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How to Measure and Monitor your SEO for FREE

8 tips on how to keep track of your SEO for FREE

You can offer the best services or goods in your marketplace, but if those who are searching for what you sell find your competitor online instead of you, you will likely not earn their business. The research shows most consumers first look online when they are interested in making a purchase. The statistics are clear; over 80% of consumers will do their own search online well before they pull out their wallet to spend their money.

 

In order to know where you stand in regards to your competitors, it’s crucial you measure your SEO (search engine optimization) to establish your position, and to monitor it on an on-going basis. If you have the budget, SEO is one of the most dominant factors in your online marketing campaign and allocating the funds to have it professionally managed, will be some of the most valuable money you spend towards driving traffic to your site and bringing potential clients directly in touch with your brand. However, if you are not yet in a position to afford expert assistance with your SEO marketing, all is not lost. With some time and effort, you can use the following free tools to identify your ranking and monitor your position. For 6 free techniques you can put into practice today to power your SEO upwards, you can read our article 6 Simple SEO Habits to Increase Website Rankings & Traffic.

1. Google Analytics

You can sign up in minutes to begin taking advantage of this powerful, free tool. Google Analytics offers daily traffic statistics which you can sort and organize:  per keywords, per visitor, per location, per referring website, per search engine, and by any time scale. Packed with useful features, it is a must have for anyone interested in measuring and tracking their website traffic and SEO progress.

2. Google Adwords' Keyword Tool

This powerful and free online resource allows you to see the number of searches that Google receives nationally, and internationally, for any specific keyword phrases.  We recommend checking off the box that says "Exact" searches, not broad or matching, for the most accurate and relevant statistics. What this means to you is that now you can confidently know which keywords your target audience is searching for the most when they're looking for brands or businesses like yours online. We use this to help decide which keywords would be most profitable to target in our SEO campaigns for ourselves and our clients.

3. Understand the Power of Search Results Ranking.

On any Google search page in organic results:  #1 gets 33% of clicks, #2 gets 22%, #3 gets 11%, #4 gets 7%, on down until #10 gets 1-3% share of link traffic. This shows how skewed the numbers are toward the top of the first page of Google. Because traffic is so heavily funneled to the first few listings, its easy to see how companies can become forgotten when they are not actively managing their SEO and staying on top of their ability to be found. Keep in mind that these numbers vary widely based on the industry you're in and how likely it is that people searching will be satisfied with the first search results versus continuing down the search results page looking for something the other results aren't providing.

4. MicroSiteMasters.com

This extremely valuable service provides Search Engine Results Page (SERP) rank reporting and tracking keywords in Google, Bing, and Yahoo, and their service is free for first 10 keywords. 10 keywords are more than sufficient to get started measuring the progress of your SEO efforts, and if you're not using a tool like this, you need to start now so you can begin understanding where you rank and how your rank changes over time.

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5. HubSpot's Website Grader

In less than 30 seconds, HubSpot issues a report that analyzes all of your online marketing efforts, not just on your website, and gives you a Marketing Grade on a 1-100 scale. It doesn’t stop there; it recommends the next steps, in order of priority that you should take to improve your strategy. By assessing over 30 factors, HubSpot offers a comprehensive assessment and then provides a plan of action, complete with online resources to help put their recommendations into practice.

6. MajesticSEO.com

This website offers a free tool to track and analyze off-site backlink health of any website online, by total history or by recent growth. Use the power of MajesticSEO’s enormous link intelligence database to compare your backlink power to that of your competitors.

7. Google's "Site:" search

I use this tool everyday, even when just browsing because it's so powerful. Just try typing “site:examplesite.com" into the Google search bar, adding in a website use regularly, and then look at total search results for the number of pages indexed by Google. This normally tells you, with a fair amount of accuracy the total number of pages on any website, which can be used as a rough indicator of their on-site SEO credibility in Google. The total number of pages a website has can also roughly approximate how well established and trusted your website is according to Google search engine’s algorithm, this is because the longer a website has existed and the more valuable content they have online, the more it lends to the idea that they know what they're talking about, assuming that the content is relevant, unique, and that there's a decent amount of it on every page.

For even more fun, try adding search terms with a space just before where the "site:" appears, and you'll be amazed at how useful it is to be doing a Google search of pages ONLY on the website listed in the example. ("site:example.com")

8. Use "Page Source" / "View Source"

This is a simple, fast way to determine which keywords your webpages, and your competitors' webpages, are targeting. This is the basic information you need to assess where your current SEO is focused and vital to your understanding of what type of traffic you are attracting—or failing to attract. "Page Source" or "View Source" is a browser tool option which you can access in most browsers by doing right-click on the webpage on PCs or Option-click on Macs; it also appears in the browser's menu. Select this option and you will see the HTML code for the page. In the code, near the top of most webpages you should be able to see or find using CTRL+F the following text meta tags; look for <title>, <meta description >, <meta keywords > tags.

Pay attention to the first words that appear in these meta tags. These keywords can be used to analyze your competition and see what keywords they are telling Google to target for each of their webpages. The most important is the title tag, but the description tag is also very important to Google, because this is the text that appears in Google search results. Conversely, be sure your meta tags are telling search engines the right story about who you are and what content or keywords each webpage is primarily relevant to.

