Wednesday, July 10, 2019
Tuesday, July 9, 2019
Leads Freezing Up? Why HVAC Companies Need SEO
Gone are the days of relying solely on postcards and classifieds to market an HVAC business. Today, the first place many sweating homeowners are going to look for their cooling needs isn’t a magnet stuck to the front of the refrigerator; it’s Google. As by Social Media Today, "86% of users search on the internet to find a local business and almost a third (29%) search for local businesses at least once a week."
The scenario isn’t hard to imagine: a hot summer day, a clogged refrigerant line, and a sweaty homeowner thumbing through Google, ready to hit "call" on the first reputable technician they can find. The most important question for any HVAC company, then, is: Will my business show up?
In most markets, competition for both organic traffic and ad placements is fierce. As with every other local service, more and more HVAC companies have gotten wise to their need for search traffic, and determining where to spend marketing dollars is more confusing than ever. So, where should you put your marketing spend?
Consider this: Organic search results on the first page of Google receive around 70% of the clicks. Why? Because most users trust organic search results as authoritative. This doesn't mean users are not clicking on the ads, it just shows the far majority of your customers are scrolling past them. Google ads work, but it's a battlefield. With any HVAC company able to pay to play, that's massive competition for a much smaller audience.
Recently, we had an HVAC client who thought they needed to throw their entire marketing budget into Google PPC to win their market. They shortly found out how bloody the battle can be and suffered financially, as costs rose to over $100 per click with an extremely low conversion rate — not to mention the alleged click fraud that runs rampant.
After this experience, together, we shifted a portion of their focus from PPC to SEO. By the time they got to the Top 3 in organic results, they were able to eliminate their ad spending altogether. In the process, they received a 478% increase in overall traffic.
Why? Competition for the first-page organic spots is far less competitive than competing for HVAC ads. When they reached the top spots, they were in prime real estate for the 70% of customers visiting the organic spots. Whether you outsource SEO or bring it in house, SEO should be a part of your marketing strategy.
How To Get Started
Here are three basic steps you can take on your own:
1. Create a robust HVAC website.
When you create a more robust website than your competitors, you’re already getting a leg up. In addition to having a website that will have more than your standard Home, About and Contact Us pages, you’ll be providing the search engines with more content to index and rank for when your customers are searching online. Start developing pages that speak to the needs of what customers will be searching for in your market, and add some specifics.
For example, create pages for each service type you offer (i.e., Commercial AC Repair, Pool Heater Installation, Residential AC Installation, Heater Repair, etc.) and each market or sub-city where you do business. Since HVAC repair and installation terms are considered local search terms, search results will bring back local companies in the area.
Content on these pages will need to include local modifiers in the text, like cities and communities that you serve. Make sure to provide thorough information about the type of service, including geo-tagged images, info on the city itself and a maps location of your business. By creating these pages, you won't climb the charts yet, but you'll be on the radar when somebody in your city looks for an HVAC service.
2. Take time to optimize each HVAC page.
Once you got the bulk of the content in place, it’s time to optimize so that Google can read it accurately to make sure your page is relevant to what your customers are searching for. Below should get you started:
• Each URL should have the service type within it (hvac.com/commercial-ac-repair)
• Meta tags should include the service type and city
• An H1 tag should include the service type and city
• Geo-tagged images with alt text that includes service type and city
• Service type and city used a couple of types throughout the body of the text
3. Build authority to each page.
Now that Google knows what each page is about, it will start to include specific pages in the search results. However, your customers will not venture too far past page 1, so you’ll need to build some authority. Each page’s authority will ultimately determine your placement in the search engines.
Authority is built by inbound links to your website and webpages. Here are some easy ways to secure those links:
• Listings: Facebook, Google My Business, Foursquare, Merchant Circle, Yellow Pages, Yelp, Manta, etc. All of these sites provide a link back to your website.
• HVAC Associations: Reach out to HVAC associations for inclusion on their member directory. Links from relevant associations provide good authority.
• Featured Snippets: To dramatically increase search engine rankings in the HVAC industry, it’s important to target and win featured snippets. Not only will it increase your organic traffic significantly with each featured snippet won, but you’ll be turning into the ultimate authority within your industry — and Google will reward you for that. I can’t stress the power of snippets enough. Should you write an article titled, "Why does my AC freeze up?" and win the snippet, you’ll build authority for your entire site and boost all pages in the search engines. In addition, you'll be providing Google what it wants — great content for its users.
