Tag Archive for: SEO tips

Google Introduces New Search Console URL Inspection API

Yesterday Google introduced the new search console URL inspection API. This will give programmatic access to URL-level data for properties you manage in Search Console.

According to Google’s news release on the topic, “the Search Console APIs are a way to access data outside of Search Console, through external applications and products. Developers and SEO tools already use the APIs to build custom solutions to view, add, or remove properties and sitemaps, and to run advanced queries on Search performance data.”

Google will be providing a new tool with the new URL Inspection API for developers. The tool will assist in debugging and optimizing their pages. You can request the data Search Console has about the indexed version of your URL. The API is going to then return the indexed information currently available in the URL Inspection tool.

 

How to use the new URL Inspection API

In order to learn how to use the new API, Google also has provided the developer documentation for the API which you can find here. The request parameters are a combination of the URL you are wanting to inspect from yours or your client’s site, and the URL of the property as defined in Search Console.

The response includes analysis results containing information from Search Console, including AMP, index status, rich search results and the mobile-friendliness of the URL.

The Google release also explains how “once you make the API call, you will get a response with all relevant results. If the request fails you would receive an error message instead. If a specific analysis result is missing from the response, it means the analysis was not available for the URL inspected. Here’s an example of the response you’ll get from the API.”

 

Final Thoughts

The entire release of the new URL Inspection API can be found on Google’s blog. In addition to Google news and other digital marketing updates, we will continue to share case studies and the latest SEO updates to help you drive your business. Our goal is to ensure we help improve your marketing and drive success.

At Onimod Global, we have endless experience and expertise when it comes to all things SEO, general social media advertising, and digital marketing. Got questions about Facebook advertising or want to learn more about us? Contact us here today.

3 Simple Ways Blog Posts Can Improve SEO Results

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is incredibly important for marketers which we often write about here at Onimod Global. When you optimize your web pages — including the blog posts in your blog or news section — you’re creating more visibility for your website and allowing people who are using search engines (like Google) to find your product or service. But does your blog content really help your business organically rank on search engines?

You may have a blog, but unfortunately very few organizations know how to fully capitalize on their content in order to maximize SEO results. Check out these three simple ways a blog can improve your website’s organic visibility, traffic and results.

 Reach a specific audience with each post

Start every blog with a very specific audience in mind, and think to yourself questions that users on your website may be looking for. This allows marketers to create content that is optimized for specific customers and contains target keywords related to specific needs and solutions. Let’s say for example you are a CBD brand, think of questions may users have about your product where you can easily reach them. Perhaps one of those questions may be, what is CBD and how is it useful in products? We suggest to use a title for your blog encompassing that question while the blog post content does a thorough deep dive on the subject providing useful information. The title of your blog post could be “Everything To Know About CBD & CBD Products” or “CBD 101: What Is It and Why Use It?”

These titles encompass the questions your user may ask while also coming from a credible source. This can have a massive impact with SEO results with just this small detail in mind while you’re composing and concepting new posts.

Use Recent Data

Google and other smart engines are quite intelligent in the sense that they can even recognize when data you refer to or a website you are referencing is outdated and affect your SEO. Recent data also gives your users the most accurate and relevant information anyways which will result in a positive reader experience.

When you include a link to a credible site that has original, up-to-date data, the search engine interprets that this site is helpful and relevant to your readers (which is a plus for that other site as well actually). At the same time, you’re also telling the search engine that this type of data is in some way related to the content you publish. Over time, your readers will come to appreciate the content which can be confirmed using other metrics like increased time on page or lower bounce rate.

Share Your Blog Posts On Social Media

An often overlooked advantage, sharing your blog posts on social media requires time but also gets visibility of your content out to your audience in a multitude of ways. This in turn improves the engagement and traffic of the blog, but also has the potential to grow your social accounts as well.

Several other benefits include:

  1. It keeps your social media sites current and relevant.
  2. It helps keep your audience engaged.
  3. Because social signals are included in the ranking algorithm, it improves SEO results.
  4. Social links help to increase referral traffic.

Just remember to include keywords you are targeting within the social media posting as these social signals can help with rankings.

Final Thoughts

In addition to blog post optimization and other digital marketing updates, we will continue to share case studies and the latest SEO updates to help you drive your business. Our goal is to ensure we help improve your marketing and drive success.

