Improving Conversion Rate Of Your Social Media Traffic

September 27, 2018 / Ads & Funnels / by Kathy Alice

Businesses that rely a lot on SEO and Google Adwords (or Google Ads as it is known now) for paying customers face a pretty daunting problem – the cost and time to acquire customers can be high. But these are tried and true lucrative channels if done right. On the flip side, monetizing Social Media has always been a struggle for many.

And it’s true, visitors from social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn may not always have the same purchasing intent as search visitors. So while they are good for building traction and followers, converting these visitors may seem like a tough call. But companies are doing it. One study found that the average conversion rate is 9.21% with Facebook Ads. This is way higher than the average landing page conversion rate of 2.35% across all industries.

If your social media campaigns have not been yielding such results yet, here are a few tips to improve your customer targeting and increasing conversion rate of your social media visitors.

Picking the right Social Media platform

Social media marketing requires a great deal of patience and investment. You need to focus on the key platforms that make sense for your business and your target market. If your market is Gen Z, Instagram, which is most popular among 18-24 year olds, might be a great fit. The type of company you are makes a difference too. Linkedin is popular with B2B (business to business) companies and service providers.

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Forget Page Load Time, Say Hello to First Meaningful Paint

May 11, 2018 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice

If I were to tell you that your homepage loads in 10 seconds, would you worry? After all there is study after study concluding that site visitors get impatient and leave if a site doesn’t load in 3 seconds.

So is a total page load time of 10 seconds a showstopper? It depends.

The challenge we have when it comes to page speed and websites today, is that web pages are getting more complex, more image rich, all which takes a toll on page load time.

A straight forward simple HTML page of text from the 90s will load much more quickly, but your user might just leave anyway out of boredom. So what do we do? We really can’t turn back the clock.

The answer is that you optimize your page speed for above the fold.

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Domain Forwarding and SEO

March 5, 2018 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice

Updated March 5, 2018

Ever worked with a lead management marketing system? There are many out there, for a monthly fee, you get a website complete with a choice of landing pages, auto-responders (often prewritten for you) and a contact management system. They work well with online advertising; where your banner, PPC ads drive traffic directly to your pre-built landing pages, generating leads for you.

So what about setting up your own domain and pointing it to your marketing system? Not a problem, for $10 or so, you buy a domain and then forward it to your marketing system URL.

This won’t cause any SEO problems for my new domain, right? Well, “it depends”.

Little did I know that when I wrote those words in 2011 I would get a flood of questions about Domains, SEO and redirects! This expanded post will help answer them!

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Squarespace SEO Review

February 9, 2018 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice

Since my SEO review of WiX attracted a lot of attention, today I’m doing another review of another popular website builder, Squarespace.

As with WiX, Squarespace also offers beautiful templates that makes it easy to create a professional looking website without paying big bucks to a developer to create it for you.

The flip side with any of these website builders is that you lose the ability to completely customize your site, including in some cases, the ability to fine tune certain on page SEO factors.

But when it comes to Squarespace, we aren’t talking about a big brand with an equally big budget looking to capitalize on every competitive SEO edge possible. The typical Squarespace user is a small business that needs “good enough” SEO.

So the question is, is Squarespace “good enough” and what are some of the “must knows” when it comes to SEO and Squarespace?

That’s what I’m going to cover in this post.

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A Conversation with Gary Illyes

January 25, 2018 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice

I had the great privilege to have coffee with Gary Illyes (@methode), a Google webmaster trends analyst dedicated to creating a better search experience for users. Well known in the SEO industry, Gary often speaks at search conferences and is frequently interviewed and quoted in the major SEO blogs.

Most interviews with Gary focus on big changes at Google, such as mobile first indexing (which yes, is still coming). These are important but tend to be a higher level conversation. I wanted to ask Gary more tactical questions related to current issues I’m seeing in the daily work I do as a SEO. So the below dialog covers JavaScript, International SEO, GSC URL parameters, a potential change to robots.txt and more. If you have an interest in technical SEO, there should definitely be a nugget or two of interest. So keep reading!

The image above is the upper portion of a lovely painting titled “Casual Conversations” by Richard Rappaport (Own work) [license CC BY-SA 4.0], the full image can be found on the Wikimedia Commons

Speaking of Casual Conversations …..

One thing I do want to make clear is that the Q and A below is not an exact transcription. It was derived from the gist of our conversation and I’ve paraphased, but I’ve done my best to accurately reflect his comments.

Now that is out of the way, let’s dive in.

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New Google Search Console is here!

January 11, 2018 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice

On January 8, 2018, Google announced that the new Google Search Console will be rolling out to all users. This new version has been in beta for a few months, soon it will be available to everyone.

One very exciting aspect of the new GSC is that keyword and ranking data will be available for up to 16 months! A big improvement over the old limited 90 days of data that we used to get.

Keep an eye out for an email from Google with the subject “Introducing the new Google Search Console” that will notify you when you have access.

Introducing the new Google Search Console

I have a client that has access so I took a tour and have screenshots to share with you in this post.

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