Most small business owners are able to handle the financial and HR departments by themselves, but get confused or are clueless when it comes to marketing. Should they use traditional methods of marketing for their business? Or should they use digital marketing? If they do decide to go with digital marketing, which type of digital marketing should they consider? Should they concentrate on social media such as Instagram or Facebook? Or should they concentrate on Google ads and ads displayed online? Or should they create their own website and concentrate on SEO to gain traffic. The answer varies from business to business, and in some cases, it might even be best to be involved in all of these different areas of digital marketing. However, in this article, we are going to tell you why SEO is so important for small businesses and how a good SEO campaign can be beneficial for your small business in the long run. 

Is SEO Essential For Small Businesses?

The importance of SEO for small businesses can not be underestimated; SEO gives you almost an equal playing field to compete with other businesses. SEO gives you an equal chance of competing with local and international businesses online. Continue reading to find out how SEO can help your small business. 

1. SEO Increases Brand Recognition

Brand awareness represents how familiar your target audience is with your brand and how well they recognize it. Improving your businesses brand awareness is valuable when you want to market and sell your products. Brand awareness is important for businesses of all sizes, but it is very essential for startups and small businesses who want to grow their clientele consistently. 

Some of you readers, may like to calculate success in neat terms and figures. If so, the term brand awareness may be annoying for you as it is a very vague concept that cannot be calculated to a specific figure. But, just because you can’t calculate whether your brand awareness has decreased or increased, does not make building brand awareness non-essential. Brand awareness allows consumers to relate to your brand and allows the readers to trust your brand, which in turn motivates them to buy your product or service. 

A. How Brand Awareness Impacts Consumers Buying Behavior

Studies have shown that consumers decide where to buy a product from when they are aware of a brand. When exposed to newer brands, consumers take a long time to decide whether they want to buy the product as they have doubts about the product. This is because they have thoughts such as “is the product of good quality”? Or “is this product worth its cost?” that always pops in their mind when buying a product from an unknown brand. 

All of these questions don’t pop in the mind of consumers when they are aware of your brand, therefore making the process of selling a product or a service a lot more easier. 

This shows that building brand awareness can increase your market share in a number of ways. Increasing your brand awareness prevents consumers or makes it difficult for consumers to choose products from other brands. Depending on the industry you are working in, you might even need an aggressive brand awareness campaign to become a brand that consumers can consider. 

Note: Studies show that brand awareness and cost do not go hand in hand, which means that just because your brand awareness is increasing, does not mean you can increase the price of your product or service.

B. How Small Businesses Can Harness SEO For Brand Awareness In Small Regions

In small regions, most queries searched on Google will include a location or terms such as “near me”. For example, if you wanted to find an Indian restaurant to eat lunch, you would go to Google and search for ‘Indian restaurants near me’ or ‘Indian restaurants in XYZ’. If your website is properly optimized, your website will show for these terms. Ranking consistently for these terms will make the user subconsciously remember the name of your store, and it will tempt them to visit the store the next time they are near your store. 

You should also keep in mind that most users assume that a website ranking first for their particular search query means that the website has the best product or service. This is why when you are doing SEO for small business; it is essential to do local SEO. You can learn more about local SEO by reading our article “How To Do Local SEO?”. 

2. SEO Improves Traffic

As a small business owner, you must know how challenging it is to get customers to enter your store. Every business has gone through this phase finding ways to attract customers to their store. Even the big business you see today, such as Mcdonalds or Ikea, have gone through this phase. 

This is where Search Engine Optimization or SEO comes in. If you rank on the top for a particular search term consistently, you are likely to gain more traffic. In fact, according to Backlinko, the top-ranking page of an organic search results page (SERP) has a CTR of 31.7%. 

Another stat you should keep in mind is that the average top ranking page also ranks in the top 10 search results nearly 1000 other relevant keywords (source). This means that you are receiving traffic not only for the keyword you have targeted but also for keywords similar to the one you are targeting. If you are struggling to rank for a keyword of your choice during the Covid-19 pandemic, this article should help you. 

3. SEO Generates Interested Customers

As a small business owner, it is important to ensure that you have a high return on the amount of money you are investing. If you were to invest in making a TV ad or even a banner ad, you would be targeting everyone that sees the ad. This happens even in social media ads, and this is where SEO has the edge over other forms of marketing. 

If I were to rank for the term “affordable SEO services for small business”, I know that the people approaching me are interested in SEO services, they have a small business and that they are not looking to spend a lot of money on SEO. This makes it easier for the traffic to be converted into a client. 

Remember how I said that people tend to trust Google and the results they show for a particular query? So if I were to rank first for the term “SEO Services For Small Business”, I would automatically improve my brand awareness, gain traffic and convert the traffic into clients or consumers. 

4. SEO Helps You Learn Your Customers

A properly optimized website will improve your search engine visibility, usability and credibility, thereby improving the traffic in your site. Once you start enjoying a larger number of visitors on your website, you can use Google Analytics (a software that shows you stats of your website) to track information of the visitors that have visited your website. Information such as the browser your visitors use, their geographical location, the time they have spent on your website, on which page of your website they have spent the most amount of time. You basically get to see what visitors have done from the time they entered your website, to the time they leave your website. 

All of this information that you receive from Google Analytics and other SEO tools will help you find your target audience in more detail, help you advertise your brand better and plan strategies on ways to improve your business. 

5. Why SEO Is Cheaper Than Ads

One of the biggest advantages of doing SEO for small business is ROI. In terms of ROI, SEO is one of the best long term investments you can make. With all of the benefits of doing SEO mentioned in this article? Doing SEO must be expensive, right? SEO is inexpensive, or in better terms, I should say that in the long run, SEO is cheaper than other forms of advertising. Here is why:

A. High Competition = High PPC

Getting your ad shown on Google or Social Media, will get you instant results. But, to get your ad shown, you are going to have to face a lot of competition, Google Ads shows ads based on two factors Ad rank and the amount of money you are willing to spend. If your ad rank is not as good as your competitors, you are going to have to pay more money for your ad to be shown. A small business doing this for a long period is unfeasible.

If we talk about video ads and you plan on running an ad on Youtube or doing a video ad on any other platform, you are going to have to spend money on making the video, hiring an influencer if required and at the end of it all; you are going to want the visitors to visit your website to buy your product or service.

B. Higher Ad Cost With Inefficient Website

When your ads start getting shown using Google Ads, you are going to lead the viewers to your website. If your website has not been optimized well and has a high bounce rate, Google will remove your ad. Wouldn’t it be easier to focus on creating an optimized website in the first place?

C. Recurring Expenditure

When you are involved in Google ads, the amount spent to show your ad is a recurring cost. The ad will be removed once you stop the payment; on the other hand, if done properly, SEO will continue to show your website for a period even after you have stopped investing in it. So If brand awareness is your goal, or getting traffic or conversions is your goal, I would recommend concentrating on SEO as it is cheaper and longer-lasting. However, if you want quicker results, then you should focus on Google Ads. 

Conclusion

With the invention of smartphones, laptops and the internet, the amount of screentime has gone through the roof; it would therefore be unwise for small businesses to ignore how crucial having an online presence is. With correct and honest guidance, SEO can help you set your business apart from the competition. With SEO, you could highlight your unique selling points, get higher conversions and improve your brand awareness. If you have doubts on SEO, you can check out the informative articles on our blog; however, if you want a detailed guideline on how to do SEO for your website, it would be best to contact our SEO Analyst at Ozias. With more than 3 years of experience, we have experienced the highs and the lows of SEO, and we can use this experience to help you do better.

At the first glance, Quora might not seem to be that useful site for businesses. But, as you get to learn in detail about this website, you will get to know how important it is and why you shouldn’t ignore using it for your business.

What is Quora?

Although, this website does not require any introduction, it is a unique social media platform where you can share your views and experiences as well as you can gain experts knowledge about a particular topic easily and for free. Unlike other social media sites, quora has a powerful community, known as Quorans, that has industry leaders for each segment.

Here, you can ask and answer questions voluntarily which is the same for everyone. So, you can ask anything, a professional query, personal query, gaining knowledge query or anything you wish to. Of Course, there are moderators who might scan your query to check if it suits the standards of the website.

Like asking questions, you can also answer the questions in any field that is relevant to you and you know the answer to that query. The answer must be relevant to the question and must look like you are sharing your knowledge and it is helping the person asking the question. The answers are validated by the moderators and the other readers.

What Is Quora Marketing?

Quora marketing is one of the brand building techniques wherein, you establish lasting authority and create engagement with the readers by correctly answering the questions in your niche or your area of expertise. It is always recommended to stick to your single area of expertise, so your readers know that you have specialized knowledge about that particular subject.

When you answer a query, you not only get the attention of millions of quorans but also you can share your content with your website link or your youTube channel link or even your podcast link. By this, you can increase your site views and engagements that turn out to be the leads for your products.

For Example: If you are a lawyer or a barrister, you can answer questions or queries related to your expertise and then mention that to gain more knowledge about the subject one can visit your website or a particular page on your website. This becomes one of the most appealing SEO marketing for lawyers. Same goes for the other professionals and experts.

Why Quora?

This must be a common query that most of us have. Whilst there are so many questions and answers on quora, how can I have a successful SEO strategy in place by using quora? And why is quora such an important part of my business marketing strategy? In the following section, we will give you the reasons why quora is so important when it comes to marketing of your business.

1. Interested Learners

With more than 70 million unique users every month, which gives you a worldwide exposure to your business, quora ranks on many of its questions keywords. It not only engages the quorans, but also, the people searching for similar queries on search engines. For Example: When I search for ‘Are Dental Implants Safe?’ on Google search, I found quora in the top 10 results. This increases the quora query visits and in turn, the traffic on my dental care website (when my answer is relevant and has a link towards my website), which is a part of marketing strategies for doctors.

Also, you must understand one thing, when a person normally check out forums or other social websites, he might not have a buying intent or content engaging intent, whereas when a person is typing the query on quora, they are interested in knowing more about the content and will definitely click on the link that engages and answers his queries.

2. Helps in Finding Crucial Influencers

Influencer marketing has been a trend since years, where there was word-of-mouth marketing, referral programs and many more. Now, with the increase in digital trends, the influential marketing has taken over the online space too. In quora, there are many contributors who are given the tag of key contributors as they have proven their credibility in that particular aspect. The answers of these key contributors are given importance to by the other quorans for their highly informative posts and answers.

You can get the attention of these readers (the ones who read all the answers by the key contributors), by answering the questions posted by the key contributors or by commenting on their answers. You can also connect directly with the key contributors and ask them if they could promote your business in one of their posts for some fees.

3. Helps in Finding Latest Industry Trends

Whenever there is a new product or service launch, or some new technology trend, or anything new comes around the world, people are likely to have questions about the same. They tend to ask them on a Q&A platform to receive a complete and valid answer to their query.

At this time, they make use of quora and the experts, the industry leaders and the key contributors tend to answer their questions with the best possible answers. With this, you know the new product and its important aspects. For example, there are continuous changes in SEO as Google brings in new updates. There are several questions that users and digital marketers have which are solved by many industry experts on Quora. You can also check this article on things that have changed in SEO for the latest updates.

We know them as industry experts, with their quora bio and their work in the field. This is how every industry queries are solved on this platform and thus it helps us in staying updated with our individual industry trend.

3. Gain Insight about Target Audience

A customer trusts a brand that pays attention to their problems and not just sells out their products. This means, if you are a known brand and there customers who have queries about your products then, you can come forward and solve those problems on quora. This way, you will be able to have a trustful relationship with your customers for a longer term. 

You can also use quora for surveying about your products. When a number of people are asking for a solution for the same problem, then that can be your break-through for developing a solution and getting customers for the same.