At Onimod Global, we have endless experience and expertise when it comes to all things SEO, general social media advertising, and digital marketing. Got questions about Facebook advertising or want to learn more about us? Contact us here today.

3 Ways To Check Your Website’s Technical SEO Health

Regardless of how great your content may be, the ranking of your website and its traffic will suffer if there are issues with your technical SEO. This is why it’s crucial to perform routine SEO health checks so you can stay up to date on the performance of your website and constantly optimize for the best performance.

Website crawlers – to know them is to love them

A Web crawler, sometimes called a spider or spiderbot and often shortened to crawler, is an Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web and that is typically operated by search engines for the purpose of Web indexing.

It’s one of the most powerful assets you have when working on your website and trying to optimize it. Your website links are an essential tool to use in determining what pages are the most important content to your target audience, and not all of your links are created equal.

What that means is essentially there are ways to heavily optimize and influence what Google sees as the most important pages of your site. It also will help Google and other search engines to direct traffic to certain areas of your website.

Ensure search engines are rendering the page correctly

Crawlers are essential to ensuring your pages are rendering correctly. If your website’s content isn’t optimized for these bots, it won’t show up in your bots and may not render correctly. There are ways to avoid this, and that includes marketers presenting their content in a format that both searchers and crawlers can view.

“Things that require user clicks and user involvement will be difficult, if not impossible, for bots to reach,” Ashley Berman Hale from SMX Next said. “Go to the most popular pages and enclose important content in Google quotes to see if they’re included.”

Another thing you can do to improve the technical SEO is to see the rendering of your pages is to use Google’s mobile-enabled tools to take a screenshot of what everything looks like.

Review indexing for your site’s pages

If you find that Google and other search engines are crawling and that they’re correctly rendering your sites, check all of the indexed pages. A page is indexed by Google if it has been visited by the Google crawler (“Googlebot”), analyzed for content and meaning, and stored in the Google index. This gives you the clearest indication of the state of your site, highlighting selected pages, excluded pages, and why search engines made those decisions.

“You can check everything that Google sees, which is insightful,” said Hale, “ While half of our battle is getting the good stuff into the index, the other half can be getting the bad stuff out.”

More from Onimod Global

These simple and effective ways to check on the health of your technical SEO can make the biggest difference in the performance of your website. We will continue to share case studies and the latest SEO updates to help you drive your business. Our goal is to ensure we help improve your marketing and drive success. Our mission is to ensure we help improve your marketing and drive success.

At Onimod Global, we have endless experience and expertise when it comes to all things SEO, general social media advertising, and digital marketing. Got questions about Google display ads or want to learn more about us? Contact us here today.

Google Ads brings image extensions to desktop

New search engine update coming your way in just a few weeks. The new Google update will be bringing image extensions to desktop devices before the end of 2021. In addition, advertisers that are already using image extensions for mobile devices will automatically show those extensions on desktop. Google Ads will begin to roll out image extensions to desktop devices in the coming weeks, the company announced last week. This update will not only be added to static images, but also apply to all dynamic image extensions.

Why marketers should care.

It really depends, however image extensions can be extremely helpful in making your ads more visually appealing, which might encourage visitors to click on them. Before the end of 2021 and available the start of 2022, image extensions will also be available on desktop which will enable you to show any images that are relevant to users whether they’re at home or on the go.

If you’re already running image extensions on mobile, they’ll automatically show on desktop devices as this update rolls out, so make sure to monitor performance so that you can assess whether this is something that’s worthwhile for your brand.

Prior to this update, the images attached to ads would only show on mobile devices. For advertisers that are already using image extensions, their ads will automatically show these images on desktop devices as this update rolls out.

Desktop device performance can be broken out by segmenting your data by “Device.”

Dynamic image extensions are also expanding. 

This update also brings dynamic image extensions, which automatically select the most relevant image from your ad’s landing page, to desktop devices. In addition, these are also now available for all languages.

Google has also added a free, searchable library of stock images to help advertisers source visuals. To access the library, select “stock images” when you’re asked to choose an image for your image extension. Stock images can be cropped to a square or landscape format from directly within Google Ads before adding it to your image extension.

