In the business world, that no longer applies. Instead, comparing your business’ digital marketing strategy to others can give you a heads-up over your other competition.

It’s all about determining which strategies they’re using and then figuring out how you can use them yourself. From this perspective, those comparisons aren’t bad at all! Let’s get started.

1) Take Some Time to Determine which Competitors to Focus On

It makes sense to start out your competitor research by actually choosing your competitors. The main thing to remember here is that the word “competitors” is very broad. You can go with those who are leaders in your market, or even local companies that may not sell the same services or products as you.

It’s all about how you want to market your business. For example, if you’re aiming at a national market, then it makes sense to go with your national, leading competitors. However, if you plan on getting more local customers, then find a few local businesses that seem to be doing everything right. They don’t need to be on the same field – they just need to be successful.

After all, you’re going to be looking at their keywords, their SEO, and their social media accounts; even if they are quite different product or service-wise, their information is still valuable.

2) Pick your Metrics Wisely

You don’t need to analyze everything that your chosen competitors do in the digital realm. Instead, you should pick a few key metrics to focus on.

Metrics like content engagement can show you how many of that company’s followers are interacting with their posts. How many people comment or “like” a status? And how does that number compare to the overall amount of followers on that channel?
Another interesting metric is audience growth. Did your competitor post something that made their amount of followers go up tenfold? What was the post? Why did it have the impact that it did?

Content distribution is another one. This looks at how often your competitors post. On top of that, if their blog posts or updates are distributed through social media, which accounts were updated? Finally, there’s a metric called SOI, or Share of Interaction.

This metric creates an analysis graph of your information versus your competitors. It will show you things like growth over time. If you really want to compare the effectiveness of your digital campaigns, then this is the way to go.

We’ve mostly discussed the various metrics above and didn’t really go into detail about how to choose the best ones. While you don’t want to try to compare everything, as you’ll end up with information overload, you should pick at least two of these metrics.

For example, you can look at engagement scores and SOI, or engagement and distribution. Every combination has a purpose and a meaning. You just need to pick the ones that will work best for you. It’s all about what you want to focus on and the metrics that you want to improve.

3) Only Compare a Few Channels – Not All of Them

In digital marketing parlance, channels refer to social media accounts. There are many to pick from, although Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are the most popular. However, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, SEO, email, and even blog post updates all count as channels for this purpose.

Like we stated above, if you try to compare all of the channels, the end result will give you too much information to truly get a handle on what your competitors are up to. Instead, pick a few channels, compare them, and go back and look at a few more.

Also, if you don’t plan on utilizing a particular channel, such as Pinterest, then that’s an obvious one to leave out. You aren’t trying to copy everything that they do completely – just get an idea of how they approach their digital marketing.

4) Utilize a Comparison Program

There are a number of different digital marketing comparison programs out there. Programs like SEMrush, SpyFu, The Search Monitor, Open Moves, Mondovo and so on can all give you some great analytics to focus on.

Many of these services will charge you monthly or yearly, but they do provide everything that you need in one easy to use package – Keyword research, backlink analysis, Facebook analysis, SEO site audit, search engine rank tracking etc.

They’ll allow you to look at your competitor’s metrics, channels, and more. You can compare one competitor to another or even one competitor to your own site and social media accounts.

This definitely beats doing things the hard way – looking at everything on your own and taking notes on a spreadsheet. The amount of time that you’ll save makes paying for one of these services worth it.

Before you choose a comparison program, make sure to shop around a bit. You can always ask their customer service people questions about what’s included in the package, as well as how many competitors you can follow. There are many limits to the number of metrics and channels, too. It’s always good to know this in advance, so that you can pick a service program that accurately meets your needs.

5) Don’t Forget to Check Out their Backlinks

Backlinks are one of those things that are easy to overlook. However, you do need to check them. Your competitor’s backlinks matter just as much as your own. You need to see if those backlinks come from quality sources or have a follow tag. Are they from a trustworthy website? Does their content match the link?

It’s too easy to buy non-quality backlinks. There are some services out there that will hire bloggers to provide backlinks. Those bloggers are paid a small fee in order to come up with a post that uses several specific links and wording. The problem is that those aren’t considered quality backlinks. They can really hurt your search engine results.

If your competitor is using them and you aren’t, then you actually have a leg up on them. Of course, you don’t want to tell them this! However, if your competitors have good backlinks to their sites, then you need to reach out to those sources to see if they’ll provide you the same courtesy.