5. Network with People

Quora has its effects beyond just being a Q&A website. It helps in building relationships like that of a forum. You can follow all the topics related to your industry and then, whenever there are any conversations in that topic, you can be a part of it and lead the quorans to your website by building relationships with them.

6. Educate People about Company’s Products

Quora is a large build up community where everyone relies on each other for information around the world. When you answer a query with the best possible solution related to your business, then that automatically builds your credibility on the website and among the quorans.

With this credibility, when you propose a product, service or a podcast, they believe in it and so, can become your next lead. Of Course, it goes without saying that you must not continuously try to sell on this platform. Your content must carry some meaning every time you attempt to answer something.

7. Gain SEO Traction

Search Engines like Google search results often have quora queries and their solutions in their snippets. This makes the site more SEO relevant. Whenever you answer a question on this website, insert a certain amount of keywords related to the query and your business. This increases the ranking capacity of the answer on Google. And that quora query might appear on search results.

Out of the visitors opening this query, there must be some who clicks onto your website link and become your next lead. Always insert a thoughtful content which is qualitative and reputable so it comes on Google search results.

These were the major reasons why you must have quora presence. There are some other reasons that also help you with your business when you are active on the Quora community. These reasons include: 

• All the quorans are required to add their real names and are verified. So, the person disclosing the information can be considered to insert quality content.
• If your website has a blogs section, then this platform helps you in finding suitable article topics for your next article.
• You can build thought leadership on this platform. Even if you are not the industry leader, you can demonstrate your extensive knowledge by steering a direct conversation about the products your brand offers.
• Explaining a concept with an image on quora will get you more click through rate towards your website.

These are the other benefits your business gets when being an active quora member. But, Is Quora reliable in terms of the information it provides?

Why is Quora a Reliable Source

As discussed earlier, while one creates an account on quora, it asks for you to sign up with Gmail or Facebook accounts and later verify them. Also, the credentials that you insert in the bio are also verified. Later, as you start answering and reading about the products, solutions, techniques, etc, the website positions your answer that way.

This means when a contributor includes in their bio as being an expert in the graphic designing field and answers several questions in the same field and readers likes their content then, that individual’s answers to most of the posts would be in the 1st or 2nd position.

This means as per your credentials, your post is managed by quora. This is the reason why quora is a reliable source of information as only the best information is showcased as the initial answers to the questions.

Power of Quora

Generally, all of us have heard about the power of words, and in this online world, we have always heard of the power of content. A website with the right amount and quality of content gets the best reach on search engines rank. A value-adding content increases the authority of the website over the others that are not. So now, what is the power of quora? Is it related to the content too?

Advidently yes! Your content on quora decides how reliable you are. When an answer is posted by someone, other quorans can upvote, downvote, report, share and even comment on that content. When there are more upvotes, your content gets more reliable and so is your credibility.

With a unique, great and interesting content you can get 1000s of upvotes, shares and you can become quora viral. By this, your post will be sent to lakhs of quorans in the emails as a newsletter and your profile might get a Top Most Viewed Writers award. All these visitors might as well visit your website which will generate leads. Doesn’t that sound great? Of Course it does!

Wrapping Up

Although there are several ways of marketing your business and there are no right and wrongs in marketing, we all have choices as to what all marketing tactics we wish to explore for our business. Marketing online is the new trend which includes organic and inorganic marketing. Inorganic marketing includes all your SEM efforts which does pay you off but less then the organic one which is SEO. And so, SEO is always better than SEM.

When we talk about SEO, Quora becomes important for all kinds of businesses as it has several benefits from brand awareness to brand recognition to brand management along with the traffic it brings into the site. So, level up your brand efforts with quora now!

The marketing field may be competitive, but it is better than not attempting or giving up marketing completely. Marketing is essential for institutes in Mumbai because there are so many students and teachers who are searching for them and waiting to find an institute in which they can fit in perfectly. Students or teachers may visit the institute’s website for online registration forms, information and access to courses, learning methods and for educational means. For the educational institute, marketing brings in some online presence and engagement, which will give the institute more chances to convince the student or the teacher why their institute would be perfect for them. 

So why would an institute want to consider doing online marketing when there are so many other channels of marketing? Keep reading to find out why a principal, director or owner of an educational institute might want to consider online marketing or digital marketing. 

Benefits Of Digital Marketing For Educational Institutes

1. Brand Awareness

Whether an institute has a website or a social media platform, it helps in improving the brand awareness of the institute. It also helps in the enrollment process and grows the base of your audience. When you are online, you can reach anyone in the world, you could not only attract domestic students, but you could also attract students who are staying abroad. Online marketing is beneficial to even institutes that are not very popular. So you do not have to be a Podar, Ambani or St.Xaviers to do online marketing. 

2. More Affordable Than Traditional Marketing

There are a lot of institutes that still use traditional methods such as tv ads and radio ads, and in some cases, they even use cheaper traditional methods such as flyers are newspaper ads. However, Digital marketing still outdoes traditional marketing. For example, you could invest in a social media campaign and make it cost-effective and controllable while also having much more reach than traditional marketing. 

Another plus of doing online marketing is that you can set your own budget, unlike traditional marketing, where you would have to negotiate for ad space. This allows you to promote your educational institute on your own terms. 

3. Personalised Marketing Approach

Marketing on your own budget is not the only way you can personalise the way you promote your educational institute. When you focus on marketing online, you could use data to create a strategy that has been personalised based on your goals, budget and audience. This is something that you cannot do when you are promoting your institute via traditional means. When you personalise the way you promote your institute based on your audience, your engagements and conversions will increase. For example, let us imagine your institute has a medical, engineering and a business department. Data gathering tools available online could help you personalise the message you send to your audience based on the intentions of the audience. So a different message would go to students interested in engineering while another message would go a student interested in medicine. 

4. Higher Conversion Rates  

Digital marketing allows you to target the area in which you would like your institute to be promoted, So an institute in Mumbai could target students or faculties in other parts of the country depending on the data and preference of the educational institute. Combine this with the way you could personalise your online marketing campaign and the chances of attracting more students increases drastically. Another reason online campaign have higher conversion rates is because of the call to action. While traditional marketing methods also have a call to actions, most of them tell you to call or visit the institute’s website. Call to actions present online, would allow you to that in a single click saving a lot of time for a future student or faculty member. 

5. Trackable And Modifiable

This is one of the biggest advantages of promoting your institute online. When you start an online campaign, you will be able to see the number of people who have seen the ads, the number of people who have interacted with the ad. This is not possible when you are promoting your education institute by using traditional methods. When you use the traditional method, you might be able to find an estimate of the number of people who have viewed the ad, but you would not be able to find an estimate of the number of people who have approached you because of the ad. 

Since you can see all the statistics of online marketing, you get a clear view of how your ad is performing. You can even change your ad if you think it is not doing very well. Another feature of online marketing is the retargeting feature. This is when users have seen your ad, but have not interacted with it. You can then target the same users again to try and get their attention again. 

These are just some of the reasons why online and digital marketing is the way to go forward for educational institutes. If you are the principal, director or owner of an education institute, you would want to consider the following online marketing strategies to help your educational institute grow. 

Marketing Strategies For Educational Institutions

1. Social Media 

There is so much that can be done on social media if you are institute. If your institute does not have a social media account, you are missing out on all the opportunities present. There are 4 social media platforms where your institute must have an account; Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Linkedin are the leading platforms in social media, and you will find a lot of potential students and teacher in these platforms. 

Kids, teenagers and adults spend a lot of time on social media, Instagram has 800 million active monthly users. Facebook has 2.6 billion active monthly followers, Linkedin and twitter have 610 million followers and 330 million members, respectively. Besides this, you will also find apps like Snapchat and TikTok that are getting popular. Instagram is one of the best apps to use for marketing your institute. It is a platform where you can show your programs, facilities, extracurricular activities and other USPs of your educational institute. 

It is really easy to use Instagram, and even people who are not tech-savvy can get used to using this app. You can post attractive photos and also edit them in just a few taps or clicks. In Instagram, you will also find Instagram stories and Instagram live that allows you to interact with viewers and broadcast live events that may take place on your premises. 

Besides Instagram, you could also create an account on Facebook and create a Facebook page for your institute. By creating a page, you will also be able to use Facebook Ads that you can use to boost the engagements of your post. To make your Facebook campaign successful, ensure that all the pictures you post are authentic or real. Post pictures of actual students and alumni. Also, include a call to action on your post to motivate the user to sign up and follow your page. If you are using Facebook Ads, try to be as creative and unique as possible to attract more people. 

2. Google Ads 

If you are new to running online ads and have budget constraints, the best place to start would be Google Ads. Google Ads allow you to create different types of ads; for example, you could create image ads that appear on related websites or video ads that will play your advertisement before a video is played. 

Google Ads also allows you to personalise and target ads to a specific demographic. You can use data available to you to create a specific ad for a particular audience. If you are receiving a lot of impressions, you could also retarget the audience to make your ad appear more than once. 

When you are using Google Ads, try adding additional information to your ads, for example, you could add the receptionist’s telephone number or the institute’s email address. 

3. Create Your Search Engine Optimised Website 

It is essential for an institute to have its own website. The website should be well designed and optimised for search engines. Optimising your website will help your website rank better on search engine results. You could look at websites of other educational institution in Mumbai to get an idea of how you want your website to look. Your website should be easy to navigate through so that the user can easily find his or her destination. Your pages should be detailed and informative. Most users would be searching for fees, entrance exam procedures or enrollment forms, make all these easy to find and enter all the possible information you think visitors may need. 

Since the website would be of an institute, the content you put enter on your website would be on the formal side of things. A lot of things go into making a website that has been optimised for search engines; you could read our guide on Local SEO that will help attract students that are close to the institute’s locations. To attract international students, you would need to target their location and keywords. You could learn more about SEO by reading our guide on the changes that are taking place in SEO.

Conclusion 

In the marketing strategies listed above, you would have found Ads and SEO. A lot of people get confused on whether to spend their budget on Ads, SEO or both. We could read our article comparing the two by clicking on this link. In the end, the method you choose would depend on the data you have collected, your goals and your budget. Traditional marketing can still be helpful, but with the development of technology and the number of people using this technology, the only way forward is to promote your Educational Institute online. If you need any help with your website, you could contact us and we will help you improve your website.

Since only essential shops such as pharmacies and grocery stores are open, it has become difficult for businesses in different sectors or niches to operate. Getting your business through the Covid-19 pandemic is not going to be easy, and it can be very stressful to entrepreneurs and employees, but not everything is dull and gloom, you can use the time this pandemic has given you to improve the digital side of your business. 

In this article, you are going to find many tips on how you can improve your online business, so please continue reading as this will not only help your business survive the pandemic but help it grow.

Improving Your Online Business During Covid-19

There are many ways you can improve the digital side of your business, and we plan to cover all of them. We are going to provide you with tips on how you can increase your online business during a global pandemic. These tips can be used for businesses of all sizes; it does not matter in which sector you are as long as your business does not involve heavy-duty manual labour such as construction. But even professionals such as constructors, architects, interior designers etc. can improve their businesses online presence. Improving your businesses online presence now might not help your business during the pandemic, but it will definitely help you once we get through this. 

1. Creating A Website

By creating a website, you give your business an online presence, instead of your business just reacting to a few hundred people, it will interact with thousands, and in some cases, millions of people. A lot of people have started to spend their time online because of Covid-19, the numbers were pretty high even before the virus, but the virus has made that number grow even more. 

Especially since there is little to no physical interaction because of the lockdown, it makes it crucial for your business to interact with their client and prospective clients online.  