Final thoughts

In addition to Google Ads updates, general SEA and other digital marketing tips, we will continue to share case studies and the latest digital marketing news and tips to help you drive your business. Our goal is to ensure we help improve your marketing and drive success.

At Onimod Global, we have endless experience and expertise when it comes to all things SEO, general social media advertising, and digital marketing. Got questions about how to optimize your search engine advertising or want to learn more about us? Contact us here today.

3 Simple Ways To Optimize Responsive Search Ads

Google’s responsive search ads, also known as RSA, have existed alongside the original expanded text ads (ETAs) for the past several years. The goal has been to give marketers more formats for their campaigns. Since then, the now default RSAs are quickly being set up to be the only text ad format moving forward into 2022.

Experts at Onimod Global would advise that you start optimizing RSAs to stay ahead of any competitors. Here are three simple suggestions that Onimod Global gives to marketers to improve your RSA effectiveness.

Analyze your asset labels

Google Ads’ asset labels can be very useful by showing you which assets are performing well and which assets you should replace after the RSAs serve. These kinds of assets should be monitored for roughly two weeks, then the idea would be to replace those that are underperforming.

When you open up your RSA, Google gives you a breakdown of all headlines and descriptions. The labeling they give to each asset is based on how they performed overall. Thus this RSA data can be very useful information and provide insight transparently on what is performing well for you and where you can save ad dollar.

Use variations of headlines

Using a variety of headlines in your RSAs can allow marketers to use more keywords, which can enable the ads to reach even more potential customers. The more Google variations the better, because using a variety can increase your CTR. Also according to Frederick Vallaeys, co-founder and CEO of PPC management software company Optmyzr, in his session at SMX Next “If you give Google more variations then the CTR goes up because they’re able to show the right ad to the right user at the right time.”

One important note to add: just because you are experiencing spikes in CTR doesn’t necessarily mean you’re conversion rate has increased. Some data shows they actually decrease with more headlines. Fortunately, adding more headlines also increases total impressions as it gives Google more flexibility to create the ideal ad for each situation, leading to more impressions per RSA. How you view these outcomes is completely dependent on your goals for the text ads in general.

Take advantage of smart bidding automation

Smart bidding automation is often times a very helpful tool when it comes to preventing ads from showing up to the wrong groups. If you’re doing manual bidding and allowing Google to show your RSAs to audience members that my not be as likely to convert, then that’s in the end a problem for your SEA budget since your manual bids are not going to be able to handle that.

However, when combining smart bidding and Google automatically showing the right ad to the right customer, even if that includes a bit more of broad matching, you can achieve very good results for text ads. This tactic holds up  in court by plenty of search data backing up this recommendation. Marketers that make the switch from ETAs to RSAs, using the same assets, in campaigns that use broad match and smart bidding see an average of 20% more conversions at a similar cost per conversion, according to Google. If automation is the future of search ads (which most likely is the case for all future SEAs and social media advertising), it is very senseful to use Google’s machine learning systems in every fullest extent possible.

Final thoughts

In addition to RSA, general SEA and other digital marketing tips, we will continue to share case studies and the latest digital marketing news and tips to help you drive your business. Our goal is to ensure we help improve your marketing and drive success.

At Onimod Global, we have endless experience and expertise when it comes to all things SEO, general social media advertising, and digital marketing. Got questions about how to optimize your RSAs or want to learn more about us? Contact us here today.

 

SEO Strategy – Voice Search and its Impact in 2021

How many times have you said ‘Hey, Google?’ today? You would most certainly not be the only one. Voice search is not only on the rise, it’s becoming second nature for everyone in their day to day lives. It’s not only questions being directed at smart speakers, but there’s also a massive surge being used for mobile. With that being said, if you aren’t optimizing for voice search in 2021, that is likely to have an impact on your ranking in the future. Experts at Onimod Global are here to help you discover more about voice search and how your keyword decisions could make all the difference.

As usual, data is very telling. Almost one-third (27%) of the online users globally use mobile voice search. Those numbers will be considered minuscule in the future as they’re bound to double in the next few years. The big pressing question: why is this the case? Is it just because it’s practical, or because it’s convenient, or maybe just because it’s trendy? One thing is certain: it’s gaining popularity as it is for sure easy to use, fast, and conversational compared to conventional typing. 

