Google algorithm updates are considered something that marketers are always wary of. So, every time Google rolls out an algorithm update, they become nervous and have no option but to roll with the punches. However, Google releases hundreds of minor adjustments and a few significant tweaks to its algorithm every year.

In this article, we will discuss your ideal strategy in the wake of such updates so that it does not affect your traffic and rankings. We will also explain how you can use past algorithm updates to understand the current trends and deal with them.

In the past decade, the core objective of Google algorithm updates was to prevent manipulation of search engine algorithms by unscrupulous companies, so only the relevant sites may appear on the top SERPs resulting in a better search experience for the users.

What Are Google Algorithm Updates?

Now that Google has taken search experience to the next level, the search engine not only wants its users to get relevant results for their search queries, but it also wants them to be happy with the websites appearing on top of SERPs.

The focus of the previous updates used to be:

1. Up-to-date, unique, and relevant content
2. Trustworthiness of the website
3. Link quality
4. User experience (download speed, ease of navigation, and glitch-free checkouts, etc.)

It usually affects how a web page ranks on Google.

Google also wants to make sure its users love the content and their overall experience on the website.

So, all the authoritativeness and the backlinks are useless if the website doesn't offer a good user experience. So, for better or worse, The focus is now shifting towards user experience.

It's crucial to know since we want our readers not just to be ready for a particular update to be rolled out in the future but any algorithm update that Google may announce in the forthcoming years.

Apart from the regular algorithm updates, Google announces some sweeping updates every year to prepare proactively and update their websites accordingly.

A Brief Overview of Previous Google Algorithm Updates

Let's discuss some significant algorithm updates that changed many practices and changed the landscape of SEO across the web world.

1. Google Panda Update

The first serious update that shook the web world was the Panda, which Google announced in 2011. It was aimed at penalizing poor-quality content that offered very little value and was overstuffed with keywords.

Now, let's discuss the context of this update. Google announced this update at a time when most companies engaged in content farming. It was all about poor-quality content created for search engines. It mainly was irrelevant, least helpful for the users, and keyword stuffed. The aim of writing such articles was to game the search engine algorithms to win top rankings. As soon as Google decided to deal with this sneaky practice, Panda was rolled out to penalize those sites.

The timeline for the Panda algorithm update indicates that Google targeted thin content, high ad to content ratio, and various other quality issues. Google rolled it out in a phased manner in different countries, and finally, in September 2012, Panda #20 was announced, which was a significant update, affecting 2.4% of the queries.

Again in May 2014, Google announced a major Panda update that affected 7.5% of English language queries, and with these updates, Google almost tackled duplicate and poor quality content. Digital marketing teams across the globe started creating high-quality content that offers real value to the users. With this, the nefarious practice of keyword stuffing took a back seat and was replaced with the natural inclusion of relevant keywords.

2. Penguin Update

Google announced the Penguin update just a year after Panda was first rolled out in 2011, but its aim was entirely different. It was launched to deal with another significant menace in the web world— artificial link building used as a “hack” to win top ranks.

You must be familiar with the fact that Google has been taking backlinks as a sign of authority, popularity, and trustworthiness of a site since its inception. It openly uses it as a ranking signal.

Some unscrupulous webmasters decided to take advantage and started using it as a hack to rank on top manipulating Google's love for backlinks. Low quality and spammy backlinks led to reduced search results on Google as low-quality websites started ranking high. Google took it head-on with the Penguin update and started penalizing the sites involved in this practice. Soon a significant shift happened, and business owners and webmasters started tracking their links and removing low-quality, irrelevant and spammy links.

3. The Hummingbird Update

Google announced the Hummingbird update to provide a better experience to the searcher by showing the related results. For example, if someone searched for “small business,” Google will use different search intents to show the results. So, the results may include websites offering small business loans, business consultancy and networking services, small business ideas, small business trends, and government websites that connect entrepreneurs with lenders. For example, if you run a cake shop, you can optimize your website for the following keywords:

• Cakeshop
• Bakery
• Cupcakes
• Cheesecake
• Birthday cake
• Vegan bakery
• Italian bakery
• Sweetshop
• Pastry shop

Even though the results don’t look like an exact match to your queries, they are relevant and valuable for the searcher. So, this up-date expected marketers to focus on related keywords as well apart from the main keywords.

How to Proactively Prepare Yourself Against Future Algorithm Updates?

If you want to keep your website “update proof” and don’t want to lose out on traffic because of every damn update, the best strategy is to learn from the past updates.

Here are a few tips you can proactively use to protect your website against any future algorithm updates:

1. Understand the Basics of Google Algorithm Updates

You can understand the central objective of Google update, and to a great extent, it was explained by Ben Gomes, Google’s Vice-President of Engineering, “our goal is to get you the exact answer you’re searching for faster.”

So, relevancy, accuracy, and rapidity are what Google wants to achieve with these updates. It makes understanding the search intent of the user essential. Marketers should focus on relevance and user experience, and it will cover almost everything Google expects from your website.

So, let’s begin with user experience. First, check how long it takes for your website to load. Have a look at the navigation. Is it user-friendly? Can you get to the sections you need to go in a maximum of three clicks? Are too many ads bothering you or preventing you from seeing the content on your web pages?

The recent changes made to Google’s algorithm point that sites with poor user experience will also get penalized regardless of other factors that might have propelled them to the top ranks.

2. Optimize UX

As per a shocking study by Google, as page load time increases from one to 10 seconds, the bounce rate of a mobile site visitor may go up by 123%. So, if you are serious about retaining visitors to your site, you should minimize the page load time.

Reducing the number of ads, especially near the critical navigation buttons, is also a good way of optimizing the UX. It would help if you kept in mind that users won't close the three random ads and would instead close the website and move to another site.

How to Identify That a Google Algorithm Update Has Affected Your Site?

Here's a checklist you can follow to determine whether your website has been affected by a recent Google algorithm update:

1. Track Google Updates

Keep on tracking Google updates and find out if there have been any recently. Most Google algorithm updates that occur almost daily are industry-specific and their effect only in specific industry verticals. Their objective is to improve the search results. Specific algorithm updates are also referred to as core updates on the flip side, and these updates happen several times a year.

If you want to know about the latest algorithm updates and how they can affect your website, check out Moz’s list of Google algorithm updates. The following screenshot explains the updates that happened in 2021 and how they impacted search results. For example, the latest update was detected by many SEO tools in February 2021, and it was named “Featured Snippets Drop.” Its likely impact was that Google Search started showing featured snippets less often (SEL).

2. Wait For the Dust to Settle

Don't panic as soon as you sense an update taking place. Let the dust settle down, which takes around a week. It would help if you didn't react to things in the meantime. Once the data stops fluctuating, you can initiate the repair. You can refer to Google Analytics and Google Search Console after that and take cues from these channels.

3. Check Google Analytics

Now it's time to get back to Google Analytics and Google Search Console and choose different date ranges to see any traffic fluctuations. To access Search Console via GA, go to Acquisition > Search Console

Sometimes, this fluctuation can be due to an external factor such as running an email or any other promotion campaign, or a big event or holiday, so you should choose a broader date range.

If you see an overall decline in your traffic or a sharp drop in your organic sessions or leads, it can be due to a Google algorithm update.

4. Check It Across Different Landing Pages

Log in to Your Site's Google Analytics Account > Go to Acquisition > Search Console > Landing Pages

If traffic drop is sitewide, it could be due to an algorithm update.

Similarly, you can also check it across different devices.

Acquisition > Search Console > Devices > Click on Mobile

Usually, a sitewide traffic drop is a strong indication that your website has been affected by an algorithm update.

5. Perform the Preliminary Assessment: Check Google

There is another method that you can try with ease. If you feel that your website has been affected by an update, check the search landscape on Google. Also, check the current position of your website as compared to your competition:

a. Is there a significant change in the positions?
b. Which site is ranking at the position your site used to rank before?
c. Are you still ranking but in no-click search results, snippets, or paid ads?
d. Compare the rankings of your web pages to those that are now ranking well. Compare the keywords you are targeting versus them? Find out if they are using any keyword variations or content strategies?
e. Have they implemented any specific landing page strategies you haven’t tried so far which may help you boost your rankings?

