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The Ideal Website Building Strategy for Your Business

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What is the best website-building strategy for your business? How to create a solid plan? Here is everything you need to know!

The Ideal Website Building Strategy for Your Business

How to create a website that works for your business and not the other way around.

The primary purpose of developing a website strategy is to combine your business objectives with site design. According to Tarek Riman, a professional digital marketer and experienced entrepreneur, website design aims to make it look pretty with a usable and accessible interface.

A business or company needs a solid website strategy to achieve its goals. At Riman Agency, our professional team defines this as an essential step for any online venture. Whether you want to replace an existing site or create a new one from scratch does not matter.

Riman Agency has carried out various website building and strategy development projects. According to Tarek Riman, a website strategy is a step-by-step process that requires thorough planning and preparation. Riman says a website strategy much include:

  • Proper definition and description of your goals
  • Detailed market study and audience identification
  • Apply branding techniques and adapt digital tools
  • Planning website launch, measuring results, and continuous improvement

Today’s article will give you a step-by-step approach to developing a sophisticated website strategy for your business and improving your company’s bottom line. So, follow the steps/tips/tricks below to streamline the entire process. Read on!

Define Your Objectives

What are your company goals? Most businesses are not all clear about what they want to accomplish. Likewise, you can’t start working on your business website until you get everything down in writing. Therefore, defining your objectives is crucial before working on your website.

  • What is your business model?
  • What type of products or services do you sell?
  • What prices have you set for your products/services?

On the other hand, what is the purpose of building a website if you don’t sell products or services? Is it about providing information to your target audience? Is it an information resource? Are you looking to build a loyal audience for blog posts?

When you answer these questions, you can define your business objectives and use the information to build your website accordingly. Here are a few good examples of objectives for a website strategy.

  • I want users to subscribe to an email list, so I can covert leads
  • I want to sell products or services via the website
  • I want to reach a broader audience and let them learn about my business
  • I want my target audience to find specific information reliably and quickly
  • I want customers to call a number or use other forms of contact
  • I want to improve my business’s online presence via a sophisticated site

Identify Your Target Audience

Who are your customers? Knowing your target audience is critical to providing it with the information and experience they are looking for online. If your site does not look like it will deliver what your target audience wants within the first few seconds, you will lose them. For example, they will go to another website and never return.

According to Tarek Riman, knowing your target audience defines how your site will look and function. Numerous demographic factors play a crucial role in influencing a website design. These include age, gender, profession, location, etc. Tarek Riman recommends considering the following questions:

  • Who is my business website for, or who is my target audience?
  • How do users expect to interact with my website?
  • Do people spend time on my existing website?
  • Do they quickly access information and move on?
  • Will my target audience respond better to text, images, or video?
  • Will they arrive from Google or other platforms?
  • How can I make customers keep coming back?
  • How can I convince my target audience to purchase products/services?
  • What does research into demographic data tell me?

Align it with Your Brand

Riman Agency is one of the most reputable web development companies. Our professional team has created hundreds of successful business websites. The primary reason is that our team aligns the website with a client’s brand.

For example, we put much thought into the colors, typefaces, iconography, logo, writing style, fonts, etc. When working on a business website strategy and planning, you must consider branding a primary factor.

For example, At Riman Agency, we convert CMYK color values to RGB to digitize branding. At the same time, we transform fonts into valid formats/web fonts or buy new licenses. Likewise, we create a responsive logo and sub variants for small spaces, screens, and social media.

At Riman Agency, our professional team follows a step-by-step process to create a web-style guide and document everything before building a business website. The purpose is to align your brand style and corporate values with your business website.

Focus on a Goal-Driven Design

Understanding your business goals and your target audience are crucial steps to building a website strategy. However, how do you convince your target audience to reach your goals?

According to Tarek Riman, if you don’t tell or convince your audience what you want them to do, you can’t expect them to do it. For example, if your goal is to increase the number of subscribers to the email list, you can add a prominent area to your website and offer a free downloadable item in exchange for emails.

Remember, this is your call-to-action or CTA because you tell visitors to take the following step/action. For instance, users can click this button to download the resource/file/material.

According to Tarek Riman, a successful website-building strategy guides its users to the prominent areas, allowing them to take the next step or click a CTA button. Your principal business objectives define your call-to-action or CTA. Your design, layout, and content must fit around this because it directs the visitors into performing a specific action.

Tarek Riman says CTAs are calls to a phone number, clicks to a button, purchases of an app, like on social media pages, etc. It depends on your business goals, meaning how you define your strategy.

Website Navigation

Working on an attractive and functional business website is not good if the essential information, knowledge, and data people are looking for are not on the forefront or are behind a maze of navigational menus.

Even if you create an attractive website, not focusing on the navigational menu can prevent you from achieving your goals. So, focusing on this critical factor is essential to streamlining the entire process.

If your company is a “personal brand, such as you are the face of your business and your visitors decide to become your clients because you are a famous person, make sure you don’t hide CTAs below a give paragraph life story.

