As the founder of Nomadic Advertising, a digital marketing agency, I was recently invited as a guest on a podcast where I shared my insights and experiences related to various topics in the digital marketing realm. One of the topics we discussed in-depth was the versatile and widely used CMS platform, WordPress. I spoke on the reasons why WordPress is a favored platform by many of our clients, which includes its flexibility, risk mitigation, and its self-hosted nature. The platform provides clients with the freedom to make any changes to their website’s code without restrictions. Additionally, it is the most widely used CMS platform on the internet and has budget-friendly options. However, I also acknowledge that other platforms like Wix and Squarespace have their use cases in the digital marketing space, especially for individuals who are not web developers and have limited capital.

We then transitioned to a more complex topic of blockchain and fintech industries and how companies can effectively market themselves in such industries. I pointed out that these industries have unique vocabularies that can be difficult for people to comprehend, and ad platforms like Google and Facebook are often reluctant to accept advertisements from companies in these industries due to bad actors, making marketing a challenging feat. To overcome these challenges, I recommended that companies in these industries focus on organic marketing channels such as search engine optimization (SEO) and create educational content to help users understand their industry. By focusing on organic channels, companies can avoid concerns regarding ad accounts getting disapproved or shutdown. Through organic content, companies can build a community, generate organic traffic and position themselves as an authority in the space. As many companies, including major players like FTX and Celsius, are imploding, the time is right for new companies to establish themselves as authorities in the space. Thus, in a nutshell, my recommendation for any company in a highly technical space with a lot of confusion is to create content-driven marketing, build a community, and become an authority in the space.

As an experienced entrepreneur, I also shared valuable tips with the audience during the podcast. One of the tips I shared was the importance of developing a unique approach instead of copying competitors. I related my experience of going door-to-door to sell my services and failing to make a single sale. Instead, I had to discover my own approach to grow my business.

Another critical tip I shared was the importance of prioritizing sales, as no business can exist without them. While my background is technical, and I initially focused on having the best SEO and technical components, I soon realized that sales should come first. I advised listeners not to expect any marketing hack to grow their business and to be relentless in their efforts to make sales.

While some may disagree with my approach of not focusing on one industry and instead working with clients from various industries, I emphasized the importance of doing what works for oneself. I also acknowledged that what may work for one person may not work for another.

Overall, the podcast provided an excellent opportunity for me to share my insights and experiences with the audience. I hope it will be helpful to those looking to improve their digital marketing strategies. I encourage everyone to listen to the full podcast and learn how to apply the tips and strategies discussed to their business.

The post WordPress, Blockchain Marketing & More appeared first on Toronto SEO Expert.

Would you recommend using an AI writer to your clients?

— Mordy Oberstein 🇺🇦 (@MordyOberstein) January 18, 2023

The outcome of this survey suggests that there persists a considerable degree of skepticism regarding the implementation of AI in content generation. Despite the rapid advancements in AI technology in recent years, many industry experts are still hesitant to entrust AI with such a critical task.

It is crucial to acknowledge that the utilization of AI in content creation is a relatively novel concept and its eventual impact on the industry remains to be seen. As such, it is imperative for SEOs to stay ahead of developments in this field and exercise prudence when considering the integration of AI in their workflows.

However, it’s not all doom and gloom for AI in content creation. As the technology continues to evolve and mature, it is plausible that we will see a greater number of SEOs warming up to the idea. Ultimately, only time will tell if AI will prove to be a valuable asset to SEOs or if it will continue to be met with reluctance.

In the meantime, SEOs must weigh the potential risks and benefits associated with the use of AI in content creation. Ultimately, the decision whether to recommend the use of AI to clients should be made on a case-by-case basis, taking into account the specific needs and objectives of the client. For now it may be better to stay away from using AI to create content but there still may be other areas where AI tools can help make SEO’s more efficient such as for writing content briefs or brainstorming keyword ideas.

The post 66% of SEOs Not Yet Ready to Recommend AI for Content Creation appeared first on Toronto SEO Expert.

It’s important that every blogger know the basics of SEO if they want to be successful. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of refining the content and structure of a website to improve it’s chance of showing in search results on search engines. Once you have your blog up and running, it’s important to think about SEO before doing anything else.

Keyword Research

Keyword research for blogs is the process of finding and analyzing keywords to use for blog posts, keywords should be based on what terms are getting highly searched that match your content. Keyword research is an integral part of blog content creation. By understanding the terms used by your target audience, you are better equipped to create great content for them. Using Google’s Keyword Tool or an SEO tool such as SEMrush is one of the best ways to learn about the keywords your audience is using. You can then use this information to create blog content that will be more likely to get visibility on search engines like Google.

SEO Blog Title

To create an SEO title for a blog, first choose your keywords. Next, use those keywords as the basis for your title. An example of this would be if you were targeting a keyword like “Best Instagram Strategy” you could name your blog post “The Best Instagram Strategy For More Followers”, with this title you include your keyword in it but also make it more attractive to reader by adding on a little. You should ensure that your main keyword is mentioned in the title on your blog and should ideally be in an H1 tag in your blogs html code. You should also include your main keyword in a title tag and mention it in your post. In some cases your keyword and your blog title could be exactly the same.