6. Check Your Backlinks Profile

Sometimes you may notice a drop in traffic due to the presence of spammy links. As Google may penalize your site anytime if they detect spammy links, it's essential to check your backlink profile regularly. You can use Google Search Console for auditing your backlinks. You can also manage your backlink profile and improve the overall health of your backlinks through GSC.

Here is the step-by-step process of checking your backlink profile using SEO SpyGlass and Google Search Control:

A. Get the comprehensive list of your backlinks

Open SEO SpyGlass and enter your domain name. SEO SpyGlass provides a comprehensive list of backlinks as it uses its own index to find backlinks.

For better results, you can sync your Google Analytics and Google Search Console account with SEO SpyGlass. To do this, put a tick in front of the Enable Expert Options line, and click Next.

You can also turn it on using the “Preferences drop-down” menu of the tool.

Once Google Analytics and GSC are connected to the tool, it will start retrieving the backlink data. However, the process may take some time.

B. Identify potentially harmful backlinks

Google ignores occasional bad backlinks, but an overwhelming number of suspicious backlinks may attract a manual penalty. Here is how to identify toxic backlinks.

In the tool, Go to Backlink Profile and then click the Penalty Risk section from the drop-down menu. On this screen, the tool will provide you with the estimated penalty risk for the backlink domains.

A backlink with a penalty risk of over 70% is considered a harmful and high-risk backlink. These are marked red, and you should remove those backlinks.

C. Remove toxic backlinks

The best option to remove toxic backlinks to your website is to disavow them. You can do it with the help of the Google Disavow tool. Google wants you to use this tool to inform them that these backlinks should be ignored when assessing your site for ranking purposes.

To do it, create a “disavow” file where you can collect all the toxic links and submit this file to the Google Disavow tool.

If you are using SEO SpyGlass, select the backlinks you want to remove and choose the Disavow backlinks option by right-clicking on it.

Export the file from the tool and submit it to the Google Disavow tool as we did it previously.

You may not notice any immediate impact of this activity on your backlink profile, but Google will soon start ignoring these backlinks.

You should frequently do a backlink health check for your website and remove toxic and harmful links this way.

7. Keep Google’s Resolution and Mission Statement in Mind

As emphasized above, Google wants to offer the best user experience and exact search results faster. So, if you notice a drop in rankings or traffic, check whether your website provides:

a. Excellent user experience
b. Great and compelling content
c. Excellent usability

8. Use External Google Algorithm Update Trackers

To keep yourself abreast with the latest Google algorithm updates, you may refer to the following trackers.

A. Moz Update History: This list is maintained by none other than SEO guru Rand Fishkin’s Moz. It’s a comprehensive and up-to-date list of algorithm updates so that you can identify the trend.

B. Google Webmaster Central Blog: Monitor this resource to stay updated on the latest algorithm updates, straight from Google.

C. SEJ’s Google Algorithm History: Search Engine Journals’ Google algorithm history provides you a sneak peek into the latest as well as previous updates. You can also see the updates using filters such as the year an update happened.

D. Twitter: After Matt Cutts, the most reliable source of getting information about algorithm updates and Google’s “insider information” is Twitter. Apart from Google, you can follow the likes of:

a. Danny Sullivan: @dannysullivan and @searchliaison
b. John Mueller: @JohnMu
c. Barry Schwartz @rustybrick
d. Marie Haynes @Marie_Haynes

E. SEO Tools: Apart from that, you can use the following tools to track Google algorithm updates:

a. Mozcast
b. SEMrush Sensor
c. Rank Ranger Rank Risk Index Tool
d. Accuranker ‘Grump’ Rating
e. Algoroo
f. Penguin Tool

How to Recover If Your Website Has Been Penalized by a Google Algorithm Update?

If you feel that your site has been penalized following an algorithm update, here is the step-by-step approach to recover and reclaim your lost rankings:

1. Audit Your Website and Find Its Cause

As explained above, check all previous updates and trends through update trackers, and identify what might have gone wrong. There can be several reasons for a penalty, such as —— duplicate or poor quality content, spammy and irrelevant backlinks (backlinks from other niches and industries), keyword abuse, poor navigation, poor user experience, and site usability issues, etc.

Visit Google Webmaster Tools to identify such issues and how to fix them.

2. Make Algorithm-Friendly Changes

Once you identify the possible reasons for a penalty, make algorithm-friendly changes to reclaim your lost rankings. You can remove low-quality spammy backlinks, remove duplicate content, add high-quality content and improve user experience on the site.

3. Improve the User Experience on the Site

You should also pay attention to user experience and related issues such as:

A. Site load speed
B. Poor navigation where it becomes difficult to access the content you are looking for
C. Too many ads that may annoy a visitor
D. Bad layout and website design

FAQs About Google Algorithm Updates

1. What is a Search Engine Algorithm?

The search engine uses a complex system where data from its search index is retrieved to instantly deliver the best possible results for a search term or query. Search engines use algorithms and various ranking factors to return web pages ranked by relevance on their SERPs.

2. How Many Google Algorithm Updates Happen Every Year?

Google changes its algorithm about 500 to a few thousand times per year. However, there are only a few significant updates. Minor updates may not affect your website immediately, but there is always a pattern and trend behind these updates. Therefore it’s crucial to keep an eye on these changes to prevent any penalty.

3. Why Should You Track Google Updates?

If you are a business owner or an SEO expert, you should keep track of small and significant changes that could impact your website so that you can change your SEO strategy and tactics accordingly.

A Google algorithm update can either boost or hurt your:

• Rankings on SERPs and overall visibility
• Organic traffic
• Leads and conversions
• Revenue

4. What Is the EAT Concept in SEO, and How Is It Related to Search Engine Rankings?

EAT is a popular acronym in SEO that stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.

The EAT concept is quite important as, according to Google, it helps them measure the relevance of a website and decide whether to rank it higher or not.

So, always try to publish content written or compiled by an expert and is well-researched. If an authority writes it, it will boost trustworthiness.

For example, have a look at this Therapytribe blog. TherapyTribe is an online directory of psychiatrists, and the content it publishes is created by certified mental health and psychiatry professionals.

What are Bulimia, Anorexia, & Eating Disorders? The article is written by Emily Mendez, M.S., Ed.S., a certified psychotherapist and an expert in mental health and substance abuse cases. It increases the trustworthiness of the website for the website visitors.

The websites with unverified and shallow content are often penalized by Google as the information provided in those websites can be potentially harmful to the readers.

Conclusion

Dealing with thousands of minor and a couple of major algorithm updates every year is not a cakewalk. Still, if you have the right tools such as keyword density checkers, backlink finders, and Google algorithm update trackers mentioned above, it will help you puzzle it out.

Apart from that, tools such as Mozcast, SEMrush Sensor, Rank Ranger Rank Risk Index Tool, Accuranker’ Grump’ Rating, and Algoroo will also be handy.

If your website is affected by a Google algorithm update, go to Moz or SEJ’s trackers mentioned above and study the past algorithm updates to figure out its exact reason.

Use Google Search Central, which was previously known as Google Webmasters’ Tool, to find ways to fix it. You can find many tools and useful study material on GSC. Use it along with the tools listed above, and soon you’ll be on your way to reclaiming your lost rankings and traffic.

If you are an agency and don’t have the required tools and expertise in it, you can hire result-oriented white label SEO services from DashClicks for your clients. It is not only affordable but hassle-free and time-saving too.

While looking for ways to create more organic traffic, you may hear a term called SEO-friendly website design almost every single time. However, this term can seem a little overwhelming, especially to businesses that are just starting out in the digital world.

Let's begin by answering the question - what is an SEO-friendly website? Simply put, an SEO-friendly website is implemented with SEO techniques that are designed to help the search engine crawlers to explore and read pages in an easier manner.

Today, many businesses create a website just for the sake of it. They don't incorporate design and content that attract visitors who are important for their business. Due to this, their potential customers are not even able to find it on the web. If their website is optimized correctly, it can transform into a full-fledged salesperson and help them reach their potential customers. An SEO-friendly website helps businesses achieve exactly this. Such a website helps them consider the needs of their target audience. It also helps them rank high on Google, provide an enhanced user experience, and increase their customer base.

Now, you may wonder what are attributes that make your site SEO-friendly. Don't worry, we can answer that for you, too.

What Makes a Website SEO Friendly?

The approach to making a website SEO-friendly is quite simple. It is carried out so that Google and other search engines can crawl efficiently on each webpage, effectively interpret the content, and finally index it in their database. After this, they provide the most valuable and important web pages to their users according to the topics they are looking for.

