Category Archives: Online Search

How to Fix Your Bounce Rate (Hint: It Has Nothing to Do With a Rubber Ball!)

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Biz Support, Business Development, Content, Content Marketing, Copywriting, Customer Relationships, Marketing Tips, Online Search
(65 visitors with 1 visits today)

bounce rateWhen you’re not talking about marketing, “bounce” brings back memories of a lot of fun things you did as a kid—jumping around in an inflatable bounce house or playing a game of jacks or dribbling a basketball or tossing a small pink ball against a wall. But “bounce rate” is a whole lot less fun and a lot more confusing when it comes to website analytics.

What is website bounce rate…what’s good and what’s not?

Okay, let’s get this out of the way. Bounce rate is the percentage of single page visits (or web sessions). It’s the number of visits in which a person leaves your website from the landing page without browsing any further. If you  want to know what your bounce rate is, Google analytics calculates and reports the bounce rate of a web page and bounce rate of a website. Continue reading →

6 Tips to Improve Your Local SEO

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Biz Systems, Content, Local Search, Marketing Tips, Online Search, Search Results, SEO
(98 visitors with 1 visits today)

Local SEOYour prospective customers are looking for local businesses like yours online. When they search for a business to meet their needs or desires, they enter terms into search engines and get a list of relevant results. Whether or not your business is among those results depends on your local SEO.

It’s true that Google knows where a user is when they search. So it will skew search results depending on where they’re located for their convenience. For example, if I’m in Atlanta, Georgia, and I search for a Bikram yoga studio, the results will show studios in Atlanta more prominently than studios in New York City.

But that doesn’t mean you can afford to ignore local factors when it comes to SEO. Local SEO is sometimes considered trickier than general SEO simply because additional factors are taken into consideration. The following tips will improve your local SEO and make a positive difference in driving traffic to your website. Continue reading →

How to Increase Referral Traffic to Your Website

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Biz Support, Business Development, Content, Content Marketing, Local Search, Marketing Tips, Online Search, Targeting
(91 visitors with 1 visits today)

referral trafficIf you’re looking to attract more leads and generate more business from your online marketing efforts, your primary goal should be to drive more traffic to your website. Low traffic means not enough people are checking out what you have to offer. Higher traffic means more potential customers. One way to boost your traffic relatively quickly is to increase your referral traffic. What is referral traffic, and why is it important?

The traffic that comes to your website can generally be categorized into four main types:

Direct Traffic consists predominantly of visitors who typed your URL directly into their browser or accessed your website from a bookmarked link. Most direct traffic comes from people who are already aware of your brand. So direct traffic can be increased by boosting your brand awareness, which is a long game strategy.

Organic Traffic is when a visitor arrives at your website by searching terms in a search engine, such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo. Organic traffic can be increased through search engine optimization (SEO), a set of strategies that makes your website more visible in search results. Increasing your organic traffic takes time, effort, and patience.

Paid Traffic is driven to your website through advertising, such as pay per click (PPC) campaigns in Google Adwords or banner ads. Paid traffic requires a budget that covers the cost per click or display as well the cost of an expert to ensure you’re optimizing your paid campaigns effectively.

Referral Traffic includes visitors who arrived at your site by clicking a link on another website. If another website links out to your site as a relevant reference or resource, this can drive clicks to your site and it can also enhance your SEO. If the site linking out to your website is considered authoritative on the topic, the link signals to search engines that you must have quality content. So the potential benefits of pursuing more referral traffic are at least twofold: You’re positioning your website as more legitimate both to the people browsing online and to search engines.

How can you generate more referral traffic to your website?

Continue reading →

5 SEO Tricks That No Longer Work

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Biz Systems, Content, Copywriting, Marketing Tips, Online Search, Search Results, SEO, Techy Love
(207 visitors with 1 visits today)

SEO concept retro symbol isolated vector illustration

SEO changes all the time. Staying in the know when it comes to search engine updates and best practices is far more than a full-time job. However, if you want to avoid getting penalized by Google or falling for inflated promises based on outdated tricks, it’s important to know which one-time “tried and true” tactics can get you into trouble now.

Here are 5 old-school SEO tricks you can skip, because they not only don’t work — they work against you. Continue reading →

Google Is About to Penalize Your Popups!

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Content Marketing, Development, Marketing Tips, Mobile, Online Search, Search Results, SEO, Techy Love
(125 visitors with 1 visits today)

As far as marketing tools go, popups are getting on in years. Though they remain incredibly popular today, popups have become an increasingly annoying fixture of the web experience, especially as we transition into a mobile-dominant browsing space. Because of the limited screen real-estate afforded to most mobile devices, even popups that only took up a modest portion of the screen on desktop usually become full-screen on mobile, blocking out all content until you win a game of “Find the X” and manage to close the thing.

screenshot-2016-09-18-11-03-03 Continue reading →

How to Design a Search Page That Goes Above and Beyond

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Design, Development, Online Search, Search Results, Techy Love
(94 visitors with 1 visits today)

mart49-11When bouncing around the interwebs accomplishing the various tasks of my day, I am often confronted with a strange disparity. I’ll stumble across a competently or even beautifully designed site, but when I attempt to use it’s search function I find that the search results page hasn’t been given the kind of love and attention that the main pages or posts of the site have.

This is a major missed opportunity. The person who lands on your search page has already decided that your site is one worth delving deeper into, and to make the process of finding the info they are looking for difficult or unattractive is to take a prime lead-gen opportunity and squander it.

How do you take a generic search results page and make it sparkle? Stick around and I’ll give you a few pointers! Continue reading →

What’s Up With Google?

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Development, Online Search, Search Results, SEO, Techy Love
(164 visitors with 1 visits today)

Google-Fonts-LogoIt’s well known that Google is a company constantly in flux. Whether they’re updating their algorithm, rolling out new features or whole new sections of their service, or buying up smaller companies left and right, staying still has never been in the Google playbook.

Lately, they’ve really stepped up the pace of change, and so we’re going to take some time to check and see what the latest is all about, and whether it really is the greatest.

So stay tuned, and we’ll give you the skinny. Continue reading →