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“Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.”

This children’s rhyme does not apply in today’s highly connected world where a few negative words can cost your company a lot of business. Now everything from quality reviews and recommendations, legitimate issues and reputation damaging complaints are there for the entire world to see.

Managing your online reputation is no longer optional. It needs a simple strategy that combines monitoring what is available about you and responding appropriately. This will ensure your business is not unknowingly damaged by negative comments.

Even if you have never added your information into Yelp, Google My Business or other online business directories, it doesn’t mean that your business isn’t already visible online and immune from the backlash of an unhappy customer.

How should your business approach managing its online reputation?

Because of its critical nature to the success of your business, you need to proactively manage your online reputation. It’s not something you should leave up to someone else. When it comes to responding and engaging your audience, you should handle that personally. Here are 5 tips to get you started:

Regularly monitor your brand’s reputation

Search for your business name and see what comes up. Conducting a vanity search helps you identify not only where you are listed but also what is being said about your company. You want to be sure your information is accurate and complete. 

Take note of all the places your business name appears. You will need this information to determine what online directories are important to claim and control. 

Claim your local business listings

Did you know that 90% of consumers search for local businesses online? So how does your business be visible in a crowded local market.

Claiming your local business listings is a mandatory action item. When a listing is claimed, it sends a message that the business is open and ready to help. Unclaimed listings make your business seem out of touch. Plus you run the risk that someone else can claim your listing.

Make sure the content in the listing is accurate and optimized to include your top keyword phrases to get better visibility for local searches.

Stay or get more active online

Is there something negative about you or your business that shows up in the search results? Removing content from the search results is nearly impossible, but you can make it less visible.

Implement a sound content marketing strategy. Create more interesting and positive content that pushes the negative down and out of the first few pages of the search results.

• Start a blog. Remember each blog post is a new page that can be indexed.
• Implement a public relations strategy. PR is a great way to post positive news about you and your business.
• Post on LinkedIn. This content can show up in search results.
• Guest post on popular blogs. Put together a strategy for guest posting and reach out to quality blogs that take guest posts.

Google wants fresh content so the more you post, the more content you will have in the search results. New pages of content in your or your business’s name will push negative content lower in the results and out of site.

Encourage customers to write reviews about your business

You can’t easily remove negative reviews but there are ways to minimize their impact. However you do need to get your best customers to speak on your behalf.

There are several ways to encourage reviews without being pushy:

• Add a note to your invoice asking “How did we do?” and point them to your website.
• Provide links directly to your Google My Business write a review feature.
• Create a big “Write a Review” button on your website which takes them to a page of links to your Google My Business, Bing Local, Yelp or other online review sites. This makes it easy for you to point them to one place where they can click a link and write a review.

Respond to negative comments and reviews immediately

You cannot ignore what is being posted about your brand online. Reviews, both good and bad, will happen whether you want them or not. Most rational people understand that you can never please everyone all the time, so a couple of unflattering reviews are expected. But if all I find are negative comments, I will question the integrity of the company.

Take the high road and respond to negative reviews. Try to resolve them as quickly as possible. Respond as you, the business owner and be visible, authentic, concerned and humble about the situation. This will alleviate fears and send the message that your company is concerned about their customers. (Then strive to get happy customers to post positive reviews!)

For most of us, monitoring and managing our online reputation is not that difficult. It takes a little time to monitor what is out there and determine what you need to do to respond or change the perception. This exercise is part of your marketing plan. It is important to create the image you want your prospects and customers to see. Even if you don’t have any negative content about you, you still have work to do to create an image that is visible, credible and consistent with your brand.

Article source: https://masterful-marketing.com/managing-online-reputation/

Marketing is an investment in your business. Creating and implementing an inbound marketing plan can increase your visibility and strengthen your expert reputation. But marketing mistakes can be costly to your small businesses in terms of dollars, reputation, visibility and results. They can lead to customers questioning your expertise and move on to evaluating your competitor.

