasing real-life success stories. These can serve as powerful social proof and attract backlinks from satisfied clients or industry publications.
- Developing interactive and engaging tools:
- Calculators: Create useful tools like ROI calculators, mortgage estimators, or even fitness trackers to engage visitors and encourage sharing.
- Quizzes: Design fun, interactive quizzes that appeal to your target audience. As users share their results, your quiz (and its backlink) can spread like wildfire.
- Interactive maps: Develop engaging maps that showcase data or provide location-specific information.
Utilizing Content Outreach
Sometimes, even the best content needs a little nudge to gain traction. By actively promoting your content, you can attract more backlinks.
- Skyscraper technique: Why settle for ground-level when you can touch the sky? The skyscraper technique involves:
- Identifying top-performing content in your niche
- Creating an even better version (think: longer, more in-depth, better visuals)
- Reaching out to the right audience (those who have linked to or shared similar content)
- Round-up posts: They say two heads are better than one, so why not gather insights from multiple experts? Round-up posts involve:
- Collecting expert opinions, tips, or recommendations on a specific topic
- Compiling them into a single, comprehensive blog post
- Promoting the post to your contributors, who may share or link to it
- Leveraging Unlinked Mentions:
- Sometimes, people talk about your brand without linking to your website. Let’s fix that.
- Monitoring brand mentions: Use tools like Google Alerts, Mention, or Brand24 to track when people mention your brand, products, or services online.
- Requesting link attribution: When you find unlinked mentions, reach out to the website owner and politely ask for a link. Most of the time, they’re happy to oblige, as it adds credibility to their content.
- Opportunities for link reclamation: Keep an eye out for broken links or outdated resources on other websites. Offer your content as a suitable replacement, and request a link update.
- Digital PR and Newsjacking
- If you’ve got a story to tell, why not make headlines? Digital PR and newsjacking can help you earn backlinks by leveraging timely stories and media connections.
- Crafting newsworthy stories and press releases: Share exciting company news, product launches, or industry insights in a press release. Distribute it to relevant journalists and media outlets.
- Identifying trending topics and creating timely content: Stay informed about current events and trending topics in your industry. Create content that connects your brand to these stories, making it more appealing for journalists to cover and link to.
- Connecting with journalists and media outlets: Establish relationships with journalists and editors in your niche. Offer expert commentary or exclusive insights, making it easy for them to link to your website as a credible source.
- Niche-Specific Directories and Resource Pages
- While directories may feel like a blast from the past, niche-specific directories and resource pages can still provide valuable backlinks.
- Researching relevant directories and resource pages: Seek out high-quality, niche-specific directories or resource pages where your website can be listed.
- Crafting a compelling submission: Write a unique, engaging description of your website, and ensure your submission adheres to the directory or resource page’s guidelines.
- Monitoring and tracking results: Keep track of your submissions, and monitor the impact of these backlinks on your website’s performance.
Need help with your SEO and or earning links? Contact us today and we will provide a free consultation.
When it comes to link building, variety is the spice of life. Diversifying your strategies ensures a healthy backlink profile, while a commitment to quality over quantity keeps search engines happy. As the SEO landscape continues to evolve, staying adaptable and creative is key to staying ahead of the game. So, go forth and conquer the world of backlinks, one creative strategy at a time
by Robert Long | May 25, 2021 | Online Business
Building an online store is a pivotal step for any business venturing into the e-commerce space, but understanding the time investment required is crucial for planning and execution. This blog post delves into the various factors that influence the timeline of creating an online store, from choosing the right platform and designing a user-friendly interface to integrating payment systems and testing for launch. Whether you’re a small business owner or a seasoned entrepreneur, we’ll provide you with detailed insights on what to expect during the development process so you can set realistic timelines and effectively allocate resources. Join us as we break down the hours needed to bring your online store to life.
Custom design & development of the home page and theme elements.
The homepage of your website should be custom-designed so that it does not look exactly like one of your competitors. This usually requires a few design ideas going back and forth over a few days. However, sometimes, with a more particular client, this process can go on for a week or more until a design that fits your client’s vision while still looking professional and easy to navigate is created, allowing it to convert better.