Some of the most significant characteristics of an SEO friendly website are:

1. Attention to URLs

A simple thing such as a URL can make a world of difference in making a website SEO friendly. Apart from possessing a clean structure, your webpage URL must adhere to the best SEO practices associated with search engine indexing to make your website SEO-friendly. In the case of permanent links, make sure that they are self-explanatory, in lowercase, and separated using dashes. They can also feature keywords placed organically in order to improve visibility.

2. Unique Content

The content on the web pages of your website should be unique for it to be SEO friendly. Search engines are aware of websites with plagiarism and flag them for the same. Such a thing results in a decrease in the SEO friendliness of your website.

3. The Right Structure

A well-structured website is easier to index. Here's what a general website structure is composed of:

Ø  Header

Ø  Page title or H1 tag

Ø  Breadcrumb menu

Ø  Text separated into several short paragraphs along with subheadings

Ø  Information of the author

Ø  Footer

4. Quick-loading Webpages

Needless to say, neither your potential customers nor search engines are fond of slow-loading websites. So, here's an insider tip - SEO-friendly websites are optimized for speed and fast loading time. A website that loads faster leads to more user interactions.

SEO Friendly Website ā Why Do You Need it?

How would you feel if someone does a Google search regarding a problem that your business can solve but your website isn't even visible to them? This is precisely the reason why SEO should matter to you. You are likely to miss out on your potential customers if your site isn't ranking on the first page of SERPs (when a user submits a search query, SERP is the page that a search engine returns).

For a higher ranking on SERPs, you must start your web design process with your target audience and SEO in mind. The chance of your web page ranking on the first page of SERPs increases if you keep on improving your SEO strategies.

With an SEO-friendly website in place, you will have an edge over the competitors who don't create their website according to their potential customers and search engines.

Let's discuss in detail the reasons why your website should be SEO friendly:

1. Helps Generate Organic Traffic

When you work on your website content taking into account the strategies used by the competitors, you are able to obtain a higher ranking, which increases the chances of selling. High ranking is an excellent source of organic traffic to your website (organic traffic is the traffic that comes from search engines).

How to boost organic traffic?

Some ways in which businesses can generate more organic traffic are:

• By creating insightful, persona-optimized content that is based on their market niche
• By using long-tail keywords (the keywords that are more specific to the service or product by the business)
• By creating quality content and being consistent at it

2. Helps Get Valuable Traffic

If you are getting web traffic, that's great! But you must ensure that you are attracting potential customers as well. As we now already know, an SEO-friendly website helps you achieve exactly that!

There are many ways to get valuable traffic with the help of an SEO-friendly design. One of them is using long-tail keywords in your content. Let us define long-tail keywords for you to understand them better. The search terms that have low competition levels and search volume are called long-tail keywords. They have a longer length (more than 3 words) as compared to other keyword types. Such keywords are specific and derive more valuable traffic to your website. Some examples of long-tail keywords include buy beebalms plant near me.ā

Image Source

Another way you get valuable traffic with the help of an SEO-friendly design is because it integrates a responsive design into your website. Such a design is an essential part of an SEO-friendly website. A responsive design helps your website to adapt to any device the user may be using at the time of the search (such as a tablet, mobile, or website). This helps the users to have a positive experience on your website. They tend to stay longer on your website because the website accurately fits their screens. This, in turn, sends a positive signal to Google. As a result, your site's ranking improves in the search results and you get more valuable traffic.

3. Is Cost-effective

Ā It is important to understand that as opposed to paid advertising or other marketing strategies, you are not required to spend money on achieving a good ranking in search results. Search engine listings are free and easy to attain. A website that is implemented with SEO strategies helps you in this respect.

Consider this scenario for better understanding- when funding is stopped for an ad, it is removed from the internet, and web traffic declines for that specific website. But when it comes to utilizing SEO, your web traffic and ranking remain consistent without the need to spend any money.

4. Increases Your Reputation

If you take a look at one of the statistics of 2020, it may not come as a surprise that 89% of consumers read reviews before purchasing products (as quoted by Trustpilot, which is a leading online review platform). With so many people checking for reviews before purchasing from a business, your website needs to create a great impression on its visitors. An SEO-friendly website helps you achieve this.

A notable characteristic of such a website is that it has a visually pleasing interface along and easy navigation that helps visitors find the information they seek. The website is tailored keeping in mind the needs of your target audience. The aim is to keep the visitors engaged and help them become return users. When people have a good experience on your website, it only works to enhance your reputation in the market.

5. Enhances Customer Experience

As you can now easily interpret, an SEO-friendly design helps in enhancing the customer experience. You gain customer loyalty and get repeat customers when you provide them with such an experience.

A good customer experience is like an endorsement. If search engines become aware that people are clicking onto more pages or spending more time on your website, your ranking will definitely soar high.

Insider tip: Refrain from using too many flash elements as it doesn't add value to the SEO of your website. Moreover, it delays the loading time, which can annoy your customers. Focus on offering a more refined user experience with different SEO practices, such as improving site speed and interlinking for increased content discoverability.

Image Source

6. Is Optimized for Conversions

Getting quality traffic on your website is impressive but you need to analyze if you are able to 'seal the deal.' An SEO-friendly website design is Conversion Rate Optimized (CRO). CRO is defined as the process in which your website and content are tweaked, tested, and improved to increase conversions. With CRO, you get more out of your web traffic. There are many CRO marketing strategies that you can try, some of which include:

• Use live chat software in your high-performing webpages
• Use lead flows (high-converting pop-ups that offer value)
• Re-engage people who left your website by tracking them and showing them online ads when they check other websites on the internet.

7. Is a Long-term Investment

How about having a web design that keeps paying you back? An SEO-friendly website design pays your business back as long as you vow to maintain it. All that you require is minimal monthly maintenance to maintain the position that you have in search results. Doing so also helps you increase traffic and helps your business grow.

8. SEO Holds Even More Importance on Mobile

How many times have you used your mobile to search for information and products? 88% of consumers looking for a local business with the help of a mobile device end up visiting/calling the business. This means, it is crucial to be on top of mobile search results or you may lose your customers to the competition.

As mentioned before, an SEO-friendly website has a responsive design that helps you connect with mobile users. Such a design offers an improved user experience and helps your leads stay longer on your website when they conduct a mobile search. Owing to this fact, Google ranks your website higher in the search results, which in turn, helps you get more customers.

9. Builds Brand Credibility

You must already trust the websites that show up on the first pages of Bing, Yahoo, or Google, right? Other internet users are likely to think the same too. This not only helps in brand awareness but is also good for brand credibility. You may ask why? Well, when you are displayed on the top, it clearly states that you are the best in your field. It makes a statement that your website is as per the needs of your users. A website that finds a frequent mention at the top of the result page is bound to gain exposure and credibility.

10. Helps Increases Engagement

We all know the objective of digital marketing ā create interaction with your customers. This engagement leads to brand exposure or an increase in sales. Thus, it is important to devise an SEO strategy that helps you reach more people, make them stay longer on your website, and urge them to share your content. Remember, your rankings will improve with more engagement and you will get the chance to move towards your desired results.

How to Create an SEO-friendly Website?

You can create an SEO-friendly website by keeping certain factors in mind. For instance, incorporate the most important keyword in the title of a page. Apart from this, you can integrate other essential keywords in smaller headings as well. You must also add content that is light and captivates the reader.

Implementing all these tips is just the start of the journey towards an SEO-friendly website. Here are some more ways to make your website SEO friendly:

• Ā Add new content regularly
• Ā Optimize your meta description to increase clicks
• Ā Use internal as well as external links
• Make sure that the readability of the content is on point

If you wish to create SEO-friendly websites in seconds, DashClicks's InstaSites tool allows you to do exactly this. Just a few clicks and you are done!

Bottomline

An SEO-friendly web design is extremely important for your business to find potential customers. We all know that building an SEO-friendly, professional niche-based website can take many days. However, if you use DashClicks' agency website tool, you can make an SEO-friendly, custom branded agency website in a matter of seconds. An excellent way of impressing your prospects, isn't it?

All in all, now that you know the importance of an SEO-friendly website design, you are in a better position to put in the required work and take your business to greater heights.