6) SEO and Blog Content Matter

While you’re looking at everything your competitor does, you need to take a look at the SEO (keep it as do follow )that they use on their site, as well as their blog content. Do they post blogs that are stuffed with keywords? Or is their content organic and on topic?

If you find that their blogs aren’t organic at all and simply utilize keywords in weird ways, then you have found something to improve on with your own digital marketing. There’s clearly a niche in the market that you can fill – field expert. You can start coming up with your own posts that aren’t stuffed full of keywords, and post ones that show your expertise in the subject. You’ve found a way to beat the competition.

The same is true for their website content. If their sites don’t use SEO properly, then you can jump in and make sure that yours is better. On the other hand, if they follow good SEO practices, feel free to be inspired by their keywords and web copy. Just make sure that everything you post on your own site is completely original, or you’ll be punished by the search engines.

There’s no shortage of ways to compare your digital marketing strategies to your competitors. As long as you find a way to focus your lens and only compare a few channels or metrics (and competitors) at a time, you’ll be able to find out exactly where they succeed.

Read Next: SEO in 2018: Why SEO will and Should be more Important to You this Year

The opposite may occur as well. You might find some of their shortcomings. You can take advantage of this by using those to your own advantage. This is where comparing your business to others can really help.

In the end, using your competitor’s ideas to come up with your own is a valid way to enhance your digital marketing strategies. Odds are, they did the same thing to come up with theirs.

The post 6 Competitor Research Tips to Improve Your Digital Marketing Strategy appeared first on Proven SEO Blog.

So, if you want your website to be ranked high on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) related to your product niche on Google, Bing, Yahoo and other important search engines, you need to get a lot of one way backlinks pointed at your web pages from high-quality sources.

Here then, are ten quick and easy ways to create backlinks so you can get your website ranking higher on Google and other search engines.

Beta Testing Forums

If your business creates software, there are many beta testing forums online where people are willing to test out your products prior to launching them to the public. To get high-quality backlinks, register on these beta testing websites and connect with testers.

This has the double benefit of being able to get informative advice on the quality of your software that you can then use to improve your products, as well as getting one-way backlinks from the forum when users write about your software on their own websites.

Helpful Hint: Some of the best beta testing sites to use are BetaNews, ieXbeta, and FlexBeta. If you are looking for links that will improve your ranking rather than driving traffic to your pages, make sure you check that the “unfollow” attribute is available on any given forum.

Tap into Tech Bloggers

Another great link building option, to increase your website ranking, is to send your products to tech bloggers and ask if they would be willing to review it. When it comes to getting publicity for your products, you need to be proactive rather than reactive. So rather than waiting for the biggest and most influential tech bloggers to discover your software on their own, send it to them and ask if they can include a one-way backlink to your website in their review.

Charitable Donations

Want to gain valuable one-way backlinks from a reputable website and help other people out at the same time? Then make a charitable donation to an organization that thanks to its donors on their website and include a link to your web page in the thank you section.

Google may assign a lot of weight to a backlink that comes from a recognized charity. So their backlink can give a boost to your website ranking more than what you can expect from a non-charity site.

Speaking of giving back to the community, if you are web designer, work with SEO, or programmer, one option is to offer your talents to non-profit organizations for free – especially those that have a website that ends in the authoritative .edu or .gov suffix. Then ask that they include a backlink on their site to your web pages.

Event Sponsorship

Another way to get high-quality one-way backlinks and improve your website’s ranking from an authoritative website, is to be a sponsor of an event with an educational or governmental institution. Many of these agencies will display their corporate sponsors on their web pages and when they do, you can include a backlink to your web page.

Sponsoring an event also has the benefit of building your business’s profile and reputation in front of industry leaders. You also may get an invitation to the event, where you can mingle and network with people within your industry.

Participate in the Conversation

Interact with thought leaders in your industry by posting questions and comments on their blogs and websites, and interacting in forums related to your niche. Always remember to leave an electronic signature that includes a backlink to your web pages. This can definitely help in raising your website’s ranking a few notches in search engines.

You also can use these opportunities to attract new customers and fans, especially when you post information that is relevant and useful.

Target Local Business Forums

Create a thread about your business on a local forum that allows posting of information about area businesses. Make sure to include information about the products and services you provide, your location, high-quality photos and other images, and important information such as contact numbers, email addresses, and hours of operation.