SEO Blog Content

When optimizing blog content for SEO, writers should first identify keywords that are relevant to their topic, then integrate that word throughout the text. It’s important the the keywords still fit naturally in your blog post, you don’t want it to seem unnatural. The amount of times you mention the keyword will vary depending on how long your blog post is. You should also include links to other pages within your own site when it’s relevant. Images on blogs are best optimized by including captions with keywords or titles of other images on the page. You should also use an image alt tag to describe what the image is about, this is helpful to Google bots as well as visually impaired users.

SEO Blog Analytics & Rank Tracking

You should be using some kind of analytics tool to track website visitors to your blog so you can measure how much traffic you are getting. A good free option is to use Google analytics. Google Analytics is a web analytics program that tracks website visitors. The service tracks data about the user’s internet browsing behavior including pages visited, time spent on site and much more.

Rank tracking is a method to track the changes in one’s ranking. By tracking which position your website is showing in Google for different keywords you will get a better idea of if the SEO changes your making are working. Rank tracking can help you identify and solve SEO issues that may be present on your website, such as broken links, analytics not set up correctly, or incorrect page titles or descriptions. It can also be used to track how well the site is doing over time. By monitoring rank changes, you will know what is working and what should be changed to get better visibility on SERPs.

SEO is an important part of blogging. It can be difficult to understand the basics, but with this article you now know what you need to do to get started.

• Conduct keyword research and create a blog post with relevant content.
• Optimize the title and content of your post based on the keyword research you did.
• Install blog analytics and use rank tracking tools to track your progress

The post SEO for Bloggers appeared first on Toronto SEO Expert.

Everyone knows the feeling of waiting for a website to load. On average, if a site takes more than 3 seconds to load, users will start to abandon the site and move on to something else. Optimizing your website can increase conversion rates and improve search engine rankings because fast sites drive faster indexing and faster loading times will improve your site’s user experience and also make it easier for Googlebot to crawl your pages.

Page speed is an important factor for all these reasons although it’s not the most important. Many websites rank well on Google but still load slow. The website may be large or have a lot of content, or could have a faulty design. A simple analogy is to think of the internet as a freeway. If there are too many cars on the road, it’s going to take longer to get where you’re going. So if your website has too many files or those files are very large in size it’s going to take longer for the site to load.

Google has created a tool called Pagespeed Insights that you can use to check your site speed. You can type in the name of your website address into this tool and it will show you how fast or slow your website is. The pagespeed insight tool has received criticism because it is not fully accurate when it comes to measuring pagespeed. The tool can show that a website is very slow even when it is not, and websites will be rated poorly if they aren’t fully optimized even for optimizations that don’t make much difference when it comes to load time. I prefer using the GTMetrix pagespeed tool which also shows the pagespeed insights score within it.

So should you optimize your site? While site speed is important, it’s not the most important factor when it comes to success on google. There are many other factors that affect your ranking on google and if you want to pick and choose what aspects to focus on improving, I would recommend focusing on site quality, content quality and backlinks. Unless you have excessive loading issues.

In conclusion, it’s important to have a fast website but there are many other factors that determine rankings and success. It’s also important to have a stable site, which may include having an SSL certificate, caching plugins, CDN, responsive design, and secure hosting.
As the popularity of the internet continues to grow exponentially each year, website speed is still not the most important factor when it comes to success or ranking on Google but it is still something website owners should keep in mind.

The post Is Website Speed Important? appeared first on Toronto SEO Expert.

By the end of this post you’ll discover 10 online dental marketing ideas you can immediately apply to attract new patients to your dental practice.

And the best part:

All the ideas are super-easy to implement by anyone in your team.

Sounds interesting? Let’s dive right in.

Reconnect with patients who have already showed interest in your business

In the early days of the Internet:

● there were not that many competitors.
● we weren’t bombarded with a gazillion ads either.
● people informed themselves less

Now the decision journey is much longer (especially for more expensive services/products).

For instance, now we might look into the mirror and notice our teeth got yellow.

We want to find out why. We ask Google why do we have yellow teeth.

The screenshot above is taken from Google Keyword Planner, a tool that shows you how many times per month (on average) a certain keyword/phrase is searched on Google, in a certain location.

Next, we want to find out what we can do about it.

We might look for different solutions.

Once we have different options, we might want to find out which one is the best or the safest.

Next, we look for a dental clinic near us.

But maybe we aren’t convinced yet (or we aren’t ready).

We then read some reviews to make sure we’re making the right decision.

Then we might want to see some case studies too.

Or we compare different clinics.

And only then we schedule an appointment.

Now, some people might make the decision faster.

But studies show that only 2% of website visitors convert during their first visit.

And we need between 6-9 interactions with someone until they reach a decision.

That’s why a single ad, is not enough anymore.

And this is where Retargeting comes into play.

Facebook has a feature called Retargeting which allows you to show a piece of content only to people who have previously interacted:

• With your website
• Or with your Facebook page

For instance, you can retarget people who have visited one of the pages where you present a certain treatment:

Or you can show another piece of content to people who have liked your Facebook page.

Or to people who have watched one of your Facebook videos:

Or to people who have interacted with your Facebook page in any way (liked, commented, shared or clicked one of your ads etc.)

How you can use this?

Well, for instance, if someone visited your dental braces page and hasn’t scheduled an appointment you can then show this person an ad that might answer to some of his or her objections related to this service.

