SEO (search engine optimization) is a combination of digital marketing techniques to increase the (online) visibility of a website on the search engine results pages. For most businesses this means getting on page one, or even position one, in Google’s search results. A successful SEO strategy consist of 3 major pillars: technical SEO (the optimization of your website’s code and structure), on-page SEO (everything involving your website’s content), and off-page SEO. In this article we will focus on one important aspect of the off-page SEO by explaining what link building is and how it works.

 

What is a link?

 

Simply said, a link, or a hyperlink, is a connection between two pages on the internet. With a link you can refer people to a page, a blog post, a PDF file or a different object on the web. So, with a link you are able to travel from one web location to another. To understand the importance of link building it is crucial to understand what a link is, how it is created, and how search engines recognize and interpret them.

In coding language (HTML), a hyperlink looks like this:

<a href=”https://griddigitalmarketing.com/search-engine optimization/”>Search Engine Optimization</a>

A link consists of 4 different parts and all these elements work together to form a unit. Each part has a specific function within the link. In the following section we will explain the different sections of a link step-by-step.

1. The start of the link:

The first part of the link is called an anchor tag (the “a”). It opens the link tag and informs the search engine that a link to another page or entity is about to follow.

2. Link Referral Location:
The “href” stands for “hyperlink referral”, the text inside the quotation marks indicates the URL to which the link is referring. In this case, it’s the URL of the Search Engine Optimization page (https://griddigitalmarketing.com/search-engine optimization/)
This doesn’t have to be a web page necessarily, it can also be an image, a PDF file or a different download file. 

3. Visible text of the link/achor text:
The anchor text is the piece of text that website users are able to see. Users need to click on this bit of text if they want to open the link. The text is usually blue and underlined to tell users that the link is clickable. This piece of text is called the “anchor text”. The anchor text has two purposes: it should describe what the linked page is about and it should invite people to click. If a link has a relevant anchor text, this has two advantages:

1) More people will click on it, which will lead to direct traffic.
2) It will help search engines understand what your page is about, possibly leading to more traffic from search engines.

Obviously, you cannot control what anchor text other people use to link to your site, but you can use a relevant anchor text for your own internal website links. Also when requesting links from partners it is worth considering what your anchor text should be and including this in your request.

4. The closure of the tag:
This indicates to search engines the ending of the link tag.

Search engine robots follow links to discover new pages on the internet. This is called “crawling”. Once a search engine has crawled a webpage, it will extract the content and add it to their index. During this process it will decide whether a webpage is of sufficient quality to be ranked well for relevant keywords (Google created a short video about this process). When search engines are deciding this, they don’t just look at the content of the page, they also look at the number of links pointing to that page from external websites and the quality of those external websites. So, the more high-quality websites link to your website, the more likely it is that your website will rank well in the search results. And this is where link building comes in.

 

What is link building and why does it matter?

 

Link building is the process of acquiring links from other websites to your own website. Link building is important because it is a big factor in how search engines like Google rank web pages. If numerous high-quality links lead to a specific webpage/site, search engines will consider it relevant and therefore they will rank the website higher. For easier understanding, you can see a link as a positive vote, and the more votes (links) you have to your website the better you are ranked. It is however important that these votes (links) are coming from other well rated websites. The Google algorithm takes this into consideration to ensure that people do not achieve the highest rankings simply by spamming low quality website links. In fact, bad link building procedures can actually lead to punishment by the Google search engine leading to decreased Google ranking, so make sure you’re getting it right!

What should you do to get links?

There’s a right way and a wrong way to get links to your site. If you care about the long-term result of your site and business, we advise you to stay away from shady tactics like buying links. If you want to do it the right way, try some of these strategies:

• Create valuable content that can be interesting or beneficial for people to link to. How do you do this? Find out who your target audience is, what kind of content they need and are interested in, and from there you start writing and sharing content.
• Try to get links from relevant partners, for instance the supplier, manufacturer or distributor of your product(s) and other businesses you associate with.
• Write and publish a press release.
• Hire a SEO-specialist that can help construct and execute a (successful) link building strategy.

Hopefully, this article has given you more insight into what link building is and why it is important. Link building can be a confusing topic, however, if done correctly it can have amazing results for your website traffic and Google rankings. Do you have any questions about this article or link building in general? Feel free to contact us for further assistance or SEO advise. We can help you reach the top rankings in a cost-efficient, and long-term positive manner. 