Don’t forget to include a link to your website as well.

Offer Free Samples

Offer free samples of your products or a free trial of your services to your clients, vendors and other contacts. In return, simply ask for their honest feedback … as well as a backlink on their web pages. This is another quick way to bolster your website rankings.

Don’t Forget Your Local Chamber of Commerce

The purpose of local Chambers of Commerce is to promote local businesses. So don’t forget to make contact and participate in your chamber. Usually, they will allow members to post links on their websites and other relevant materials.

Partner with Local Businesses

Look for mutually beneficial ways to partner with other local businesses, such as posting each other’s links on your websites.

You May Also Like: Why SEO Audit Is Mandatory For Your Website?

Use Citations to Promote Your Business

Citations are badges that include your business’s name, address, contact information and other relevant information. These citations can help get you ranked higher when they are posted on other sites, even if they don’t have direct backlinks to your pages.

To generate your own personalized citation, Whitespark Local Citation Finder is a free tool you can use.

So, now that we have shared the list of top 10 ways to create high-quality backlinks to improve your search rankings, do let us know in the comments section below as to which technique or a mix of techniques worked best for you.

Good luck!!

The post 10 Ways To Boost Up Your Website Ranking By Back-Linking appeared first on Proven SEO Blog.

Even brick and mortar businesses are more dependent than ever on people who search online for the types of products and services they provide.

That means that the key to connecting with your customers – regardless of whether you are a brick and mortar or online business, or what type of products and services you offer – is to optimize your web pages in order to make them easier for people to find.

Here are 7 fast, easy and effective keyword research for you to improve your search engine optimization so that you can improve the flow of customers to your company’s web pages.

1. You Need To Understand Your High Value Keywords

The Internet is built upon keywords. They are the backbone upon which the algorithms used by Yahoo, Bing, Google and other search engines are built.

Search engines use keywords to quickly and accurately determine what a web page is all about. High-powered software programs can scan thousands of documents per second and instantly pick out the keywords and phrases to determine how and where these web pages should be ranked on their search engines.

As a business owner, your job is to get your web pages ranked at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs).

That’s because most people searching for the type of products and services you provide are going to click on the top one or two websites that show up on the SERPs that appear on their screens. If you are anywhere else than the top half of the front page of that SERP, odds are very few customers will find you.

The problem is that the best keywords for your specific product or service – regardless of what it is – are by their very essence going to be the most desirable for other business owners within your niche. That means that the rules of supply and demand dictate that the best keywords are also going to be the most expensive.

And if you don’t have the marketing budget to bid on these keywords in Google Ads and other popular paid marketing platforms, you are going to have a very hard time landing on the top of the SERPs, right?
Not necessarily!

One way to get around this dilemma is to focus on long-tail keywords which are specific keyword phrases composed of two to five words that most accurately describe your products and services.

For example, if you specialize in selling men’s winter parkas and you are based in the northernmost regions of Canada, you can load your content with a phrase like “men’s parkas in northern Canada” to get more directly to your prospective customers without having to bid on costlier – and more general – keywords such as “men’s parkas” or “winter coats”.

2. You Don’t Have To Go It Alone

Now you know that finding the best long-tail keyword phrases for the products and services you offer is the most affordable and effective way to connect with the customers you need to succeed. But how can you know which are the best keyword phrases for your specific interests?

One way is to simply brainstorm a bunch of keyword phrases and then narrow these down to the ones you think are going to be the same as those typed in by prospective customers. But this is largely trial and error and probably isn’t going to give you the results you want – at least not as quickly as you need to maximize profits.

The fastest and easiest way is to use a free keyword tool that can give you an array of keyword suggestions that already have been tested and proven to attract the highest number of prospective customers. Keyword tools are highly accurate and do an effective job of providing you with only those keywords and keyword phrases that are most likely to connect you with the customers you want.

3. The Internet Is Like The Wild West

In the corporate business world, there are a lot of regulations and laws aimed at preventing companies from stealing each other’s key information – such as product development, future intentions, and other high-value data.

But the Internet is still largely unregulated. That means that if you want to make your online business successful, all you really need to do is find the best things your competitors are doing and steal them for your own use.

This is a strategy known as competitive analysis and every successful online company does it to one extent or another. Understanding the keywords that are the most effective for attracting the highest amount of traffic to your web pages is as simple as logging on to Google or another popular search engine and looking at the keywords used by the top SERP results.