Or you can present them an offer.

The possibilities are unlimited.

Create a (lead generation) funnel for each service

We’ve seen earlier that having a single touch point with your potential patient is not enough.

Because only 2% of the visitors convert the first time (and that’s a good number!)

If you don’t have a funnel, you lose the other 98% of the potential patients.

What is a funnel?

In simple terms, it’s system through with you:

1. Attract
2. And convert

complete strangers into someone who showed interest in one of your dental treatments.

Once the person shows interest in one of your dental treatments (a.k.a becomes a lead), you nurture this lead until he or she becomes a patient.

Simply put, you “guide” the person through every step of their decision process.

One way you can do this is through retargeting.

But the downside of retargeting is that you pay money to Facebook every time you want to communicate something to your potential patients.

This is why email marketing and Facebook Messenger is much more effective.

You communicate with your potential patients without any limitation and without paying anything.

Here’s a few tips to successfully convert strangers into leads and then into patients through an email marketing automated system:

• Create a relevant hook to build your list (e.g. don’t give away an iPhone to get email subscribers)
• Segment your list based on what people are interested in
• Send useful content = answer people’s questions/objections
• Send offers based on the segments/lists you’ve created

Use Facebook’s Lookalike feature to reach people similar to your existing patients

What if you could “hire” Facebook to do all the heavy-lifting for you and find people who are similar to your existing patients?

It’s possible and it is so easy to do it.

Facebook has a cool feature called Lookalike Audience. This feature allows you to basically instruct Facebook:

“Hey Facebook, in the last 6 months a bunch of people scheduled an appointment on my website.

Please show my ad to people that look SIMILAR to these patients”.

And now Facebook will show your content (or ad) only to those people with SIMILAR interests, behaviors, demographics, etc. with the people who scheduled an appointment on your website.

Simply put, you can reach your IDEAL PATIENT without much effort.

But how can Facebook find more people similar to the people who visited your website?

Well, because Facebook knows a lot of stuff about us:

• what websites we visit
• what videos we watch
• what are our interests
• our marital status
• places we visit
• what interest we have
• even the time we spend looking at certain photos
• and other a few hundred thousand data points.

And all these signals will be used when we (as a business) are trying to target customers.

This feature is one of the most powerful targeting features you can use and it’s not complicated to set up.

Track your results

There are so many dental marketing ideas you can try to attract new patients.

But without properly tracking what works and what doesn’t it’s like painting in the dark.

Here are a couple of things you should measure and track:

Conversion rate: how many people visit your website (or click your ads) versus how many actually schedule an appointment by completing a form?

Conversion rate/channel: which marketing channel brings you the most patients?

Time on site: how much time do visitors spend on your website before leaving?

New visitors vs. returning visitors: do people return on your website/blog?

Form abandonment: how many people started completing your contact form vs. how many abandoned it

Email:

• open rate: how many people receive your email vs. how many open it
  • clickthrough rate: how many people open your email vs. how many click it
  • unsubscribe rate: how many people don’t want to receive your emails anymore

Cost per lead: how much does it cost to get a single lead?

Cost per “sale”: how much does it cost to attract a new patient?

Referral rate: out of your total number of patients, how many of them were referred by your existing patients?

Implement a referral system

Your best patients are probably already referring friends, family, and business associates to you from time to time.

And if you carefully analyze your dental practice, chances are these people are probably very similar to your best patients — similar interests, similar desires, similar buying habits.

The problem is that most dental practices I’ve seen, they settle for the small

amount of business these passive referrals bring in – without ever actively asking referrals from their existing patients.

But think about the amount of new patients you currently get through passive referrals. Now

imagine five or ten or 20 times that amount.

This is what happens when you implement an ‘active” referral system. A simply active referral program can immediately bring in new patients.

One of the simplest active referral programs could be an incentive:

For instance, you might offer a $25 discount on an initial exam for new

patients referred by an existing patient.

Why? Because your existing patients are more likely to approach people if they can offer them some sort of “inside deal” only available through their referral.

You can can also give them a special gift card and tell them something along the lines:

“You know, we do no advertising. It’s mostly through word of mouth that we get real nice patients like you. if you have a relative, friend or co-worker that you’d like to refer to this office, it would be real nice.”

Optimize your dental practice for local search

The most effective dental marketing ideas to get new patients fast is to show up in the exact moment someone is actually looking for a dentist.

Therefore, optimizing your online presence so that your practice shows up when someone performs a local search such as “dentist in location” should be among your top priorities when it comes to marketing your practice online.

There are 2 ways you can do this:

The fastest one is to set up and optimize a Google My Business listing.

Google My Business is a section of Google’s search results that shows the local business related to your query.

So when someone Googles “dentist in [location]”, your dental practice can show up:

But in order for your dental practice to show up there you have to:

• Create a Google My Business page (it’s free and simple to use)
• Verify that you are the owner of the business (step by step tutorial here)
• Make sure you provide every little detail about your business
• Get (a lot) of reviews

Here’s a complete tutorial that shows you step by step how to do all these.

You should also make sure your dental website shows up among the top positions when someone searches for “dentist in [location]”.