According to Tarek Riman, let the visitors find your CTA. If they can do this without knowing whose website they are on or what the website is about, you have made it easy enough. So, congratulations, you have the best navigation to provide customers with the best user experience.

Moreover, if you hose blog posts, which can change a visitor’s life, ensure they reach those articles with a few clicks, or they will never see them. Remember, two clicks are crucial, and three clicks are too much for visitors.

Therefore, consider arranging your website content with lots of information or services into summarized or bite-sized chunks. You can do this by creating a homepage or landing page.

Thus, visitors or customers will skim over the information quickly, allowing them to decide what action to take or where to go next. For instance, if you offer two or three services, you can place them on the homepage using high-graphics content and let users click through to see more info or make a purchase.

In various website development projects that Riman Agency delivers, our professional team uses cutting-edge techniques to streamline the component-based design process. The purpose is to make the homepage of your website more navigational, allowing users to easily access the main parts/components.

Measure the Results

Your business website may look fantastic, but its functionality is critical. You have launched your business website and are excited to see the results. You want to get those extra subscriptions, drive traffic, convert more leads into sales, and increase revenues.

However, how do you know your website performs well? In that case, Tarek Riman, the founder of Riman Agency, recommends planning for measuring the results and creating a strategy for the changes you will make to fine-tune its success.

Moreover, if your new business website is a replacement for an outdated site, you might already have historical data and metrics. These metrics can tell which parts of your business website performed and what areas need improvement.

For example, tools like Google Analytics provide companies with a lot of information about popular pages, peak visit times, visitors’ demographics, and crucial traffic sources.

Therefore, Tarek Riman suggests configuring Google Analytics according to your goals and marketing strategies. The purpose is to get detailed information related to sales funnels.

On the other hand, if you have a new website for a new company or project, you must start recording and measuring metrics, working out patterns, and conducting testing. Remember, A/B testing, also known as split testing, is an integral part of measuring results.

You can conduct this test to measure the results and compare them to see how your website performed and how well it is doing now. Some businesses carry out split testing regularly, and based on the results; they make a change every month.

However, this depends on how your website has performed. So, the time interval you set for result measurements depends on your business goals. You can make changes to your website bi-monthly if it does not perform according to your expectations.

On the other hand, you can test the results bi-annually if it has performed well for the last five months but failed to produce positive results in the previous month. Therefore, this depends on the positivity and negativity of the results.

Final Words

Although launching a business website is exciting, it is daunting and time-consuming. You rely on guesswork if you have not developed a website-building strategy. So, this can lead to severe consequences and prevent you from improving your business’s bottom line.

An attractive and functional website is like a storefront that drives people to the store. However, if you have a poorly designed storefront, most customers will go away and visit another shop.

The same goes for your business website. If you don’t know how to do the job professionally, reliably, and cost-effectively, you can hire an experienced web development company like Riman Agency.

Riman Agency has designed this guide to help companies get into the right frame of mind. Today’s post will help you think deeply about what you need, what your target audience or customers do, and how you want to achieve your goals. Contact Riman Agency for more information or discuss your requirements with our professional team for a solid website-building strategy.

Connect with me if you want to develop your business site: t@rimanagency.com

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7 Ways To Expand Your Business Through Digital Marketing in 2021

So many businesses are slowly focusing on the digital aspect of their business, recognizing the opportunities that come with having a strong online presence. Big or small, digital marketing can have a big impact on your business if executed correctly, which is why I am here to help. Fundamentally, there’s a lot more to Digital Marketing than just search, in fact, Digital marketing is an ever-evolving mix of different digital channels that you can use to promote and drive value to your business. While most people think of SEO and SEM when it comes to digital marketing, and while yes, they are a big part of it, there are also other crucial channels to look at when trying to optimize and prepare your business to excel in the online world.

  1. SEO (Search Engine Optimization): The process of aligning the various elements of your site (tags, content, data, information, links, etc.) with the best practices of search engines, so that you can rank as high as possible in search engine results.
  2. SEM (Search Engine Marketing): The process of implementing search and display campaigns on advertising platforms such as Google Ads and Bing Ads, with the aim of creating relevant traffic and awareness for your brand and website.
  3. Social Media Marketing: The process of marketing your brand and website on social channels to create awareness, loyalty, retention, traffic and conversions.
    • Most common social channels: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.
  4. Email Marketing: The process of collecting email subscribers, then creating and sending email campaigns intended to grow brand awareness and sell more products and services, or otherwise convert subscribers such as encouraging event sign-ups, content downloads, etc.
    • Common email marketing platforms: Mailchimp, Constant Contact, GetResponse, SendinBlue (this is a highly saturated market, and there are many to choose from)
  5. Content Marketing: The process of creating and sharing videos, articles, images and other forms of digital content.
  6. Local Marketing: The process of marketing your product or service to specific geographical locations or neighbourhoods.
  7. Landing Page Marketing: The process of creating highly targeted landing pages and directing traffic to said pages based on a set of predetermined criteria. The main goal of these pages is to get visitors to stay longer on your site and convert (buy, signup, etc.)
    • Landing page marketing is also known as CRO or Conversion Rate Optimization.