Another way is to use a keyword tool that can do all this research for you – and collate the results in a manner that can easily be understood and used for your competitive advantage.

4. Benefits Of The Google Search Console

If you have been working in online marketing for a while, you may have heard about Google Webmaster Tools. These actually don’t exist anymore. Instead, they have been converted into the Google Search Console, which essentially is a keyword tool that helps you identify the best keywords on Google to promote your products or services.

Google is by far the biggest and most popular search engine in the world, especially in English-speaking countries. So if you can land at the top of the SERPs on Google, you will automatically land on top of the Yahoo, Bing and other results pages.

When you use the Google Search Console to optimize your existing content with the most popular specific keywords and phrases for your business, you can sort keywords by clicks and then focus on the most relevant target searchers for your actual products and services.

This helps you select the specific long-tail keyword phrases that will drive the most traffic to your web pages. Include these in the content of your pages and you can instantly improve your click-through rate (CTR).

5. Location, Location, Location

Perhaps the easiest way to optimize a keyword phrase for your target audience is to include your location. For example, there are probably tens of thousands of auto repair businesses in the United States, but you want to attract mostly those customers who are in your city – or even your neighborhood.

So rather than using global keyword phrases such as “auto repair” or “auto repair services”, include specific geographic keyword phrases such as “Baltimore auto repair” or “south Baltimore auto repair services” that attract customers looking for the types of products and services you provide within the geographic area in which your business operates.

6. ‘Can You Be More Specific?’

When you us Google Search Console or another keyword tool to find your initial keyword, the next step is to use these tools to analyze the effectiveness of each specific keyword or keyword phrase to identify the ones that will bring you the most results.

Data to be considered includes:

• The number of global searches per month per keywords. Look for the biggest number.
• How many other marketers are bidding on the same keyword or keyword phrase? Look for keywords with a high number of searches but low competition.
• Search trends will tell you if the keyword or keyword phases has increased in popularity during the last month, the last year, or whatever timeline you determine

7. Where To Place Your Keywords

Once you have determined which keyword phrases you want, the next step is to determine which pages on your website you should place them in order to attract the highest amount of traffic.

These probably will include your home page and other web content that already is popular. There’s little value in driving traffic to pages such as your Privacy Policy or Terms of Use, so target only those pages that are most likely to earn you revenue – such as those that feature your products or describe the benefits of your services.

Read More: 5 Proven Strategies To Double Your Blog Traffic in a Month

You probably want to limit each page to no more than five keywords or keyword phrases each. It also makes a big difference where on your pages you should include your keywords in order to improve your page ranking.

The post How to do Effective Keyword Research – 7 Essential Elements You Must Know appeared first on Proven SEO Blog.

However, what you also need to track are your local rankings. Tracking your local rankings provides data that helps to continually improve your opportunities for optimization, visibility, and awareness of penalties. Keep track of your local rankings so that you stay ahead of your competitors and remain relevant in searches.

Understanding Rank Tracking

While no rank tracking system will ever be one hundred percent accurate, it’s important to understand why. Rank tracking systems report different results to each person on each device every time. These results vary based on factors like location, time, device, browser, and search history.

While a search rank tracker can’t compare apples to apples in ranking reports, it can provide value in other ways. Tracking your local rankings is still relevant because it can help you identify low hanging fruit, show your ranking around the city, display ranking trends over time, and alert you to major changes in your rank.

Keyword Opportunities

If you currently rank between fourth and tenth on search engine results pages (SERPs), you have some pretty high opportunity keywords that, if optimized appropriately, can push you into the top three spots. The top three positions on SERPs get sixty percent of the clicks, so it’s important to getting more users to your site.

By keeping track of your ranks and how your keywords are performing, you can identify which keywords you can maximize to increasing your rank and return in one of the highly-coveted top three positions on any SERP. Using Google ranking reports, you can identify keywords and their rank so you can focus efforts on the appropriate ones, increasing your rank and getting more customers.

Google My Business and Local Snack Packs

Google classifies the top three results on each results page as a Snack Pack. As a local business, you need to claim your Google My Business listing to take advantage of the local benefits. Only businesses who have claimed their Google My Business listings show up in Google’s Snack Pack.

The majority of local businesses haven’t claimed their Google My Business listings, meaning this puts you at a huge advantage over other local businesses and increases your chances of being included in the Snack Pack.