Successful marketing efforts take a combination of planning, creativity and patience. As you review your plan and adjust for the next 90 days, make sure you are not making these costly marketing mistakes.

Strategic marketing mistakes

1. Not defining your target audience and understanding their needs

Trying to be everything to everybody means you dilute your message and attract no one. People want to do business with someone who understands them. They want someone who can provide clarity and help achieving their goals. By focusing on one specific market, you can clearly identify why they should do business with you. 

Once you have chosen your starter market, define the characteristics of your ideal client.

• What do they desperately need that you can help with?
• Do you understand their challenges?
• Can you clearly describe how you can help them better than anyone else?

The more you know about your customers, the more effective your marketing efforts will be. Study your best customers and why they chose your business. Get to know your ideal client intimately so you can produce the results they are looking for.

2. Not developing a marketing plan or 90 day action plan

Jumping right into activities without understanding what strategies can help you achieve your goals, sets you up for inefficient marketing with little to no results. Not establishing a solid plan before taking on any activities results in ineffective programs that waste your budget.

The value of developing a plan is to set the direction of your marketing  so you can keep moving towards your goals. Once you decide on your strategy, you need to stay focused on executing that strategy. Constant change to compete with the latest fad does not breed success.

Once you have your strategy, create a 90 day action plan that provides constant feedback loops. This feedback indicates whether things are working or not. Break your 90 days into 6 to 7 two week sprints where you can narrow down what you need to work on now. These two week sprints enable you to quickly measure what is working or not, enabling you to adjust your efforts before its too late.

Costly marketing mistakes that a sprint eliminates includes:

• Sticking with an ineffective strategy – The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Don’t get complacent and think that “things will get better” if you are not getting the results you want with your current activities. Review what is happening at least quarterly and adjust as needed.
• Changing a strategy that works – On the other hand, if you have a marketing strategy that consistently gives results and gets you closer to your overall outcome goal, then why change it? Enhance, extend and improve your strategy to keep it fresh and effective, but don’t make radical changes to something that is working.
• Stopping an Activity Too Soon – Easily the most costly mistake is changing your marketing messages or brand midstream. Just about the time you are sick of your marketing, your prospects are just beginning to recognize who you are. Marketing requires patience so give your marketing time to work.

3. Not creating a powerful web presence

All businesses should develop and maintain an extensive digital footprint. The bigger the footprint, the more likely your business can be found when someone is searching.

Your digital footprint is everything that can be found about your business online. It is made up of your:

• Website
• Social media profiles
• Directory listings

Some of these you create, others are created for you. All of them should be consistent in their brand and messages to avoid confusion. Consistency with your message and brand across all of your online properties helps to drive home your value.

Your website is the hub of your online presence. Make sure it:

• Is professionally designed in WordPress
• Works perfectly on a mobile device
• Has an SSL certificate installed 
• Optimized for visibility.

Prospects want to know how working with you is going to help them. They need to see the value you offer and quickly realize the potential benefits of working with you. Keep the details about how wonderful your company is as background information. People need to trust that your business can help them. 

Create social media profiles only for those platforms that make sense for your business. You don’t, and shouldn’t, be everywhere. Focus on those that can reach your audience most effectively. Then use these platforms to get your prospect’s attention and drive them to your website or to sign up for your email list.

4. Not investing in marketing when the economy is bad

Marketing keeps you visible when the market is slow. It helps you stay top of mind with your prospects. Staying active lets your prospects know that you are alive and well.

Cutting marketing is a big mistake in tough economic times. Reducing spending and ensuring your marketing dollar is spent wisely is important. Look at your plan and do the things that are low cost or free to get you through the downturn. But stopping marketing completely requires you to start all over once the economy turns or your pipeline is empty.

Now avoid these 6 marketing tactical mistakes

1. Not paying attention to details

How people perceive your business is based on what image you regularly project. Whether it is online or off, not reviewing your marketing materials for typos, grammatical errors or other issues can detract from your message. It hurts your professional image and can send a negative message.