Digital marketing is constantly changing. The needs of our clients evolve as the pace and competitiveness of social marketing and paid search make it difficult for small businesses to stay on target. They need personalized solutions, continuous optimizations through real-time analysis, and automated solutions to improve to nurture those leads.

That's exactly what machine learning is doing for companies in 2021 and beyond.

If your current strategies are proving ineffective, or if you need actionable solutions to give you an advantage over your competitors, take a look at how machine learning will bolster your digital marketing strategies and ensure that your business continues to be a leader in your industry for the foreseeable future.

What is Machine Learning for Digital Marketing?

Machine learning is a system, or systems, that utilize artificial intelligence to gather analytics and present actionable solutions based on the findings. As your audience engages with your advertisements or shared content, knowledge about each user and their behaviors feeds into an algorithm. The more data that the algorithm receives, the more accurate and effective the proposed solutions will be.

There are two major types of machine learning that experts use to gather and interpret data sets:

Guided Machine Learning

A machine learning system will generally have a difficult time gathering and interpreting data without first receiving the help of human intelligence. In digital marketing, experts will instruct the system on what specific data to track as well as how to look out for patterns of note. You can do this by supplying it with data previously gathered manually from past marketing campaigns. For example, if you’re analyzing the math tutor cost across different regions, you can train the system with historical pricing data to identify trends and predict future costs. The machine learning system interprets this data and applies it to data gathered from.

The machine learning system interprets this data and applies it to data gathered from future marketing campaigns and experiments.

Unguided Machine Learning

This type of machine learning system is exactly the opposite. Experts allow the system to gather data from users in real-time without receiving the knowledge of previous user patterns or behaviors. Artificial intelligence is left to its own devices to sort out the gathered data and come up with solutions to improve its processes as time passes.

The Importance of Artificial Intelligence in Marketing

As a marketing professional, you may be thinking that you already have no shortage of tools to help you gather data. However, the true problem is finding the time and resources necessary to effectively sort through all of this valuable data to present meaningful solutions that get your clients real results.

Artificial intelligence is able to interpret and organize vast amounts of information in a fraction of the time it would take a human employee. In fact, as long as enough data is being fed into the algorithm, the results are virtually instant.

This means that machine learning development services can free up countless billable hours for your digital marketing agency. With the help of artificial intelligence, you can run any number of experiments with the right tools, focus your efforts on other tasks in the meantime, and return to find meticulously organized and accurate information to perform effective optimizations.

Image Source

Machine learning is not only faster but also eliminates the potential for human error. It is effectively improving the digital marketing process for every business in the world.

How to Use Machine Learning to Improve Your Digital Marketing?

Now that you better understand what machine learning is, we wanted to walk through the various ways you can utilize machine learning marketing to improve virtually every aspect of your agency. Below, you can find a list of the most important ways that the top experts are utilizing the best tools to help their teams prove more efficient:

1. Personalizing the User Experience

If you compare your Amazon shopping account with a friend's, you're guaranteed to observe two very different experiences. That's because the website is utilizing algorithms to constantly observe and track user behavior while they are utilizing their platform. As a result, you get personalized product recommendations, unique search predictions, and unique listing rankings.

The same is true for just about every platform you can think of - Netflix, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and many others.

Image Source

Your business or marketing agency can utilize machine learning to the same effect. You can utilize these systems to create personalized homepages or platforms for customers using your service. You could also personalize your paid ad or email marketing campaigns to better target users that take unique routes throughout their buyer's journey with your company.

2. Analyzing Your Data

Does your team currently utilize Google Analytics or Facebook Business Manager for your marketing goals? If you answered yes, you're already utilizing machine learning to improve your marketing processes.

These machine learning systems are able to gather vast amounts of data from your audience at a faster rate than humans and do so while retaining accuracy. Your team will quickly learn about customer demographics, bounce rates, retention time, clickthrough rates, etc.

Machine learning can also conduct experiments for you by segmenting your audience into different groups and observing which strategies perform best. It will also be able to automatically determine when its learning efforts are complete and automatically turn off experiments, optimizing the use of your advertising budget without input from an employee.

This powerful method of data analysis outclasses anything you can do manually, and will effectively improve every aspect of your marketing services without question.

3. Automated Customer Service

An estimated 85% of all customer service interactions online will be resolved with an AI chatbot by the end of 2021. The statistics show that businesses and users alike enjoy the benefits of chatbots for the following reasons:

• Immediate response times
• Available 24/7 – no waiting for business hours
• Immediate solution suggestions
• Ability to sort customer queries and direct complex issues to human experts
• Ability to assist hundreds of customers simultaneously

While you will always have a share of consumers who insist upon human interaction, most are simply looking for their problems to be resolved as quickly as possible. As a result, businesses can utilize chatbots to handle billing and payments, subscriptions, account-related issues, and so much more.

A chatbot driven by machine learning can also sort through a vast library of help articles to provide the right solution to the user immediately. Additionally, if the chatbot is unable to help a user, it still gathers the data and offers your team insights on how to improve the automated customer experience.

Automated customer service can also potentially save your business thousands of dollars annually.

4. Improve Your Website and Landing Page Designs

Before machine learning, web designers were largely left to guesswork when it came to optimizing webpage layouts. With these new AI systems, you can learn everything you need to know about user activity on your site.

Web designers can now take advantage of heat mapping, which tracks which sections of the page receive more clicks as well as how long their eyes stay on a particular segment. Sections of the page that are ā€�hotā€¯ are safe to call keepers, while notably ā€�coldā€¯ sections likely need a redesign.

Image Source

Businesses and marketers can also take advantage of A/B testing, which allows you to direct your audience to two different versions of the same website. Machine learning will automatically track user behavior on each page, calculate which performs best, and automatically redirect users to the better page when enough data is gathered.

You will once again save time and money by performing optimizations backed by data from real users that want to engage with your content.

5. Optimize Your PPC Campaigns

Every business has a set budget when it comes to monthly digital advertising, so it's essential that you don't leave it up to guesswork. Machine learning now outperforms manual decision-making by helping experts choose the best types of ads, where and when to launch them, and how much of your budget you should use to boost engagement.

AI-driven machine learning will save you countless dollars and work to lower your cost-per-lead month after month (Are you beginning to see the pattern?)

For example, many social media platforms that offer to advertise can accept your previous campaign data to guide future efforts. The algorithm takes previous metrics, applies that data to users on the platform, and automatically generate what’s known as a “lookalike audience” to reach new customers that are most likely to convert.

Machine learning systems can also take over and autopilot the bidding process, adjusting bids according to your set limits, and knowing when to cease budget use when keyword costs become too competitive.

6. Improve Your Presence on Social Media

More than half of the world is now participating in social media. That statistic alone describes how necessary it is for every business to market themselves through those platforms.

With the help of machine learning marketing, you can easily turn Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more into tools for success. Similar to the methods mentioned above, machine learning systems can automatically track and compile data from your audience to determine what types of content foster higher levels of engagement and impressions.

Image Source

Something that is unique to social media is knowing what days of the week to post as well as the best times to catch your audience's attention. Machine learning utilizes that same data from your audience to create an easy-to-read map of the best times to share your content on each social platform. User behavior greatly fluctuates depending on where you're posting, and AI-driven marketing provides you with immediate answers.

7. Machine Learning is Now Mandatory for SEO

Experts are no longer combing through each of your business's web pages with a fine-tooth comb. If you're not already, you need to be taking advantage of the world's top SEO tools including SEMrush, Ahrefs, KWFinder, and Moz - all of which utilize machine learning.

Once again, these AI systems are able to scan, track, and identify SEO errors across each page of your site with almost zero waiting period. These error reports will also come with proposed solutions that your team of experts can put into effect. This allows for more effective optimizations that in turn help your brand become more competitive in search rankings no matter how new your website is.

Additionally, these automated SEO reports can help dictate which type of content will best help improve website traffic and engagement. You will be able to track content keywords your audience is using and create articles, videos, or images for your site that naturally satisfies the demand.

Image Source

Conclusion - Adapt to Machine Learning Marketing or Be Left Behind

Machine learning marketing doesn't eliminate the need for intelligent, seasoned marketing experts. It simply takes over the role of completing the necessary, yet time-consuming, trivial tasks, and does so faster and with greater accuracy.

The role of future marketers is not to complete hours of menial tasks, but to utilize the tremendously beneficial insights that artificial intelligence can provide. The most competitive brands will utilize these tools in their marketing arsenal to continuously optimize web design, content creation, paid campaigns, search rankings, and everything else that goes into your overall business success.