Be sure to include as much useful information in your Google My Business listing as possible. Business name, address, phone number, email, URL, photos, and a description all help to make your listing appealing. Reviews also give your listing credibility. You need to make it easy for customers to contact you by whichever means they prefer, ensuring that you remain relevant in SERPs.

Effective Optimization

If you don’t rank in one of the top three positions for keywords, chances are you won’t see any significant increases in website traffic. It takes time to improve your ranking position, so sometimes it’s difficult to tell if your efforts are paying off.

Monitoring your local rankings over time shows any progress you make, even if you don’t return in Google’s Snack Pack. If your SEO strategy is working, your rankings will steadily show improvement. This leads to more website traffic and increased conversions.

If you don’t monitor these statistics, you won’t know the fruits of your labor, and you can’t make improvements. Constantly tracking your local rankings makes it easier to know what works and what doesn’t.

Diagnose Site Issues

Tracking your local rankings can also help diagnose major site issues and alert you to Google penalties. Google takes into account the performance of your site in addition to keywords. If your page speed is slow or your website is unresponsive, it will stop appearing in SERPs.

Google can’t index properly if it can’t read the contents of a page, so you need to know immediately if this happens. You can use any of the free or paid on page SEO checker tools available online to find out major on-page site issues.

Continually monitoring your rankings can alert you to possible issues. For instance, if some keywords begin to fall on the ranking report, but others don’t, you may have an indexing issue on some pages but not others. You can quickly identify which pages have issues by looking at past data.

Google imposes manual penalties when it identifies over-optimized pages. When you use keywords too often to try to boost your rankings, Google catches on to your keyword stuffing and penalizes you for what is considered spamming.

These penalties affect your entire website, not just specific keywords. If all of your rankings disappear, Google may have given you a manual penalty.

You may also get a local penalty from Google if you violate the terms of the Google My Business listing. False or spammy business names and duplicate Google My Business listings create these local penalties. If your maps rankings disappear, but your organic rankings don’t, this could indicate a local penalty.

Tracking your local rankings alerts you to local penalties very quickly because you can see local rankings and maps rankings separately, meaning you can identify local penalties immediately and focus on fixing your Google My Business profile.

Your Competitors

When tracking your local rankings, you may wonder if your competitors are affected by a drop in keyword rank. Knowing how you measure up to your competitors is valuable information when optimizing your website.

Using tools to track your competitor’s performance in SERPs helps you understand how competitors gain at your expense so you can improve your optimization efforts and stay ahead of the game.

Diagnostics and Reporting

Read More:5 Powerful SEO Hacks That Will Rank You Higher In Search Engines

If you see unusual fluctuations in organic traffic, you have data at your disposal to diagnose the issue. By tracking your local rankings, you can keep up with your website performance and how it affects your traffic. It could provide meaningful insights into a new competitor that bumped your rankings or some poor link building you thought you fixed.

If the new content you added boosted your rankings, it tells you that as well, and these are the types of things your bosses and clients like to see.

While you shouldn’t focus your reports on rankings alone, they are good statistics to provide. When you develop an SEO strategy to improve your rankings, you should have solid data to support your success.

Let’s face it. No matter how good you are, you really, really like to be number one. SEO and tracking your local rankings can help ensure that you reach and maintain the number one spot.

Rankings aren’t the only metrics you should use to measure your success. However, it does help you keep track of other important factors that can improve your SEO.

Sometimes focusing on rankings alone prevents you from seeing the bigger picture. Understand the importance of rankings and what they mean, but realize they’re not everything. Keep tabs on your rankings and implement changes where you see fit to benefit your SEO strategy and your overall business performance.

The post Rank Tracking – What Is It & How To Track Search Engine Rankings appeared first on Proven SEO Blog.

Adding keywords, content and header tags, and creating backlinks used to get ranks, but it doesn’t anymore. Search engines are looking for more intelligent data like site speed and responsiveness, content, authority, and technical code, among other things you may not know.

Why Website Audits Are Important?

Search engines are constantly changing how they compute search results when someone performs a query.

If you don’t regularly perform site audits, you may not be optimized for the results. You can stuff keywords until you’re blue in the face and it won’t improve your chances of ranking.

Performing a site audit yourself helps you hone in on the metrics that you find critical to your business, but many SEO audit tools are more comprehensive than the items listed above and may include areas you don’t know to look.

What An SEO Audit Includes?