This involves a process called local SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Simply put, you have to perform little “tweaks” to your website in order for Google to:

1. recognize that your website is a local dental practice in X location
2. recognize your website is better (and more relevant) than other dental practices.

Some of those “tweaks” are:

Choosing the proper keyword and including it in the title tag of your website.

and in your content.

You must also add proper NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) on the home page. And make sure this NAP stays consistent.

Having a Google map also helps Google better understand that your dental practice is a local business.

Also make sure you create a Google My Business listing.

And the last (but one of the most important) thing you should do is to acquire citations (backlinks) from other authoritative websites.

This means websites should mention your website along with address, and phone number (if possible).

Leverage other people’s audience

There are 3 important aspects when it comes to marketing:

1. The product/services
2. The communication channel
3. The message

Tapping into someone’s existing audience (a.k.a a partnership) is a great way for you to immediately attract new patients.

Why?

Because you shortcut the trust-building process.

If someone already trusts a person, then it will also trust his or here recommendations.

Of course, provided that the person who recommends a product or service doesn’t recommend any kind of product, ruining his or her credibility this way.

For instance, you can partner up with a plastic surgery clinic.

You could offer their patients a sweet discount to your teeth whitening or cosmetic treatments + a commission to the clinic.

Why a plastic surgery clinic?

Well simply because there’s a high change that someone who is concerned about their aesthetics and is interested in a plastic surgery, will also be interested in having a beautiful smile.

You can also partner up with Facebook groups owners.

The principle stays the same:

• choose a relevant audience for your treatments
• offer an incentive to both the group owner AND his or her community.

Also make sure you:

• Choose an engaged community where people actively discuss certain topics
• Avoid groups full of spam
• Offer some kind of value before marketing your treatments
• [Recommended] Promote useful content/advice before selling your services
• Don’t overspam

Use relevant giveaways to reach more (relevant) people.

Giveaways can add a lot of people to the top of your funnel.

It’s easy to get a viral giveaway, but if you’re offering the wrong prize you can end up spending a lot of money on attracting people who will never become your patients.

For instance, you can offer an iPhone as a prize and you can easily get thousands of email subscribers and Facebook followers.

But how many of them will actually 1) afford and 2) actually want a treatment from your dental practice?

So here are the top 3 most crucial tips for a successful giveaway:

1. Offer a relevant prize (avoid iPhones). Try a free teeth cleaning session.
2. Nurture those leads. Put them into an email sequence. Retarget them.
3. Promote your giveaway to amplify your reach

Improve your copywriting

Have you ever thought about this?

Let’s say you create an ad.

You spend $100 to get 1000 people on your website.

From those 1000, only 1% actually schedule an appointment. That’s 10 patients.

But what if…

You spend $100, you get 1000 people on your website, but now you improve the text on your website and now 2% of the people actually schedule an appointment?

That’s 20 patients.

Think about it, you’ve doubled the number of patients without investing any money.

Now imagine what you can do if you improve:

• The text on your website
• The text of your ads
• The text of your emails

This is the power of copywriting.

Copywriting = the art of writing persuasive texts with the sole purpose of getting a potential customer do a certain action (i.e. schedule an appointment, sign up to your newsletter, click your Google ads etc.)

So before trying to attract new patients, I’d highly recommend hiring a copywriter and look over your entire business.

Use multi-step forms to increase your conversion rate

There’s one little mistake a lot of dentists make that ruin their marketing.

You can literally waste most of your entire marketing budget if you do it.

The mistake I’m talking about is the forms your potential patients have to complete in order to schedule an appointment.

If these are too complicated, you lose a lot of potential patients.

In fact, forms are so important that some companies like Expedia, for example, made an extra $12 million per year simply by removing one field on their form.

But what can you do if you need to ask a lot of info in order to schedule an appointment?

Well, there is a trick.

It’s called a multi-step form and how this works is that instead of people seeing 5 overwhelming fields at once, they see only one per screen.

In this way, they feel like they’re making progress towards a certain goal and thus it increases the changes that people go all the way through.

Ask people a simple, low-risk, yes or no question. Make them take the first step.

Then show them the next fields to complete.

Ask people a simple, low-risk, yes or no question. Make them take the first step.

Then show them the next fields to complete..

Your turn

I hope these dental marketing ideas gave you enough things to work on in order to attract more patients to your dental office.

And now I’d like to hear from you:

Which idea from today’s article would you like to try first?

Or maybe you have a question regarding one of the tactics presented.

Either way, let me know by leaving a comment below right now.

About the author

Patrik Bindea is a growth hacking marketer at Strodin Dental Marketing, where he helps dentists get more patients using digital marketing. He obsessively tests everything until he finds those details that turn strategies, concepts and words into sales. 

The post 10 Simple Digital Marketing Ideas For Dentists appeared first on Toronto SEO Expert.

Google has rolled out a core update in June, in unusual behavior Google has actually decided to warn webmasters before the update in a tweet.

Tomorrow, we are releasing a broad core algorithm update, as we do several times per year. It is called the June 2019 Core Update. Our guidance about such updates remains as we’ve covered before. Please see this tweet for more about that:https://t.co/tmfQkhdjPL

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) June 2, 2019

The update has now finished rolling out and we have some more information on the kind of sites that were affected. Since this is a core update there was no specific element targeted, unlike the Google Panda and Penguin updates which specifically targeted unethical link building and poor content this update targeted many different things.