The time range to fine-tune the design perfectly is between 12 and 36 hours. This includes the most important elements of your website, such as the header, home page, and footer. The header and footer will cover most of your website. Any custom development, such as scripts, slide shows, and galleries, can greatly increase the time.
Adding Internal Content Pages
A content page usually contains around 1500-2000 words provided by the client and a few images. These pages are custom-designed to match the overall look of your home page and theme. Each page usually takes around 4 hours to complete, including adding content, images, SEO tags, links, and graphics and getting feedback from the client and any edits required. As the average small eCommerce website has at least five web pages, this adds about 20 hours to the project.
Creating Categories
Categories are like pages, which contain the products within them. Each category page usually has content and one image related to its products. The categories also have SEO tags such as a title, h1 tag, and possibly links to other categories, pages, and or products.
The typical small online store would have around four categories, each taking about 30 minutes to create, which adds 2 hours to our total.
Adding Products
Each product on your website is like a landing page on the Internet. A product details page can be set up in many ways, but the average setup contains the following items.
- Product images, usually around 3-5 images. These images must be correctly sized both dimensionally and in actual file size. This normally requires some time in PhotoShop to correctly size each image so they are matched visually and optimized to load quickly online and take up less server space. They will also require the correct names and tags called “Alt Tags’ which will help search engines know what the image represents. These images are then added to the product they belong to via the administration area.
- Product titles, descriptions, tags, UPCs, prices, sale prices, colors, sizes, shipping rates, stock levels, and possibly other features.
- SEO tags for the product SEO title, description
- Internal links when possible
- Stock Level, if required
- Upselling and cross-selling products
- Weights, product dimensions
- Shipping Zones
Normally, this can take between 30 minutes to 2 hours, depending on how many features, images, and so on are required for each product. So if your store has 20 products, then it would take between 10 and 40 hours.
Basic USPS Shipping Setup National Only
Shipping can require many hours, depending on the client’s requirements. We are sticking to the basics for the estimate, which would be the USPS basic setup. This requires us to configure the USPS plugin to accurately calculate your shipping based on the weight of your products. However, as mentioned above, there are many ways to set up your shipping; some take much longer. This method usually only takes about 2 hours to set up and test.
Sales Tax Setup
Again, there are many different requirements for sales tax based on the client’s needs. This outline is only for the basic, one-nexus sales tax setup. A nexus is the region/s you sell in and have a nexus in. Normally, we have to import around 1000 or so zip codes, with their corresponding sales tax rates, into WooCommerce. And configure the site to use them. This normally takes around 2 hours to set up and test.
Set Up Yoast SEO Plugin and Optimize The Website.
This is one very important step that many web designers neglect. However, it must be completed to ensure your web pages are indexed correctly in Google and other search engines. For an eCommerce website, we recommend installing Yoast for WooCommerce.
Configuration & Setup of Website & Plugins
Every website requires plugins for speed optimization, spam blocking, security, shipping, etc. Normally, an eCommerce website requires at least five plugins, which are estimated to take around 4 hours to install and configure.
Website Training
A normal website is initially overwhelming, and an eCommerce website is even more so. However, once you get the hang of a few tasks, such as processing orders, adding, updating, and deleting products and pages, you will have a much easier time learning the rest. We usually spend about 2 hours training a client on how to use their website. This is normally broken up into 1 hour on the phone and 1 hour creating a short video tutorial to show them around their new website. Adding 2 hours to the project.
Website Hosting & Email Setup
After the website has been accepted and tested, we move it onto the server, where it will go live. Normally, this requires between 4 – 8 hours, depending on the complexity, the host it’s going on, and the ability to communicate with all parties involved efficiently.
Domain Name Setup
If the domain name is not currently pointed at the server, we will set it up so that it loads the new website. This normally takes about 1 hour. However, waiting for the domain to connect completely can take up to 48 hours of non-work hours. This time is not charged for but should be noted.
Adding your website to Google Analytics
If you want to know if your website is receiving traffic and from where, then one of the best and free options is to use Google Analytics. This usually takes around 30 minutes to set up.
The above is only the basic setup of an online store. But it’s enough to get you started and in business.