If you don’t care to project the best image for your business, what makes a potential client think you will deliver above and beyond when providing services to them? Always have another pair of eyes look at your materials before you publish, both online and in print.

2. Deviating from your brand

Your brand is the promise you make to your customers. It is the perception the world has of your business and communicates your personality and values. It also highly influences your prospects’ opinion of who you are and whether they want to do business with you. 

Customers know immediately when there is a disconnect between what you have promised and what they receive. If your marketing activities deviate from the voice and reputation your brand has already established, you run the risk of confusing, disappointing or angering your customers and prospects. Ensure that all of your marketing stays true to your message and the promise of your brand.

3. Not adhering to email marketing best practices

Nothing is more frustrating than receiving an email newsletter I didn’t sign up for. People are adding their LinkedIn connections to their email lists. Don’t do that! Connecting doesn’t give you permission to add someone to your list. In fact, it can damage your brand reputation.

One of the most powerful resources for marketing your business is your in-house email list full of prospects that are interested in what you offer.

• Use a reputable email service provider (MailChimp, Constant Contact, aWeber, etc) to build your list. 
• Write interesting emails that grab their attention.
• Be sure your email is easily read on a mobile device.
• Figure out the best cadence for your emails (i.e. frequency and timing)

Then use email marketing to keep in touch with your prospects and customers. Create offers that take them from being an interested party to a paying customer.

4. Not seeking professional help to create your brand identity

I’m all for small business owners being in control of their marketing efforts. However, when it comes to laying the foundation for a consistent online brand, you may want to think twice about creating your own brand, website or social media strategy without professional help.

It is far more cost-effective to create your brand identity right the first time. Hire professionals for those areas that require a unique skill – design, development and user experience. Then you can begin promoting your business with confidence, knowing your brand projects all that is good in your business.

5. Neglecting your online presence

Now that you’ve spent time creating a powerful web presence, don’t forget to review it regularly. You need to know what has been written about your business across the various review sites. Once someone searches for your business, what they see will determine whether they contact you or your competition. 

No business will ever please 100% of their customers. Unfortunately, when someone is unhappy, they are more likely to go online and write a bad review. Make sure you respond to that review. Ask your happy customers to contribute a good review. Provide them links to your preferred review pages. Get a few on Google, Yelp, Better Business Bureau and any industry specific review site.

The biggest marketing mistake of all: believing that marketing is an expense, not an investment

If you have the mindset that everything you do in marketing is an expense, ready to cut when things aren’t working just right, then you are setting your business up to fail. Marketing is a process that requires a regular, consistent investment to increase your visibility and demonstrate your expertise. If you stop marketing to cut costs, your marketing efforts, and ultimately your business, will fail.

Spending time on marketing while trying to manage other aspects of your business has its challenges. By implementing your 90 day marketing action plan, you can avoid making these costly mistakes. Your business will be more successful if you do.

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How is your marketing working for you? Did it help you increase visibility, generate more leads or find new lucrative clients? Even if you feel your marketing was successful, you should conduct a simple marketing review every 90 days.

A quarterly marketing review is important for the following reasons:

• It helps you determine which marketing activities are working
• You get data on those activities that are not working before they cost you time and money
• The right activities help you continue to move towards your outcome goal

But why so often you ask? There are many reasons to do your planning in short, 90 day segments. The following are just a few examples:

• The market for your products and services can change rapidly. Reviewing every 90 days ensures you notice the changes before it’s too late
• Marketing changes rapidly. What worked yesterday may not work today (look at Facebook Business Page organic reach).
• Your channels to reach your target audience may have changed. The faster you notice where your audience has moved can help you adjust.
• Activities you are spending time and resources on aren’t aligned with your vision or aren’t getting you closer to your outcome goals. 

Difference between marketing review and marketing audit

The words audit and review can be used interchangeably. However, for our purposes, there is a distinct difference:

• A marketing review is a simplified assessment of your activities and how they are helping you achieve your goals.
• A marketing audit takes a deep-dive look at all of your existing marketing assets and activities to determine how well they are serving your business.