Voice Search 101

By definition, voice search is voice recognition technology that allows users to perform searches by speaking directly to their supported devices. These range from smartphones like your iPhone and Samsung to your computers to any home assistant devices such as Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple’s Siri and many more device assistants. In total, Google voice searches have skyrocketed over the past several years, so how you incorporate voice search into your digital marketing strategy is a must. 

Whether you’re working as an SEO consultant or working on building a website right now from the ground up, we advise you to ensure your site and all pages are optimized it for voice search. 

Website Voice Search Optimization in 2021

You may still be asking yourself, what are all of the benefits that come with optimizing for voice search in 2021?

  • More revenue: More visitors mean will in turn result in more conversions, and more conversions will of course equal more revenue.  
  • Higher rankings: Almost always these queries will rank in the top 3 positions on search engine results pages (SERPs).   
  • Higher authority: When you start ranking for voice searches and increase your audience, you boost your website’s authority. 

There is of course a catch, and that catch is called keywords. So in order to make your voice search optimization work as planned, you need optimized content. As always, keywords are the key.   

Voice search SEO requires:   

  • Question-based keywords: Queries should be in the form of questions, as that is also how the query is typically formed
  • Long-tail keywords: Really think about user intent and focus on action queries 
  • Conversational content: Natural-sounding language is key

Your Google My Business Page Is Important

More often than not, most users finish their queries with the words “near me.” The determining factor for where your page will rank for those types of searches is the Google My Business listing. This is by far one of the easiest ways to get noticed by your target audience via voice search, but one important key factor is ensuring your content and all contact information are complete and on point. 

Google needs to know where your business is located when someone asks to display similar businesses in your area. Include your name, address, and phone number (NAP) in the listing and choose the right business category and area code. 

Additionally, you can try to rank for those “near me” queries by targeting local keywords that contain location-specific phrases that generate results related to the same geographic location. 

Final thoughts

In addition to voice search SEO strategies and other digital marketing tips, we will continue to share case studies and the latest digital marketing news and tips to help you drive your business. Our goal is to ensure we help improve your marketing and drive success.

At Onimod Global, we have endless experience and expertise when it comes to all things SEO, general social media advertising, and digital marketing. Got questions about how to optimize for voice search or want to learn more about us? Contact us here today.

  

3 Steps for a Successful Holiday SEO

A holiday season simply wouldn’t be complete without frantic shopping, especially online shopping. Regardless of if people are shopping on Black Friday, Cyber Monday or completely throughout the holiday shopping season, millions of customers rush to get their hands on gifts for friends and loved ones. That means retailers must be well prepared for your holiday SEO strategy.

One way to really stand out for e-commerce business owners and marketers is a top notch holiday SEO strategy. If your brand is looking to optimize for holiday-specific website traffic, here are the three main steps to take to make sure you’re ready.

A good indication of where to start for keyword research is with trends from 2020. You can find this in the Search Terms report in Google Search Console. First ask yourself:

  • Which pages generated the most traffic last year and likely to gain lots of traffic this year as well?
  • Which search queries were the most used to discover your products and deals?

After you’ve gathered this information, analyze data from other channels that your company is active on. In particular, definitely research the top referral sources — affiliates, social media websites, email campaigns. Determine which channels drove you the most conversions and prioritize them for this year’s strategy.

Google Search Console is much more suited for providing you with technical website data versus Google Analytics. Long explanation short, this tool reports how search crawlers ‘view’ your website and interact with it to explore and attempt to determine its value for users.

Identify keywords relevant for holidays

In order to have a successful SEO strategy, keyword research is an absolute must. Irrelevant keyword targeting or those with no purchase/product research intention translates to budget waste. Going after overly-competitive keywords that every other online store is after means low chances for success. To create your holiday keyword plan, we again recommend to search into historic data from last year. Did you see any interesting keywords that shoppers used to find you? A great place to look is the Google Search Console for these specific queries.

When it comes to holiday keyword research, make sure you are careful about which keywords you want to battle and win. During the holiday season, you’d need to rank fast. So don’t go after overly-competitive broach keywords such as “buy cosmetics online.” Why’s that you ask? The reason is because your company would be competing for shopper attention with carousel ad results, Amazon product listings and category pages from other national retailers.