In-depth SEO site audits are not quick. Set aside a few days to do it properly. If you have a large website, it could take longer. You want to ensure you find all of the issues and create actionable direction on how to improve.

A manual review of your site in conjunction with several different reports helps you retrieve a variety of data from various sources to give you the best chance of improvement. Every audit should include the following minimum requirements:

• A technical audit to make sure your site is responsive.
• An on-site audit including a full review of all pages for proper keyword use.
• An off-site audit analyzing backlinks, anchor text, authority, and trust.
• A social audit reviewing mentions and visibility.

What To Expect From An SEO Audit?

An SEO site audit should provide a detailed analysis of how your website performs in search, social media, and other internal or external links related to its existing state.

Included in the results is a list of action items with explanations and a marketing strategy, enabling you to take advantage of opportunities for improvement.

Do It Yourself

The cost for an in-depth audit prepared by a professional is cost prohibitive for some businesses. There are SEO audit tools available online to run your audit and start impacting changes, but it’s not difficult to perform your own as long as you have a guide. So let’s dive in.

On-Site SEO

The most important part of the SEO site audit is checking your website to measure its optimization for search. Take into account titles and descriptions, URL structure, text formatting, and content.

Titles and descriptions should be unique for each page. If the user can’t tell from the title what the page is about, then rework it. The report should provide direction and let the user know what problem that page solves.

URLs should be unique and correctly formatted. A URL is a string of text with no spaces, but that doesn’t mean it is hard to read. In fact, it should help the user to identify precisely where they are on your site.

For example, www.format.com/this-is-correct tells the visitor what website they are on, and which subpage they are viewing. URLs contain keywords, include hyphens to separate words, are unique for each page, and are less than 255 characters.

Text Formatting Includes tags, bold, and italics for emphasis. Lists break up big blocks of text, helping with readability.

Unique Content Helps with indexing and prevents the assignment of penalties from search engines. High-quality content is free of spelling and grammar errors. Maintaining a frequent posting schedule helps keep content fresh and relevant.

Links Show search engines that you value other industry experts’ opinions, and you foster an environment of learning among internet users.

Use keyword anchor text for links and check periodically to make sure the links still work. There are free tools on the internet that review your site and return a report of all broken links.

A good rule of thumb is to use between two and ten internal links to other pages on your site, along with linking to valuable external sources. Linking to pages from your home page ranks them higher on search engines.

Images Make a web page easier to read and more attractive for sharing on social media. Be sure your images don’t affect page load times, or it can work against you.

File names should describe what the image is about and should have an ALT tag. Consider compressing images to minimize their size if you use a lot of them.

User Friendliness Is subjective, but there are things you can do to make your site more helpful. Make your 404 page descriptive if a user types an incorrect URL. Minimize clicking to internal pages to ensure a user finds what they need in three clicks or less.

Define Your Main Menu And keep your interface and navigation consistent across all pages. Group content into relevant categories and pages, make your contact page easily accessible and implement breadcrumbs or another identifier on all internal pages, so users know where they are and how to get back.

Page Speed Affects ranking and conversion rates and contributes to user-friendliness, so use audit tools available to you to check page speed and give recommendations on how you can improve it.

Social Media

Social media affects SEO in the form of links and exposure. You can optimize your site for sharing by adding images, making it easy to read, and keeping content blocks short.

Ensure you have a presence on social media so followers can tag you, tweet you, and spread the word about your brand.

Linking to relevant external sources in your blog helps to build credibility with other experts in your industry.

By sharing blogs on social media sites, you begin to develop inbound links, amplifying your marketing power.

Linking to other blogs on your site sometimes generates a ‘return the favor’ sort of attitude within the community, and simply linking to other people’s work can build a good foundation for awareness. You can also create organic inbound links by guest blogging on someone else’s site.

Off-Site SEO

Performing and off-site SEO audit provides a list of inbound links. It’s hard to do this yourself because you may not know who is linking to you.

There are tools available online to return a list. Determine how many unique domains link to you and whether they are trusted.

Learn how many links point to your home page versus other internal pages, which pages have the most inbound links, and what percentage of the links are keyword based.

If you need to increase the number of inbound links, you can use the social media strategy mentioned above. Once you have a list of who is linking to you, you can reduce harmful links by requesting that the site administrator remove them.

Keyword-based links are useful, but if you have too many, Google may penalize you, so have a good handle on this number and keep it under control.