If you’re reading this, you are probably pondering the meaning of the various statistics displayed in your Google Analytics, such as the bounce rate. Or perhaps, you’ve been using Google Analytics for a while, but never really understood the significance of the bounce rate metric. With the help of Google Analytics you can measure the traffic on your site and gain insight into the performance of your site. One of the statistics provided by Google Analytics is the bounce rate. The bounce rate is measured in two different ways in Google Analytics: the average bounce rate of your website and the average bounce rate per web page. In this blog we will elaborate on the meaning of the bounce rate and how to improve this for your website.

What is bounce rate?

Bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors that leave your website – or “bounce” back to the search results or referring website – after viewing only one page.

In general, a low bounce rate is seen as positive and a high rate as negative.

However, let’s step back and consider when the bounce rate is important to use for analysis. The site-wide bounce rate that you can find via the Audience Overview in Google Analytics gives a general idea on how your site is performing, but it is a very general number. This is because user behavior is different on each page and section of your website, so averaging all of this together into a single number doesn’t really tell us much.

Rather than looking at the site-wide bounce rate, try looking at the bounce rate of specific webpages. See how they are performing in comparison to other similar pages. Take a look at your channels report, and see on which ones users are staying longer or see on which channels users are more engaged. By engaged we mean for example filling out a contact form or replying to a post.
You can can check this by going to Google Analytics and selecting Behaviour » Site Content » Landing Pages.

What bounce rate is good?

A high bounce rate is often seen as something negative. Yet this is not always necessarily true. A good bounce rate differs per website and per page. Therefore, you should take the purpose and content of the webpage into account. Do you have a website that encourages people to look around, and spend more time? Or, does your website encourage single-webpage sessions? For example, blog readers are most likely to visit your website, read the article they are looking for, and then leave. This will result in a high bounce rate even though the visitor got exactly what they wanted. In this case, a high bounce rate on your page is not a bad thing. So always look at the goal of a page and consider how this may impact the bounce rate.

Moreover, search engines bring people to the exact page they are looking for, therefore website visitors tend to spend less time “exploring” on a site. Thus, this means there is no set number of what a good or bad bounce rate is.

So, it’s more important to consider the user experience and if users have a need to visit more than one page. If not, it’s important to look at other ways to measure engagement instead of relying on a second page visits. Another way of measuring engagement is assessing how many achieved actions you had on your webpage; like clicking on a phone number or making a booking. Determine which website actions you want your visitors to undertake, and measure if those actions are being achieved. These achieved actions are also known as ‘events’ in Google Analytics. You can measure these by creating “goals” in Google Analytics.

How to improve the bounce rate

A high or low bounce rate is not necessarily good or bad, it depends on the purpose of the webpage. However, if you have a page with a high bounce rate where this is not desired, there are some ways to improve this. The following three tips will help you to optimize the bounce rate on your website.

1. Ensure you have a mobile-friendly website

52,2% of internet traffic is on mobile devices, and Google even ranks for mobile-friendliness. Therefore, it is very important to have a mobile friendly website. If your website is not mobile-friendly, chances are high that mobile website visitors will instantly leave your website. Thus, make sure your website is optimized for mobile devices.

2. Improve your site’s loading speed

The loading speed of a page has a major influence on the bounce rate. If it takes too long for a page to load, visitors will often quickly leave your website. You can improve the loading speed by, amongst other things, minimizing the file size of images and using browser caching. You can measure your site’s loading speed with tools like Pingdom or Google Page Speed Insights. These tools will also provide suggestions on how to improve your website loading speed.

3. Use internal links

The use of internal links increases the chance of website visitors clicking through to other web pages. This will result in a lower bounce rate. In addition, internal links will improve your user experience and make your website more user-friendly. But make sure that the internal links are relevant to the page the visitor landed on. On top of that, the right use of internal linking can help to boost your SEO! Internal links connect your website content, like blogs or other web pages, and give Google an idea of the structure of your site. This allows you to give the most important web pages more link value than less important pages.

So that’s it. Hopefully this article helps you understand what the bounce rate is, what is causing a high bounce rate and how you can fix it.  Do you have any questions about this article? Feel free to contact Grid Digital Marketing & Web Development.

When talking about marketing, you often hear the terms SEO and SEA. But what do these terms mean, and how can you use these digital marketing techniques for your company? In this article we will delve deeper into both digital marketing strategies to help you make an educated decision for your business.