While these are not the only ways to grow your business online, they are a gold standard that should be practiced with every business. The channels help build a foundation for your business to not only survive online but to thrive in it and sail the waters efficiently.


 

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5 ways to improve your SEO content marketing strategy in 2021

SEO has changed quite a bit over the years. With the world increasingly moving towards online, it becomes even more important to have strong and optimal SEO & Content for your site or web property. Search engines such as Google and Mozilla for example, are getting smarter and smarter which makes search engine specialists stay on top of their game. This also paves the way for content to be increasingly important to drive visitors to your site. Remember, content is king, content is the lifeblood of your site or web property which is why it is important to remember these 5 key ways to improve your SEO Content so your web property can stay on top of ITS game.

  1. Addressing Searcher Intent vs Just Keywords

Remember, search engines are becoming smarter and as content creators, we have to adapt to the reality of things. It cannot be stressed enough that Intent should be prioritized over keywords! When we usually search we always go right for the goal of what we are looking for so it’s important to think about which words or phrases someone would use in the search bar. Keeping the customers’ intent in mind will help you tune your keywords towards what your customers are actually hoping to find.

Remember: Keywords of course matter, but make sure they are organic and always address the intent first. It is also important to remember the four types of search intent of being: Informative, investigative, navigational and transactional!

 

2. Create Original Content

Creating original content is crucial for not only search engines but for humans as well. In the grand scheme of things creating original content is the safest bet to not get penalized for duplicate content. You also have pride in something you created from your brain and is an incredibly rewarding feeling. Having said that, Backlinking is something incredibly important that weaves into creating your original content. Backlinking for those who don’t know is a means to get other sites to link your website to theirs. Essentially a referral, a vote of confidence if you will, and it turns out one of the best and effective ways of getting these sites to backlink you is to be original and create unique content.

 

3. Make sure it makes sense!

 We saw how smart search engines are getting and it’s important to keep that in mind the whole way through. Make sure your content makes sense! Say we are writing about “the best gyms in Montreal”. Google will grade our authority and article integrity based on if we referenced actual gyms such as Pro Gym, Rgym, Econofitness etc…

Google knows that these are actual legit gyms and will look for them, which means that if Google doesn’t find any it wouldn’t deem the article worthy and not show up!

4. Create engaging content

 Google is well aware of how engaging your content actually is, and rewards it accordingly. Which is great of course, but puts extra emphasis on how well you can actually produce engaging content. To help yourself in making engaging content, some of the main ranking factors for search engines are not surprisingly user related. Metrics like: time spent on site, bounce rate, pages per visit will help you judge how engaged your visitors are on your site. Make sure to create content people want to spend time with!

 

5. Diversifying is Key

 

Lastly don’t forget that diversification will always be incredibly useful for content. Video, images, text, gifs… product descriptions, reviews, helpful tips, useful articles, fun facts, media coverage, quizzes, your grandmother’s famous sugar cookie recipe… Is it relevant? Is it fun? Accessible? Linkable? Useful? Engaging? Get it up there! Diversify your content and your content type. Users appreciate it and Google will reward you accordingly!

 

 

Of course, these aren’t the only ways to improve your SEO and Content creation but it is a good place to start! Remember to always create with the user in mind. Search engines will always look for good, relevant and accessible content so make sure you are on the search engines’ good side!

If you liked what you read, be sure to check out The SEO Way, my book on a beginner’s guide to SEO for all the latest tips and tricks to help you along your journey!

https://www.amazon.ca/SEO-Way-Beginners-Search-Optimization-ebook/dp/B07VGJZPK8

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How to Capitalize on Relevancy and Intent as a Marketer?

As we are moving more and more towards voice search, mobile-first indexing, and machine learning algorithms, search and SEO are becoming more and more… intentional.

At least in the sense that you must focus on the intentions of your market.

If the content is to successfully build strong SEO, it cannot be based solely on keywords. The intent of your audience must also be taken into account.

What do I mean by this?

An intention, in search, is the meaning behind a search query and not simply the words used.

Let’s say you are looking for a gym to go to so you type “gym” into Google. Go ahead. Give it a try.

Notice that Google doesn’t give the definition of the word “gym”. It doesn’t give you the history of gyms, or even an alphabetical list of gyms.

No. Google anticipates your intention. It assumes you are looking for a gym in your neighbourhood. The first results you see will be the Google local listing gyms near you, then a list of search results for gyms in your area and gym directories, typically listed based on an algorithm of user reviews, link popularity and many other factors.

Google’s mission is, “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

For me, the most important part of Google’s mission/vision statement, are the last two words: accessible and useful.

We are constantly moving to more relevant and smarter search results – results that are more and more accessible and useful. Relevancy, accessibility and usefulness depend heavily on understanding the intent of the audience.