Step 1: Choose And Register Your Domain Name

The first thing you would have to do is obviously to create your own business website, if you already have an active website, please proceed to the next tip. The domain name you choose will be the website’s name and URL (link), for example, our domain name is www.ozias.com. Users on Google or other search engines and browsers can then use this link to visit your website. 

You can register these domain names on popular websites such as GoDaddy and other Domain registration websites. The cost of the domain would vary on the type of domain you buy, for example, .com domains and costlier than .in websites. 

Step 2: Choose Your Web Hosting Service

Once you have chosen a domain name and registered it, the next step is to select your web hosting service. Web hosting services store and host your website’s data on a secure server and make it available to a user whenever he or she visits your website. It is essential to choose a good web hosting service as selecting a bad one would affect the quality of your website and affect the visitor’s experience, such an experience is not only bad for the visitor, but for the website as well. A website that provides a bad user experience is likely to rank really low on Google’s SERP (Search Engine Results Page). You will learn more about this in the SEO section. 

Whichever hosting service you choose, ensure that they have the following features:

• Domain Name With SSL
• Custom Email Accounts
• High Bandwidth 
• Easy WordPress Installation

Step 3: Create A WordPress Account

WordPress is one of the easiest tools you can use to create and personalize your website. There are other tools available as well, but we would recommend using WordPress. WordPress, for the most part, is free, but there are a few things you would need to pay for, for example, a premium theme or tool. 

The procedure to set up WordPress in any hosting service is similar, but since a lot of people use Bluehost, we will provide a step by step guide for Bluehost users.

• Log in to Bluehost
• Click on “my sites” followed by “create site”
• Add your details, after which WordPress would start to install.
• Once WordPress is installed, it will provide you with your login detail which you can use whenever you want to use WordPress.
• Once you have the details, you would want to ensure that your website is working correctly, for this just enter your URL to the address bar of the browser and press enter. 
• Besides the URL, you will find a lock icon; the icon indicates that your website is safe to visit and that visiting this website would not harm the computer. Most users do not visit websites that do not have an SSL certificate. 

Step 4: Personalize Your Website

Once you have set up WordPress, you can use it to customize your website. You can add a theme to your website, an icon, and design how a page looks. If you find it a little confusing, you can also add a premade design and format it until you get the hang of the website editing tool. WordPress also provides you with the option of adding plugins which you can use to enhance the user experience, improve your website and improve other factors of the website. 

Once you are happy with the way your website looks, you can start adding content to it, whether that content is about a particular topic for the blog on your website or just simple content about your website’s products or services. There are a few things you should keep in mind when you are adding content; you can find all of these factors in the SEO section. 

2. Performing Search Engine Optimization

I may have mentioned SEO a lot of times in this article already, but that is because a website without SEO is as good as not having a website. You have put in a lot of effort into creating your website, and it would be a shame if a lot of people did not visit it. This is where SEO or Search Engine Optimization comes in. In SEO, we optimize the website to help it rank on search engines such as Google. Your website will be shown on Google and other search engines when a user searches for a query that is similar to the content of the website. 

When you search for something on Google, it takes you to a page where you will find a list of 10 websites that show content similar to the keyword you inserted on Google. For example, when you search for Covid-19 updates on Google, you would receive a list of news websites that are providing you with updates on the virus. This page is known as the SERP or the Search engine Results Page, and the results change based on your location. To make your website rank for a particular keyword, you have to keep a few things in mind. 

A. Keywords Research 

Before you start writing content for your website, ensure that you have researched the keywords for the content. Target Keywords that are very relevant to your website and keywords that have a high search volume. There are a lot of people who add content to their blog without doing any keywords research. They later get disappointed when nobody visits their website because of which they quit. 

Besides targeting keywords that have a high volume, it is also essential to target long-tail keywords and keywords that have low volume. Why do you ask? This is because a lot of websites target keywords with large volumes which makes it very difficult to rank for that particular keyword. On the other hand, long-tail keywords and keywords with lower volume are more comfortable to rank for comparatively. This is because not a lot of people target keywords that are long or have low volume. 

B. Content

This is the most essential part of the website. Content is important because this is where a lot of people spend most of their time reading. Your content should be simple to understand, yet it should be able to capture the mind of the reader. Your content should not be concise, yet it should not be extremely long and tedious. The most crucial part is that your content should be relevant to the keywords you are targeting. The relevancy of the content to the keyword plays an essential role in how high up your website ranks. 

You should also check the keyword density of the content you have written. Keyword density is the number of times you have mentioned the keyword divided by the number of words you have written in the article multiplied by 100. The keyword density should be around 0.5 to 1.5, that means, on average, you should mention the keyword once every 100 words. Keeping all of this mind just ensure that your content is helpful to the user. 

C. Images

Nobody likes to read plain text when they are reading an article. I still remember how I enjoyed reading school books when compared to college books. The lack of pictures in most college books just made it very dull to read. Images give the reader a break from reading continuously and change the scenario a little bit. The only type of content where I would suggest to avoid a lot of images is when the topic is something serious. If you were writing an article on law or crime, you would like a more serious tone to the article and avoid adding a lot of images unless it is necessary to add the photos. 

Also to make it a point to add alt text or alternate text to the images. You can add the alt text on WordPress, when you are in the editor, click on the image, once you have done that you should be able to find an alt text box on the right side of your screen. Alt text helps the images you use to rank for a particular keyword, which is another way your website might get visitors. 

D. Page URL 

The page URL is your domain name + the title of your page. For our blog page’s URL is ozias.co/blog. You can edit the name URL of your page by clicking on the permalink section on WordPress. There are a few things you should keep in mind when you are editing the pages URL. 

1. Your primary keyword should be present in the URL. 
2. Try to keep your URL as short as possible. 

E. Interlinking

Another thing to keep in mind when you add content is to interlink the pages. When you create content, try linking it to similar content. Why is interlinking important? We have something known as the link juice in SEO; link juice helps your website rank higher. So when you interlink all your pages, you are passing on that link juice to all your pages and therefore helping those pages rank. 

SEO keeps changing weekly, yearly, monthly you could look at some of the significant changes that are taking place in SEO in 2020. 

3. Social Profile Optimization

I believe that optimizing your companies social profiles will be of more significant help during this pandemic than SEO, but that does not mean that you should ignore SEO. The reason I say this is because SEO is a long term project, while social profiles don’t take as long, and you can speed the process up by placing social media ads. Another reason why I believe optimizing social profiles is the way to go ahead is because of the amount of time spent by individuals on social media during the lockdown. 

This gives you a high chance of interacting with people and growing your social media and online presence. Optimizing your social profiles will also help your businesses growth during the pandemic. Here are a few things you should keep in mind when you are managing your social media accounts. 

A. Fill Out All The Details Requires

This might seem like a stupid point, but there are a lot of companies and brands out there that do not fill in all of their details. By filling out all the details, you improve the brand association and add value to your follower’s experience. When you are filling in all the details, ensure that you don’t write gibberish. Make your sentences clear and concise. Explain what your brand does, mention your client’s feedback and add a call to action to make the profile a little more engaging. 

B. Images

When you are handling your social media account, ensure that your images are of the correct size. Images are a great source of adding content to your social media account. You see a lot of brands creating memes and making relevant images which makes the followers interact with the brand. The best scenario is when your followers like the image you have posted so much that they tag their friends and colleagues, increasing the number of interactions with the post. 

You should use the same profile picture in all your social media accounts so that it becomes easier for your followers to find you on a social media platform. These are the preferred sizes of images that you use in social media accounts:

• Facebook profile picture: 170 X 170 pixels
• Facebook cover photo: 828 X 465 pixels
• LinkedIn profile photo: 400 X 400 pixels (minimum)
• LinkedIn custom background: 1584 X 396
• LinkedIn cover photo: 974 X 330 pixels
• LinkedIn banner image: 646 X 220 pixels
• Twitter profile photo: 400 X 400 pixels
• Twitter header image: 1,500 X 500 pixels
• Instagram profile picture: 110 X 110 pixels
• Pinterest profile picture: 150 X 150 pixels
• YouTube profile picture: 800 X 800 pixels
• YouTube cover photo: 2,560 X 1,440 pixels on desktop
• Google+ profile picture: 250 X 250 pixels (minimum)
• Google+ cover photo: 1080 X 608 pixels

C. Cross-Linking

Another essential thing you should keep in mind is to cross-link your accounts. For example, on your Facebook profile, you should mention that your followers can also follow you on Instagram, Linkedin and other social media platforms. Also, mention your website in your social profile. This will increase your followers on all the social media platforms. You could sometimes also create content that would only be available on one social media platform; for example, you could create an interactive video and ask your Facebook followers to see it on Instagram. If you are in a field where there is a lot of information, you could also have live sessions, and mention how this live section would only be available on Facebook or Youtube. 

D. Get Verified 

Ever noticed a blue tick next to certain social media accounts? The blue ticks mean that the social media platform has verified their accounts. The blue tick makes users trust your account instantly. There are a lot of people out there who might create fake accounts with similar names to your company to try and grab followers, but once you have that blue tick next to your account, you can expect to see a growth in the number of followers you have. 

E. Consistent handles

All social media accounts have @ next to their names. Try keeping the names on all social media accounts. This makes it easier for users to find your account. There are times when users want to tag a brand, and the first few letters they will type when they want to tag your brand is “@” followed by the first few letters in your account. Keeping a consistent and straightforward handle makes it easier for your followers to tag and interact with you, which further enhances the reach of your brand. 

4. Improving Brand Awareness

The best way to improve your brand awareness during the pandemic would be to promote your brand on social media and Google. You can do this using Google Ads and Facebook Ads. As I mentioned before, a lot of people are spending time on social media during the pandemic. This makes promoting your brand on social media one of the best ways. Whether you are doing SEO or optimizing your social profiles, these are methods that produce excellent results but take a lot of time and effort before they can show these results. 

Using Ads on Google and Facebook, on the other hand, are more expensive, but they are faster. On youtube, an ad is shown before every video, on Facebook, an ad is shown after every 5-8 posts or 3-4 videos. Some of the ads on Youtube can’t be skipped, therefore improving the awareness of your brand. Even if the ads are skippable, the audience can remember the brand when the ads keep getting repeated. At some point, it may even irritate the user, but they will remember the name of your company and that is improving your brand awareness. 

Conclusion

These are a few methods we believe will help your business get through this pandemic. Some of these methods may not necessarily show immediate results, but they will show results eventually. Times are hard, but it is essential to stay patient and believe in your plan. If you enjoyed reading this and found the article helpful, you could follow our social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter and Google, where we will update you with all our latest post and other exciting content. We will see you in our next post until then stay home and stay safe. 

“Successful SEO is not about tricking Google. It’s about PARTNERING with Google to provide the best search results for Google’s users.” – Phil Frost

Search Engine Optimization is a constantly evolving branch in the world of digital marketing. It is a process of optimizing your website to help it rank first on the search engine results page for a particular query. All Search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo have algorithms that list websites when a user searches a specific query. A lot of marketers prefer to target Google as it accounts for over 79% of all global desktop search traffic.

Why is SEO important?

“Marketers see SEO as becoming more effective, with 82% reporting effectiveness is on the rise, and 42% of this group stating effectiveness is increasing significantly.” – MarketDive

Every year Google earns more than $100 billion from its advertising networks. AdWords is just 30% of the overall search results; the remaining 60% plus results are pure organic outcomes; we can approximate precisely how significant these 60% outcomes will be worth. To rank on the google for the particular positions or query, one should understand what exactly SEO is or hire good SEO Agencies. Globally 93% of all the purchases start with online research. SEO plays an essential function in convincing consumers to get items/ services from your company. Unlike AdWords, where big firms dominate higher positions, using SEO, you can rank above larger competitors if you have what it takes to carry out an excellent Search Engine Optimization strategy. That is why SEO is superior to SEM and other digital marketing techniques.