SEO and SEA: The meaning

SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization. SEO includes all activities that you carry out to ensure that your website scores higher in the organic results of search engines such as Google. Search Engine Advertising (SEA), also known as PPC or Pay-Per-Click. Is the process of advertising directly on Google and other similar search engines. When using SEA, search engines will show ads for your company in the search results above the organic results. In the image below you can see how google displays the search engine advertisments (1) and the organic results (2) when using the query “real estate playa flamingo costa rica”.

SEO versus SEA

Both online marketing forms aim to attract more traffic to your website. For SEA you need to pay advertising costs, usually in the form of pay per click. SEA provides immediate results, however the results only exist as long as you are paying for the advertisements. In the case of SEO website traffic is generated organically. This means that traffic from search engine searches is free and does not requite a fee per click such as with search engine advertising. However, developing organic visibility takes time and effort (money). Most likely you will need to outsource the SEO work to a specialist that can help you rank higher and improve your organic online presence. In many cases, SEO and SEA work best when integrated together and strategically aligned to cover both short-term and long-term goals.

Difference between SEO & SEA

There are a number of important differences between SEO and SEA. They are as follows:

• Getting a high ranking in the organic search results pages of Google (SEO) can take several months, while search engine advertisements (SEA) are immediately visible on top of the search results. Therefore, search engine advertisements offer instant results in terms of website traffic. With SEO this can take a while.

• Google offers less insight with organic search results. For example, you are not able to see with which keyword your website visitor ended up on your site. With search engine advertising Google does provide you this information. With conversion tracking and the Google Ads system you can determine what keywords convert and at what cost.

• Paid search results in Google are largely at the top of the page. Usually four advertisements are shown on desktops and three on mobile phones. A user will always see the paid searches, even if they scroll past them. The unpaid search results are sometimes not even visible without scrolling down.

• Unlike search engine advertisements, organic visibility and traffic doesn’t dry up when you stop paying. Efforts to develop organic traffic and visibility are more sustainable than advertisements in the long run. SEA needs a constant investment.

• With paid advertisement you can very easily control your budget. Determine how much you are willing to spend per day and set a fixed budget. This is important to ensure you don’t exceed your limit, as it can go very fast with paid advertisements! For this reason we suggest outsourcing your search engine advertising, as an experienced professional can optimize your campaigns with a lower budget, thereby saving you money! Outsourcing your Google Ads is often not only more effective, but also cheaper. Read more about this in our other blog “5 reasons to outsource your digital marketing“.

• Search engine advertising can be expensive. It is not always the case, but costs can quickly add up if you don’t constantly monitor and optimize your campaigns. We always advise clients to outsource their ads to an expert to keep their Google Ads account in top shape. Traffic from organic searches is free. It does take effort to develop online visibility but it is more cost-effective than advertising.

• With paid advertisements you can target specific keywords, which is also the case with SEO. However, advertisements also allow you to target specific locations, languages, devices, and audiences based on previous website visits.

• With paid search advertisements you have more control and space to deliver your marketing message. The advertisements enable you to highlight extra information such as: your phone number, opening hours, business location, Unique Selling Points (USP’s) and more. Just like you can see in the example down below.

The combination of SEO and SEA

Ideally we advise our clients to invest in both SEO and SEA as there are advantages and disadvantage to both. An optimal online marketing strategy will take advantage of both methods as they complement and support each other very well.

• SEA gives you direct feedback on the keywords you advertise on, so you learn what the intention is of people searching for a specific term. This intelligence can be used for organic search engine marketing (SEO) to improve results.
• You can test your keyword strategy in Google Ads, if it works you can use it for a long-term SEO strategy.
• You can use the A/B testing data from SEA into your SEO strategy. For instance, you will discover what ad copy works best based on the clicks in SEA. You can use this in your meta data descriptions.
• You increase confidence and awareness among potential customers when you’re visible both organically and through paid advertisements. This will result in your website coming up twice during searches.

In other words, a unified search engine marketing strategy with both SEO & SEA is the optimum approach, leading to improved results in the short and long term. Of course, every market is different and a tailor made online marketing strategy fit to your specific business needs will provide the most benefits. Curious what online marketing can do for your business? Get in touch with us for a free online marketing consultation today. Do you have a question about this article? Or do you want to know what we can do for you? Contact Grid Marketing & Web Design.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) will help you to generate more organic traffic to your website and, if correctly implemented, it will help your blog to rank higher in the Google search results. There are several techniques that you can apply to optimize your blog for SEO. Here are 6 SEO blog writing tips to help your blog’s findability increase, thereby generating more traffic to your website.