Total Hours
- Custom design & development of the home page and theme elements. 12-36 hours
- Adding Internal Content Pages 20 hours
- Creating Categories 2 hours
- Add 20 between 10 hours and 40 hours.
- Basic USPS Shipping Setup National Only: 2 hours
- Sales Tax Setup: 2 hours
- Set Up Yoast SEO Plugin and Optimize The Website. 3 hours
- Configuration & Setup of Website & Plugins: 4 hours
- Website Training 2hrs
- Website Hosting & Email Setup 4-8 hours
- Domain Name Setup 1 hour
- Adding your website to Google Analytics ½ hour
Total Estimated Range: 62.5 to 120.5 hours.
by Robert Long | Feb 1, 2021 | Online Business
The Advantages of Marketing Online
If you already have a bustling business, you might wonder why you must participate in online marketing. Why should you take the time to learn how online marketing techniques (or pay someone to do it for you) when you’ve already built a business of which you’re proud?
Having a well-performing online presence is absolutely crucial to growing your client base. While your store may do well with physical advertising, word-of-mouth, and attracting passersby to your location, you can still benefit from trying to get people online to buy from you.
Most of the world’s population logs onto the internet. This means you can expand your client base far beyond your local area. Savvy business owners always want to look to the future and discover how to grow their profit margins. You open yourself to a whole world of new customers by putting yourself online.
Bolstering your online marketing also boosts your local clientele. If you’re a shop that serves a specific audience in your area, for instance, knowing how to conduct local marketing on the web will gain you more customers.
In turn, this gives you more revenue opportunities and the chance to develop loyal clients.
Search Engine Optimization
Have you heard of search engine optimization (SEO) before?
Most people researching the world of marketing online run into it. Search engines such as Google and Bing use algorithms to sort web pages after a user makes a certain inquiry. Marketing experts track how these algorithms work and try to develop SEO methods to assist businesses in reaching the top of the search results.
SEO functions using keywords and links. When you use SEO for business, you need to figure out which keywords people are typing into search engines to find services like yours. You accomplish this by using keyword research tools or consulting with professional online marketers specializing in SEO for business.
Then, you try to incorporate as many of those keywords into the content of your website. This shows search engines your content is relevant to the people looking for your services.
Linking
Next, you want to establish reliability. When algorithms review online content, they’re looking for relevant and reliable information so their users get the best results. They do this by looking for links. The more someone links to your website, the more reliable the algorithms believe your content is.
While you can’t always control who links to your website and who doesn’t, you can do your linking. Link to pages on your website and interesting, relevant information you find on other places on the web. The algorithm ranks your content higher when you link either within your website or to another site.
What Is Local SEO?
Let’s face it, though: there are millions of different online stores worldwide, and ranking well as you compete against so many companies is extremely difficult.
But did you know you actually might stand a greater chance of growing your business locally?
Think of it this way: search engines often give you local listings whenever you inquire about a product or service you need. For instance, if you search “Bookstores near me,” the search engine might bring up your local Barnes & Noble or indie bookshops. If you were to do the same search in another town, though, the search results would be different.
That’s because algorithms actually use the location of people’s laptops or mobile devices to determine which results are the most relevant to that user. They pair people with products and services in their area.
This is good news for you. When you use local SEO for small business purposes, you can expand your reach locally and narrow your competitors to those in your hometown. This especially serves brick-and-mortar stores well, as people in their area can locate them more easily.
Using Local SEO
So, how do you implement local SEO?
Again, SEO depends greatly on keywords, and local SEO is no exception. The key to ranking well in your area is knowing which keywords people in your region commonly use to find businesses like yours. Fortunately, you can use keyword research tools to determine which ones are the best for you to use.
When you implement SEO for business, you should start seeing more traffic to your website, which gives you a chance to convert them into customers.
Want to Improve Your Local Marketing?
Are you looking to improve your local marketing and local SEO?
When you implement SEO services for small businesses, you should see an increase in the number of people who visit your website. Using local marketing techniques, such as local SEO, opens your client base to the opportunity for growth and expands your business.
Do you want some help making your online presence the best possible? We can help! Our talented team specializes in making you stand out on the web. Request a quote today!