The majority of the time, people expect unrealistic results from SEO, that too, in a concise period. Maybe that understanding is due to the fraudulent SEO firms that claim to get you number 1 rankings in merely 15 days! If you do not recognize regarding Search Engine Optimization, it’s simple to fall right into this honey trap.

Tips for Choosing a Reliable SEO Company

So before hiring any SEO company, it’s necessary to do your very own research study as well as know as high as you can around Search Engine Optimization and also the business you will hire. It’s always great to make a knowledgeable decision.

There are lots of Search Engine Optimization professionals and SEO companies that remain in the marketplace, so correctly, how do we choose which of them is better and also who can deliver to your specific SEO needs. Listed below, we have some tips for choosing an SEO Company.

1. Clearly define your goals.

To find the perfect team for the job, you first require to find out which areas of your online presence you want to develop. You might need a whole new website or just Search Engine Optimization. Furthermore, you need to identify your target audience. The SEO efforts largely vary depending on the geographical location of your prospective customers. If your company happens to make most of the profit from the population in close vicinity, a particular approach known as “local SEO” might be the best-suited option for you.

If you’re not sure which locations you require to enhance, then go through a digital marketing analysis. A good SEO agency will certainly have the necessary information to prove which areas are most beneficial to focus on.

2. Dive into their profile and case studies

When hiring an SEO business, take a look at the specifics of what they have provided for other customers or clients. By having a look at their profile and case studies, you can generally obtain a sense of their style and also what sorts of results their clients receive. You can additionally discover exactly how they incorporate various other services with their SEO, such as Pay Per Click, Digital Marketing, and web designing.

To get access to the examples of past work, you could consider asking the SEO business for a portfolio if it isn’t readily offered on their website. This allows you to look at real-life examples of what you’re being offered. Permits you to the web page via as well as check out a real-life instance of what you’re being offered. By doing this, it will give you a visual idea of what you can expect from an SEO project.

3. Check references and reviews

The best method to get an unbiased point of view about a company? Reviews! Among the best means to locate a trusted company is to check out their testimonials and online reviews. You will indeed often find these testimonials by discovering the business’s website or looking for them on sites like Google, Glassdoor, or even Yelp (to see what their workers think about working for them).

Another critical step in the analysis process when looking for an SEO company is to gather references. Ask about the web sites that they have benefited in the past, and make a document of them. Do your homework and call a few previous customers to ensure that you are being provided with accurate details. Also, don’t forget to ask these clients about the testimonials of past SEO services.

4. Find an SEO company that tracks your information.

To find the most adequate solutions for your company, you will always want to use an SEO agency that can track and measure all of your business data. This includes contact forms, phone calls, site visits, click-through rates and much more.

5. Follow them on social media sites and read their blog site

Take some time to follow them on Facebook and LinkedIn. Check out a few posts as well as subscribe to their email newsletter. This will undoubtedly provide you with a sense of their tone since blogs and also social media sites commonly bring out the much less formal tone of the business.

You can likewise discover their understanding and also concerns by reviewing the material they’re putting out.

6. Schedule an Appointment

Whether you are a thousand miles across the country, you can always ask for an appointment. More than likely, the company will undoubtedly enjoy pulling up some research on your industry and also walk you through some approaches they have utilized on past customers or clients. An appointment will always help you to get a feel for the type of people on their team and their level of creativity and passion.

It’s a crucial time to build a trusting relationship with your SEO company, so use this as a moment to see how well you connect and according to your need ask them specific questions 

7. Specify your SEO Budget

Before getting invested in the service, don’t forget to plan out your budget ahead of time. It is a great idea to inquire about package deals as well as price ranges early, to see if the solution is in your cost range. The majority of SEO firms will certainly have a variety of monthly packages to choose from, which would make life much more comfortable.

However, you usually get what you pay for, so going for the cheapest option may not be in your best interest. So always invest in an SEO company that is going to give you a personalized experience.

Mistakes to avoid when choosing an SEO company

Everyone makes mistakes, and that includes successful or best organizations. Sometimes it’s decidedly more comfortable to know what you should avoid, rather than what you should look for. Below are the mistakes to avoid when choosing an SEO company:

1. Choosing a cheap SEO Company.

Cost does matter when it comes to choosing an SEO company and their services. You need to set a budget and find SEO firms within that budget. The common mistake done by some businesses is that they set very unrealistic budgets, and they see some SEO agencies provide services for $100 per month, for instance, and think that’s a reasonable amount.

You might often come across individual freelancers or start-ups SEO agencies that promote their services at sub-standard prices. Most of the time, these companies underdeliver, lack proper knowledge of the constant updates in Google’s algorithms and hence the results are nowhere close to your expectations; you may expect them to be marginal at best. You might also have to deal with infrequent/ineffective communication of progress.

While multiple factors govern the efforts required to rank your website and hence the budget necessary! Some of the most influential factors that may call for a higher SEO budget include restructuring/optimizing your website, the competition for organic rankings in your niche, and if any previous faulty link-building is to be rectified. 

2. Dealing only with Local SEO companies

Getting to work with a local SEO firm is a bonus when choosing a good SEO company. When it comes to select and what to look for in an SEO company, the location of the company shouldn’t be your top factor. Restricting yourself to a small location or area can stop your organization from achieving the kind of outcomes you want.

For example, if your competitor partners with an experienced SEO company which is not local and it is several states away, and you settle with a local but inexperienced SEO company because of that, it can prevent your website and company from ranking at the top for the valuable keywords of the search results page. 

That means less revenue, leads, and sales for you and more for your competitor.

Choosing the location of the company shouldn’t be your top factor, as mentioned above. Even if you choose an SEO company that isn’t local, they will often try to contact you and be in touch with you. For example, they may use video conferencing or phone calls to chat with your team in a more personable way and also deliver monthly reports through emails.

3. Choosing a shady SEO company

Always remember, Search Engine Optimization does not provide instant results; it requires a minimum of three to six months to start providing a return (depending on the type of niche and the company). Due to this waiting period and not getting sufficient returns overnight, companies often refrain form committing to long-term partnerships with genuine SEO agencies. This misconception also leads most companies to fall for “I’ll get you ranked in under 15 days” proposals.

Notoriously known as Black-hat techniques, SEOs promising quick results use certain unethical tactics that are far from optimal for sustainability of your online presence. By utilizing abandoned Black Hat SEO strategies, your website may very well rank in SERPs quickly, but it will also fall from page one as fast as possible. By using these strategies, Google may even ban your website from showing up in its search engine result page again. 

That means people wouldn’t be able to find your business site using the world’s most significant internet search engine.

Avoid any SEO firms that promises anything like the following:

1. Overnight rankings
2. Instant leads
3. Doubled traffic
4. Search engine submissions
5. X amount of backlinks
6. Any sort of ROI projections

Conclusion

There are lots of SEO companies, but everything comes down to selecting the one that understands your business objectives and purpose. There are a lot of advantages if you hire or work with a good or reputed SEO company because it can help improve your rankings, increase your leads and customers, and lower your general advertising and marketing expenses dramatically.

If you combine the above tips with your company SEO objectives and purpose, only then, you’ll have a strategy or approach that will certainly guide you to a good SEO company for your organization.

With the more number of doctors, comes more competition for General Medical Practitioners as well as Specialists. Like Lawyers in Australia, the medical practitioner’s industry isn’t optimally marketed in Australia to its prospective patients. This creates a gap between the patients and the right doctor for them.

How Patients Choose a Doctor

Before a patient enters a doctor’s clinic, he does thorough research about the doctor and the benefits of treatment that he may get after taking advice from that doctor. Generally, when an individual chooses to visit a doctor, he goes through different stages and so, the doctors have to present themselves best in all the stages for prospects to select them. Below mentioned are the stages that a patient goes through.

Check for the Doctors in the Area

While your prospects know their illness, they will look for doctors around locally. Like if they are looking for a Gynecologist in Sydney, then they will first ask their local physician for advice on it, and they will also look for a specialist online. Once they get to know about different local gynaecologists, they will move to the next stage.

Word of Mouth

This is the step every prospective patient generally follows. They ask people around them about which doctor is most suitable for their particular illness. Although every individual is different and their treatment also varies, for most of the time, a positive word of mouth works better than the negative one for the doctor. When a prospect receives positive feedback, he moves to the next stage.

Quality Check

The very next step they would take is checking the quality of the doctor’s treatment from his previous patient’s testimonials or reviews. For this, they will ask their family and friends for their reviews and check reviews online on different websites.

Once they go through all the above stages, they will book an appointment with the best doctor they found after the process.

Do you wish to have this juice of prospects? Do you want to convert these prospects into your patients? Here, I will discuss all the marketing techniques that you can use for attracting these prospects to your clinic.

Marketing Tips for Doctors in Australia

Developing scalable marketing strategies for a medical practitioner is essential as their niche has its limitations and advantages. One major advantage is that they can get instant responses from marketing efforts if they can catch their customer’s attention. The limitation comes in terms of advertising efforts like they cannot go for mass advertising and marketing for their firm. So, let’s know what kind of marketing efforts work best for doctors in Australia.

1. Optimize your Web Presence

In today’s fast-paced life, searching on the internet is the best option that prospects in the health care sector believe will help them in getting their queries solved. Your website will be the place where all your marketing efforts will focus through that you can get your leads. 

Build a professional website that describes your clinic, your expertise and engages your prospects till they book an appointment with your clinic. For this, funnel your web pages that will take the prospects through the information page, then the expertise page, and at the end to the appointment booking page. All the below is a crucial part of general SEO as well as local SEO.

The website must have the following things for having it optimized. 

I. On-Page Keywords

This means your website must have the required phrases and words that best describe your work and expertise. The keywords you must use on your website are ‘Money Keywords’ that go to the money page or appointment page of your website. For example: ‘Best Gynecologist in Sydney’ and similar keywords for Gynecologists. 

Then, there are ‘Discovery Keywords’ that help them discover your website like ‘Gynecologists Near me’. And, there are ‘Attention Keywords’ that look for the searcher’s intent for finding the service like ‘What exercises to follow in Pregnancy’. All kinds of keywords must be used on the website, so it becomes more valuable to the prospects and so, you can have it ranked higher on search engines.

II. Quality Content

The above keywords can help your website rank only when you insert them in your content qualitatively. Every page of your website must have an optimal content distribution. Optimal content includes the number of words, the quality of the content, its originality, its usefulness, everything. A search engine ranks content on queries when it is valid, has the quality and has a good readability.

Also, a website with a limited amount of content might get less preference as compared to the website that has more information about the service. So, you can have a blog section on your website that can have attention keywords which will direct your visitors to the money page of your website.

Your content should be focused more on what prospects or consumers expect rather than what you have or want.

III. Website Responsiveness

A responsive website is the one which adjusts itself to the screen it has been opened. This means it can be opened anywhere, on a desktop screen, tablet or mobile screens. For a health query, it is said that 89% of people immediately search for it online. They can search from any device, and when your website is responsive, prospects are likely to spend more time on it.

It is said that 5% of your prospects judge your professional credibility based on your website design and the quality of content you have on it. So, choose your website look and content carefully.

Create your own personal brand with your website. You can also have an automated price estimator for individual patient services, this will increase customer engagement on your website.

2. Grow Organically on Search Engines

The most commonly used search engine platform, ‘Google’ has various parameters to rank a website high on a particular search. You can follow those guidelines and have your website ranked on the first page of Google for the keywords that match your speciality. When you want to focus on local clients in the area itself or in a particular city like ‘Sydney’, then you must focus your efforts on local SEO for your website. For ranking high on Google organically, you can do the following things.