 

1. Plan your content based on keyword research

Through search engine optimization your blogs will become easier to find for visitors and search engines. In order to optimize your blogs properly, you need to start by doing research into the most important keywords. Keyword research such as a keyword analysis helps you determine which topics your target audience is interested in based on search engine data. This ensures that you are writing about topics that people are actually searching for. Moreover, it’s a great way to come up with new blog topics. There are several keyword research tools you can use for finding relevant keywords. We wrote a blog about 3 helpful keyword research tools and how to use them.

 

2. Use an effective blog post title

The main purpose of a search engine is to display relevant sources based on a search query. The title of your blog is the first component for the search engine in determining the relevancy of your content (and for a reader too!). So, it’s very important to include your keyword in the title. Be sure to include your keyword in the first 60 characters of your title, because this is where Google cuts off the titles in the search engine page results.
Tip! Use the Google SERP Snippet Optimizer tool to predict what your blog post will look like in the Google’s search results. 

 

3.    Internal linking

Link to at least one of your own articles or webpages in your blog. This helps users easily navigate to other pages, it engages them more, and these links will create a contextual relationship between your webpages. On top of that, it will ensure a link back to your website if your article gets shared by another website. Creating good content increases the shareability and the chance that other websites will link to it, so aim to create quality content!

 

4.    Make your blog easy to read

Readability is an important ranking factor for search engines. Therefore, it’s important to use short sentences, smaller paragraphs, punctuation, headings, and bullet points.  We suggest to use images and white space around the text to make your text easier to read. Moreover, it’s important to use a proper hierarchy when you use headings. You main title needs to be a H1, and subheadings need to be H2 or lower (like H3, H4, ect.)

 

5.    Write unique content

Make sure that you do not copy any text (both from internal content on your own website or from external content). Every text on every page must be unique. With the siteliner tool you can check whether you published unique website content. This will help you to determine what content on your website needs to be optimized.

 

6.    Gain insight into your content results

To get insight into whether your content is performing well you can use various tools. We advise everyone to install Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free Google tool that tracks and reports data about your website’s traffic. It provides several metrics like: the number of user sessions, the average time spent on a page, the bounce rate, conversions and more. This is valuable information, because it will show which blog or webpage is generating website traffic, and user engagement.

We hope this article helps you to optimize your blog posts for SEO. It’s very important to use SEO techniques to ensure higher organic traffic and engagement on your blog and website.

Do you have any questions about the SEO blog writing tips, content marketing or SEO? Feel free to contact us.

 

Content is and remains one of the most important ranking factors for search engines. Whether you are just starting out or running a website for many years, writing content plays an important role in improving your online findability, Google ranking, and organic traffic. In this blog we will share three handy tools for writing effective SEO content.

Base your SEO content on targeted keywords and search engine data

Your SEO content will not reach the right people if you don’t include targeted keywords in your content. By targeted keywords we mean keywords and phrases for which your target audience is actively searching. To find these terms you have to research: who your target audience is, what information they need, and which keywords they use to find that information. You can use several keyword research tools to discover what your target audience is interested in based on search engine date. Below you will find our three favorite tools for generating content ideas and establishing keywords.

 

1. Answerthepublic.com

A great keyword research tool is answerthepublic.com. This tool provides you with a free report of keyword suggestions visualized in a ‘search cloud’. It works like this; first choose a country, and then enter a keyword. After that the tool presents you with several questions, prepositions and alphabetical lists of keywords related to your query. For example, when we entered “seo content” as a keyword, the tool provided the following visualization:

Thus, this tool is ideal if you’re looking for content ideas, blog topics, or keyword suggestions. But, before you start writing SEO content, it’s important to take your research a step further. It’s time to select a number of keywords that you want to focus your SEO content on. Choose one or two focus keywords, and a few other keywords related to the subject. Ideally you want to choose keywords that have the highest search volume and the lowest competition. Search volume is the quantity of searches that take place for a particular keyword per month. You can find the search volume of a keyword with the help of competitive keyword analysis tools like the Google Keyword Planner or Ubersuggest. Eventually you need to incorporate these keywords in your content so that you have the most complete SEO content for both users and search engines.

2. Keyword Planner

With the Google Keyword Planner you will receive insight into the monthly searches conducted by users.