To capitalize on relevancy and intent as a marketer, remember these four query types:

  • Informational
  • Investigative
  • Navigational
  • Transactional

Each of these query types can be associated with certain phases of the consumer purchase journey:

  • Informational Queries – Researching non-transactional information

Informational queries are at the very top of the funnel – the awareness phase. Results are usually broad and informational, with no intent to sell.

The main intent behind informational queries is, well, to get information. Most search results associated with informational queries tend to be direct answers.

  • Investigative Queries – Researching options

Investigative queries come from consumers with the intention to discover options in the market or do additional research. In terms of the consumer purchase process, these searchers can be in either the awareness or consideration phases of the funnel. These queries may not necessarily lead to conversions. Indeed, they may not even be driven by any intent to purchase.

These are queries that involve researching specific details. Searchers may be looking for talent, competition or options available in the market.

The intention behind these queries may or may not be to eventually purchase, but what Google does know (or assume) is that the searcher is exploring options. Search results are, therefore, tailored to provide those options for investigation.

  • Navigational Queries – Looking for something you already know you want

By this phase, the consumer already knows what they want. Perhaps it is healthy fruits (from informational queries) and the consumer now knows the best places to buy them from (investigative queries).

For example, when a searcher knows the brand, product or service, but does not know the URL, they will just type the name into their search or address bar.

For example, when you want to access Gmail, you usually just type “Gmail” into the address bar rather than a full URL. Google does the rest.

As generations are getting lazier by the second, navigational queries are becoming more and more popular.

  • Transactional Queries are queries that involve an intent towards an action

The action doesn’t have to be money related, it could be a signup, newsletter, phone details, address discovery, getting direction.

For example, if you search “Buy healthy food”, then that is a transactional query.

So what can we do as marketers, entrepreneurs, and startups?

We have to capitalize on the searcher’s intent instead of keywords and capitalize on each query type.

I would recommend using this approach in your future content as well as for past content. Go to your current blogs, pages, and products; analyze the actual intent and value of the content and update accordingly.

The best way to test search intent is Google Search itself. Search the term you have in mind and based on search results, you will be able to categorize it accordingly.

Remember there are no right or wrong search intent queries, the right approach is to match the right queries with your brand and business goals.

If you are an e-commerce site, it is ideal to concentrate on transactional queries and investigation queries, while not fully ignoring the informational and navigational queries.

Intentions can no longer be ignored, they need to be a critical part of your marketing moving forward.

Source:

https://moz.com/blog/segmenting-search-intent

http://searchengineland.com/search-intent-signals-aligning-organic-paid-search-strategy-249601

 

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Short Guide to On Page SEO Tags | On Page SEO Optimization Intro

What is on page optimization?

The optimizations that you can do on-page of the site. These optimizations include most of the on-page tags of the website.

What are the most important SEO On Page Tags?

What are the on-page tags that we can optimize?

  • Meta Title tags
  • Meta descriptions
  • Page URLs
  • Content on page
  • Alt text for images.

It is important that the work that we do on these tags is aligned with the Keyword map that we put together in the previous chapter.

Meta Title tags

What is an SEO Meta Page Title Tag?

HTML: <title>Page title goes here</title>

This is the first thing that we see in the search results.

In the page below it is “5 Best National Parks Near Montreal | Top 5 National Parks in Quebec”

Based on Moz, https://moz.com/learn/seo/title-tag

They recommend that we use both the Primary Keyword and the secondary keyword with the brand in the title.

Primary Keyword – Secondary Keyword | Brand Name

If we are to go back to the keyword map that we put together in the previous chapter, here is how the title would look:

Page/Topic KW 1 KW 2 Related Terms
“5 neighbourhoods to visit in Montreal” Montreal Famous Neighborhoods Places to walk in Montreal. Montreal Downtown

NDG – Notre-Dame-de-Grâce

Mile End

Le Plateau-Mont-Royal

Gay Village

Mont-Royal

Westmount
Title Montreal Famous Neighborhoods | Places to walk in Montreal

It is important to note that the title should be within 65 characters if it has more than that, it will show the three dots at the end and Google will not show the full title.

 

Meta descriptions

What is an SEO Meta Page DescriptionTag?

Meta description no longer has a direct impact on the page’s SEO. Yet it does have an indirect impact.

What does that mean?

Well for search engines right now the most important ranking factors are mostly user behaviour related. Meaning CTR (Click through rate) and number visits for example.

As much as a description may not have a direct impact on the site, it may still have a direct impact on the user behaviour which in turn will have a direct impact on the SEO of the site.

What does that tell us as marketers?

Well when we are creating a description for our site, it is more important that we create the descriptions for the user’s engagement rather Search engines.

It is definitely important to include consistent keywords yet it is also important to have a call to action, and enough information to peak the searcher’s interest.

 

Page URLs

How to optimize page URL for better SEO Results?

As for the page URLs. Well, it goes back to the site structure chapter. Where I highlight the importance of having a clean and well-organized site.