By adapting to machine learning, you will save thousands of dollars, free up countless hours for tasks that can actually enhance your business, and do so while putting out better content than any of your competitors. If you've yet to embrace it, you're already late. Adapt now, or get left behind for good.

Website design is never truly complete. If you're trying to get more conversions out of that new landing page, it may be time to rethink that hero section or consider adding a video. However, you may not be sure what changes will work best.

Even the most seasoned marketing experts can't trust that their instinctual analysis will always be correct. That's why every marketer or business owner needs to be aware of how to run an A/B test in Google Analytics.

In this article, you should learn what an A/B test is as well as how you can easily set up various types of split tests with minimal effort.

What is an A/B Test in Digital Marketing?

An A/B test is a process of utilizing two versions of a sales page to determine what yields better results. You will start by fully designing your landing page including the layout, color choices, images, videos, and copy.

Then, you create a second variation of the page generally by modifying the existing format. These changes depend upon what exactly you are looking to test during this process. For example, you may have two strong approaches to sales copy, but are unsure of which will best speak to your audience. Another example may simply be recording and adding a personal video to engage new prospects.

After you create your two variations, you can direct a set percentage of your traffic to either page. A 50/50 split will see half of the users arriving at Page A with the other half getting the Page B experience.

Google Analytics then gathers various metrics in real-time to help you determine which page is the best performer. These insights may also help you better understand what creatives your audience responds to, so that future marketing ventures are naturally tailored for success.

Who Should Use A/B Testing?

Any website owner or business owner should be utilizing A/B testing in Google Analytics. Whether it's a website or a fancy new landing page, you're making that investment to get you qualified leads and improve your sales. The best way to do that is to constantly analyze what's getting results and making the necessary improvements along the way.

While the process of setting up A/B tests is relatively simple, it may not be so for newcomers who are unsure of what creatives need testing. As a result, studies show that most of these A/B tests will fail.

The good news is that we generally understand the reasons why most of these end in failure. Before we get into the specifics of how to set up your A/B test in Google Analytics, let's take a moment to educate ourselves on what not to do when performing your future tests.

What Causes A/B Tests to Fail?

Knowing what not to do is just as important as knowing best practices for success. Here is a quick list of things you need to be aware of and avoid to ensure that you make the most of your time and marketing budget:

1. You Aren't Making Any Significant Changes

Making small copy changes may seem appealing (and can yield results when done right), but it's not a substantial change that generally sees long-term differences. While you and your team might be able to point out the difference in a header, a paragraph, or an image, the overall layout of both variations remains fairly identical.

So - what should you change? Consider big picture items such as the overall tone or approach to selling your product on the page. An easy example might look like this:

• Page A features a CTA (call to action) in the headline along with a sign-up form, a relevant, high-quality image, and a brief paragraph telling users why they need to enter their information.

Image Source

• Page B features the same headline and sign-up form but replaces the image and most of the sales copy with a video.

In this particular example, Page B is going to outperform Page A most of the time. A quality video will yield better results than still images 75% of the time. Without that insider knowledge, you would need to rely on an A/B test to know for sure that the video was the deciding factor.

2. You're Testing Too Many Changes at Once

It's great that you have several ideas on how to approach your webpage. However, incorporating too many changes simultaneously may make it more difficult to isolate exactly which changes bolstered your results.

When creating your experiment, you should make an effort to simplify your hypothesis and put the variations to the test. Then, create a separate experiment down the line to further improve conversions. Don't view website optimizations necessarily as a sprint, but plan on making continuous improvements and revisions over time.

3. You're Stopping the Tests Too Soon

Testing is a continuous process. If you go into the expectation that you're going to make some quick changes and watch the leads roll in, you're going to be disappointed.

A/B tests are most effective when you allow sufficient time and conversion volume. It's common sense that you would put more faith in a survey of 1000 unique persons versus 100. Unless your brand is already a hot-ticket item, it can take several weeks to gather enough data of any real statistical significance.

4. The Tests Focus on Personal Bias

This one can be a bit harder to identify, but your personal bias may be blocking from you accurately assessing problems with the page. You keep making changes to the areas that should be driving conversions, but neither variation is outperforming the other in any noteworthy fashion.

True testing needs to be focused on what is actually happening, not your personal feelings or assumptions about the copy or web design. Unless you're confident that you know what to test, A/B testing may not be helping as your variations are not featuring any actionable changes.

Key Elements for Your A/B Testing

To ensure that you prepare properly, let's take a look at some of the key elements on the webpage that you generally want to be the focus of your A/B testing:

1. The Sales Copy

This is a broad category, but debatably the most important part of the page. Every person who clicks on the ad needs to be able to easily read and comprehend what they're being told on the page.

The description of the product, service, and offer should be clear and easy to digest. It's okay for your audience to have some questions, but they should feel informed and empowered to sign up or make a purchasing decision on the spot. If you're getting traffic to the page but have a low conversion rate, explore different ways to communicate the details such as bullet lists, product or service comparisons, and pricing details upfront.

Image Source

2. Headlines

Headlines are the first tool you use on a web page to get your audience engaged. It should directly address the individual and provide them with an immediate incentive to take action and learn more.

We can use another example to better understand an A/B test of two headlines from two landscaping services:

• Page A – Improve Your Home with Joe’s Landscaping Today!
• Page B – Sign Up to Get $100 Off Your First Landscaping Service Today Only!

Both headlines directly address the customer by using some form of “you,” but Page B is more engaging. The headline immediately describes the service, provides an attractive offer, and incentivizes immediate action by revealing a time limit. While improving your home sounds like a great benefit, A/B testing allows you to take a step back and determine the actual highlight of the page.

3. Social Proof

Customers continue to get more purchase-savvy online and tend to be more skeptical of a great offer. You can combat this effectively by offering your customers social proof. Examples of this may be testimonials, past sales figures, or current subscriber numbers.

You then place social proof on your landing page, but you're still not converting. Thankfully, A/B testing allows us to explore the possible reasons. The metrics may show that users are not scrolling down to see your testimonials at the bottom of the page, meaning that your B variation should try alternative placements to improve the impact and visibility.

4. Webpage Design

This may seem like a no-brainer until you consider how many visually unattractive pages you see every month as an active internet user. Poor color choices, illegible or hard-to-read text and lack of visual engagement with high-resolution images or video can cause users to bounce off your page quickly.

While problems with your web design may not be so severe, you still want to explore alternate page layouts and designs to activate your readers. The design should amplify the copy, gracefully walking readers through your pitch and naturally leading them to a call-to-action button.

How to Set Up an A/B Test in Google Analytics?

After you review the key elements of your webpage and come up with a few actionable hypotheses, you can begin setting up your A/B test. You will require a Google Analytics and Google Optimize account to begin.

AAfter logging into your Optimize account, complete the following steps:

1. Click on the appropriate Container name and navigate to the “Experiments” page.

2. Click “Create Experiment” Give your experiment an easy-to-identify name that’s relevant to the subject of testing.

3. Enter the URL of the page you wish to test.

4. Select “A/B test” Then, click “Create”

Now that your experiment is active, you should see two tabs on the page. One is the Variants card and the other is your Configuration card.

Creating Your Variant

1. On the bottom right side of the page, click “Create Variant” to begin.

2. Name this variant and click “Add.” You can do this again for as many variants as you need to create.

3. You can see your variants in a list on the page along with the number of changes currently present. Click on a variant anywhere to begin making your desired edits.

4. An editor panel will appear, and you can now make changes to the new page variant. When you are satisfied with the changes, be sure to click “Save.”

5. When all of the changes are in place, click “Done” to complete the variant.

Configuring Your Objectives

Now that you have a variant to test alongside your original page, you need to set the objectives for your Google Analytics A/B testing experiment. You can do this by performing the following steps:

1. On the objectives tab, select a Google Analytics View. Then, select a Primary Objective.

2. Click “+ Add Objective.”

3. Add a description and hypothesis that describes what you’re looking to test and achieve with this experiment. Then, click “Save.”

4. Next, we will select who to target with the new variant and when by going to the Targeting tab.

5. Under Who, select the split percentage of your audience you want to send to your variant page.

6. You can further establish targeting rules by utilizing the When tab. There are a variety of custom rules you can use to determine when your audience will see the variant. We encourage you to review this in-depth targeting tutorial from Google. Also, be sure to review Google’s policies before continuing with your new targeting rules.