So on a quarterly basis, you should do the simplified marketing review to make sure your effort is paying off in new leads and new customers.

What to look for while conducting your review

When you conduct this simple review of your marketing activities and results, what should you be looking for? What are the signs that things aren’t going in the right direction?

You can get the process to conduct your marketing review in this post.

The first thing you look at are your results of your current activities. If your marketing activities aren’t driving inbound leads and sales, then we need to determine why.

Tracking your results helps you understand how each marketing activity is contributing to your success. You can make informed decisions about whether to continue with what you are doing or try something else. For each marketing activity, answer the following questions:

• Does the activity help your business achieve its marketing goals?
• Has the activity resulted in new leads, brand visibility or sales?
• How much did the campaign cost in terms of dollars or resources?
• Was the return on your investment worth the effort?

For those that are working, great. Keep doing what you are doing.

For those activities that aren’t working, we need to figure out why.

Reasons why your marketing isn’t working

Your target market has changed

Have you noticed a difference in the type of clients you now attract? As your business grows and matures, your ideal client will naturally evolve. As you get a clearer perspective on your business, you begin to attract an audience that:

• Values what you have to offer
• Enjoys working with you 
• Is willing to pay more for your expertise.

Not only do you thrive working with this client, these clients truly benefit from working with you.

Maybe it’s time to focus your target market and cater your services to this new, more lucrative market. These changes will require you to adjust your messages, content, service offerings and marketing activities. But by focusing on a particular niche, you can be clear on exactly what you offer and how it helps them.

Your messages miss your intended target

Getting noticed in a crowded market is difficult. How do you create a message that cuts through the media clutter and captures the attention of your target audience? When you can be this clear about how you serve your audience, visitors to your website will see that “this person really understands what I need”.

Customers want solutions to their problems. Your core message needs to demonstrate how you solve their biggest challenge. It should make them understand why they should trust you and choose your business over the competition. Talk about the experiences your ideal customers will have and how they will benefit from working with you.

Your products and services are not relevant to your target market.

Correctly pricing and packaging your products and services for your target audience is one of the more powerful marketing activities that you can do. Are your products and services:

• Created to help your ideal client overcome some critical need?
• Packaged such that they highlight your unique skills aimed at your ideal client?
• Priced to fit their budget while maximizing your revenue?

Value packaging your services to align with their needs reduces their perceived risk of working with you and makes their purchase decision much easier.

Your brand is inconsistent across all your web properties.

Your brand is everything you do and say, not just the visual image your business projects.

• Do you project the same image and message across all web properties?
• Does your website accurately reflect who you work with and what you offer?
• Is what you say on your social profiles consistent with what is on your website?

If your marketing tools are inconsistent, you confuse your prospects which reflects poorly on your brand. It is important that your brand be consistent every place your business has a profile so that no matter where someone finds your business, they are left with a compelling, lasting impression.

Your website needs a face lift.

In addition to an inconsistent brand, is your website fresh and does it properly project your expertise? If not, it’s time for a website makeover. Without a well developed, quality website, your visibility is compromised.

Creating a compelling website and investing in search engine optimization helps you establish a strong web presence. As the hub of your web presence and the central focal point of your inbound marketing strategy, your website is where you can regularly develop and promote relevant, brand-related content that can drive more inbound leads and increase your revenue.

Now create your next 90 day marketing action plan

Your simple marketing audit has given you the valuable information you need to adjust your marketing action plan for the next 90 days. Keep doing what has worked and reassign resources (money or time) to new activities that may produce better results.

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Today’s climate has every business looking at ways to change the way they market their business. This is especially true for home services businesses. Homeowners need quality landscapers, electricians, plumbers, HVAC services and remodelers. When they need them, they will go online to find one. For those who already use online marketing, they are ahead of the game. For those small businesses that have not invested in online marketing, now is the time to take the plunge.