I. Listing on Local Searches

Get your website listed on different local search websites like Google my Business, find local, area-specific directories, industry-specific directories and all such platforms. Ask your previous and current customers to write reviews about your services on such platforms. This will increase your prospective customers and Google’s trust in your services.

II. External Website Linking

Google ranks a website like a local individual. When many people recommend the individual about a place, then he will also, probably recommend the same place to others. In the same way, when different types of websites recommend your clinic as an expert Gynecologist clinic, then even Google will show you high on the search engine, recommending you to the searchers as an expert in your field.

External website linking should be optimally done. Some websites over do it, whereas some websites under do it. There should be a consistency and grip on it. You can hire SEO Specialists in Sydney to help you with your Clinic’s SEO.

III. Include Video Content

When we talk about medical practitioners, their current and previous patient’s testimonials are the best way to build communication with their prospective clients. These testimonials, along with the medical procedures drafted in the form of video, can help your prospects find you and believe in your work. This also increases Google’s trust on your website.

Consistently update your website and its content to stay at the rank allocated by Google. This is because there are consistent changes in SEO so your website needs to be prepared for all the changes.

3. Reputation Management

A doctor’s reputation in terms of his service matters the most for a prospect or a new patient. It is essential to provide an excellent patient experience to your current customers. It is a fact that when it comes to the health sector, the prospects consider a vast difference between a five-star and a four-star rating. 

So, it becomes essentialt that the current customers give a five-star rating and that attracts more prospects to your services rather than your competitors. Also, excellent services generate a lot of positive word-of-mouth publicity for your clinic. You must gain insights about what kind of experience would be liked more by your patients and comprehensively give the treatment in the same form.

4. Referral Programs

Under referral programs, you can involve local physicians and general practitioners and ask them to refer prospects to your clinic for related illnesses. You can pay these doctors an amount of commission for performing this and then, once they send a patient, you can give the best experience and some valuable offers that the patients can’t resist. After this, you can ask for reviews and positive word of mouth referrals to your patients.

5. Get Personal

Personal attention from the doctor gives a morale boost to their patients. This eventually increases the patient’s loyalty and trust towards the doctor. Get more personal to your current patients in multiple ways like:

I. Email Marketing

Almost 90% of adults expect to have better email communication with their doctors. This can be in terms of reminding about the booked appointment, request for a friend referral, general newsletter, latest health news and seasonal tip sheets. Email communication is not only formal but also dependable as patients find them essential and specifically for themselves.

II. Automated text and Chat Messages

Several clinics have launched apps and website automated chat options for their patients. Using this facility, patients feel more fulfilled and satisfied as they can get answers to their queries anytime they want. Most of the patients dedicatedly visit the website for all their queries and recommend it to more people.

This increases your website relevancy and leads. Also, you can have live streaming discussion sharing essential or generic health tips or you can have a video conference live on your website or can have a live Snapchat session.

All these touchpoints with your patients increase their trust in the doctor and the website. This will, in turn, increase the word-of-mouth publicity and review improvements.

6. Advertising on Online Platforms

Advertising is a helpful technique for those starting a new clinic or practice. It gives a boost to website visits. Advertisements on online platforms are to provide a boost for a while and then the website must grow organically on those platforms. This is because advertising doesn’t entirely justify the spending compared to the revenue that it gives. Ranking organically is far better than advertising. In doubt? Check why SEO is better than SEM.

For online platforms, you can majorly have ads on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and many more and Google Ads is the second platform wherein you can advertise on the search page for keywords, can have display ads, and many more.

These ads must be well optimized in terms of keywords and landing page. Each advertisement must connect well with the keywords in which it has been displayed and the content to which it is directed. If you wish to run the advertisement and would like to get more output out of it, then have your website well-optimized. This will increase your website’s visibility.

7. Analyze and Track the Results

You must check and analyze the results of each of your marketing efforts. This is done to understand the return on investment that you get after you perform your marketing activities. When prospects go through all the above-mentioned stages of choosing a doctor in your area of expertise, you must know what percentage of these prospects you are currently converting as compared to your previous strategies. 

Like any other year, in 2019, some websites improved their average ranking, some dropped in their rankings, and everyone moved on to focus on the survival of the next significant change in the algorithms. Along with the general organic marketing tactics, you will have to make your website ready for 2020. As this year is going to have some HUGE changes, and if you aren’t ready for them, you can pretty much count your losses already. Scared? You should be, but you should also be optimistic. The changes that are going to be made in 2020 are going to give you a chance to outrank the competitors that are currently above you. 

We are going to help you take advantage of these changes. This article will cover the five major changes that are going to take place in 2020 and how you should prepare for them. 

Before we continue with informing you about the changes that are going to take place in 2020, let’s make sure that you know about the changes that already have been made in the year gone by. 

SEO Changes that Happened in 2019 

1. March 2019 Core Update 
2. Bert Update In 2019 
3. Google Discover
4. June 2019 Core Update 
5. Mobile First Indexing

1. March 2019 Core Update 

The 2019 core update was one of the major changes that took place in the previous year. The March 2019 core update came out on the 12th of March and Google confirmed this on the 13th of March with a tweet that said “This week, we released a broad core update as we do several times per year. Our guidance about such updates remains as we’ve covered before. Please see these tweets for more about that.” 

A couple of days later, they published another tweet in which they named the core update. The tweet said: “ We can understand it can be useful to some for updates to have names. Our name for the update is “March 2019 Core Update.” We think this will help avoid confusion; it tells you the type of update it was and when it happened.” 

Google never releases the changes they have made, but SEO Analysts figured out the changes that were affecting websites after the update:

• User experience had a massive impact on the ranking of websites. 
• Websites with a lot of pop-ups or ads suffered from a decrease in traffic. This would most likely be because of the bad user experience involved when pop-ups and ads are included. 
• Websites with low-quality content saw a loss in traffic.
• The Quality of backlinks mattered more than the number of links a page received. 
• It became essential to include title tags to increase the click-through rate of a site. 

2. BERT Update In 2019 

The BERT update focuses on how Google understands Search queries. This update also provides better search results for long queries with a specific context. This is what Google had to say about the update; “ These improvements are oriented around improving language understanding, particularly for more natural language/conversational queries, as BERT is able to help Search better understand the nuance and context of words in Searches and better match those queries with helpful results.Particularly for longer, more conversational queries, or searches where prepositions like “for” and “to” matter a lot to the meaning, Search will be able to understand the context of the words in your query. You can search in a way that feels natural for you.”

With BERT, Google has become a lot more accurate and provides relevant answers or pages to the search queries. To get around this update, it is essential to target precise keywords. It is also vital that your content targets the same specific keyword. The BERT update also keeps in mind the quality of the content rather than the length of the content, so you might see pages with 300 words ranking above pages with a 1000 words only because the previous page is targeting that specific query. 

3.Google Discover

Google feeds, now called Google Discover, shows users topics and news items in Genre’s that interest the user. Google Discover provides you with information on your favourite football or soccer team without you even searching for it. 

So how does Google Discover affect your website? Well, over 800 million people click on the sites shown in Google discover, so, if your website does get displayed in the feed, there is a massive chance that you are going to see a spike in the traffic your website receives. 

Another update in Google Discover was the addition of the Discover report in the search console. The report will show you how many times your website is shown on Google Discover, Content that is performing well in discover and how your content is performing differently compared to content in the search results.

You should be able to find this report on Google Search Console, the reason this was big news is because, you can now check how you are receiving traffic from Google.

Your website will be shown on Google discover if your websites loading speed is fast, Your page has the latest content, and Your page is promoted on social media. 

4. June 2019 Core Update 

The June 2019 Core Update was the second core update of the year. Google released this statement on their official twitter account on the 3rd of June – “ 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.” 

Google has always told webmasters to focus on their content quality and they said the same after the core update was released. After the update, big websites with high domain authority such as the Daily Mail lost a considerable chunk of their traffic. Some said this was because of the unreliable news Daily Mail has been publishing, while others disagreed on this matter. 

Another big site that lost almost all of its traffic is the CCN. Since then, CCN has been forced to shut down because of the rapid drop in traffic and revenue after the June update. CCN also reported that they lost about 90% of their daily revenue after the update. 

 5. Mobile First Indexing

In mobile first indexing, Google will crawl and index mobile versions of pages instead of the web version. In 2019, Google enabled mobile first indexing by default for new websites or websites previously unknown by Google. For older sites, Google continues to evaluate and monitor these pages based on “Best Practices”. Mobile First Indexing has made it essential for webmasters to have their websites optimized for mobiles. So if you haven’t already done it, make sure you optimize your website NOW. 

Here are a few things you should make a note of about Mobile first indexing. 

• If you have a separate URL for the mobile version of your page, Google will show the mobile URL on Mobile and the Web URL on the desktop.
• Google also said that they would not change the crawl count per day but would shift the balance from desktop to mobile crawls.  
• The mobile Speed update is an independent update and is not related to the mobile first indexing update. 
• Using Hamburger menus or Accordion for the mobile version of the page is completely fine.

5 Major Changes in SEO In 2020 

1. Voice Search (Featured Snippets)
2. Zero Click Searches
3. Search Intent  
4. Mobile UX will determine The Rankings
5. BERT Update IN 2020 

1. Voice Search 

Voice search is going to be the next big thing in SEO, and the stats support it. 

• 55% of teenagers and 41% of adults who use smartphones use voice searches more than once a day.
• 20% of all mobile searches on Google are Voice Search, and it is predicted that 50% of searches are going to be voice-based by the end of 2020. 
• By the end of 2020, All Web browsing sessions will be done without a screen. 

All these stats suggest that voice search is only going to continue to grow; this makes it essential for the websites to be optimized for voice search. 

Your page will have to be explicitly optimized for voice search for it to be shown on voice searches. To do this, you would first have to find, target and optimize your page for voice search related keywords. Voice search keywords are likely to be long tail, and they are also expected to be a proper question, for example; if you were to check a celebrity’s age, you would search for “Tom Cruise age” on text, in voice search you would probably ask for “What is Tom Cruise’s age”.

For your website to be shown on a voice search, you would need your website to rank for a featured snippet on Google. Voice searches are going to impact local SEO as people start searching for restaurants or bars near them. Using My business listing on Google should help you do that, your site would appear when it is near the searcher’s location. 

Almost all voice searches are done on mobile, so your website should be optimized for mobile devices if you want your website to rank for voice search related keywords. 

2. Zero Click Searches in 2020 

As the name suggests, Zero Click Searches are when the user does not click on a single link for his/her query. Since the answer appears on the top, the question gets answered without the user having clicked on any website. So How does this affect SEO in 2020? For starters, 34.4% of all searches on desktop end up without a click and 62.5% of all searches on mobile end up without any clicks. 

Search results could be in the form of featured snippets, maps, definitions, calculators, knowledge panels and instant answers. 

So how do you rank for featured snippets? It is easy to rank for keywords that you are already ranking on the first page for. To rank for featured snippets, you would have to keep all the user queries (How, why, what, where) in H2 tags. Google tends to prefer this tag over other tags as it makes it easy for it to understand. Also, make a list of all the things covered on the page, for example; if your article is on the best SEO tools, make a list on the top or close to the top of the page. It is easy for Google to understand ordered or unordered lists. This puts you a step ahead of others who want to rank for the featured snippets. 

You should also search and rank for keywords that show featured snippets. You can use an SEO tool for this. You would get a list of keywords that have featured snippets, and you would find websites that are currently ranking for these featured snippets. To outrank the site currently shown in the featured snippet, you would have to:

I. Write your content in more detail than your competitor’s.

II. Include a list at the top of the page. 

III. Put the question and answer in an H2 tag; this would depend on the type of problem though. 

3. Search Intent

Your website won’t rank if they can not match the reader’s query. This makes it essential for the website to understand the intention of the user. With the help of BERT and other Google updates, Google has become smart enough to understand the searcher’s query. Unlike before, you won’t rank if your page has a lot of links or has a lot of content. You can now see pages with 300-400 words ranking on SERPs above pages with more content.