The competition for Google’s affection is fierce, and HVAC companies need to get serious about SEO. Like it or not, organic search results are still king — for now.
Friday, July 5, 2019
7 SEO Analysis Tools You Need to Know About
SEO analysis is a never-ending search for opportunities to improve your website, be it fixing
issues, polishing the content or spying on rivals’ strategies.
Each aspect that adds
up to your site’s performance in search engines will naturally demand through
research and careful data evaluation, as well as a keen eye for details to
discover the missteps and room for improvement in each. Yet all the deliberate
efforts and time invested in it will pay off big times.
The real choice you
have is between trying to handle that many-sided task manually or grab a
helping hand from a myriad of SEO analysis tools out there. To make a weighted
choice, let’s go over the core aspects that a comprehensive SEO analysis tool
would dig into for you:
1. Technical SEO and
usability audit point errors scattered all over the site – be it broken links or
pages loading forever – may ruin user experience; unintentional indexation
restrictions may be blocking search engine crawlers out of your site;
inefficient site architecture may break the internal link-juice flow throughout
the pages. An SEO audit tool that can crawl your site in-depth and help you
uncover technical issues timely will certainly save you hours of racking your
brain over the consequences later.
2. On-page
optimization analysisAnother essential part is optimizing your content and
metadata to its full potential around the search intent your target. Good tools
for SEO analysis would not only help you pinpoint the flaws, but they would
also, provide actionable recommendations on how to tailor each and every page
element considering your target topic and best SEO practices.
3. Competitive
intelligenceCompetitive SEO analysis is part science and part art.
Comprehending your competitive landscape can help you uncover the winning
peculiarities and traits your rivals’ pages have in common, as well as spot
their oversights. A good SEO analysis tool would allow you to benchmark your own
pages against the top competitors to see how you compare and help you
reverse-engineer the raw data gathered from the top SERPs.
To help you find the
best fit for your routine, I’ve tested a number of the best SEO tools and
looked into the bright sides and drawbacks of each.
1. WebSite Auditor
WebSite Auditor is an
SEO analysis tool providing comprehensive insights on your site’s tech health,
as well as its optimization potential. The tool crawls each and every page and
resource on your site and serves an in-depth site audit report featuring 50+
technical and on-page SEO factors for you to revise, fix or discover an
opportunity behind.
The tool covers a vast
number of website analysis areas: from site architecture to internal PageRank /
traffic distribution, from indexation and crawl-ability to all kinds of broken,
redirected or non-friendly URLs, from duplicate or missing metadata to hreflang
errors. The dashboard is extremely intuitive: each factor is accompanied by a
short description, actionable how-to’s, and a list of involved URLs. In
addition, WebSite Auditor is equipped with an in-app sitemap and robots.txt
file generators.
On the page level,
WebSite Auditor allows you to analyze any page of your site for the keywords
your target with it and compare its optimization level to the top-ranking pages
in a search engine of your choice.
Looking through the
sections dedicated to each page element – from meta details and body tag to
link anchors and image lets – you get full keyword usage statistics and the side-by-side comparison to your SEO competitors’ pages, along with
page-specific recommendations on how you could improve the content and
metadata. Inspecting the top pages’ details also helps you uncover winning
tendencies and best-performing kinds of content for the topic.
WebSite Auditor’s own
TF-IDF tool supplies you with an extended list of keywords and phrases
harvested from rivals’ pages. The most prominent keywords that you are missing
out on, as well as the keywords you might be overusing, are pinpointed for your
consideration. With all the ideas and stats at a glance, you are well-armed to
create topic-driven content with keywords supported by the semantically
relevant context.
Cool
feature
Content Editor module
– a page optimization playground where you can see how each change impacts the
optimization rate on-the-go. A finalized version of the page can be exported to
HTML, ready for re-uploading to your site.
Pricing
Starting from $124 for
the license key (one-off) with a minor maintenance fee after 6 months (from
$4.44/mo), the number of projects you can create and pages you can analyze is
unlimited in any paid version. Full trial available, no credit card details
required.
The next tool for a thorough analysis of Google’s relationship with your website is, undoubtedly,
Google Search Console, a free SEO analysis tool by Google itself. Google Search console provides all kinds of insights on your site’s well-being, helping you
analyze and improve its search performance.