The beauty of online marketing is that it doesn’t have to cost a lot to implement. For local small businesses, changing the way you reach your target customers can have a big impact on your bottom line.

So where do you start? What marketing activities should your small business implement that will benefit you the most?

Here are 3 areas of to focus on as you pivot your marketing:

• Create your professional web presence
• Keep in touch with customers
• Ask for referrals

Create your professional web presence

First and foremost, make sure your online presence is the best it can be. Don’t take short cuts in this important area. People search for solutions online and will judge your business by what they see. Consider some or all of the following depending on your business and how much time you can spend. I have listed these activities in order or importance.

Build your site using WordPress

Get a professionally developed, responsive website in WordPress. For small businesses, WordPress websites make changing content and updating messages easy. WordPress puts control into the hands of marketers and small business owners. You can create fresh, relevant content to attract your ideal customer. 

Control all the online accounts that make up or contribute to your web presence. These include your domain,  website hosting provider and your local business listings. Also use your Google account to create your Google Analytics, Google Search Console or any other account in Google.

Do not let someone create them under their personal accounts. If your relationship with them falters, you will need to start all over again which will affect your business success.

Implement local SEO strategies

Local SEO extends organic SEO with a combination of online strategies to make your business more visible to those searching locally for products and services. 

Claim and verify your local business listings on Google My Business (GMB) and Bing Places for Business. Research other industry directories and claim your business listing on those that make sense. 

Create content that educates and inspires

Today, all content created for your business is strategic. First, develop a content strategy that organizes what content you should create and when. Having this content calendar in place will help you remain consistent with your publishing.

Then use this schedule to create compelling web content to attract attention and develop your expert reputation. Provide up-to-date educational information that speaks to your target audience.

Build an in-house email list

There are only two things your business actually owns when it comes to online platforms – your website and email list. Building your own in-house email list and providing a focused and well executed email marketing campaign is very effective for keeping in touch with your target customers.

Build your email list with an offer that encourages visitors to join. Having a strong, loyal list available when you have some special offer can be the difference in the success of a new program.

Select your social media platforms wisely

Select your social media platforms based on where you can connect with your target audience. Your social media platforms and local business listings in conjunction with your blog can create a powerful information network that makes it much easier for you to be found. Promoting your content on these social platforms can get you more visibility with the right audience. Not all businesses will benefit from social media, but those who will, should implement a social media strategy.

Ask for reviews from happy customers

The average consumer reads 10 reviews before feeling able to trust a business. But many small businesses forget to ask customer for online reviews.

Create a system where you automatically ask your customers when the job is complete. Start with getting people to provide a review on your Google My Business listing.

• Add a link to your website that takes customers straight to the review window
• Email your customers at the end of a job with the link
• Ask the customer when your project is complete

Never provide an incentive for the review. That is again Google’s and most review platforms terms of service. Also spread them out. Having a large number of reviews hit your listing in a week can raise suspicion that they may be fake. Getting a couple every month spreads them out and keeps fresh reviews visible on your profile.

Keep in touch with customers

Those who already do business with you should be one of your prime focus areas.

• Communicate with your customers and offer them special deals using social media where appropriate.
• Provide awesome customer service and quick responses to their questions so they can only brag about how wonderful you are.
• Implement a messaging function on your website or Google My Business so customers can contact you quickly. 

Happy and satisfied customers who understand the value you offer will not hesitate to refer new customers to you.

Ask for referrals

Every small business should include referral marketing as one of their primary marketing activities because it will deliver long term results. With so much noise in the market, people don’t trust messages coming from your company directly. But getting a referral from a happy customer makes the sales process that much easier.

Most people like to help other people and will do it willingly if they remember.

• Ask for a referral is verbally at the end of a project. 
• Join a referral marketing group such as BNI. This will also help you hone your ask since you are required to do so every week.
• Offer an incentive for a qualified referral. Some people call them finder’s fees. Others send a gift card to a local restaurant. Incentives are allowed when asking for referrals.