Every keyword you find has an intent behind it, the user may want to buy a product, compare a product, read the reviews of a product and if your content can’t match the query, your website won’t be able to rank for those keywords.If you are confused about the intent of the keyword, check the websites that are currently ranking for that keyword. For example; all the pages ranking for “SEO in Australia” are either websites listing SEO firms or an SEO Firm. By looking at the results of the keyword, you can make out whether to write an informational article, a list or a review. To rank for this specific keyword, you would need to either be an SEO company or someone who rates SEO Companies, since none of the informational websites are ranking for this keyword. 

You don’t only need to do this for the new content you are going to write, you can also do this for all the old content already present on your website. This may help them rank for keywords that they were once ranking for. 

4. Mobile User Experience will Determine The Rankings

As it has been stressed before multiple times in the article, Mobile Optimization is the way ahead. Why? Simply because the majority of the searches are now done on mobile. In Fact, there are so many searches done on the mobile that Google had to bring in the Mobile First Indexing update last year. 

And this is the second reason why it has become so crucial for pages to be mobile optimized. One of the major ranking factors for your website is mobile optimization. Desktop SERP will have the same results as the mobile SERP, with mobile SERP being given more preference. So if your website ranks poorly in the mobile SERP, it is going to rank poorly on the desktop SERP as well. 

You can check if your website is mobile-friendly by doing the mobile-friendly test available on Google. If you don’t pass this test, you will have to optimize your page for mobile. To do this, you

1. Have to keep your paragraphs short. 
2. Have to use Header tags after every 3-4 paragraphs.
3. Should use bullet points or numbered lists to form a list of things. 

If you are unable to optimize your website for mobile, you can outsource it to a Digital Marketing company like Ozias or a web designer.

5. Bert Update In 2020 

Yes, The BERT or Bidirectional Encoder Representations From Transformers came out in October 2019, but it will continue to have massive impacts on websites in 2020. Google says that you can’t really optimize your site for the BERT update, but you can. 

You would first have to check if your website has already been affected by the update. To do that you could use the Google Search Console if you can’t afford to use any of the paid tools that check website traffic. After you open the search console, check the month after the update rolled out (25th October – 25th November). If you see a drop in website traffic in that period, then you have probably been affected by the update. 

Here are a couple of things you should do to recover from the BERT update. 

• It has been repeatedly said that writers should concentrate on humans rather than crawler, but all we really do is search for keywords on SEO tools and then base our article/page/post on these keywords. 

With BERT, Google can understand the language people use in specific countries or regions, so if you want to rank for a particular region, it is important to understand the language that is used in that specific region. 

• Content Writers have been optimizing their content for keywords for ages now, but with BERT, it is going to be crucial to make your content relevant to the keyword. If you stuff keywords in your content without really writing anything about it, you aren’t going to rank for the keyword. 

BERT doesn’t focus on content length but content quality. This makes it essential to make your content relevant to the keyword. 

Conclusion 

Now that you have been informed about the changes that took place in SEO in 2019 and the changes that are going to take place in 2020, it would be wise to get your website optimized for these changes. Without this, your website’s SEM efforts will also go in vein. It is better to rank your website through SEO then SEM with the above-mentioned updates. You could optimize the site yourself or call someone who knows SEO. 

This makes it evident to rank your website high on local search. Isn’t it?

What is Local SEO?

SEO, being a wide term, has seen significant changes in 2020. Under SEO, there is general as well as Local SEO. General SEO is done for the website to rank high on Google search while there are searches from any place, any keyword (related to the firm), and from any device.

While Local SEO is marketing your business visibility on location-based searches. This technique helps businesses to promote their products and services to the local customers searching for it in that geographical area.

About 95% of smartphone users use their devices to perform a search for local businesses before visiting the physical store. Local SEO is the easiest way to drive visitors to your store.  

Local SEO differs for different niches. People searching for nearby stores search differently for different niches. For example: while searching for supermarkets, they might search for “Groceries stores near me,” whereas while searching for lawyers, they might search for “Best Lawyers in my city”. This difference is just about the intent that the customers have while visiting the location.

Generally, the searches relating to Local SEO have a purchase intent. This means that when the searcher is looking for purchasing the product, he looks for such local queries. Hence, the conversion rate of such searches is higher compared to the general informational searches.

General SEO is different from Local SEO as general SEO involves a lot of focus on website and brand recognition whereas, Local SEO also needs GMB (Google My Business) optimization.

You must be curious to know how you can perform your website’s local SEO. 

How To Do Local SEO?

Local SEO requires some effort from your side, for your website to rank on the first page of Google. Here I present to you the steps by which you can rank your website high on Google using Local SEO.

1. Set-up Local Google Listings

Local Google Listing is listing your business on Google My Business (GMB), i.e., Google Maps. To register on Google my Business, you need to:

Sign in > Add your Business Details (Name, Address, Contact Info, Category of your business, Working Hours, Photos and Videos, website URL) > Validate your Account by entering the pin sent to you via courier to the mentioned address > Insert introduction with specific keywords relating to your business.

When a person searches for a Local Keyword, Google shows 3-pack Google Maps results as shown in the image above. According to a research, around 46% of people who searched for local results, clicked on these 3-pack results only and didn’t look for further Google Maps results. 

Your GMB profile must be as up-to-date and accurate as possible. This increases its chance to appear in the local pack, makes it trustworthy, attractive, and appealing enough to get a click on it.

You can get a spot on 3-pack results by following the further steps.

2. Regular Client Reviews

Along with the information you insert, the Google Maps result also includes reviews, Q&A, and GMB attributes section, which is entirely written by consumers after experiencing the firm’s services. Google has designed its local algorithm to give an online experience that is just like the offline one. For Google, the most popular website ranks higher, and the less popular one ranks lower.

It checks the popularity of a website by the number of people recommending the site. So for getting more people discussing your site, you can start by asking your company’s loyal customers to review your website on Google Maps. Also, You can ask all your customers to include reviews about your company on Google Maps.  

Google not only checks the number of reviews, but it also checks the kind of reviews people give. For example, when an educational institution’s review repeatedly mentions one of its courses to be the best, then Google ranks its website higher on Google Maps for that course. You can’t control customer reviews, but, you can prompt your customers in adding certain words on their reviews.

Google gives the star ratings on the reviews less importance as most of the reviews are rated from 3 stars and above, it can’t precisely rank the sites on that basis. Also, the reviewer to the site matters. There are Google Local Guides who are reviewers for several websites, so they carry a higher weight for their reviews as compared to a new reviewer. 

3. Optimize your Content on Every Page

As per your business niche, you can also have separate pages for each of your services. This widens your individual page’s reach, and each service page can rank on search engines. Optimizing every page on the website means making the website visitor and search engine ready.

For this, you need to:

I. Build a proper Site Architecture

Site Architecture means arranging the functional and visual aspects of your website. This means creating a structure of the website and dividing the content in a hierarchy form. The structure of the website includes the page URL, Title, Meta Description, Heading tags, content, and the image Alt Text (descriptions). These things must be taken care of while structuring a website.

II. Keywords Distribution

Identify the target keywords for each page. When an individual searches a query on Google, he is likely to use general terms on the search. If the terms are similar to the keywords mentioned by you on your website, then it is very likely for him to visit your website when you are ranking on the Search Engines. Hence, you must use different kinds of keywords on your website.

Distribute these keywords in your content, headings, URL, meta description, everywhere. All Headings must be keywords; the distribution of keywords on content must be approximately 2-3% of the entire content, and meta description must include 2-3 keywords. You can also optimize your website’s images by adding keywords on the Alt Text.

Your title tags, headings, content, URL, and meta description should be unique, interesting, and informative. This improves the website’s rank on Google.

4. Make your Website Responsive & Secure

A responsive website is the one that fits well on all screens like computers, laptops, mobiles, and tablets. You can analyze your website’s responsiveness by just checking how it looks on mobile phones, and how it looks on the desktop when the screen size is changed. If it doesn’t fit on these devices, then you must change the theme of your website to the one which is responsive to all the screens.

For Local SEO, it is crucial to have a responsive website as this profoundly affects the user experience. If your site isn’t providing a good user experience, then it won’t rank on the 3-pack results of Google Maps.

Along with the website’s responsiveness, you must work on your website speed. The amount of time your website takes to load is the website’s speed. The website that takes longer to upload while searching for it again makes it less user-friendly. To avoid this, you can switch to SSD hosting, which increases your site’s speed. 

Also, you must make your website safe and secure. For this, you can install SSL on your website. By this, you as well as your visitors are safe to search through your website.

5. Start with a Blog & Optimize it

Having a blog on your website is the best way to showcase your firm’s talent and expertise in the niche. This increases users’ experience and trust for the company’s products. 

Therefore, a blog section on your website enhances its relevance on Local SEO. For selecting the content type that you want to have on your blog, you can check your competitors’ blog, or you can write one of the following types of content:

I. Buyers Guide to purchase your products:

Here, you can include contents like:

• “How to use your products.”
• “Difference between different products of yours.”

II. Best Practice Guides:

Here, you can include contents like:

• “Product Reviews”
• “Best List of Products”

III. Infographics and Case Studies:

Here, you can include content like:

• “Frequently Asked Questions on your Products”
• “Common Mistakes People Make with the Products”

You can optimize each of your blog articles with attention-grabbing headlines, keywords insertion on heading tags, title, URL, image alt text, and content, internally linking all your pages to each other with anchors, linking related content to external aggregators websites and having social media platforms links. 

6. Start a Video Content

Google’s algorithms prioritize websites with video content. This is because video content increases the time that visitors spend on your website. Hence, it increases the website’s chances to come on the 3-pack results.

If you wish to be seen in the video, you can have the videos on you explaining the products on the whiteboard, product demonstrations video, interview-style video, or solving an FAQ video. 

If you do not wish to be seen in the video, you can have videos with talking slides, before and after product usage examples, screen captures, or you can use cartoons in the video.

Screen Capture Videos Content can Include:

• “Ways to use your Products.”
• “Difference between previous versions and new versions of your Products.”

For these videos, you must use keywords in the heading tags and title tags. It is proven that such videos boost the website’s online visibility and increase the click-through rate.

7. Business Directory submissions

You can submit your company details like Company Name, Address, and Phone Number (NAP) along with your website URL on your Country’s Local Directories. If you do not appear in the places where people are searching for a business like yours then, your competitors might take over the customers you would have got. 

The details you fill in these directories must be consistent on all the platforms. A mismatch in this data makes it difficult for Google to match your company’s data on different platforms. If there are any discrepancies, then Google avoids listing your website on the 3-pack results.

Here, the quality of local directories matters as compared to the quantity of directories as Google gives more scores to the website having directory links from authority sites (aggregators site) rather than any not so known websites. 

Some examples of local directories are:

For a firm in the USA, directories in which you can submit are Express Update, Localeze, Acxiom, Factual, City Search, and such website directories.

For a firm in the UK, you can submit your NAP on the directories like Local Data Company, Market Location, Thomson Local, Infoserve, and such directories.

You must be regular in adding your company details on these NAP websites like you can post them on an interval of a month or 2-3 weeks.

8. Industry Directories Submissions

A directory with industry specific websites are called industry directories. For example: An industry directory for an educational institute will have websites of educational institutes only. It will be further categorized in different divisions like law institutes, engineering institutes, etc.