Web Site Promotion

Promoting your website online goes beyond SEO. Performing a site audit involves looking outside of your SEO strategy to things like mobile, customer education, and the big picture.

Optimize the mobile version of your site to accommodate the fifty percent or more of searches made on mobile phones.

Develop an Android app for the millions of new Android users per day. Establish a YouTube presence to firmly plant your foot as an industry expert and reach the millions of people who search for expertise on YouTube every minute.

Read More: Importance Of Advertising With Your Facebook Page- Why You Need To Do It

What An SEO Audit Accomplishes

An SEO audit identifies missing opportunities, finds potential customers, and suggests ways to reach them. An SEO site audit gives business owners ideas for improving their online presence.

It’s a complete assessment of errors or issues, and many online tools will suggest improvements based on the results. The goal of a proper SEO site audit is to increase organic traffic, improve conversions, and grow revenue.

The post Why SEO Audit Is Mandatory For Your Website? appeared first on Proven SEO Blog.

That being said, it is important for businesses to use social media in an effective way to build a positive reputation and connect with more customers. To help you to do that, here are five powerful strategies to build a solid brand reputation online through the use of social media platforms.

1. Choose the Most Suited Social Media Platforms on Which to Build a Network

If you are serious about building a strong and positive online reputation through social media, a high level of involvement is required. This will mean having content ready to share, and not just on a once weekly basis.

Trying to remain active on too many social platforms all at once can become a tedious undertaking. If you eventually become overwhelmed with trying to keep up, your efforts may fizzle out, and your social media pages and business will suffer in the long or short run.

It would be a more prudent and practical decision to carefully choose the best social media platforms which for you, represent the most lucrative opportunities to push your business forward and to develop networks from.

When you select two or three, these will be much easier to manage and maintain. This will ensure that you can successfully sustain your business image. Failure to do so would reflect badly on your business and thus damage your reputation.

2. Maintain a Consistent Image across Social Media Platforms

When potential clients or other interested parties view your brand, it is quite likely that they will do multiple searches across all of your social media pages. This is why consistency becomes so important because it helps to establish your credibility in the eyes of potential clients.

You want to appear professional and serious-minded so that your brand is well represented and this will definitely boost your reputation.

3. Keep Your Social Media Pages Current

Engaging with your audience and potential clients through social media is an important way to let them know that your business is still alive and well.

Posting relevant and valuable content on a regular (daily) basis will further grab the attention of your audience and keep it, especially if the information is of great value to them.

Once you keep your pages up to date by posting daily, you assure your audience that you are interested in your business and as a result also interested in them.

While it can be daunting to keep up with frequent posting, some platforms such as Facebook allow for scheduled posting which takes the hassle out of actually having to be actually present online all the time.

As a result, you will be able to manage your time well by creating quality content and basically placing it in a queue to be posted at a date and time you have pre-selected. Having done that, you are not absolved of the responsibility of responding to the queries and comments of your readers.

This takes us to the next step which is…

4. Address the Queries, Concerns, and Complaints of Your Customers

In posting content, you will find that your readers will often have questions. It is important to either invest in monitoring applications or tools to notify you when these requests do come in or have an individual designated to address these in a timely manner.

Additionally, there are unfortunately times when a customer may be dissatisfied with a product or service, and they make it known via your social media page. A negative comment need not be detrimental to your reputation.

One of the key things is a prompt response. Of course, a pragmatic approach will be needed in trying to address the situation^[2]. Presenting a solution or offering an apology are practical options which can be used in a bid to alleviate the situation.

Your professional public response says a lot about you to persons looking on. Of course, you may further pursue the matter away from the public’s eyes with a view to a final resolution.

Read More: 7 Proven Ways to Help You Maximize Your Twitter Marketing Campaign

5. Develop a Relationship with Influencers

If your brand is new or your reach may not yet be at the level you would like to have it, quite likely apart from posting amazing content, you need another way to create a network and increase visibility.

This strategy of leveraging influencers is more of a long-term undertaking however, it can boost your reputation and firmly establish you as credible.

To achieve this, you can adopt several approaches. One is to look up the persons in the industry who are trusted and respected and reach out to them via email, making them aware that you have made reference to them in particular posts.

You may also tag them in posts you have shared, or, mention them by name and/or link their websites in your posts. With this option, if they have notifications set up whenever they are mentioned by name or site, they will be alerted.

Making use of these strategies will give you a solid boost toward the kind of image you want to establish through social media.

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