When you are satisfied with the experiment, you can click “Start” to push your variant pages live. Google recommends allowing this experiment to run for at least two weeks or until a variation has a 95% probability to outperform the original.

Conclusion

Performing A/B split tests in Google Analytics is easy to pick up but offers a host of ways to get even more confident results with experience and know-how.  You may eventually wish to graduate from general A/B split tests to perform more in-depth content experiments.

Google also provides built-in reporting that you can review at the end of your experiment. Their reporting utilizes Bayesian inference, which is a statistical analysis method that helps to determine the actual likelihood of your variant outperforming the original. Optimize can also advise you on when it can no longer realistically gather relevant data to improve the results.

A/B split tests in Google Analytics offer numerous benefits with almost no downside, including:

• Ongoing performance analysis
• An easy way to make low-risk changes
• Learning from your audience to improve engagement
• Utilizing gathered data to improve your website and future webpages
• Noticeable improvements to conversions

If you have a page that you’re ready to test, you can use this information to start testing today. Stop wasting money on vanity traffic numbers, and start turning those leads into conversions.

Google is committed to the wellbeing and growth of local businesses, and it reflects in its past few algorithm updates. Google has paved the way for local businesses to get noticed within minimum efforts.

To boost your local business, you should pay attention to the following assets:

A. Google My Business profile
B. Name, Address, and Phone (NAP profile) at various places on the web
C. Social media
D. Google reviews
E. Social citations, if any
F. On-page Optimization with local keywords
G. Local link building

Most of these strategies are already being used by local shops and businesses. You can find the areas where they are weak and use it as an opportunity to gain a strategic advantage.

Schema markup is one of the most effective local SEO strategies that take SEO one step further.

So, you can add schema to your website and reap its immense local SEO benefits for a long time. Here are a few tips for using schema markup to boost your SEO.

One significant advantage of adding schema markup to your website is that search engines start giving more descriptive and informative results about your website. It can be crucial, especially in a saturated market where a little extra content can differentiate visitors and convert customers.

What is Schema Markup?

Structured data or schema markup is often referred to as the language of search engines. It has its semantic vocab, which is used as a code to provide more information about your content to search engines. The accurate information that is often displayed below the SERPs page title helps users know what they can expect on the web page.

Let’s discuss how schema markup works:

When you enter search queries like “SEO companies” or “SEO companies near me” in the Google search field, you get the search engine result page just like the one given above, where Google displays SEO companies near the searcher’s location.

However, this is just one type of schema markup you can deploy on your website. As you can see, it’s beneficial for visitors looking to find the kind of products and services you sell.

Now, let’s discuss other schema markup values for local enterprises and how they can add better visibility to your business.

How to Do Schema Markup for a Local Business?

According to Search Engine Watch, you can follow these tips while implementing schema markups:-

A. Go through Google’s guidelines

B. Brush up on your coding skills. You need not master the coding to implement schema, but a fair understanding of Microdata and JSON-LD will make things easier.

C. Pick a suitable template and stick to it while creating code. Be as descriptive as possible. You can use many elements such as your social profiles, website URL, events, and Google Maps location to enrich your business’s local profile.

How to Choose the Best Schema Markups for Local Business SEO?

You can choose from the following five primary markup values for different website types:

1. Organization Schema Markup

Combine the power of Google local search features with organization schema markup and reap its many benefits. You can produce brand signals and improve your Knowledge Graph entry in Google search. It will also help you boost your website snippet presence. Add contact details, logo, and social profile links to grow your brand.

Example (with JSON-LD):-

<script type=”application/ld+json”>
{ “@context” : “http://schema.org“,
“@type” : “Organization”,
“legalName” : “Business Name”,
“url” : “https://www.example.com/”,
“contactPoint” : [{
“@type” : “ContactPoint”,
“telephone” : “+1-xxx-xxx-xxxx”,
“contactType” : “customer service”
}]
“logo” : “https://www.example.com/img.jpg”,
“sameAs” : [ “https://www.facebook.com/”,
“https://twitter.com/”,
“https://www.youtube.com/”,
“https://www.linkedin.com/”,
}
</script>

2. Website Schema Markup

You can also boost the schema markup of your website to view the Sitelinks Search Box feature. It helps your website name get featured in the search results (SERPs). However, an existing site search is needed to enable the Sitelinks Search Box element.

Example (with JSON-LD)-

<script type=”application/ld+json”>
{
“@context” : “http://schema.org”,
“@type” : “WebSite”,
“name” : “Business Name“,
“url” : “https://www.example.com/”,
“potentialAction” : {
“@type” : “SearchAction”,
“target” : “https://www.example.com/?s={search_term}”,
“query-input” : “required name=search_term”
}
}
</script>

3. Breadcrumbs Markup

A breadcrumb trail indicates a specific web page position in the site hierarchy, making navigation and exploring a better experience website. So, when a user starts from the last breadcrumb, they may go their way up in the site hierarchy, scrolling one level at a time.

The Breadcrumb schema includes rich snippets that you can create for different content available, “ web pages. These snippets will appear on the SERPs.

4. Site Navigation Schema Markup

This markup is used to explain your website's structure to the search engines to encourage better navigation. It is also used to boost organic sitelinks. Sometimes, visitors don't want to go to the home page and instead move to a specific page such as a blog or careers page. Site navigation markup facilitates them to choose the right page before even hitting the website.

5. Video Schema Markup

According to a WordStream survey, 87% of online marketers use video content. 51% of marketers mention video as the type of content that produces the best ROI globally.

Needless to say video content is quite important for businesses, and they should find ways to promote video content not only for engagement but also for the bottom of the funnel, i.e., conversion and sales. It also helps to rank in the search engines. For many search keywords, video content outranks your site rankings. It is more prominent in the “what is” and “how-to” type of content. You can use VideoObject schema for hosted or embedded video content. Your efforts are rewarded when you see that the rich snippets from your website show up in the google video search, and it becomes possible only because of the schema markup you use.

What are the Elements You Need to Create a Video Schema?

Here are a few elements that are included in the video schema:

• Name of the video/video title
• Description
• ThumbnailUrl
• UploadDate

You can use the schema elements to introduce your video to search engines in the following manner:

<script type=”application/ld+json”>
{
“@context”: “http://schema.org“,
“@type”: “VideoObject,”
“name”: “Name of the Video (title you gave it on YouTube/Vimeo/Website)”,
“caption”: “whatever caption you’d like this video to have – this isn’t a mandatory field, but I would recommend it”,
“description”: “A short description of your video: keep it concise (like your Video Meta Description in YouTube and Vimeo, so approximately 150 characters).”,
“thumbnailUrl”: “http://www.example.com/thumbnail.jpg,”
“embedUrl”: “A URL pointing to a player for the specific video. Usually, this is the information in the src element of a <embed> tag”,
“uploadDate”: “2017-04-05T08:00:00+02:00”,
“duration”: “PT1M33S – this section has to be in ISO8601 formatting”,
“contentUrl”: “http://i.vimeocdn.com/video/515473390_100x75.jpg?r=pad”,
“embedUrl”: “http://www.example.com/embed?videoetc”,
“interactionCount”: “2347”,
“transcript”: “A transcript of your video is helpful for SEO – it’s also great for adding more detail about the video for search engines to understand given that the description above is so short”
}
</script>

How to Implement Video Schema Markup?

Here is the process to implement video schema markup for your website:

1. Go to Google Tag Manager and create a custom HTML Video Schema tag.
2. Copy the above format (code) and edit the fields to reflect your video details.
3. Turn on the preview and debug mode, so you can ensure that it runs on the page containing the video.
4. Verify that the code is working and publish the video.
5. Also, try it in the Google Structured Data testing tool.

Maximize the Potential of Schema Markup Values

Follow these rules and get better results with schema markup. The process is pretty simple. You can list down all the popular schemas and identify the schema types to help you achieve your SEO goals. There can be numerous categories, but you have to choose what will help you boost your business strictly. Last but not least, don’t forget to mark up. The more content your markup, the greater visibility you achieve for your website. However, make sure that you don’t mark up hidden content. For example, don’t mark up hidden div or other hidden elements.