Search Engine Journal has done a good job of documenting John Mueller’s comments on the update and how it affects webmasters. You can see their documentation below:

Google’s John Mueller was asked in a Webmaster Hangout what to do if a site is suffering a traffic loss due to Google’s June 2019 broad core algorithm update. John Mueller’s answer provided insights into understanding what is happening.

Then Mueller provided hope that Google may offer further guidance on what to do.

Webmaster Asks If It’s a Content Issue?

The person making the question states they’re a news publisher. They ask that because they deal in content, that it may be that the core update issue for them is content related.

Here is the question:

“We’re a news publisher website, primarily focusing on the business finance vertical. we probably have been impacted by the June Core Update as we’ve seen a drastic traffic drop from the June 1st week.

Agreed that the update specifies that there are no fixes and no major changes that need to be made to lower the impact.

But for a publisher whose core area is content news, doesn’t it signal that it’s probably the content, the quality or the quantity which triggered Google’s algorithm to lower down the quality signal of the content being put up on the website which could have led to a drop of traffic? “

The questioner states that webmasters need more guidance:

“…it would really help if Google could come out and share some advice to webmasters and websites.

Not site specific, but category or vertical specific at least on how to take corrective measures and actions to mitigate the impact of core updates.

It would go a long way in helping websites who are now clueless as to what impacted them.”

Google’s John Mueller was asked how to recover from a Google broad core algorithm update.

Why Nothing to Fix

John Mueller did not suggest fixing anything specific. He explained that the reason there’s nothing specific to fix is because a core update encompasses a broader range of factors.

Google’s John Mueller explains:

“I think it’s a bit tricky because we’re not focusing on something very specific where we’d say like for example when we rolled out the speed update.

That was something where we could talk about specifically, this is how we’re using mobile speed and this is how it affects your website, therefore you should focus on speed as well.”

Core Update, Relevance and Quality

John Mueller then discussed the core updates within the context of relevance and quality updates. He did not say that core algo updates were specifically just about relevance or just about quality. He seemed to mention those to aspects as a way to show how these kinds of updates do not have specific fixes.

Here is how John Mueller explained it:

“With a lot of the relevance updates, a lot of the kind of quality updates, the core updates that we make, there is no specific thing where we’d be able to say you did this and you should have done that and therefore we’re showing things differently.”

John Mueller then explained, as an example, of how changes that are external to a website could impact how Google ranks websites.

This is what he said:

“Sometimes the web just evolved. Sometimes what users expect evolves and similarly, sometimes our algorithms are, the way that we try to determine relevance, they evolve as well.”

That may be the most a Googler has said so far to explain about core algorithm updates.

It follows along with what I’ve been saying, that factors like how Google determines what it means for a page to be relevant to a user can change. Some continue to focus on “quality” issues, fixing things like missing biographies, too much advertising on a page, but that kind of advice ignores relevance issues.

John mentions quality, but he also mentioned how users and the web evolve. That’s not a quality issue. Those are factors that are external to a website that need to be considered.

Nothing to Fix

John Mueller related that there aren’t specific things to fix. But he suggested that it may be useful to understand how users see your site, how useful your site is to users.

Here’s what John Mueller said:

“And with that, like you mentioned, you’ve probably seen the tweets from Search Liaison, there’s often nothing explicit that you can do to kind of change that.

What we do have is an older blog post from Amit Singhal which covers a lot of questions that you can ask yourself, about the quality of your website. That’s something I always recommend going through. , That’s something that I would also go through with people who are not associated with your website.”

John Mueller may have been citing a Webmaster Central blog post from 2011 titled, More Guidance on Building High-quality Sites

In it, the author provides a large number of questions a site owner should ask themselves about their content.

Here is a sample of the kinds of questions Google suggests you should ask yourself:

• “Would you trust the information presented in this article?
• Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?
• Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?
• Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?
• Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?
• Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?”

Ask a Third Party For a Critique

John Mueller then suggested that a third party that is unfamiliar with your site may be able to see issues that are not apparent to you.

What John Mueller said:

“So, often you as a site owner you have an intimate relationship with your website you know exactly that it’s perfect. But someone who is not associated with your website might look at your website and compare it to other websites and say, well, I don’t know if I could really trust your website because it looks outdated or because I don’t know who these people are who are writing about things.

All of these things play a small role and it’s not so much that there’s any technical thing that you can change in your line of HTML or server setting.

It’s more about the overall picture where users nowadays would look at it and say, well I don’t know if this is as relevant as it used to be because these vague things that I might be thinking about.

So that’s where I’d really try to get people who are un-associated with your website to give you feedback on that.”

John Mueller suggested asking in web communities, including the Webmaster Help Forums, to see how others see your site, if they could spot problems.

One issue with that is that every community have specific points of views that sometimes don’t allow them to get past their biases to see what the real problem is. That’s not a criticism but an observation on the nature of opinions is that they tend to vary.

Here’s what he said:

“…you can talk with other people who’ve seen a lot of websites and who can look at your websites and say well, I don’t know the layout looks outdated or the authors are people that nobody knows or you have stock photos images of instead of author photos. It’s like, why do you have that?

All of these things are not explicit elements that our algorithms would be trying to pinpoint but rather things that kind of combine to create a bigger picture.”