The power of word-of-mouth marketing, both online and offline, is valuable for small businesses. Being referred by a happy customer helps you develop credibility and expert reputation. 

These are my choices for marketing activities that have the biggest impact. As the world becomes more virtual, your business needs to ensure you are visible when people are looking. 

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Every small business wants to rank on the first page of the search engine results. Ranking on page one increases traffic to your website and, ultimately the chance of new customers finding you. But that doesn’t happen without investing in SEO best practices.

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a component of an inbound marketing strategy that helps increase traffic to your website by increasing the visibility of your content in the search engine results. Since search engines deliver results based on their opinion of best fit for the query, you need to make sure that they understand the context of your content and that you are the most credible option.

Implementing basic SEO activities can be the difference between finding your next customer or them finding you.

SEO challenges for small businesses

There are several challenges that most small businesses face when trying to implement an SEO strategy. 

Quality content

Well-written, optimized content is the foundation of your inbound marketing strategy. Without content, there is nothing to optimize. Small business owners are hard pressed to find time to write content when they are dealing with other challenges in their businesses. 

Expectations

SEO takes time to produce organic rankings. If you are looking for immediate return on an investment, SEO is not the strategy to pursue. But if you have patience to build your web presence using organic search strategies, your business will become visible and will continue to stay visible long after the initial effort was made. Regular maintenance and new optimized content can keep you visible for the long term. 

Technical SEO

Optimizing your content is only one piece of the SEO puzzle. There are technical aspects to SEO that need to be implemented so your content optimization doesn’t go to waste. These factors include things like website performance, mobile support, link structure, optimized images with alt tags, sitemaps and keyword research. 

Budget

SEO needs a budget. You need to hire the right resources to create and optimize your content and implement technical SEO on your website. You can try to do it all yourself, but most small business owners realize that it may not be a good use of their time. Outsourcing this to someone that knows the intricacy of content, optimization and technical SEO is worth the investment. This investment can have long-term benefits for your business.

SEO benefits for small businesses

But despite the challenges, implementing an SEO strategy does have many benefits that can’t be overlooked.

Long-term results 

If you implement a paid search strategy, you get quicker results. However, these results only last as long as you have the money to pay for traffic. Once you have implemented a sound organic search strategy, you continue to get traffic from being found in the search results. You do have to maintain and adapt your SEO strategy to changes in the search engines, but you won’t drop out of the results immediately like you do when you stop paying for traffic.

Visibility for your brand

Higher rankings in the search engine results build brand awareness. When your site is on the first page of the search results, your potential customers see a brand that is the authority for the topic. This raises your credibility and authority and puts your business ahead of your competition.

Organic traffic to your website

What is the sense of having a website that gets no traffic? Unfortunately a lot of websites still don’t get much traffic. They built a website and thought people would come.

Your website should act as your premier sales person. If people can’t find you or see what you offer and how you help, your website is not doing its job. A professional website is important to your business, but only if it is visible to those looking for what you offer. SEO is the most effective way to do this.

Featured snippets

A featured snippet is a brief summary appearing at the top of Google’s search results designed to answer the searcher’s query. It is an excerpt from your web page that gives your content greater visibility.

Google recently announced that a URL could only rank for a featured snippet or appear in the organic results on the first page, but not both. So although there has been a bit of controversy around featured snippets, capturing a featured snippet will still be a goal for small businesses.

If Google chooses your content as the top answer to the search query, it can boost your traffic and your authority in your industry. It does depend on the query and the content contained within the snippet as to whether this makes sense to your business. If the content answers the question completely, it could result in a zero-click outcome.

But, for most service businesses, it could encourage people to contact your business because you have demonstrated expertise in that particular topic.

SEO Best Practices Checklist

Does your website support mobile first?

Google has been crawling many websites using their mobile-first index. This means Google is using the mobile version of a page for indexing and ranking. That’s why it is important that your site looks good and performs well on a mobile device.

Google recommends that you use a responsive design for your website because it serves the same URL for a piece of content to all users regardless of the device they are on. This saves resources for your website and for Google’s crawlers.