Validate It With Google

Regardless of how carefully you have written the code, you must run it through the Structured Data Tool from Google before deploying it. This tool is quite helpful. You can find various tools out there, but none offers the kind of quality this Google tool provides. A better course of action would be to develop a code that is written accurately so that you can rely on it. You can add the elements to fit your requirements whenever you need them.

How to Find the Markup on the Page?

Make sure that markup exists on the page. Copy and paste the JSON-LD into the page. Right-click on the web page>>View source>>Search for “LD+JSON” within the elements tab to check if the code exists there.

However, it would be convenient for you to use Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool (SDTT) if you are doing it with the Schema app to deploy the code. However, soon SDTT will be replaced with the Schema Markup Validator (SMV), which is currently into its beta testing phase.

How to Use Schema Markup Validator (SMV)?

Google’s much-awaited Schema Markup Validator was launched in May 2021, replacing Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool. The Schema Markup Validator is based on the Google SDTT. The SMV can extract RDFa, JSON-LD, and Microdata markup and identify syntax errors in the markup.

Step 1:  Launch test by hitting https://validator.schema.org/ in the browser

Step 2: Enter the URL you want to test for schema markup. You can also enter your page's HTML code snippet in the adjacent field.

Step 3: See the errors listed by the tool

How to Upload Your Schema Markup?

To simplify things while uploading your code, use a custom HTML tag from Google tag manager. For businesses that operate from different locations, it is advised that you generate codes for each of them and then implement them on your location pages to get the best local SEO results. Once the code is set up and ready to use, hit the publish button and validate it with the structured data tool from Google. You will need the URL of a website in the process. Finally, Google will notice your local business markup and increase the visibility of your pages.

Steps to Upload/Implement Schema Markup on Your Site:

1. Visit Google's Structure Data Markup Helper.

2. Select the type of data you want to markup from the given options.

3. Enter the page URL you want to markup or copy-paste the entire HTML code of your page in the “HTML” tab beside “URL”.

4. Select and highlight the type of elements to be marked up.

5. Add more markup items.

Use the list of data items as a reference, and highlight the other items on your page to add them to the markup list. It's not necessary to tag every item; choose the ones that are needed. But, the more things you choose, the better it's for you.

6. Click on Create HTML.

7. The Structured Data Testing Tool will also tell you how your page looks with the added markup. The tool will also display warnings if any.8. Now, add the schema markup you have generated to your web page.

How to Add Schema to Your WordPress Site?

WordPress is the most popular CMS around the world. So, it is time to discuss how to add schema to your WordPress site to help WP users. Here are a couple of options, and you can choose the one that fits your requirements:

1. Add basic information to your theme manually
2. Theme-based schema markup
3. Add basic information using an SEO plugin
4. Try a niche-specific schema plugin
5. Work with a generic schema plugin

Let’s discuss these options.

1. Add Basic Information to Your Theme Manually

Find an online tool and enter the information about your website to generate some markup. Get the output by tweaking your theme.

Schema.org JSON-LD Generator is a tool that you can try to create comprehensive, structured data entry.

Follow the wizard and complete the entries to generate. This way you can create either a generic entry or specific entries for web pages.

A JSON-LD (or JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data) is created when you enter all the details. It would help if you validated it with the Google Structured Data testing tool.

If you’re a beginner and don’t know much about JSON, copy and paste the code into your website and add the crucial business details such as business name, website, category, address, working hours, etc.

Get the JSON text ready as you’ll need it to add it to the WordPress website as a script. Go to the header of your page and add a script tag to do it quickly.

To add the script, you can either edit the theme of your site or use a plugin such as “Insert Header and Footer.”

Add the machine-generated script, save, and run your website using the Structured Data testing tool. It will ensure that the code is written correctly and ready to install on your website.

It is the easiest method of adding schema markup, where you don’t need any plugin and developers’ support. So, it can be done easily by the small local businesses that need their basic info to be displayed by the search engines.

2. Theme Based Schema Markup

With schema markup getting so much prominence, you can buy many themes online that support schema markup.

For example, you can try themes like Schema Lite and The Schema.

As you can see in the screenshot, the theme produces a variety of markup structured data that includes pages, header and footer, organization, blog items, and site navigation elements.

3. Add Basic Details Using Your SEO Plugin

Now that schema markup has become indispensable for SEO; most SEO plugins also allow you to add structured data.

If you use Yoast SEO, go to SEO > Search Appearance:

Most SEO plugins have almost similar settings to create schema markup data so that you can do it quickly.

4. Try a Niche-Specific WordPress Plugin

You can also try niche-specific plugins that generate markup schema for specific types of data. We’ll discuss one such plugin — “Event Schema” here.

Event Schema

If your site generates numerous events and you want them to be marked up as the Event structured data, you can try the Event Schema plugin.

It is the kind of output you can expect from this plugin on SERPs.

5. Work With a Generic Schema Plugin

Just like the themes, a few plugins can also output various types of structured data.

You can try a feature-rich schema plugin known as the Schema plugin. With a high star rating, it’s a popular plugin.

The Schema plugin supports:

• Knowledge Graph
• Creative Works
• Blog, WPHeader, WPFooter, BreadcrumbList, & other WP elements
• Third-party WordPress plugins such as WooCommerce,
• Schema Review

This plugin can also define new schema.org type outputs, so developers can go creative and add support for a specific type of markup.

Configuration Wizard in the plugin simplifies things and allows you to instantly define the schema markup for your website.

Conclusion

Despite the proven significance of schema markup on local SEO, only a fraction of websites and businesses have benefited from it. It is time to beat your competition by learning and implementing the Microdata and schema markup codes to enhance your website’s visibility on search engines. For an inexperienced eye, it might look like a tedious job. Still, if you follow the instructions provided above, you will be able to successfully place your business on the map, increase its visibility and attract more traffic to your website.

Selling SEO services can be pretty challenging for many reasons, and the most common ones are related to an incorrect strategy. The search engine algorithms and digital marketing trends are constantly changing. There is no way you can predict the outcome or the results of an SEO campaign, especially when it's related to your website's position on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Therefore, it becomes imperative to continuously educate the clients about the benefits of SEO and how far it can take them apart from talking purely about rankings and traffic.

SEO is more of a knowledge-based service, and therefore, you need to religiously inform the clients about what you are doing and its likely impact. In the absence of such interactive engagement between you and your client, you may not be able to explain the reason why they can't see an immediate rise in rankings and traffic. Therefore, it's recommended that you keep them informed and maintain transparency.

Even the slightest misunderstanding may lead to confusion, which may impact your entire SEO project and even jeopardize your relationship with your client.

So, whatever you do, keep it transparent and explain why you are doing it, what would be its likely impact, and the kind of results we can anticipate. SEO is not paid advertising where you can download the analytics and reports from Google or Facebook, and the client gets the complete picture.

You need not be an excellent salesman to sell SEO services. SEO is purely organic, and it's inevitable, so all you need to do is communicate the benefits of traditional SEO with your customer.

As soon as an update is announced, it would help if you took preventive actions to protect your website from any drop in rankings. You should also inform your client or prospective customer about the fixes required on your website to boost lead generation and conversion. With these measures, you'll likely win the clients and retain them without any extra effort.

Here are the 14 sales hacks every agency owner must know to boost SEO sales:

1. Talk Less and Listen More: Focus On Your Customers' Core Needs

There are different types of companies, and each one can be different in terms of their situation, their capacity to spend, product life cycle, industry, niche, and the target audience. So, a universal solution wouldn't work. You can offer a solution only after a preliminary need assessment, and most of the time, tailor-made solutions work best.

When you happen to be on the phone with a prospect, you feel compelled to speak incessantly about your services and how you can help that person. However, this is not a good practice from a sales perspective. So, even when you feel under pressure to pour out all the product knowledge you have, avoid it as it may overwhelm the listener.

Business owners know a lot more about their businesses than you may ever know. So, it would help if you took this opportunity to speak at length about their companies to get as many clues as you can. The more business owners reveal their needs, the better it is for you because it will help you run better campaigns and choose the right audiences. It's also the best way to know their customers' pain points, frustrations, and interests. You can, later on, use this information for full-fledged campaigns.

2. Avoid Over-Promise and False Commitments

Since SEO is both a science and an art, you can't say anything with conviction about SEO. Furthermore, SEO depends heavily on the ever-changing search engine algorithms sling with several other factors. Therefore, you should not over-promise and refrain from making false commitments, especially about rankings and numbers. Google warns against the agencies guaranteeing rankings or traffic volumes.