While not being a go-to tool for competitive intelligence, Google Search Console lets you create
first-hand reports on how your website is being crawled, pinpointing broken
pages and pages with any crawl anomalies, ambiguous restrictions or duplicated
ones without canonicals. As it comes to indexing and understanding your pages’
contents, Google Search Console offers detailed reports on mobile usability,
drawing your attention to problematic areas, and on structured data usage on
your site, listing the valid items and the ones with syntax errors that require
fixing. The Links report lists all the internal and outgoing links to your
pages and shows the top linked pages for you to see where the linking power is
steered to.
In terms of content
optimization, Google Search Console won’t give you hints on which keywords to
add and where. However, lots of valuable strategic insights can be found in the
Performance tab. The report lets you explore the queries your site already
ranks for, detect the pages that might go up from page 2 to page 1 with minor
efforts, track down the inefficient pages that rank high but have low CTR, or
learn which queries are coming from a certain device or country to improve your
mobile or local targeting.
Cool
feature
The URL Inspection a tool that allows you to retrieve the indexed version of a certain page as it’s
seen and fetched by Google, check for AMP errors, structured data errors, and
indexing issues.
Pricing
Free.
On Page SEO Checker SEMRush is another SEO analysis tool that helps you put together a huge volume of SEO data. During a quick setup, you choose the pages you wish to
gather optimization ideas for, your target location, language, and device.
Next, based on the
data from SEMRush and by comparing your pages to the top SEO rivals for the
target keywords, the tool supplies you with strategic, UX, semantic, content
and new backlinks ideas. The pages are automatically prioritized based on the number of ideas gathered traffic growth potential and ease of implementation.
Switching to any page’s individual dashboard, you’ll be able to see where the
room for improvement is: a better choice page that already ranks for the
keyword, a SERP feature opportunity you might win, major page elements you need
to add keywords too, or optimal content length you should consider.
The semantic ideas the section will offer a number of semantically-relevant keywords used by rivals,
along with TF-IDF stats. And the Top 10 Benchmarking feature will analyze how
your target page compares to rivals’ in a number of aspects like content
length, referring domains, keyword usage, markups, and others, highlighting the
factors you fall behind with.
Optionally, you can
set up Site Audit in the same project for the tool to generate technical SEO
ideas based on the found issues. Once the pages have been crawled, you can
check the overall number of on page errors, warnings, and notices, as well as
thematic reports dedicated to crawling ability, security issues, load speed, and
internal linking structure. For task prioritization, you may refer to the
handpicked top issues, based on severity and the number of affected pages.
Cool
feature
Integration with
Trello that allows you to send reports with optimization ideas for individual
pages directly to your Trello board, turning insights from your project into
ready-made tasks.
Pricing
Starting from
$99.95/mo for 5 projects, up to 20K pages per project. Full trial available,
credit card details required.
WooRank is a web-based
SEO analysis tool running automatic website audits and providing optimization
ideas for boosting traffic and visibility. With the tool, you can crawl up to
10K pages of your site to spot a wide range of on-page issues (meta details
being too long, too short or duplicate, body content being duplicate, thin or
blank), accessibility and usability troubles (5xx server errors, 4xx client
errors redirect chains and loops, mixed content). The tool will also report
non-indexable pages or pages buried too deep, as well as canonical and hreflang
implementation issues.
Recommended
for You
Running a review for
an individual page, you can revise your meta details as they appear in the
SERPs, see the keywords your page is currently optimized around and check for
any structured data, mobile usability and page speed issues.
Promotion section will
show where you stand in terms of backlinks, social media presence and local
directories reviews associated with your site. If you add your target keywords
and connect your Google Analytics account to the project, the Measurement the section will keep you updated on your ranking performance and traffic stats in
addition.
Tracking up to 3
competitors along with your site, you can see how your pages compare in terms
of content optimization, off-page efforts, and rankings, and dig into
competitors’ SEO strategies: detect the weak spots to surpass them in, or ideas
worth adopting.
Cool
feature
Marketing Checklist,
which is a tailor-made, prioritized checklist of steps you may undertake to
improve your site’s optimization, with an additional option to get help from a
WooRank’s certified expert.
Pricing
Starting from
$59.99/mo for 1 project with up to 2K pages. Free trial available, credit card
details required.
SEObility is another
online SEO audit tool that helps you detect the issues that might be holding
your site from climbing up the SERPs.
With SEObility, you
can crawl up to 100K pages within one project and get an overview of the
technical, structural and content issues. Navigating through technical and meta
dashboard, you can find crawling stats, URL details, status codes breakdown, as
well as any neglected meta tags and page attributes. Structure analysis will
uncover problems related to internal linking, anchor texts distribution, and
pages’ distance from the homepage.