Create landing pages for special launches

This will give you a significant leg up on SEO holiday queries. To increase your chances of showing up during the time of your holiday offers such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday-related search queries, it’s important to create pages that target relevant keywords. (That you’ve discovered during the previous step). In order to discover the best prices available for their query, users will often search for keyword combinations with “[brand name] or [product] deals, discounts, promos”.

You can research which options are trending in your product vertical using historical results from Google Trends. Depending on the industry your business is in, it may be beneficial to create a Black Friday or Cyber Monday page for each product you plan on offering at a discount.

Final thoughts

In addition to holiday SEO strategies and other digital marketing updates, we will continue to share case studies and the latest SEO updates to help you drive your business. Our goal is to ensure we help improve your marketing and drive success.

At Onimod Global, we have endless experience and expertise when it comes to all things SEO, general social media advertising, and digital marketing. Got questions about how to make the most of your SEO during the holidays or want to learn more about us? Contact us here today.

 

Long-Tail Keyword Guide: How To Use In 2021

Are you exhausted of trying ranking for the same highly competitive keywords as your competitors? Here are two and a half words that will help you solve this problem: Long-tail keywords.

There are so many benefits of highly targeted search terms packed with intent. Onimod Global experts are here to help break down the definition of long-tail keywords and how to use them to your advantage.

What are long-tail keywords?

By definition, long-tail keywords are longer and much more specific keyword phrases that users will likely use to guide them to their desired destination faster. This usually also occurs when they’re closer to a purchase or when the visitors are using voice search. Long-tail keywords can be extremely valuable if you know how to use them.

Here’s an example to explain: if you’re a furniture company, most likely the odds are that your pages won’t often rank or appear near the top of an organic search for “furniture” because there’s too much competition (this is particularly true if you’re a smaller company or a startup). But if you specialize in, say, a specific type of vintage furniture, then keywords like “vintage victorian style desk” are going to reliably find those customers looking for exactly that product on your page.

Managing long-tail keywords is essentially just a matter of establishing how you communicate the product or service you’re selling between your business and the customers who are already out there that are actively searching or shopping for what you provide.

Note that the actual length of these keywords technically isn’t relevant. Long-tail keywords tend to be at least three words long due to their specificity, but precise low-volume searches that are only one or two words long (such as many brand names) are also considered long-tail keywords.

How to use long-tail keywords in 2021

Standalone broad keyword strategies are a matter of the past. Years ago, hunting for long-tail keywords with a seemingly low search volume probably seemed and felt like a waste of time and effort. However, long-tail keywords contain so much opportunity in order to connect with your audience which are likely to be converting and paying customers.

In 2021 (almost 2022), the combination of Google’s increased focus on user experience and search intent, and the steady increase of conversational search and voice search, means that long-tail keyword SEO strategies are more important than ever before. Incorporating these can be a real game changer for your company.

Long-tail keywords are also a crucial part of optimizing for ensuring your content is connecting with your audience by showing them exactly what they’re searching for. We live in an age where 55% of millennials use voice search daily. When these users query these platforms, they use long-tail keyword phrases such as questions (what are the best cafe’s with matcha lattes nearby?) and commands with clear intent (compare the price of the blazer from Zara and H&M).

Put yourself in the shoes of the customer to predict the intent behind naturally spoken and voice search questions so that you can provide the most clear and direct answers about your business and services and better target these long-tail keyword phrases. Even better than guessing what your customer’s are guessing, we suggest to do market research and ask a group of people in your target market for their Google searches relative to your content and product and/or service.

Final thoughts

In addition to long-tail keyword strategies and other digital marketing updates, we will continue to share case studies and the latest SEO updates to help you drive your business. Our goal is to ensure we help improve your marketing and drive success.

At Onimod Global, we have endless experience and expertise when it comes to all things SEO, general social media advertising, and digital marketing. Got questions about Facebook advertising or want to learn more about us? Contact us here today.

 

 

 

Continuous Scrolling Added To Google Mobile Search

Back again with another Google SEO update, this time regarding continuous scrolling. Google announced they will be updating mobile search in the US with the ability to continuously scroll as more results automatically load.

Continuous scrolling to Google Mobile Search

In an announcement, Google says:

“At Google, we’re always exploring new ways to help people find what they’re looking for quickly and easily. Earlier this year, we launched a redesign of the Search results page on mobile for a more modern experience that’s easier to scan and navigate.