That’s good advice. Familiarity does make a person unable to identify what the problems are in a website.

I know from experience that it’s not uncommon for a site owner who comes to me for help with their site is sometimes surprised that their site contains problems with their content, is outdated in some way or has room for improvement in the way the content is written.

Sometimes they intuit that something is wrong but they can’t see it. I once had a site owner come to me with a negative SEO problem but the feedback I received directly from Google was that they were suffering from content issues related to Google’s Panda algorithm.

It was a shock for them to hear that their content was bad. But having it confirmed by Google made them better able to see that yes, there were problems with the content.

Google May Provide Additional Official Guidance

John Mueller appeared to be moved by the situation experienced by the web publisher. He offered more advice and insight into core algorithm updates than has previously offered and it went beyond the “nothing to fix” advice that, while true, is still felt to be unsatisfactory by many in the web community.

Mueller then offered hope by suggesting he would inquire about providing additional guidance for web publishers.

“I know a lot people have been asking for more advice, more specific advice so maybe there’s something that we can put together. We’ll see what we can do internally to put out a newer version of a blog post or kind of provide some more general information about some of the changes we’ve been thinking about there.”

Takeaway: See the Big Picture

The important takeaways are to be able to step back and see the big picture, which means:

Some issues are external to the website. For example, many fashion brands no longer publish blogs. An SEO recently attributed that to a failure in the content strategy. But that’s missing the big picture. The reason many fashion brands no longer publish blog posts is because users don’t consume that kind of content. They consume content on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and other social media websites.

That’s an example of how users evolve and how it’s not a problem with your site, but rather a change in user habits that may be reflected in the kinds of pages that Google shows in the search results.

Takeaway: Algorithms Evolve

Google’s algorithm does not really match keywords to web pages. It’s about solving problems for users. Google’s increasingly updating how it understands what users want when they type a query. Google is also updating how it understands the problems that a web page solves.

A website that focuses too much on keywords and not enough on providing quick information to users who need it quickly and deep information to users who need depth, may find that Google’s algorithms no longer favor them. Not because your site is broken and needs fixing. But because it does not solve the problem for the user in the way Google has determined users want them solved.

Takeaway: Have a Third Party Review Your Site

Lastly, it may be helpful to have a fresh set of eyes review your website. If that doesn’t provide insights, then someone with experience diagnosing relevance issues may be useful.

Watch: Webmaster Hangout

The post Google June Core Update appeared first on Toronto SEO Expert.

You can see an image Google shared demonstrating the difference below:

What does this mean for SEO?

In my opinion the new design makes it easier for Google to blend ads in with Organic results. I think that the distinction of an ad from an organic result has becoming increasingly difficult for the user to be able to tell.

This is not good for SEO as many users will click an ad when they believe they are clicking the organic result. This also makes it even more important than ever before for your site to have a favicon.

I do think highlighting the favicon is a great idea because it makes it easier to tell if you are visiting the right site (when re-visiting a site you have been on before). Although I wish Google had done it while keeping the green ad icon users are used to instead of switching to a dark generic “ad” text.

How do I check if my site already has a favicon?

You should be able to see a little icon next to your site’s title inside your browsers tab. If you do not see it than your site probably doesn’t have a favicon, you can use this tool to double check: https://realfavicongenerator.net/favicon_checker

How do I create a favicon?

Creating a favicon is as simple as resizing an image and putting it into the right format. Choosing your image is the hardest part, generally I recommend using a part of your logo. Since the favicon is shown at really small sizes your picture should have as little detail as possible and be easy to identify at small sizes.

You can use this tool to automatically resize it and put it in the right format for you.

How do I add a favicon to my site?

If you don’t have a favicon on your site you will probably want to add one.

If your using a WordPress website usually your theme will have an option to add a favicon to it. Check your theme’s documentation to find it if you are unsure where it is.

If you are using a website builder such as Squarespace or Weebly you should be able to find a spot to change the icon in the website settings.

If your website is custom built or your website builder does not have the option to add a favicon most modern browsers will use a favicon.ico file placed in the root directory of your site. In order to ensure your favicon gets picked up with all browsers add the following code between the <head> </head> tags on your website:

<link rel='icon' type='image/x-icon' href='/favicon.ico' />

Or if you icon is a png use this code:

<link rel='icon' type='image/png' href='/favicon.png' />

If you use the tool that I linked above than it will automatically provide you with the code required to add to your website.

The post Google Search to Feature Favicons on Mobile appeared first on Toronto SEO Expert.

The general answer to this question is one that most business owners hate, which is “it depends”.

Although this answer is dreadful for most since it’s not really an answer there is a reason to it.

SEO is not a guaranteed strategy to generate leads. Like all marketing SEO is a risk and some industries require heavy investment to see any results at all. Other industries are simply not suitable for SEO at all!

So before answering your question regarding the cost of SEO, first you need to see if it’s suitable for your business. I have seen business owners literally spend thousands of dollars on an SEO campaign and get to the first page for many keywords only to realize these keywords have almost no search volume or are being searched by a completely different audience than they wanted to target.

How do you know if SEO will work for you?

One of the easiest ways to get a quick idea of how well SEO will work for your industry is to check the monthly search volume for key search terms that your target market might be using.