Based on the pages
crawled, you get a detailed report on content duplication issues and text
quality. The tool extracts the keywords most frequently used across your
website and raises an alarm if multiple pages are competing for the same
keywords, to prevent wasting ranking potential.
Checking any certain
page, you may look closely into its anatomy and detect the page elements
optimized poorly. Analyzing competitors’ pages the same way, you can sport
their target keywords and spy on the strategies they stick to.
Apart from performing
SEO analysis, SEObility allows you to track rankings of your website alongside
your rivals’ to spot any fluctuations or opportunities springing up.
Cool
feature
As part of the content
quality audit, SEObility reports on duplicate paragraphs within one page,
content pieces appearing on multiple pages, and even typos (apart from the
complete page duplicates).
Pricing
The free version covers
one project with up to 1K pages. Paid plans start from $50/mo with free trial
available, credit card details required.
6.
ContentKing
ContentKing is a
real-time SEO auditing and change management tool that is designed to take you
worries away and help you improve your site’s visibility in search engines.
This SEO analysis tool
scans all the pages and reports on a wide range of aspects holding your site
back: indexability issues, broken links, pages buried too deep, load speed and
mobile readiness, and many more.
Each page is scanned
for meta details being unique and in place, and is checked for social markups
like OG and Twitter Cards, Schema markup, and Google Analytics tracking codes.
Integrating your Google Analytics and Search Console, you can also see how
pages perform to prioritize your optimization efforts.
At the end of the
crawl, ContentKing arms you with an actionable to-do list based on all the
pitfalls found.
The tool does not run
in-depth content analysis, but only checks for titles, descriptions, and
headings; still, it can provide insights on competitors’ overall SEO efforts.
Cool
feature
Re-canning your
website incessantly, ContentKing alerts you with emails on any technical issues
or page-level changes popping up, for a well-timed and informed reaction.
Pricing
Custom pricing
depending on the number of pages, starting from $19/mo for 1K pages. Free trial
available with limitations, no credit card details required.
Website Grader is one
of those free SEO tools, which is more of an express SEO analysis service
running a quick review of your domain.
The service quickly
scans the homepage to check on major aspects like performance, mobile usability, and SEO. The performance report does not go into detail much but only shows the
overall stats for the homepage’s size, speed and a few more factors adding up
to it. The mobile usability section reports whether your page is responsive and
whether the content fits into a viewport. Additionally, the tool gives a heads-up
in case there are security/SSL certificate issues.
In terms of SEO
analysis, Website Grader only checks on the most basic things: availability of
a sitemap, presence of meta title, description, and headings, showing errors in
case those are missing. While the tool does not crawl the website in-depth and
won’t provide any keyword usage stats or optimization advice tailored for your
pages, it’s still a handy option for a super-quick overview.
Cool
feature
Website Grader has no
killer feature (funny tooltips, though) but appears to be the most express tool
from the list, giving a sneak-peak on a website’s wealth.
Pricing
Free.
Summary
Same way as with any
buying decision, your choice will depend on many subjective aspects: your
specific needs, the areas your workflow focuses around the most, your budget,
and many more. Yet, knowing what kind of SEO tools are out there and having an
idea about their cons and pros can help you make an informed choice and
consolidate your efforts in the winning direction. Hopefully, the post helped
you find a promising candidate to try out!
Thursday, July 4, 2019
Top 5 SEO Mistakes Made by Bloggers
Over the
last two decades, the digital marketing landscape has changed tremendously.
Today, search engine optimization (SEO) is really important for marketers,
specifically when blogging. “Blogging helps to increase SEO quality by put
content on the website and give a relevant
answer to your customers’ questions. Blog posts that explicitly use a variety
of on-page SEO tactics can give you more opportunities to rank in search
engines and get customers to visit your site.”No doubt you have witnessed
Google’s ever-changing algorithm one time or another. This has made it hard for
some to stay on top of the best practices of blogging. Whether you’re new to
the blog sphere or you have been blogging for some time, you should be aware of
some of the most common SEO mistakes relative to blogging. Here is a list of
the top 5 SEO mistakes made by bloggers that you should avoid.
1. Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing, including keywords as much
as possible, is arguably one of the most common SEO mistakes. This can do a ton
of damage to your search rankings and it makes for a pretty poor reading
experience. To avoid this, stick to one or two long-tail keywords to center
your blog post around. Long-tail keywords keep your post focused on the
specific goals of your audience, encouraging visitors to read your whole post
and seek more information from you.