Yet to emphasis, good site structure leads to a good URL structure. What I tell my students at Concordia University is the following:

“I should be able to understand what the site is about and what the pages are about, and where it fits by just looking at your URL”

So when creating URLs always bear that in mind.

But also bear in mind that you should not use:

  • Capital Letters: having different caps in the URL that makes a URL inconsistent. Not only that it will dilute the URL as it will create a different version of it. So always keep your URL in lower case.
  • Underscores: The reason be is that search engines and browsers view underscores as nothing, but hyphens as spaces. So if as search engines see this in the URL “best_montreal_restos_for_date” it will read bestmontrealrestosfordate.

So instead use a hyphen, a proper way to have a URL should be “best-montreal-restos-for-date”

  • NON- ASCII characters. Since URLs can only communicate using ASCII characters, when they see a non-ASCII character, they replace it with a “%” that causes URL issues and broken pages in the long run.
  • Spaces: Avoid spaces at all costs, if you leave a space when you are creating a URL, it will convert that space into a “%20” when the site is live. That also causes the URL to have issues and might affect your SEO negatively.

 

Content on-page

How to optimize on-page content for better SEO Results?

You might see it everywhere by now. That content is just king.

SEO and Content on the page go hand in hand. Based on research by SEMrush, sites that are rank number one have on average 45% more content than the sites ranking number 20th.

Using the right content and the impactful content on the site will help a lot.

Put it this way if Google doesn’t know enough about you and they need to make sure that you are an expert on the subject, so the more details you give the better it is, the more you can proof you are knowledgeable on the subject the better it is.

When it comes to content the quantity off content is as important as the quality of content. So as you fill up your site with information, make sure that it is as meaningful as possible.

Alt text for images.

How to optimize image alt tags for better SEO Results?

Alt image tags are made first and foremost of the visually impaired.

Meaning when someone with visual impairment is checking out your site, they will be able to know what the image is about, by moving their mouse over it.

As this is the main purpose, we shouldn’t look at this tag from an SEO perspective, yet from an ethical and purposeful perspective.

I this tab it is not only a best practice but our duty and responsibility to fill in this tag properly.

Check the example that follows:

A large scale Mural of Leonard Cohen on the side of a building in downtown Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

A large scale Mural of Leonard Cohen on the side of a building in downtown Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

ALT tag: A large scale Mural of Leonard Cohen on the side of a building in downtown Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

 

To learn more about SEO and how to take your optimization to the next level: Get your copy of “The SEO Way” here.

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How to Use Google Analytics to Improve Your Site’s SEO Presence  

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GOOGLE ANALYTICS & SEO

 

The Search Engine’s Mission

The role of search engines is to crawl the web and index the pages that they deem worthy, in an order that provides value to users.

In doing so, their mission is to ensure users can quickly and easily find the information, products, services or content they’re looking for.

Google’s mission statement, written in 2013, is as follows: “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Source: https://www.google.com/about/

 

Bing’s mission statement, also written in 2013, is as follows: “At Bing our central mission is to help you search less and do more. To that end, we’re constantly looking for ways to make your search experience more efficient.”

Source: https://blogs.bing.com/search/2013/08/23/find-it-faster-with-bing-product-search/

 

Yahoo’s mission is to “make the world’s daily habits inspiring and entertaining.”

Source: Yahoo.com

 

What can we take away from this?

Essentially, search engines exist to send us away from them and to what users search for. Ironic, isn’t it?

Google Search Console on Google Analytics

Google Search Console on Google Analytics

 

Think about it. You visit a search engine, perform a search and then leave. The better the experience you have with a search engine (i.e. the greater success you have at finding what you want) the more likely you are to use that one again. With that in mind, you can rely on them wanting to return search results that are as closely related as possible to what it “thinks” you are truly looking for.

There is a lot to learn from this.

My grandpa used to say, “Tell me what someone wants and I will tell you how to control him.” And I tell you today that if you want to control how your web property shows up in search engines, you have to understand that the primary mission of the search engine is around what people want and nothing else. Yes, the companies behind them want to make money through advertising, sales, etc., but they know that these things are most profitable when driven by that primary mission of providing value.

User driven metrics control search, and likely always will.

If you are able, through your site, to provide useful, accessible, engaging, inspiring and entertaining information, then you are golden. If people want you, search engines will want you. This should be the guiding principle behind your SEO strategy.

Thankfully, GA can help you understand what searchers want, like, enjoy, engage with and how you can act on that knowledge to improve your ranking.

Google Search Console on Google Analytics                                                               

Going back to chapter 14, where we installed Google Search Console, you may recall that GA alone is not enough for us to capture adequate data to take a knowledge-driven approach to SEO.

To be able to make educated SEO decisions, you need Google Search Console. Once you connect Google Search Console data to your web property, you will have access to a wide array of reports that will help you understand how pages are performing, what keywords are sending the most traffic, what pages are getting the highest engagement, what is relevant and what is not.

The goal of this chapter is to help you capitalize on GA to optimize your site’s organic search performance in the best way possible.

Let’s jump back to the GA dashboard.