You can see how many people are searching for specific keywords using tools like KWFinder by Mangools, although that is a paid tool. If you are looking for a free alternative you can try Uber Suggest although I don’t have much experience with this tool and heard the results can be inconsistent.

Alternatively you can contact an SEO expert such as me to help you see how viable your industry is for SEO.

Generally the search volume you want to see for you industry depends on how much money each customer brings to your business. If you see a search volume of 20/month that does not mean you should expect 20 clients each month. If you are in the first position for that keyword you can expect closer to 1-2 clients/month if it is heavily specific/targeted but this depends heavily on your landing page, website, industry and much more. Many keywords will bring you zero clients even if they have high search volume. If you do not have much experience with SEO I highly recommend you hire an expert to help you determine if SEO can help your business.

Most SEO experts will be incentived to tell you that SEO will help you so you purchase their services so keep this in mind when talking with them and don’t be afraid to ask for stats such as search volume and potential keywords to target.

So how much should you expect to pay?

It can be hard to determine the price because it so heavily depends on your industry and competition but I will provide a general idea for SEO prices in Toronto since that is the market I am most familiar with.

Most small businesses in Toronto will generally have an SEO budget of $1,000-$2,000/month it is common to see SEO specialists go down to $500/month or up to $5,000+/month depending on your industry and size.

SEO is a service based industry so the more you pay generally the more time the agency will put into your website which means you will rank for more terms and rank higher for specific terms.

If you are in a highly competition industry with lots of competition and money in it such as law firms you should expect to pay more. Injury Lawyers can easily get into the 5 digits for their monthly retainer.

Keep in mind Toronto is a big city with a high population which means for most industries by default you will have high competition. On the flip side you will also have high search volume. Some industries that wouldn’t be able to get much results from SEO in small towns can get big results in Toronto due to the high population and high search volume.

I hope this article helped you get a better understanding on how much it costs to hire an expert to do your SEO work. If you still have questions or would like to speak with an expert don’t hesitate to contact me today.

The post How Much Does SEO Cost? appeared first on Toronto SEO Expert.

It’s common for SEO companies to incorporate indexing with their packages although it is uncommon to get a clear explanation from them on what indexing precisely is and how it is done. Today we will go over indexing in depth and what is required to ensure Google correctly indexes your site.

What is Indexing anyway?

Indexing has become one of the buzzwords often used when discussing online marketing and gaining traffic for your website through organic search results.It can be defined as basically submitting information about your website to the search engine registry. When you request for your site to be indexed you are basically asking Google’s bot to look at your site and add it into their search results. Having your site indexed on Google is important if you want to show up in their search results.

Once Google indexes your site, it will periodically check back and look for changes. The more often your site changes, the more Google will check back on it. In many cases, if you are patient Google will eventually find and index your site on its own, but if you have a brand new site, it doesn’t hurt to request Google to index it.

How to check if your site is already indexed?

You can check to see if Google already indexes your site simply by searching for it. You can do a special kind of query to look for just your site in Google if you type:

“site:www.YourSite.com”

You will just need to replace www.YourSite.com with the link to your site. If Google returns search results, then you know your site is indexed. It still may be important for you to index your site again if you recently added new content and wanted to notify Google.

The easiest way to request Google to index your site

The easiest way to request Google to index you is to simply, Google it. If you search for “Index my site” on Google, you will see a form appear that lets you easily and quickly submit your site to the Google index. Although this is the simplest way to have your site indexed it is better to use the Google Search Console.

What is the Google Search Console and how can you use it for indexing?

Google Search Console is a useful tool provided by Google. Signing up for Google Search Console gives you more control over your site as you can optimize visibility, increase clicks, check which keywords your site ranks for and much more.

Although Google Search Console can be quite comprehensive, it can be easily used for just indexing as well. Once you have your site verified on Google Search Console adding a sitemap is fairly simple. But In case you are a new to Internet Marketing you might be wondering what exactly a sitemap is. So here is a short description of what it actually is.

What is a sitemap?

A sitemap is a list of web pages from your site which is accessible to web crawlers or users. It is generally designed in an XML format and is submitted to search engines to make them aware of your existing pages. A sitemap is very import for a webmaster to design to increase the existing crawl rate and make it easy for web crawlers to check your website frequently for new pages. With that said let us dive into the process of submitting sitemap to the most popular search engines today.

Instructions on how to add sitemap from Google Search Console with screenshots

1. Navigate to the left side of your screen and expand the option called: “Crawl”

2. Now Choose the sitemaps option. Refer to the image above for more info:

3. Now, Click on the “Add/Test Sitemap” option on the top right of your screen, You will get the following option as seen below:

4. Fill in your site address and click on test

5. In case your sitemap address is incorrect or the console faces any issue in accessing it then you will see an error but if everything goes well and no errors are seen then you have to repeat the process and this time have to click on “Submit”

Now, wait for Google to crawl your web pages. You will get a clear idea on how many of your web pages are being crawled and how many are indexed.

Remember: Google may take few days to show the data on how many of your pages are indexed although real indexing is fast, so you do not have to worry at this point.

How about Bing webmasters?

Indexing your site on Bing webmasters may be a little harder than it is using the Google version, but it can still provide major results. Bing shouldn’t be counted out, as it is still on the rise and can provide you with more coverage to different demographics.