2. Not Writing Enough Content
Many websites feature blogs that are just too
short. Writing short posts can hurt your reader loyalty. Even more so, search
engines may identify your blog as “low quality,” if it doesn’t have enough
content. This makes it extremely difficult to rank. In 2019, the ideal blog
post is a minimum of 300 words. If you’re experiencing writer’s block and you
need to beef up your blogs, try researching similar topics for inspiration.
3. Poor Page Copy
When blog writing, keep in mind that you’re
writing to address your readers and their pain points. You’re not writing for
search engines. Keep your content light. Don’t attempt to show off your knowledge
with unnecessary jargon. Write content that can be easily understood. Also,
make sure your content is visually appealing, utilizing white space and
inserting a few images.
4. Not Including Internal and External Links
External links prove to search engines that
your content is valid and relevant. If your blog includes a topic that has been
mentioned in another blog post or web page, you should link back to that page.
Internal linking will help keep visitors on your site and helps surface your
other authoritative pages to search engines. Internal links should link to a
core or pillar page on your website, as well as direct readers to related blog
content.
5. Failing to Optimize Title Tags
Title tags are one of the most important
aspects of search engine rankings. Readers and search engines use title tags to
determine the relevancy of your content. You should keep your title tag
targeted towards a keyword. Consider checking the popularity of the keyword you
have chosen using a keyword tool, like Serpstat, before optimizing for it. It’s
a best practice to include your keyword within the first 60 characters of your
title so it is not cut off on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Conclusion
While these SEO mistakes may seem basic, they
occur often, hindering many blogs from achieving optimal search engine
rankings. Optimizing blogs for SEO can be tedious, but it is necessary if
you’re looking to reach your audience and compete against others in your
marketplace.
Wednesday, July 3, 2019
Should I Start a Company Blog?
With so many social media platforms and online tools, knowing which ones to maintain a company presence on can be difficult. One tool all companies should utilize is adding a blog to your company’s website. Here are some of the benefits of starting a company blog.
Increase Organic Traffic
Blogging is an ideal way to incorporate SEO best practices into your company’s website, which can help it rank higher in search engine results. Blog posts can be created from lists of common questions your customers have, keywords they use when looking for a business like yours, and its services. This gives your website more pages to attract traffic.
Low-Cost Campaigns
If your company already pays for its website hosting and domain, it doesn’t cost anything to put up a blog post. While you might have to pay a writer or a staff member once to create the blog content, you won’t have to pay anything to publish it. You can then share your company’s original content on your business’s Facebook page and Twitter account to expand its reach even further without investing more money into it.
If social media shares of your company’s blog posts drive more traffic to your website in a way that increases sales or other key metrics, investing in paid social campaigns could be another relatively low-cost way to benefit from blog post content. As long as you’ve narrowed your target audience and have clear goals identified, paid social media campaigns can be successful. It is just imperative that you monitor it for results and adjust the campaign if needed. There’s no reason to pay for a social media campaign that isn’t garnering results.
Benefit from Evergreen Content
Evergreen content remains relevant over time. Unlike a blog post that features information about the employee of the month (who will likely leave someday) or upcoming menu items for a restaurant, evergreen content will remain accurate even several years after it is posted. This makes evergreen content more valuable as the same blog post can continue to attract visitors, bulk up the amount of quality content on your company’s website, and be shared over time.
Become an Industry Expert
Customers want to buy products and services from the best, most informed companies in the market. When you want to buy high-quality outdoor sporting equipment, most customers want to buy it from REI over Ralph’s Sports Goods. REI publishes so much educational blog content and guides on its website, product catalogs, and other digital marketing content. It is seen as an industry leader and an expert. Having a company blog can help you develop that kind of industry expertise.
There are two key factors in developing industry expertise through blog content. First, your blog’s content must provide valuable information that your target audience wants to know about. In the case of REI, teaching customers how to skateboard enables people to learn how to participate in a new hobby. These customers wouldn’t have otherwise purchased a skateboard just might. They feel better buying a skateboard from a company with established expertise.
Second, the content must be better than the blog content that already exists. It isn’t enough to simply regurgitate the information that you can find on competitor websites and online publications. Craft compelling posts that delve deeper into topics and give a fresh perspective.
There are many reasons to start a company blog, from increased website traffic to developing long-lasting, evergreen content. If you opt to start a company blog, decide how often to post and stick with it. Consistent blog posts perform better than one-off blog posts.
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