Under “Acquisition” scroll to “Search Console”.

Without Google Search Console, the default analytics results are extremely limited. In fact, GA will often return “Not Provided”.

With Search Console, you will have access to extensive data, which is enough to optimize, improve and plan ahead.

Also, Google Search Console is the best SEO tool out there that you can use for free. Make sure that you are using it and learning from it as much as possible.

 

Search Console Landing Pages Report

Search Console Landing Pages Report

Search Console Landing Pages Report

As you can see in the report above, GA provides a list of the most popular landing pages on your site that visitors have arrived at through organic search.

The table shows a lot of valuable info, which is the result of the merge between Google Search Console data and on-site behaviour data. This helps you not only know what people did to find your page, but what they did once they arrived there, and whether they took the actions that you want them to take.

These are the terms you should know to get the most out of this report:

SERP (Search Engine Results Page) Impressions – This is the number of times your pages popped up in search results.

Clicks – The number of times people clicked on your page from an SERP.

CTR (Click Through Rate) –  The number of clicks/the number of impressions * 100, meaning, it reflects the rate at which people see your listing in organic search results and choose to click through to your site.

Average Position – This is the average ranking of your page in organic search results, taking into account all the keywords that this page ranks for. If your page has an average position of 3, for example, that means your page usually shows up around the third spot in SERPs (which is a very good position to have).

Sessions – This is the number of visits that you get to your site from organic search.

Bounce Rate – This tells you how many visitors to your site (from organic search) left without taking any action.

Goal Metrics – This shows how your traffic from organic search is converting on the site.

The Landing Page Report gives you a view into how your different pages are performing from an SEO perspective. It helps you see what pages are performing well, which ones can be improved, and which pages you can capitalize on elsewhere, maybe through paid search or social campaigns.

 

 Acquisition Google Search Console Countries Report

 Acquisition Google Search Console Countries Report

 Acquisition Google Search Console Countries Report

In this report, you can see the amount of organic search traffic you’re getting from each country.

This insight can help you tailor future content for different countries, with different languages and different information that caters to specific audiences.

I use this report to understand who is coming to my site and how I can tailor new content for them. It also helps me identify opportunities I may be missing out on. For example, if I’m getting a lot of traffic from a specific country, but it isn’t converting, I can start looking into why that may be, and what I can do to better serve that traffic and increase conversions.

In the sample report above, you can see that the US is the second biggest source of traffic to my site. Because of that, I try to tailor some content to that audience instead of only concentrating on Canadian traffic or local traffic.

 

Acquisition Google Search Console Device Report

Acquisition Google Search Console Device Report

Acquisition Google Search Console Device Report

As small as this report is, it packs a big punch.

This gives you a quick overview of where you stand as a brand and site, as it shows your average position on mobile, tablet and desktop.

If you see that you have a lower than usual CTR on mobile, for example, it may be a sign that you are not appealing to users of these devices. You may find that you need to a better job with meta title and meta descriptions, or even that your site isn’t rendering properly on mobile devices

Acquisition Google Search Console Queries Report

Acquisition Google Search Console Queries Report

Acquisition Google Search Console Queries Report

This report is, for SEO purposes, the most important one in the Google Search Console reports, as it shows what terms and keywords visitors used to arrive on your site.

This shows what you’re good at and what you can improve, in terms of keywords.

It is a great place to see what type of content to concentrate on more, and gives you the start of a model for how to approach future content and what types of terms to concentrate on for a more targeted and sustained approach to the details on your site.

 

Takeaway

GA, in partnership with Google Search Console, helps you understand how visitors search for your site, how they perceive it and if they find it relevant, giving you a starting point from which to build and improve on your content strategy for better SEO.

What makes GA so important as a tool, is that it taps into user metrics, and these user metrics are the main ranking factors of any website, as of this writing.

 

This is based on chapter 18 from the book “The Secret to Capitalizing on Analytics”

 

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Why Site Structure Matters and What to Do About It

How and Why to Master Site Structure

Not all websites, pages and blogs are created (or ranked, searched for or indexed) equally. This is true when it’s a human interacting with it and when it’s a search engine.
If you are a marketer or business owner, you probably know the 80/20 rule of websites: 80% of your business will come from 20% of your pages. If you have a blog of 100 posts, about 20 of those will drive the majority of your conversions (whatever “conversion” means for your business model). This is totally normal and not something that necessarily needs to be “fixed”.

However, because a minority of pages drive the majority of conversions, site structure becomes extremely important, for both visitors and search engines.

When I work with a client, one of the first things I do is audit their website to get a clear picture of what we’re starting with. Having performed hundreds of such audits, I’ve come to realize that site structure if a common issue for many businesses.
Think about it like this: brick and mortar stores carefully layout and display merchandise to make it easy for customers to move around and find what they’re looking for, and to highlight particular items for quicker sale or to draw in street traffic. Site structure is the web equivalent of that practice.