Like Local Directories, industry-relevant directories positions the website as an authoritative one to rank higher on Google Local search. This gives Google an idea of the types of keywords that are relevant to your business.

As per your business, you must register on those industry-specific directories. For example, for educational institutes in the USA, you can register on Industry Directories like Great Schools, Zillow, College Atlas, College view, and many such directories.

Like Local Directories, these websites too must have consistent content, and there must not be any mismatch in the content. Any discrepancies makes it difficult for Google to identify and rank your website higher on Google Local Search.

Also, you can find such industry-specific directory websites if you check competitors listings on different sites. You can win over your competitors rank by including the directories that they use along with the other directories you found.

9. External Website Linking

A website’s authority is determined by the quality of links directed towards it. Google only knows your firm based on the identity it carries online. When good websites on the internet are recommending your firm (in terms of a link on their website), then Google identifies your website to be good and can be recommended on different searches. 

Google bots crawl through the contents on different websites, and while doing that, it clicks through the links one after the other. So, by this, your website content is also crawled by bots. Google also stores the pages that its bots have crawled. So, it remembers the contents that were linking to your website. 

This increases your website’s credibility on Google. You can have links to your website from social media, paid directories, and other websites that have related content. For local SEO, get locally-relevant links from locally related sites. For this, you can be a part of the local groups with an online presence that would link to your website, local online news publications, local complementary businesses, and all such local websites.

10. Check your Website’s Optimization

Website Optimization means measuring the results for your efforts on Local SEO. You can do this using these Google tools:

Google Analytics:

Here, you can learn about the amount of traffic generated to your website from search engines, how much of your website’s content is optimized, and what goals are achieved by your website after revamping it for Local Search.

Google Console:

Here, you can learn about how well is your website’s content structured for local search, the improvements you can do on your HTML codes, your website’s load speed and responsiveness, external links towards your website, internal links on your website, check what all pages on your site are indexed or crawled, keywords used on different pages, about your roborts.txt file, and sitemap of your website.

Roborts.txt file informs the search engines about the pages that it needs to crawl. In this file, you can also put the pages you do not want the bots to crawl.

A sitemap is the road map for crawlers as to how it must move around the site. It helps the search engines crawl and index your URLs efficiently.

Conclusion

While there is a possibility that you might get confused whether to go for SEO or SEM (Advertising on Search engines) for your firm. SEO is always better than going for SEM. Also, Local SEO helps your firm gain more visitors then General SEO. Just follow the above steps for Local SEO and get your firm rank high on search engines.

“Marketers see SEO as becoming more effective, with 82% reporting effectiveness is on the rise, and 42% of this group stating effectiveness is increasing significantly.”

– MarketDive

“61% of marketers say improving SEO and growing their organic presence is their top inbound marketing priority.”

– Hubspot

The above statistics show you how important SEO is and how it’s importance is increasing in the online world, but what is SEO? And how does doing SEO impacts your website?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, It’s a process of optimizing your website to help it rank first on the search engine results page for a particular query. All Search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo have algorithms which list websites when a user searches a specific query. A lot of marketers prefer to target Google as it accounts for over 79% of all global desktop search traffic.

When we talk about Google, a website owner can perform 2 kinds of SEO there, which are, general SEO and local SEO. General SEO is performed when the website is looking from traffic from any place around the world. Whereas, Local SEO is performed when a website is looking for marketing its products and services in a particular Geographical area only.

One can perform 2 types of SEO for ranking on both general and local SEO. check out the types below.

Types Of SEO

There are two types of SEO;

1. On-page SEO
2. Off-page SEO

What is On-Page optimization?

On-page optimization or on-page SEO refers to all the measures that can be taken within the website to help the website rank on the search engine. While doing this, you must also make website alterations as per the latest Google updates.

Since you have control over everything in your site, this is the best way to improve your website’s rank on a search engine for the keyword terms you want. For example, steps like, including the keywords in the title, and having content on your website that is helpful to the users, helps in improving the website’s ranking.

Essential On-page SEO Factors

Website elements such as content, structure, and other technical components affect the ranking of the website. We will be looking at all of them, to give you a better understanding of how various factors affect how your site ranks and performs on the internet.

1. Technical Components

Components such as server speed, Quality Of Coding, and Ip Address make up the technical component. 

1. Server Speed: Having a good server speed helps your website load faster. Having a slow server would mean having a slow loading speed. Which would mean potential visitors not being able to reach your website and bouncing off your site because they did not want to wait for your website to load. This would also affect your ranking on Google. 
2. Quality Of Coding: It is crucial to make sure that you don’t stop your pages from getting crawled. This would lead to the search engines not knowing about the existence of your website and therefore affecting the ranking of your website or in this case, not showing up on the search engine at all.
3. IP Address: Make sure that your website has a unique IP address. If you are using a shared hosting plan, make sure that the other websites under same host don’t contain any adult content, gambling content, etc. Sharing your websites IP Address with these kind of websites would affect your ranking posting or SERP.

2. Content

You must have heard the phrase “content is king” a lot of times, and that phrase is accurate for your website. In fact, it is the most crucial element in SEO, you could try every technique SEO guides talk about, but if your content is not good enough, your website won’t rank.

Besides having content that is informative and helpful to the users, you also need to make sure that you have done some keyword research to check the keywords search volume and competition. 

You could also add meta tags to your content that will allow you to show the title and description of your choice on the search engine when a user triggers the keywords you are targeting. 

Using the header tags for your titles, headings and subheadings. In the end make sure that your content is easy to read and understandable. 

3. Structure

Another essential component is the structure of the website. If your site is informative, it is important to categorize your article depending on the article’s niche. Make it easier for the user to navigate through the website.

If your website is an eCommerce website, you need to make sure that the user finishes buying the goods in 3-4 steps, this includes the user adding the product to the cart. This helps the user complete the purchase as soon as possible; having more steps might make him change his mind on the product that you are selling. In the end, User navigation plays a part in user experience and therefore affects the ranking of the website.

Note: If your website sells any product, make sure that the payment gateway is secured. Otherwise, that would affect the ranking of your website as well.

What Is Off-page SEO?

Off-page SEO is a technique a person can use to improve the website’s rank on a search engine results page (SERP); this technique does not involve the website and is not in your control. Off-page SEO can help your website rank even if the content isn’t the best in the world. Off-page majorly consist of link building. 

Google considers a lot of factors in their ranking algorithm, backlinks being one of them. Backlinks are links to your website received from other websites; it is similar to a positive vote to your website. Depending on the quality of the website giving the link, the value of the backlinks differ.

A Website receives links from social bookmarking, comments on blogs, forums, and from the content of another website. Links that you receive from another website’s content has the highest authority compared to links you receive from other parts.  

Backlinks can be diversified into quality based on authority. Authority links are links you receive from well-known websites. An authority website is a website that has great brand value, excellent backlinks and content for the user’s query. Websites such as The New York Times, The Guardian, etc. would be considered as authority websites.

Search engines keep trying to improve the algorithm to return the most relevant and useful websites to the user. A website with a lot of quality backlinks (votes) indicates that the site has good content and the content can be trusted. Both content and backlinks combine to be the most important ranking factor in SEO.

Benefits of Backlinks

1. Backlinks help in improving the ranking of the website
2. Increases site traffic
3. Increases brand recognition. 

1. Ranking Of The Website

As mentioned before, when your website gets links from authority sites, a part of that trust is passed on to your website. It shows Google that your website can be trusted and therefore helps in the ranking of the website. 

2. Increases Site Traffic

Most authority pages get a lot of traffic or visitors; a percentage of those viewers will click on the backlinks, which will lead them to your website. 

3. Improves Brand Recognition

When Your website keeps appearing on different authority websites, it improves brand recognition, and people start to remember your website. So the next time they think of something your site is related to, they will come directly to your website instead of searching it on search engines.

SEO vs SEM: Which one to Choose?

Before we get into the difference between SEO and SEM, let us understand what SEM is and what are the similarities between them. 

SEM or Search Engine Marketing is a paid form of marketing in search engines. SEM either shows your website on the top of the page or the bottom of the page, depending on different factors. Google Ads is the most used platform in SEM; This is because Google is the most used Search Engine.  

Similarities between SEM And SEO 

1. Helps brands appear in SERP’s.: Both SEO and SEM get your website to appear on the search engine results page. 
2. Drive More Traffic To Your Website: Since your website appears on the SERP, both of them help increase the traffic on the website.
3. Doing Keyword research to find the most used search queries online: SEO and SEM both require us to do keyword research to get the best possible ROI ( in SEM) or results. ROI may wary depending on the country you are targeting due to user habits, for example; countries like India would have a lower ROI then countries such as the UK and Australia.
4. Require testing and optimization: Without testing different tactics, you wouldn’t know which one works. SEM and SEO require some analysis, testing, and optimization to get the best results.

Differences between SEO And SEM

1. The difference In the Location Of Search Results: SEM allows you to choose where you want to post your ads, SEO doesn’t let you decide where your website should appear. 
2. Cost: SEM has a low initial cost, but the cost keeps recurring. You would also need to keep paying for your ads as long as you campaign is running. SEO on the other has high initial cost because of backlinks, but in the long run, the cost SEO reduces and there may be a time when you wouldn’t need to focus a lot in SEO. 
3. Visibility: You can target your audience in SEM,Your ads will keep being visible as long as your campaign is running. SEO on the other hand depends on Google’s algorithm and your website won’t always rank for all the keywords.
4. Results: Results are quick in SEM, while they are a lot slower in SEO, and the amount of time it takes depends on the competition of the keyword.
5. Value Over Time: Though SEM provides quick results, they don’t offer value over time, as you need to keep paying  to keep your campaign running. SEO provides you value over time.
6. Click-Through Rate (CTR): click-through rate is described as the number of people visiting your website divided by the number of impressions your website received. CTR is a lot higher in SEO than it is in SEM because of something we call ad blindness. In which the user does not notice the ads or completely ignores it. 

How is SEO better?

Whether you choose SEO or SEM would depend on the objective you have for your website and the type of site you have, for example; if you have a page that is selling tickets to a one-time event, you would prefer to do SEM over SEO as it provides quick results. But what if that same event gets repeated throughout the year? In that case, you need to pay more attention to SEO than SEM. This is because it would turn out to be very costly to promote the same event every day compared to doing SEO and making sure that your website stays on top. Similarly SEO for lawyers would be more beneficial as compared to SEM as they are there for a long term.

As you might have figured out in the similarities, you would need to at least a little bit of SEO to make your SEM campaign successful. You would need to make sure that your website is still user-friendly; you would need to make sure that you are targeting the keywords that can get you results by doing keyword research. 

So why not go all the way and pay more attention to SEO as it provides more value over time compared to SEM. SEO is cheaper than SEM and provides better results over time compared to SEM.

Marketing can be in traditional form and modern form. The traditional way of advertisements are the ones we encounter daily. These methods include Print Ads, Broadcast, Direct Mail, Telephone marketing and outdoor marketing. These advertisements are hard to ignore.

Modern marketing is done with the use of the internet these days. This type of marketing is also called digital marketing.  Digital marketing includes Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Social Media Marketing (SMM) and many more.

Search Engine Optimization is an organic form of marketing wherein; it helps the firm’s website to rank better on the specific keywords on Google Search. Whereas in SEM, you can promote your website on the search results in the form of an ad. Both the concepts are very different from each other. It is always preferred to perform SEO instead of SEM for your website. You can learn more about this in detail on this link.

A combination of traditional and modern marketing is used by firms to get the highest benefits of their marketing efforts. For the Lawyers niche, traditional marketing wouldn’t be useful. This is because traditional marketing is for the mass audience, whereas modern or digital marketing caters to your firm’s target audience.