How to use the Keyword Planner:

1. In order to use the Google Keyword Planner you need to have a Google Ads account (if you don’t have an account you can easily make one). First step, go to your Google Ads account.­
2. Select ‘Tools & Setting’ in the top right corner.
3. Select ‘Keyword Planner’.
   4. There are two different tools within Keyword Planner: “Find New Keywords” and “Get metrics and forecasts for your keywords”.
   If you want to get new keyword ideas select “find new keywords”. If you already have a list of keywords and want to check their search volume, hit “Get metrics and forecasts for your keywords’.

 

To use this, copy and paste your keywords into the search field, and hit “Get Started”. You will only get data on the keywords you have entered. The Keyword Planner will provide you with an estimate on how much clicks, impressions, and competition you will get for the keywords entered. Based on this data you should be able to select the most relevant keywords for your SEO content.

3. Ubersuggest

Our last suggestion for another great keyword research tool is Ubersuggest. Ubersuggest helps you generate keyword ideas with the associated search volume, and the competition for every keyword. Ubersuggest fetches their data from sources like: Google Keyword Planner, Google Suggest, Google Search Console, and Google Analytics. Ubersuggest has a clean interface and works faster than the Keyword Planner. 

How does it work? Type in your domain or topic, and Ubersuggest will give you keywords suggestions. Tip! You can also enter your competitor’s domain to get new keywords ideas!

Conclusion

These keyword research tools will help you come up with new content ideas, blog topics, and keywords. We suggest that you utilize these SEO writing tools for your blogs, website or other projects. You can use them for free, and it will help you create SEO-friendly content. Creating fresh and up-to-date SEO content is one of the biggest challenges, so using these tools should make this easier. Do you have any questions about this article, these tools or content marketing? Feel free to contact Grid Marketing for more information.

 

Many companies puzzle with the same question; “can we do digital marketing ourselves or do we need to outsource it to a digital marketing agency?” In theory the answer to that question is simple; you can do everything internally with the right people. But in realty this often turns out to be a bigger challenge than expected. Digital marketing is a world of its own, and it’s difficult to know every element since it consists of many facets, limitless possibilities and ever-changing features. It’s challenging to master the subject if it is not your core business focus. Investing in a (well-planned) digital marketing strategy is a clever decision for your company’s growth. So our advice is to outsource it partially or completely to a digital marketing agency. In this article the 5 main reasons why will be highlighted.

 

1. Cost Effective

Setting up and implementing an online marketing strategy requires several skills (e.g. SEO, SEA, SMM, etc.) Ideally you want to have in-house specialists to do so, but creating and managing a full digital marketing team involves time and money. An online marketing agency consists of experts that work full-time within their discipline, and have working experience across multiple industries. As a customer you get to benefit from the best in the field to aid your company. With a digital marketing agency, you can hire experts per hour or per project, without long contracts, giving you more control over the total costs. This gives you the option to easily upscale or downscale your digital marketing, and what to manage in-house.

 

2. Get access to the latest technology

An effective digital marketing agency has access to special tools that gives them the benefit of fast and accurate research, analysis and strategy, less repetitive work, faster implementation, and faster achievement of business goals. These high-end marketing tools are often expensive. By outsourcing, your costs are saved instantly and you get access to tools without having to take out an expensive subscription yourself.

 

3. Ongoing maintenance & optimizations

Great agencies will go the extra mile to help clients succeed. Those agencies know that a client’s success has a positive impact on the agency itself since positive results and references will improve the reputation of the marketing agency. Therefore, the work of agencies does not stop after the creation of a website or campaign. They will continuously test and improve their work to improve its effectiveness.

 

4. New insights & perspective

An online marketing agency works together with different types of companies and industries. Through their experience they know what is needed to make a website or campaign perform. Hiring an outsourced marketing agency can give you a new perspective and insight on how to approach your marketing today.

 

5. Up-to-date knowledge and skills

The digital marketing industry is dynamic and ever-changing. Strategies that were effective in the past, may no longer be effective in the present. Therefore, digital marketing experts spend a lot of their time learning new skills and improving existing techniques and strategies in their daily work. It is essential that an online marketing agency always has the most up-to-date knowledge. Thus, outsourcing digital marketing ensures an efficient and up-to-date approach.

To make the most of digital marketing opportunities and grow your business, outsourcing to a digital marketing agency is a great idea. Grid Marketing uses a clear and result-oriented working method to help clients achieve business goals. Do you want more information, or would you like to discuss the possibilities of outsourcing your online marketing? Book a free consultation with our digital marketing experts.