 

Here are the main disadvantages of not having a well-structured site:  

  • Dilution of page strength
  • Site cannibalization (self-competing)
  • Lack of consistency
  • Potential for duplicate content
  • Harder for search engines to crawl and understand

 

Do You Know How to Master Site Structure

 

5 things you can do to get a more structured site:

 

  • Divide content into categories.

There are many ways that the human brain and search engines are similar. One of those is that we both LOVE to categorize things! We like it when information fits neatly into set categories. When someone else clearly defines those categories for us (whether human or search engine), we can find things more quickly.

Aggregate related content and organize it into categories or with tags. When you have a lot of content, it is ideal to create a new directory (subdirectory, NOT subdomain as a new subdomain is much harder to rank for). The content in your subdirectories should be specific and should not overlap with other content.

As you categorize and tag your site, ensure that highly related content is put in the right subdirectory as one of your main goals is to avoid cannibalization.

 

  • Create a sitemap and submit it to search engines.


XML sitemaps are important for your ranking on SERPs (search engine results pages) because they make it easier for search engines to find pages on your site. Rather than have to follow a bunch of links, search engines know to look for your XML file so they can see all the pages in one place. Kind of like those giant maps in shopping malls.

Another key role of the XML sitemap is to tell search engines which pages are ok to crawl. This way, they know right away which pages not to bother with and can quickly crawl the others.

When creating your sitemap, it’s important to know which pages are your key pages, as you will need to organize the map accordingly.

Here is a great tool for creating an effective sitemap: https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

Once you have your sitemap, add it under your default sitemap URL, which should look like this: https://thecaminowithin.com/sitemap.xml. Use this URL (obviously with your own website, not mine) as your sitemap URL when connecting Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools.

 

  • Use canonical tags.


This is one of the most basic and impactful optimization tools. It’s a way of telling search engines that a certain page represents the original copy of a page in order to avoid duplicate content.

The word “canon” means, generally, “authoritative”. When a page is canonical, it means that’s the main one. The original. It’s the one that should be referenced above all others like it. So, if you have different URLs hosting the same content, designate one page as “canon” to instruct search engines to ignore the others. This ensures all search strength is directed towards your one main page, and not diluted among many.

Here’s an example of a canonical page: https://thecaminowithin.com. That’s my canonical homepage, but all these URL structures may be considered variations of that page:

https://thecaminowithin.com/
http://thecaminowithin.com/
https://www.thecaminowithin.com/

To the human eye, we can tell that these are probably all the same page. But, without canonical tags, a search engine will see all these as separate. Use a tag like this to tell search engines which page is your canon page: <link rel=”Canonical” href=”https://thecaminowithin.com”>

 

  • Remove duplicate pages, content or tags.


Duplicate content happens when content appears in more than one place within the same website. It makes your site repetitive and irrelevant for both humans and search engines.

When navigating through a website, both humans and search engines look for (and expect) unique information or content with each new page visit.

Duplicate content makes it hard to figure out what is original and what is not. It confuses search engines in deciding which version should get ranking strength and which should be ignored.

The best analogy is that you are taking a good piece of content and watering it down. Diluting its strength.

Aim for all your content to be unique, concentrating on the following areas:

  1. Duplicate titles and descriptions.
  2. Duplicate headers.
  3. Duplicate paragraphs.

 

  • Interlink properly.


An internal link is a type of hyperlink on a webpage that links to another resource (page, image, document, etc) within the same site.

There are many advantages to interlinking, such as connecting relevant pages, enabling visitors to easily find information and helping them spend more time on your site.

But, when it comes to interlinks, you must stay structured, relevant, consistent and not overdo it.

A best practice is to use relevant and descriptive anchor text that relates to the content of the page or resource you are linking to.

Just like a brick and mortar business, your website needs to be well structured for it to perform optimally. Don’t ignore site structure. Master it.

 

 

 

References:

 

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What questions should businesses ask before introducing SEO to their site

What questions should a business ask before introducing SEO to their site?

10 questions every business should ask before kicking off an SEO project.

People always come to me asking, what I should ask my agency before I get them on my site SEO? Being an important question as is, I always mention that it really depends on the offer itself.

Yet there is some basic Q & As that should be considered by all business before any online engagement of that type.

Before we start with the list, it’s important to know that getting someone to do your SEO is like giving them the keys to your backdoor. It is important that you trust that person, or that company is of high authority in the market.

One of things that frightens me, is when I do SEO for a client and I discover that the person who did their SEO prior left some back links of the other clients he was servicing. Not only this is illegal, it will also negatively impact your site authority and cause lose of SEO juice.

That being said it is important for you to know that you are dealing with the right person.

Let’s start with the main question you should ask your SEO agency:

  1. What is the most recent Google algorithm update and what should I be considering when it comes to my site?
  2. What is the process that you will follow when it comes to optimization ?
    1. The brief answer should be as follows:
      1. Audit
      2. Meeting
      3. Recommendations
      4. Optimization
  3. Can you give me a list of the keywords that you optimized for and what did you rank for?
  4. When will I start seeing results?
    1. The best answer should be 5 to 10 months depending on the size of the site and the level of the competition in that industry.
  5. Who will be implementing the optimization?
    1. It is preferable that you do your own implementation if it is your first interaction with this agency.
    2. Yet the option of having the agency implement these optimizations will ensure full liability on them. And it will ensure that everything is done professionally.