Here are some SEO strategies for Law Firms to increase organic traffic to your website. Before that, let’s understand the mistake that lawyers makes in marketing their services.

6 Marketing Mistakes made by lawyers

Marketing for Lawyers on online front requires a dedicated and continuous effort. The firm needs to focus on different things. There are various mistakes that lawyers commit while they do online marketing for their firms. These mistakes are:

1. Not spending enough time on marketing efforts

As a lawyer, it is challenging to examine, as to how much time should you spend on marketing. You should at least spend 200 hours per year of your time on your marketing efforts. You can utilize this time on various organic marketing approaches mentioned in this article below.

2. Being limited to industry exposure

Industry exposure is connecting with different people in the same industry. Meeting other lawyers, attending law conferences, giving interviews are some activities that the lawyers in Australia limit themselves. This limited exposure might not bring more significant benefit to the organization. The internet marketing community has grown widely. For you to survive in business, you must be visible to people searching for firms like yours.

3. Not knowing your target audiences

If you are not sure about who can be your clients and to whom you can cater to, you will not be able to reach them, and this will reduce your chances to acquire new clients. Also, by this, you lose your time and money on such marketing efforts. You need to carefully analyze your target audiences by knowing their needs and preferences.

4. Poor website design

Your website is a reflection of your services and your brand. It must offer the opportunity to your prospects to position your firm securely as an expert in your field. For this, you need a well-designed website with informational and engaging content. Tabs on your website must indicate the pages where the visitors wish to visit for specific information.

5. Not auditing your website frequently

To stay on the top of your niche, you must continuously reevaluate your site or hire some agency to make changes as per the latest updates. Your web presence must suit your brand identity. If you do not audit your website frequently, you tend to lower your chances of ranking on the top in the search engines like Google.

6. Failure in measuring marketing results

When you do not measure the results of your marketing campaigns, you wouldn’t be able to understand which marketing efforts are paying you well and which are just a waste of time and money. You can utilize these results for your future campaigns.

While you are willing to grow by using organic marketing, here I present to you the most used and trusted organic method for marketing. You can do Search Engine Optimization for Lawyers for increasing your visibility amongst your prospective clients.

Search Engines like Google are some easy source to drive traffic to your Law Firm website in Australia. As per research, 96% of people looking for legal advice in Australia, search for it on search engines and among them, 74% of people visit the law firms website to know more and then take action on the same.

There are techniques by which you can win the space on Google search results. 

• Using these techniques, you can manage to rank your website at a higher position on Google by yourself.
• Also, by doing this, you can screen out bad proposals by different SEO agencies.

Organic Marketing Tips for Law Firms in Australia

Understand How Google Works for Legal Queries

The results that Google shows, changes on every search. When searching for anything, you find a variety of results on Google. Same happens for legal services firm too. 

For example, when one types a query on Google like “Law Firms in Australia”, he can see different results like:

• 4 paid ads
• 3 Google maps results
• 10 Organic results

Out of the 10 organic results, most of them are aggregators sites. There is a lot of competition for the remaining spots, so, this reduces your website’s chance to be visible on the first page. 

The aggregators’ sites are well ranked on Google as they are highly rated and are a trustable source. So, rather than fighting for a spot on Google, you can list on the aggregators’ site. By doing this, you can drive their traffic to your website.

Examples of aggregators website for the keyword “Law Firms in Australia” are:

• You’ve Entered Law Land
• Financial Review

On these sites, you can rank well and manage to get the traffic towards your website.

You can also advertise on these aggregators website. By doing this, you can reduce the cost of advertisement as compared to advertising on Google search ads.

Optimize your Website on Local Search

Businesses like law firms are highly local. Prospects tend to search for a local attorney or a local lawyer when in need of one. Being available on the local searches will help you increase your visibility and competitiveness. You can register on the following platforms to be available on local searches. It is local SEO for lawyers in Australia.

1. Google My Business (GMB)

GMB is the highest reached platform as it comes on the search results in the maps section. These are localized results, and they come as per the searchers’ location details.

You can register your business with GMB. After you fill in the details, Google sends you the verification code via postcard, and after that verification, you can fill in the other information about your business. As per your business location and reviews, it will showcase your company’s website on its maps section.

2. Local Directories

Local directories work as an online phone book that associates your website with the physical location. For “Local Businesses in Australia”, there are directories like “ShowMe Local”, “True Local” and many more which rank well while searching for local businesses in Australia.

3. Law Directories

These directories get traffic from people searching for lawyers only so; these local lawyers directories become more specific. For “Lawyers in Australia”, there are law directories like “Australian Lawyers Directory” and “Find Law Australia” that rank well and are considered as the best sites for local lawyers information.

Targeting the Keywords Based on the Intent

You can search for keywords that suit best to your website from various free keywords search tools like Uber Suggest, Google Adwords – Keyword Planner tool and Keywords Everywhere tool. The keyword-based on Intent refers to the searcher’s purpose while searching for the query.

There are 3 types of keywords that you must have on your website. These types of keywords are:

1. Money Keyword

A searcher’s Intent when he types a money keyword is that he is thinking of making a purchase. The money keywords must land on the sales page of your website.

For Lawyers (if you operate in Melbourne city), money keywords can be “Lawyers Melbourne”, “Family Lawyers Melbourne” and such keywords that will directly lead to the money content of the website.

2. Discovery Keyword

Here, the searcher is searching for the information that is related to your service. The information can be related to the services that you offer or about specific guidelines in your niche. The discovery keywords can land to your services page or your blog page.

For Lawyers, discovery keywords can be “Difference between Lawyer and Solicitor” or “How to Become a Lawyer in Australia”. These keywords showcase that they want to know certain information relating to your field of expertise.

3. Attention Keywords

The searcher’s Intent while asking this query is to have information relating to a particular case. So here, they search for information for getting a reference for themselves for a specific case. The attention keywords are generally used on the blog page of the website.

For Lawyers, attention keyword would be like “Property, Stock and Business Agents Act 2002” where the person is searching for a reference for a particular case. 

You must use all the 3 types of keywords on your website. The main goal is to rank on the money keyword, but, you can also rank on the other keywords and interlink them to the money page.

Having all types of Keywords is preferable since the searcher’s volume for money keywords is far less than the one’s searching for discovery keyword. Also, people searching for discovery keywords are less than people searching for attention keywords. 

So, by ranking on all the 3 kinds of keywords, you can get the highest visibility and traffic.

Invest in a Good Website

A good website design creates an excellent first impression among visitors. Over 94% of good first impressions are related to the design of the website. When the site is well-designed, it builds trust for the website among its visitors. The design of the website must have the following things:

1. Design the Structure Based on Your Firm’s Speciality

The website’s design – that includes the website’s URL, Title, Content and Navigation based on the type of the Law Firm. There are 3 types of law firms for which different SEO tactics can be used, the types are:

I. Single Service Law Firm

If your firm specializes in any 1 type of Australian Law like Family law, then structure your entire website around your speciality only. For this, you can do the following things:

 – Use Exact Match Domain (EMD) for your website. This means, if you are specializing in family law, have your website domain name as www.familylawaustralia.com or www.familylawyers.com this will help you get a better rank. It can only be done if you are planning to specialize in a particular niche.

 – For a specialized niche, you can have pages dedicated to the informational content about the specialized niche. In that content, you can have discovery keywords and attention keywords for that niche.

II. Multiple Service Law Firm

A multiple service law firm specializes in different aspects of the law, such as family law, criminal law, commercial law, etc. For such firms, you can use the following SEO tactics:

 – Here, use the firm’s name as the domain name. It will create a brand around the firm’s name. 

 – Prepare different pages for each service that you offer and describe each function in the best possible form with the informational content.

 – In this informational content, you can include various discovery keywords and attention keywords to rank on those content too.

III. Multiple Locations Law Firm

A firm offering its services in multiple locations like Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth etc. is a Multiple Location Law firm.

 – Here, use the firm’s name as the domain name. This will create a brand around the firm’s name.  

 – For such law firms, prepare different pages for each location that it caters its services to and then, within the locations, create service pages. By this, the site will be able to rank on different places with different pages.

2. Develop Website Content that Attracts People

Your SEO success highly depends on the content you have on your website. The material on your site must be unique and must be interesting to get more readers. Following things can be done for engaging content on your website:

I. Assign Keywords to Your Content

As discussed above, you can divide all the 3 kinds of keywords in different content on your website. You can use these keywords on your: 

– Page URL (if it’s a single service firm then on the main domain, i.e. www.familylawyers.com or if it is a multiple service firm then, www.retro.com/familylayers), 

– Title (Example: Top Family Lawyers in Melbourne)

– Image Alt Text (Top Family Lawyers in Melbourne)

– Content (Have a minimum 500 words article wherein, you can include keywords 4-5 times)

II. Create a Blog Page

One of the best ways to showcase your expertise, talents and cases is by writing a blog. The legal world is always changing, and everyone can’t keep track of it. Hence, by having a blog, you can spread the information and drive traffic to your website with these blogs.

Blogging relevant content will give you an edge over the competitors. You can also provide backlinks from different websites to your content and then interlink it with your money content.

3. Include Call-to-Action on Your Website

Call-to-Action on your website directs the visitor’s next action. This improves the conversion rate on your site. You can have a contact form or lead generation form on your website for Call-to-Action.

4. Make the Website Responsive

The responsive design of the site states that it can be viewed in all devices like desktop, mobile phone or tablet. People these days tend to visit websites using their phones, so the site needs to be responsive.

Build Quality Links for your website

Authority of a site is determined by the number and quality of links directed towards it. Google ranks sites with such quality links. Building such links is a long process, but it does benefit the website for the long term. There are different types of links that you can have for your site. They are:

1. Forum Links

Being a part of related forums, answering questions relating to your expertise and then generating links through these forums will give your site a better authority. As a Lawyer in Australia, you can be a part of forums like “Law Answers” and “Expat Forum Australia”.

2. Social Media Links

You can create links on social media by having it on the company account and with that, creating a buzz about your website on this channel. 

As a lawyer, you can create a buzz by having exciting content about the recent updates in the niche and put it in a readable form. This increases the visitor’s interest towards the website.

3. Link Outreach

This is the most potent “white hat” SEO method that you can use to rank your website at a higher position on Google. Link outreach is reaching out to the sites that post related content and inserting links directed towards your website in their content.

You can add these links in their blog’s comment, or you can write a guest post on their website with a link, or you can have advertisements on their website that directs towards your website.

For a Law Firm, you could write articles on the other websites that talk about the recent reforms in the lawyers’ niche. You could also insert a link on the local news subscriptions websites like Lawyers Weekly.

4. Inter-Linking

Linking all your website pages to each other is Inter-Linking. This helps in passing the valuable link juice from your blog content to your money content.

Analyze the Results of your Marketing Efforts

Measuring marketing efforts of your firms helps you evaluate the returns on your firm’s investment on it in terms of time, money and other resources.

You can measure your SEO outputs in different forms like:

1. Check the Organic Visitors

After using the techniques mentioned above, the traffic on your website would have increased. You can check this on the Google Analytics tool (in the overview section of the audience) or you can use similar web for getting better data.

2. Track the Leads Through Organic Search

To check the number of leads generated from your website, you can visit the Google Analytics tool or Similar Web. For Google Analytics, go to Conversions > Goals > Overview. Here, you can check the number of goals completed and track the number of leads through each goal.

3. Check the Overall Search Engine Visibility

For your website to rank high on Google, it takes a few months. You can check search engine visibility on SEMrush. Here, you can check the keywords on which your site is ranking. It also estimates the traffic volume and value on your website.

By using the above SEO tactics and altering your website with latest Google updates, you can rank your website higher in search results. The Google space in Legal niche is competitive, but, you can rank well with the right SEO techniques.