 

Based in Nevada, our Las Vegas web design team would be happy to answer any questions you may have about SEO. For more resources and helpful tips sign up for our newsletter or send us a message telling us what topics you'd like to see covered here. For now, don’t hesitate to get started with these useful resources that you can access free of charge anytime. We recommend always getting professional feedback and direction at the start of any SEO campaign, no matter how small, to ensure that you're not making any mistakes that could be costing you valuable traffic. We offer free consultations and are happy to educate our customers on the value of a well designed SEO campaign.


8 SEO tips for blogs

8 SEO Blogging Tips for Better Search Engine Rankings

 

Blog with Purpose for Success You Can Measure!

Blogging is something that's easy for anyone to do, if writing comes easy for you it can be as easy as typing an email message and clicking "Post"! But unless you're blogging with with a specific SEO related purpose or goal in mind and using easy to remember SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques in your blog posts, you might just be completely missing several huge opportunities to rank your website high in search engines for the popular search terms your audience is using and thus losing valuable traffic and business.

As a Las Vegas SEO company we've talked to many large and small companies about how to add value to their websites to improve rankings, and you'd be surprised at how little the vast majority of brands know about optimizing their blogs and content to rank high in search.

Here are 8 easy to remember SEO tips and blogging strategies that will be guaranteed to improve your website's traffic and rankings in the searches your customers are performing every day.

1. Know your top 10 keywords.

AiWP-SEO-starMake sure you know what your top 10 keyword phrases are and know where you rank for them. Don’t forget that including a city name, using a different word order, or adding an “s” or “ing” after a word makes it a completely new keyword in Google’s eyes. To Google, “Las Vegas SEO”, “Vegas SEO”, and “LV SEO” are three completely different keywords. If you have no idea what interested users type into search engines when looking for information on companies in your industry, then you’re unable to target these keywords and make sure you show up when they are searching for you. For example, if you are a plumber and you are coming up when people search “clogged pipes”, but only 10% of users use that search, then well over half of your potential leads are finding your competitor, instead of you.

 

2. Target 1-2 keywords per post.

When Google is deciding what webpage to show for a given search term, it usually won’t focus on webpages that cover a broad range of topics. Google is trying to give visitors the most relevant and focused content that relates to the keyword phrase that was searched. Keep the majority of your pages and blog posts focused on just 1 or 2 keywords at most when developing your content. Feel free to mention relevant topics but keep your message and content focused, visitors and search engines will thank and reward you for it.

 

3. Match content to keywords.

When it comes to looking credible, there’s nothing better than saying you’re going to do something and then following through and doing just that. Google will use the same logic when analyzing your use of keywords in your headers and meta tags in comparison your actual text content. If your page title says “Las Vegas Web Design” but the text content on the page never uses that keyword phrase, it will seem like something is not in alignment and all of your other SEO efforts will not be as effective.

 

4. Use 400+ words per page.

The length of a post is one of the factors search engines use in determining how valuable your content is and how high to rank it. There are several reasons why this will help make your blog post more legitimate and credible in the eyes of search engines, but all you need to understand to be able to use it to your advantage is that writing between at least 400 and 600 words will give your post a significant boost.

 

5. Blog weekly.

If your website does not currently have a blog, you are missing out on a principal opportunity to boost your SEO and establish yourself as a trusted authority in your industry. Blogging has many positive impacts on the usefulness of your website, but it also is great for your SEO. It adds fresh new content to your website, gives you the opportunity to target many new keywords, and also adds to the overall volume of relevant and high value content on your site. The more you blog the better, but setting a once a week goal is an easier habit to set and stick with than over doing it and getting discouraged and not doing anything. Set a realistic goal for creating content on a regular basis and you'll see your rankings climb.

 

6. Only use unique text content.

Text content is the life blood of SEO, and you will need a lot of it if you’re going to rank well in Google. However, you must never copy content from other websites to fill in the content areas of your site. Doing so will mark you as a copy-cat in Google’s eyes and the text will retain no value. Google rewards websites that present new valuable information to visitors. If you must use quotes or excerpts from other website, do so very sparingly and understand that it adds nothing to your SEO value.

 

7. Use Social profiles.

At a bare minimum, if you don’t have a basic social media profile established on major social sites, it’s going to be hard to convince search engines that your company is professional and up to date. However you feel about social networking, you need to be on social sites for 2 reasons: 1. your consumers are there (and if they don’t find you, they will find your competitor) and 2. SMO (social media optimization) is playing an ever increasing role in SEO (search engine optimization) and doesn’t show any sign of stopping.

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8. Users comes first.

In other words, make your SEO adapt to your preferred user experience, not the other way around. Your website and blog content should never sound like an advertisement or key word bulletin. Your content should present your services and expertise in an engaging way that gives your visitors new value and makes them want to tell others about you. Adding keywords and links should be done in a natural way that blends in with or enhances your content and message.

In fact, consumers shouldn't even notice your techniques at all. Users should come away from interacting with your content with the sense that they have learned something valuable, been entertained, or both; not with the feeling they were overtly marketed to in a way that's pushy or promotional. They want to gather information and take value from your site, not be “talked at” or “sold to”. That's why they're on your web site in the first place, instead of going directly to your order page or into your brick and mortar store.

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