The Bing webmaster tool requires authentication, just like Google Search Console. You can verify Bing Webmasters by downloading “BingSiteAuth.xml” and uploading the ownership verification code to the root directory of your website. You can also use meta tagging or add the CNAME record to DNS.

Instructions on how to add a sitemap using the Bing Webmaster Tool with screenshots

1. The First step is to login into the Bing webmaster tool with your Microsoft account

2. Click on Add a site from the options on the left side of your screen

3. Submit the site Url and verify the ownership using any of the preferred methods. You can also add sitemap at this point [refer to image below], but you can also add it later on when you have successfully verified the ownership and the site is in your dashboard

4.Now on the homepage of your dashboard, you will see several options in sequence, choose the second option that says “sitemaps” and click on “submit a sitemap.”

5. Enter the sitemap address and click submit.

You have successfully submitted your sitemap to Bing for indexing.

If after following all these steps your site is still not showing up on Google/Bing this can be for a few reasons. Either your site is very new, and should appear shortly. If your site is still not appearing please make sure to check your robots.txt file to see if your site can be crawled. It is also possible your site has previously violated webmaster guidelines. You should check the rules and the guidelines just in case.

The post How to Index a new site on Google and Bing appeared first on Toronto SEO Expert.

What are Backlinks?

Backlinks, also known as Inbound links (IBL’s) are not as complicated as they sound, they are simply any link on a website like this one or this one.

What is anchor text?

Anchor text is the text used to create a link, for example the anchor text in this link is “this link“. Anchor text is important because it provides guidance to the user and gives Google a idea of what a link is about. If my anchor text is “Google crawler” than Google is going to assume that the page I’m linking to has something to do with the Google crawler.

Backlinks are a useful indication of popularity or importance of a website to Google and most other large search engines, the more quality and relevant backlinks your website has, the more authority your website has and the bigger presence you have on the internet. Generally websites with more backlinks are considered to be more helpful to a particular topic or industry.

Search engines use a crawler to crawl the web and find the number of backlinks a website has and their relevancy to a keyword. Google developed an algorithm dubbed “penguin” specifically designed for evaluating the quality of links a website has pointing to it. They use this to combat blackhat SEO tactics designed to create a mass amount of illegitimate links.

What is a nofollow link?

A no-follow backlink is a link that does not pass on the SEO benefits (link juice) of websites when they link to you. Google created the no-follow tag to help combat SEO spam. When SEO was first getting popular leaving links in comments and in forums was a common practice. The no-follow tag allowed webmasters to automatically make comments with links not pass any juice.

The value of no-follow backlinks has been often debated within the SEO community with some people believing that they do serve a benefit and others arguing that they don’t pass any link juice and as a result are pointless in terms of SEO.

The other side of the debate argues that websites without any no-follow backlinks would look suspicious to Google. Since Google looks at so many factors (200+) it’s hard to say how much of a role no-follow backlinks actually play.

What is a dofollow link?

A do-follow backlink is a regular link that will pass on the SEO benefits (link juice) of a particular website when it links to another website. Do-follow links are generally the most common types of links people use.

Do-follow backlinks can be created from any website, backlinks from high authority websites will pass more authority (link juice) towards another website.

Importance of Backlinks for SEO

When Google first developed their search engine they created a metric called Pagerank that would evaluate a sites backlinks and provide a score out of ten. Pagerank provided a lot of insight to the SEO community and it was not long until people began to take advantage of the algorithm with low-quality backlinks. To get these links people would inject their link in unrelated blog comments, forum profiles and pretty much anywhere they could. It was not too long until Google caught onto this and began taking action. The Google Penguin update shook up the SEO community by evaluating not just the number of links but by also looking at the difficulty of getting a certain link and the quality of it. For example, if your clothing website was getting links from unrelated niche sites like a restaurant, dentist, digital marketing blog etc. these links won’t be as powerful and have as much influence on your ranking. Today it’s important to get high-quality links from sites relevant to your industry.

More Referral Traffic

The sole aim of the SEO is to bring more traffic to your website and quality backlinks work not just for helping you rank but for bringing additional traffic to your site as well. With more quality backlinks to your website, you will get traffic not just from Google but from other relevant sites as well. For example, if you have a high quality guest blog post published on a popular blog in your industry and you link to your website in it people are likely to check your website as well.

Faster Indexing

The more quality backlinks your website has, the more seriously Google will take it. If you are regularly updating your website and have high authority Google will crawl it more often and index new pages faster. Hence it’s important to create good quality backlinks as much as possible, especially if your website is new. For more tips on how to get your website crawled more often check my guide on the Google crawler.

Increased Ranking

Try using some tools like Google search console to check the traffic you are getting from different websites and plan your campaign accordingly. These tools let you know the traffic you are getting from different websites so you can mold the campaign in the right direction.

Conclusion

Building quality backlinks from high authority websites is important for Search Engine Optimization. Backlinks from authority websites give search engines more trust in your website which results in more traffic, revenue and peace of mind.

A little understanding of backlinks can give you a big advantage over competitors who don’t understand why they are so important. Check out my post on Uprankly where I give my opinion on the most popular method for building backlinks.

The post What are Backlinks and why are they Important for SEO? appeared first on Toronto SEO Expert.