It is your call on this one.

  1. Make sure that they integrate the SEO strategy with content strategy at hand.
  2. Make sure that they integrate the SEO strategy with the social strategy at hand.
  3. Make sure they address both off-page and on-page optimization.
  4. How often will the agency be following up and updating you, is really important.
  5. Who will be responsible for reporting?
SEO agencies tool box

SEO tool box

Even if this is brief it will already show the agency that you know what you are doing.

Finally and most importantly, make sure that you have a proper scope of work and a quote that matches it.

 

Source/Reference: 

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/20-questions-to-ask-before-you-hire-an-seo-agency-in-post-pandapenguin-era/62504/

 

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Tips on Conducting a Site Migration Without Losing Rankings, Traffic and SEO Strength

SEO friendly site migration tips and avdvice

Site migration is the process where you move a site to a new domain or directory.

Migrating happens to almost every company out there,and more often than we tend to realize.

All Marketers and Digital Specialists aspire and aim for a site migration that does not create any loss in traffic, revenue, SERP rank, or SEO strength.

What I hear most often is that it is as simple as redirecting the old domain to the new domain with a simple 301 redirect – SEO friendly redirect. This is a good start and better than nothing. But it is important to follow a more detailed procedure that will allow you to make this transition without losing value, while getting rid of any mistakes on the current site.

So How to conduct a smooth SEO Friendly site migration while maintaining good rankings on Google, Bing or any other Search engine ?

1. First step is understanding the objective behind an SEO friendly migration.

The main Goals you should keep in mind are the following:

  1. Maintain Traffic
  2. Maintain Rankings
  3. Seamless User Experience and Transition

2. Second step is to know what to pay attention to.

Understand that there is no magic Bullet. we need to do the best we can to ensure that we maintain the highest ranking possible.
And here are Main Factors to pay extra attention to as an SEO Specialist:
1. URL structure
2. Duplicate content
3. Canonicalization
4. Indexed pages

3. Understand the process

Here are the 3 different phases that make an SEO friendly site migration:
  1. Premigration
  2. Migration
  3. Post-migration

 

Phase 1: Pre-Migration Phase

Here is what to account for and work on:
• Know what you have on your current site/platform
For an ideal SEO friendly site migration; the best place to start is with an SEO audit of the site on hand. It is important not to bring the current site’s mistakes with you to the new one.
• Understand and map current site architecture
Download your current sitemaps, and export the list of indexed pages from the Google Search Console.
This will allow you to know the pages that should be redirected to the new site.

• Understand and map new site architecture
This will allow you to understand what URLs you will be matching from the old site to the new site.
• Account for technical limitations
In some situations while moving domains, directories, or hosting, it is important to understand if the new site can support all the changes being made.
• Create a URL redirect map
Map out all the old URLs to the new URLs on the new site.

Additional Things to Account For:

• URL structure
Ensure the new site is well structured and categorized, so that there is a consistency across all the pages, posts and properties.
• Content – avoid duplication
Ensure you are using the right tags on the new site to avoid any duplicate content.
• Messaging/New design/Site
As there is a new design and there is a new domain, we tend to get too familiar with it that we forget to notify our visitors about the changes made.
It is important that you have a notification mentioning the changes, and if it is going to affect your visitors in any way.
Smart marketers turn new designs into marketing advantages, by creating a buildup, a release date and a feedback request.

Phase 2: Migration Process

• Keep the old site (in parallel while using the right redirects and SEO tags)
The most common mistakes I see in this market is when an old site is put down by the time it is redirected.
The ideal approach is to keep the old site and the new site running in parallel after performing the redirect.
• Tag the new site page properly to avoid penalization
It is important to have all the pages canonicalized to the new site before your redirect, to avoid any duplicate content.

Phase 3: Post-Migration

• Perform an audit for the new site (Fix any broken links, loop, or missing URL)
Check your Google Search Console and Bing Web Master tools.
This will allow you to discover: crawl errors, mobile usability, pages indexed, top keywords driving traffic, organic search traffic.
• New sitemap, new robots, and submit new site for indexing
Submit the new site map and robots.txt file to search engines, and keep an eye for any errors, broken links, and redirects.
• Check redirects
As a final check on the new site, check redirects to ensure there are no redirect loops or inconsistencies.
Also, ensure that all the redirects are 301 redirects. The 301 status code means that a page has permanently moved to a new location.

Site migration might be a bit of a tedious process, but it is crucial that is done correctly.
As it is done once every couple of years, it is best to pay extreme attention to details through out this process. If one is not vigilant in the process, they can suffer a loss in visitors, or SEO strength that might take a much longer time to bring back.

 

Sources:

 

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