Responsive design also makes it easier for your users to interact with, share, and link to your content. It also helps Google’s algorithms assign the most relevant indexing properties for the content.

Is your page speed the best it can be?

Page speed is critical to your digital marketing success. It impacts your:

• Rank in organic search 
• User experience and how long visitors stay on your website
• Cost-per-click (CPC) if you are doing paid advertising
• Inbound marketing campaign performance

The reason page speed is crucial to your rank is that Google continuously aims to provide a good user experience. This includes the quality of the search results themselves and the quality of the resource that they provide in the search results. 

There are many causes for a poor-performing WordPress website, but solving them aren’t that difficult and there are many resources that can help you improve your page speed.

If you want more traffic, leads and ultimately, customers, pay attention to the technical aspects of website performance. 

Have you done keyword research to know how people search?

Keyword research is one of the most important and valuable activities in marketing. It is the process of discovering the words people use to search and using that data to create your content marketing strategy. Those searches may be informational for research purposes or product and service related.

The goal of keyword research is to find suitable keyword phrases that align with your business offerings. You need to understand the user intent of the search and then provide optimized content so it ranks for those terms. Understanding what questions are being asked by your target prospects can also provide ideas for your blog posts and other content. 

But keyword research is more than just finding words you can use to optimize your content. It also gives you insights into the needs of your target market.

Does your content offer value to your target audience? 

SEO always includes the statement “create quality content”. Great, but what is quality content? It’s content that:

• Educates and entertains your audience
• Adds value to your website
• Encourages visitors to share it with others.

Quality content is determined by intimately knowing your target audience and providing content that is useful to them in some way. And yes, quality content also means grammatically correct with no typos.

But one thing is for certain – creating quality content is not an option. It is the marketing fuel that accelerates your visibility, determines your reputation, trust and authority and drives more search engine traffic.

Have you followed on-page SEO guidelines for all content?

Although the goal is to write content targeted at the human, there are some specific things you can do to help the search engines understand how to better index each page of your site. On-page optimization is a technique that puts keywords in the right places to help search engines identify the context of the page. 

First, install the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress. This plugin provides help optimizing the important parts of your content. It also provides a readability test to ensure you write content that can be easily scanned and understood. The plugin also creates your XML sitemap and a robots.txt file, adds schema.org information, applies “noindex” to the appropriate pages of your website and more.

Then spend time on the SEO title and description of each page and post of your website. This is what shows up in the search engine results. The title will catch the searcher’s attention first.

• Make your title unique for every page. Remove your website name in your title tags for your content pages. Use that space for better, optimized titles.
• Create unique meta descriptions that represent the content of the page. The description should be a concise, keyword rich statement and call to action to encourage the reader to click through to your website.

Adding your keywords naturally to your writing, linking to other quality content, adding alt and title tags to your images and formatting your content for easy reading will add to the quality of your content.

Have you installed Google Analytics and set up Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools?

Knowing if your SEO is working is important. Doing the optimization is great but you need to know if it is effective. 

Google Analytics provides the search data you need to see if you are getting more traffic. If you aren’t seeing an increase in traffic to your website, you may have some issues that need to be resolved.

Google Analytics provides a wealth of information. But I suggest you keep it simple and pay attention to website traffic at first. You can get overwhelmed with the amount of data it provides.

Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools can also provide information on issues with your website like 404 pages, mobility issues, pages crawled but not indexed or other technical mistakes that may have been made.

There are many reasons why you should block search engines from indexing a page, such as duplicate content via the category archives. But you should periodically check the list of excluded pages under the coverage report to make sure those pages that are excluded are done so on purpose.

Here’s a very complete guide to Google Search Console that explains the tool in great detail.

Have you claimed or added your business to reputable directories and social media platforms?

Even if you provide products and services nationally or internationally, incorporating local SEO strategies is important to increasing your digital footprint. Business citations that lead back to your website helps increase the chance your business will be found. Citations from reputable sites also help build backlinks to your website.