According to Google, nobody can predict the rankings based on their assumptions.

However, you can provide:

• Accurate information about how many hours you will put into a particular campaign.
• The number of reports you will generate every month.
• The realistic projections on a timeline backed by a sound strategy.

You should also inform them clearly that you can't predict anything. However, you can share the realistic expectations they can have using the strategy you're implementing. Always support your claims with your case studies.

3. Invest in Content Marketing

Investing in content is a brilliant idea, and you should use it judiciously both for your site and for your clients' websites. You can also invest in the content created for earned media and paid media.

For that, you should have an excellent in-house content team, so you can create valuable content intended to serve your targeted audiences.

Image Source

Establish yourself as an authority and showcase your knowledge by creating pillar pages and cornerstone content for your website. Create lots of content on SEO and the related topics.

Image Source

You can take inspiration from HubSpot's pillar and cluster approach to content creation. So, you can post both introductory and long-form content about SEO to create pillar content on your website. Such content will attract free traffic from search engines and establish yourself as an authority in your niche.

Image Source

Know the difference between pillar and cornerstone content before you proceed.

Image Source

Showing your expertise will always yield positive results. It will also generate a lead pipeline for your agency. So, while prospecting for SEO projects, if your lead asks you to provide specific information such as your approach to link building, you can send a polite email. The email should contain the link to a blog post on your website or some other resource, such as a YouTube video that explains your backlink strategy.

4. Educate Your Clients

SEO is a knowledge-based and active service, so you need to educate your clients from time to time if you want to retain them. You should also explain to them the secondary benefits of SEO and boost traffic and conversion in the long run. It will help if you share with them some strategies to establish your brand as an authority.

Image Source

Outreaching in the community and building links through it helps in brand building and increasing visibility. Similarly, it would help if you also communicated to your clients various local SEO activities that significantly impact your brand reputation and traffic.

5. Set Realistic Expectations

Nothing can be more frustrating than finding a client and working hard with them for a few weeks, only to find out that their expectations are entirely different from what you can offer. So, if you sit together and discuss the expectations before you commit your time and energy to the project.

SEO is a marathon and not a sprint, and you should make it clear up right in the beginning to avoid unrealistic expectations.

Apart from that, it would help if you also conveyed realistic expectations the client can have and the secondary benefits of SEO. It would help your clients stay realistic and avoid an unnecessary focus on rankings that might lead to disappointment later on. A clear understanding of the time frames required for different objectives will clear the path for a productive long term client relationship,

6. Share Case Studies and Previous Reports

It isn't easy to convince a client about hiring your services if an agency has ripped them off in the past. The right strategy for such a client is to share your reports and case studies. It will help you build trust quickly, win new customers and retain existing ones. According to a report, 42% of sales reps acknowledge prospecting as the most demanding stage of the sale process.

Here are some crucial facts about sharing the right content with the prospect during the consideration stage of the sales funnel:

1. Right content helps salespeople to take prospects down the sales funnel quicker.
2. But then you may wonder what type of content to send and when.
3. Make sure the content you share with your prospect addresses their specific situation and pain points.

Unfortunately, many marketers make a significant mistake when creating content for sales purposes. The content they create is usually about their brand, products, features, and services.

You can share case studies, previous reports, or specially created corporate demo videos, but these content pieces should address your prospect's pain points. If your content is all about your products and how great you are as a brand, it won't impress your prospects.

Here is an example of a demo video from the IKEA Place app. It reduces the need to explain things from scratch during your meeting with a prospect.

Image source

7. Perform Competitor Analysis for Your Prospects

Use popular SEO tools such as SpyFu or SEMrush and proactively perform competitor analysis for your prospective client. You can use it during prospecting. It will help you form an excellent impression of yours as a professional agency. It also means that you are serious, know your job, and care about your customers.

Competitor analysis is a critical SEO metric that helps business owners lift their rankings and boost traffic. It shows you where you stand compared to your competition and your competitors' strategies to rank on top.

Competitor analysis offers the following benefits for the businesses:

• Enables you to do comprehensive market analysis
• Offers insight into the development of products and services
• Helps in identifying spot trends in the market
• Helps in understanding and analyzing competitor strategies.
• Helpful in exploring fresh and innovative ideas
• Useful for understanding your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT analysis)
• Useful in identifying and mitigating risks

8. Transform Your Prospecting Methods by Creating Instant Websites

As an agency, you can transform your prospecting methods by creating niche-based beautiful custom websites for your clients and stun them with your capabilities.

InstaSites, a DashClicks tool, helps you to bring the action-packed value that too within seconds.

The best feature of this tool is that you don't need to know coding to create websites.

Niche-specific templates

Now you can improve your prospecting methods by working with multiple niches. Choose from a variety of industry-specific templates to create an InstaSite.

Build single or bulk websites

InstaSites doesn't just build a single website at a time. You can instantly create multiple websites using its bulk website builder with the push of a button.

You can also create a conversion-focused custom website for your agency using DashClicks' Agency Website tool.

9. Use SEO Management Tools

SEO is vast, and it involves numerous activities. So, at times, it becomes overwhelming to manage your website SEO. You can use SEO management tools to simplify the otherwise lengthy and complicated SEO processes. DashClicks' beautiful white-labeled platform brings the benefits of these premium tools you need to succeed.

Source: DashClicks' White Label SEO Dashboard

SEO tools are pretty expensive if you buy an individual or agency account. For example, if you need help with local SEO or keyword research, you don't need to purchase different tools with high subscription rates.

Image Source

White label fulfillment services from DashClicks will use the best insights gathered from these tools to make your campaigns super successful.

Image Source: Google My Business insights on DashClicks dashboard provides cumulative data for easy comparison.

10. Automate Client Onboardings

Some tools can help you automate one of the most tedious tasks in an agency ā€” onboarding a new client. Onboarding is not an easy task, and despite your best efforts, it can involve a lot of repetition and wastage of time. Manual onboardings can eat up a lot of your productive hours.

Automatic client onboarding allows you to gather the essential information from your clients through an intelligent onboarding process. DashClicks' Onboarding Center allows automated client onboardings saving your time and hassle while also reducing the chances of human errors.

11. Try White Label SEO Dashboard

The secret sauce of a successful agency is organized efforts, streamlined operations, and repeatable processes. It becomes even more critical when you are scaling your agency.

DashClicks' white label dashboard provides all the information you may need about your digital marketing projects.

Let all the heavy lifting be done by the white label platform while managing your projects from a single dashboard. When you use DashClicks' white label SEO platform, you can upload your logo and favicon on the reports generated by us and serve your client as a 100% owner of the services provided. It syncs data from all channels, and you can access it in real-time.

Here is an educational video from DashClicks on How to Make 10k a Month.

12. Generate Automated Reports

Ask any agency owner, and they will admit that report generation chews up a lot of time in an agency environment. Automated reports will save you time, increase your productivity, and help you build a good impression of your agency. These reports allow you to depict data and insights using stunning graphics and tables.

It will take your employees a lot of time to generate such high-quality reports.

Check out DashClicks' automated SEO report sample here.

DashClicks' InstaReports is a tool that produces anytime-anywhere reports for you so that you can create beautiful stunning digital marketing reports with a single click of a mouse.

13. Harness the Power of Social MediaĀ

Social media is mighty these days, and marketers can use it creatively to their advantage. Most SEO service providers aren't very active on social media, although they have their profile pages on major social media channels.

The primary reason is the lack of a well-planned social media strategy built around engagement and relationship building.

It would help if you had a long-term social media marketing strategy and should employ highly social media savvy and creative people to manage your social accounts. If you are influential on social media, you don't ever have to worry about your sales pipeline or leads.

14. Implement Paid Advertising

In the beginning, most SEO agencies aren't able to attract organic traffic and sales leads online because they don't rank high on search engine result pages. At this stage, you must invest in advertising on Google and social media to attract qualified leads and traffic to your website. It will build your sales pipeline, which you can use for a long time.

Conclusion

This blog has discussed a few tips and tricks to boost your SEO sales in a highly competitive space. While honesty, transparency, and top-notch customer support are the keys to success, nothing can beat the leverage you get by hiring white label SEO services. It allows you to scale and focus on your core areas while offering the best results to your client at an affordable rate.