Today, we’re making browsing search results more seamless and intuitive with the introduction of continuous scrolling on mobile devices.”

For Google users this is a big time upgrade as it’s now possible to scroll through an almost endless list of results to find right content.

 

Previously on mobile devices, Google’s search engine results page for mobile mainly adhered closely to the ‘ten blue links’ format that was implemented in the beginning on desktop search. Rather than seeing a numbered page list at the bottom of results, users in general would only see a displayed ‘see more’ button. Clicking that button on a mobile device is equivalent to clicking on page two of desktop search results.

The ‘see more’ button isn’t completely disappearing, however Google says that searchers will be able to continuously scroll through “many more” results before finally triggering the ‘see more’ button.

What this means for business

As we all know, CTR rates are extremely low after first page results. This is particularly revealed in a 2020 study that finds the CTR of page two results is less than 1%. The reason behind users not clicking on the page two results is uncertain, but it could have something to do with the perceived quality of content that didn’t make it to page one. With continuous scrolling on mobile, there may be the potential that the bias behind page 1 results is removed.

Think of apps like TikTok, when you’re allowed to infinitely scroll and encouraged to do so. Maybe you’re scrolling for a few minutes, or maybe for several hours. With the same logic being applied to Google Search (okay maybe they won’t scroll through Google for hours), this has the ability to increase content discovery significantly.

Final thoughts

We’ll see as the months go on if this change helps increase traffic for low ranking pages, and provide updates along the way. We will continue to share case studies and the latest SEO updates to help you drive your business. Our goal is to ensure we help improve your marketing and drive success.

At Onimod Global, we have endless experience and expertise when it comes to all things SEO, general social media advertising, and digital marketing. Got questions about Facebook advertising or want to learn more about us? Contact us here today.

Simple Link Building Techniques to Follow in 2021

When it comes to SEO, both on-page and off-page efforts are equally important and need to be done appropriately. Link building is an off-page SEO technique that has become essential in enhancing a website’s rankings and its overall growth. 

Over the past few years, marketers have had to change the way they go about link building due to changes in Google’s algorithm. Google now ranks the quality of links above the total number of links a website has. With that, here are four effortless link building techniques you can utilize in 2021. 

1. Guest Posting 

A guest post is one of the most impactful link building techniques. This not only allows you to generate more backlinks, but helps you build relations with others in your industry as well. It’s fairly easy to identify blog sites that will allow others to write guests posts for them. Look for a medium that is appropriately related to your niche, but not a direct competitor. Doing this will not only allow you to build more backlinks, but can help you build good relations as well. 

When guest posting, you want to make sure your content is high quality and published in a good presentation. If the delivery is not good, your reputation could suffer and defeat the purpose. Make sure you generate informative content so you’re building links in the most effective way. 

2. Broadening Your Relations 

No matter the industry, relationships matter. The same goes for link building. Identify blogs, forums and pages that are related to your niche. Follow them on social media and try to get into contact with them. Connecting with more businesses similar to yours can help in a variety of ways. Not only are you building links but you’re also putting yourself more in the loop of what’s going on in your industry. This also helps you create more awareness for your brand, ultimately helping you and your site grow. 

3. Testimonials 

Writing testimonials is another simple and effective link building method. There are many companies that ask and enable people to write testimonials on the products or services they offer. When you leave a testimonial, you can get a backlink if the company publishes it. Ultimately this will engage more visitors and traffic to your website. 

4. Keep an Eye on Competitors  

Lastly, you should keep an eye on the links your competitors are building. Monitor the strong links they have and see the strategies they implement in going about building them. This can help you improve your own strategies and identify how you can go about getting the highest quality links. 

Final Thoughts 

Link building is an essential factor in an overall SEO strategy. While these are fairly simple tactics, there are many more. Sometimes it’s easier to seek help from the experts. At Onimod Global, SEO is our core attribute and a pillar of our marketing strategy. We develop organic search engine optimization campaigns that deliver increases in organic traffic through an increase in natural rankings across all major search engines. If you’re interested in digital marketing assistance or want to learn more about what we do, contact us today

Onimod Global releases the latest digital marketing news and essential marketing tips every Tuesday and Thursday! To catch up on the top digital marketing news and trends, click here