Do a search of your business name and note where it shows up. 

• Have you claimed and updated your Google My Business and Bing Places for business listings? Both search engines use this listing to validate the existence and quality of a local business. 
• Is your business accurately listed in relevant business directories? Be sure to claim those listings and verify that your name, address and phone numbers are consistent.
• Do you have social media business profiles on the relevant platforms? Select the right platforms for your business. You don’t need to be on all.
• Are there any reviews about your business that you didn’t know about, both good and bad? You should regularly check on your business in the search engine results. If someone left a review, you should respond to it. 

You can have the best optimized website, but without a large, accurate digital footprint, you miss many opportunities for people to find your business. Take control of your web presence across the directories and social media platforms. 

SEO mistakes to avoid

SEO keeps changing. What used to work no longer does and in some cases, are more likely to hurt the visibility of your website or get your site penalized. The following are areas you should be aware of and don’t do them on your website.

Lack of unique, quality content

Content needs to be unique (authentically yours) and provide quality information to the visitor. Copying someone’s quality content is not unique. Writing your own content is unique but not necessarily of high quality. You need to combine both. Spend time creating content that gets read. It is better to provide high quality authentic content once a month than low quality content daily.

Duplicate content

There are many ways duplicate content can be created, not all of them intentionally. Search engines are trying to serve original, authoritative content. Having many pages on your site with the same content can cause your site to lose rank.

• Unintentional duplicate content: when WordPress date, category, author or tag archives are allowed to be indexed.  Install and use the Yoast SEO plugin and set the archives to “no-index, follow”, telling the search engines to not index the archives but follow any links.
• Intentional duplicate content: when SEO companies create hundreds of pages where the only difference is the URL, title and heading. They use them to try to get a business ranked in multiple towns or cities and found by those searching for a service in that city or town. 

Keyword heavy content

A warning signal to the search engines is using your keywords too frequently and unnaturally. Write for your human audience and use your keywords in your content where it makes sense. Use related keywords for variety in your writing. Related keywords can improve your results and prevent you from over-using a single keyword phrase.

Optimized anchor text

Anchor text are the words you use to link to another piece of content. Make sure this text is created naturally. If your link text looks like you forced your keywords into them, they are over-optimized. When embedding links into your content, use naked URLs, brand names or phrases that relate to what you are linking to as I did in the duplicate content paragraph.

Low quality links pointing to your site

Link popularity is still used by the search engines as a measure of the trustworthiness of a site if  these inbound links come from other authoritative and trustworthy websites. Buying links is not an option as they are usually made up of low quality directories and article sites, comment spam or link farms.

Hidden text

Not all hidden links and text is violating search engine guidelines. For accessibility reasons, you sometimes need descriptive text that may not be seen with normal browsers.

But when hidden text is used to specifically add content to a web page to manipulate the search engines for SEO purposes, it does. Some tricks include:

• Making text the same color as the background
• Using CSS to hide the content
• Setting the pixel size of the font so small that it is unreadable
• Hiding text behind images

But just because the human can’t see the text, doesn’t mean the search engines don’t realize that you are trying to fool them. 

Exact match domains

Exact match domains (EMD) are not bad. But purchasing an EMD for the purpose of ranking for that keyword phrase, such as “Electrician Boston MA” (electricianbostonma.com) will not help if it is only hosting a thin content website with little to no trust and authority. Your website needs to establish itself as a legitimate resource for your area of expertise for it to rank well. 

This doesn’t mean having your main keyword in your real domain will hurt you. In fact there are benefits of including keywords in your domain name. But it needs to align with your actual business name, core service or market you serve for it to have any benefit.

Invest in your online presence

The way search engines currently index and rank web pages is a benefit to most small business owners. As part of your marketing strategy, SEO needs to be viewed as an investment in your business. Implement SEO best practices for your small business to gain ranking, especially in your local market.

Article source: https://masterful-marketing.com/seo-best-practices/