Expert Tips for Selecting Your SEO Keywords

Expert Tips for Selecting Your SEO Keywords

Posted by in Digital Marketing, Industrial Marketing, SEO: Search Engine Optimization

At Moore Than SEO, the driving force behind our recommended strategies is always based on the direction the data and analytics provide. I often begin every SEO project by starting at its most basic building blocks: the targeted keyword phrases. This is because the research I do to examine top ranking competitor websites is extensive and I often brainstorm nearly 200 keyword phrase possibilities before I’m done with the first wave. Then I scrutinize and evaluate based on the search volume detected and overall competitive saturation. So, how can you improve your SEO keyword game? Read on for our expert tips for creating a powerful target SEO keyword list!

Tip One: Start by evaluating the top-ranking competition.

Spend time reviewing the top-ranking competitor websites. See how they organize their information, how much content they provide overall, how fresh their content is, and if they are incorporating more advanced integrations like social media streams, CRM integrations, etc. Take notes as you do this and provide your evaluations on content, design, mobile friendliness, and overall social media presence (click through any social follow links and make note of their existing social media following – and which platforms they’re active on). Next, go back to the competitor website’s home page & right-click then choose “View Page Source.” This will open a new tab displaying the actual code behind the scenes.

Read the areas showing <title> and <meta name=”description” content to see how much the competitor has optimized. Add any notable keyword phrases to your brainstorm list. For example, in the screenshot above, I would likely add “Atlanta Fundraiser Planners” “Atlanta Fundraiser Venue” “elegant fundraising event” “fundraising event planning” and “fundraising gala” to my list. Go through this process for at least the top three ranking competitors to your business.

Tip Two: Actively Use Google Search & “Related Suggestions” To Dig Even Deeper

Try searching for some of the keyword phrases you’ve brainstormed. You’ll see that some result in autosuggestions by Google as well as a “Searches related to X” listing at the bottom of the page.

In our example, I entered “fundraiser planners” into Google to see what other suggestions might appear. At the bottom of the first page of search results, I’m able to located some great ideas to add to my brainstorming list. For example, here, we might consider adding, “fundraising event planning template” “non profit event planning companies” “fundraising event planner” “how to organize a fundraising event” and other great longtail keyword phrases. Keep mining to find more great ideas.

Tip Three: Verify Your Choices with Google Data

Today, there are many resources to understand the actual local or global search volume of a targeted keyword phrase. Before you decide on which keywords to include and prioritize on your list, be sure you check the Google AdWords data to ensure it supports your hunches. Also, check the relevancy of any phrases to understand if they show results that make sense for your line of business. You’ll want to choose the most relevant keyword phrases with the highest search volume and lowest competitive saturation. Build your list and reevaluate it every other month.

Looking for more in-depth help for increasing your brand’s digital awareness? Moore Than SEO is a Top DesignRush Search Engine Optimization Company. Reach out to us for a free assessment and learn more about how we can help elevate your digital marketing efforts. Call us at (559) 978-4096.

Top Local Agency Tips for The Best Results in Today’s World of SEO

Top Local Agency Tips for The Best Results in Today’s World of SEO

Posted by in Industrial Marketing, SEO: Search Engine Optimization, Website Development

Fascinating content is the solution for stellar search engine ranking results, whether you are jumping into the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for the first time with a new website or you’re seeking to regain your website’s rank. Populate your web pages with text and media to answer your target customer’s questions, and you’ve nailed it.

Sounds simple? The trick is that SEO is dynamic—Your rank may be on the first page of Google search results today, but maybe not tomorrow. Your success depends upon whether you regularly refresh your website with interesting new information that’s relevant to your visitors, or whether your competition does a better job of this.

How do you keep up with the demands of posting new and relevant information? Turn to the top local agency for SEO (that’s us) to create the perfect content.

We’ll give you a few tips to get started, in the meantime.

To celebrate 20 years of the Internet, here’s a primer, designed for successful results today’s world of SEO:

1. Your content must be goal-driven.

Have a purpose for creating meaningful information. Why are you publishing your website home page, online product catalog, blog article, infographic, or video? If your answer is, “to get a high Google ranking,” go back to the drawing board.

Design everything you publish online for human consumption, for your reader’s education and enjoyment. Mold your content to fit your target customer, just the clients who want and need your products and services.

Google will take notice. Specify goals for your content, producing web pages filled with relevant,“ sticky” content where your website visitors stick to your website and delve deep into your message.

How does your content deserve that top rank in the Google results? Lay the groundwork for good SEO practices by following a measurable goal, such as:

• To increase product sales by highlighting how our products are the one and only answer our customer’s needs

• To increase inquiries and consultation appointments with proof of our experience and trustworthy reputation

• To increase the numbers of email sign-ups through offers of educational download information to help customers make the best product purchase from our catalog

When your content is meaningful to website visitors, your content will be meaningful to Google and all search engines, too.

2. Target your perfect customers with the best keyword phrases.

Create a competitive strategy around the keywords that you choose. Need help with choosing keywords? Discover “How to Research SEO Keywords Like a Pro”.

Armed with your keyword phrases, select the best user-friendly internal URLs (web page addresses). For instance, which would you prefer to click on?

https://YourCompanyName/pfc-37

or

https://YourCompanyName/groovy-guide

For more clickability, Google’s Matt Cutts recommends confining the URL extension to between 3 and 5 words. (Not https://YourCompanyName.com/groovy-guide-that-even-your-grandmother-will-love)

Use your main keyword phrase in the first paragraph of your text, within the first 100 words or so, while ensuring that the text is natural for any website visitor to read. Don’t try to force or stuff a keyword phrase into the content. Good grammar and punctuation trump keyword placement.

Sprinkle your content with semantically related keyword phrases—text that includes words associated with your industry, business sector, products, and services.

3. Include optimized tags.

This is the information provided for the search engine bots that crawl the web to locate new information to include in the search engine results. Your human readers don’t see these optimized tags unless they know how to look for it. Without this information, automated web crawlers don’t know that you’ve posted brilliant content.

Supply the following information to your IT guru to insert on your web pages, or do it yourself:

• Optimized Title Tag—Include your target keyword phrase and limit it to 60 characters

•Optimized Meta Description—Include keywords that encourage completing a call-to-action, and limit the description to less than 160 characters

• Optimized H1 Tag—This is the actual title of your page or article that your human visitors read, and it includes your target keyword phrase. It can be identical to the Optimized Title Tag.

4. Add internal and external links.

Hyperlinks provide resources for website visitors to learn more about your company and offerings.

Internal links posted on your website take the visitor to another page within your site. Use internal links to offer visitors reasons to take advantage of your calls to action.

Outbound, or external links were once feared, due to the concern that visitors are guided away from your website and brand. Linking to informative sources and business partner websites strengthens your reputation—Visitors believe you are the ultimate authority for your subject and your industry. Choose links that guide your potential customers, helping to answer their questions while preventing them from landing on your competitors’ websites.

Add links to your social networks, too, and insert widgets on your website that display your most recent posts. Post social share buttons to encourage website visitors to create a buzz about your useful information, products, and deals to their own networks of followers. Think of this as free advertising and great SEO!

5. Ensure that your page loads quickly and is viewable on multiple devices.

A major ingredient to gaining a successful mobile search rank position is how fast the pages on your website load. Check that your website design template is running on the most recent update and optimize images on your site. Learn more about enhancing your search appeal with a mobile-friendly website.

6. Don’t skimp on the content.

How many words should a web page or blog article contain? Our rule of thumb: Use enough words to go into depth to answer your website visitor’s questions clearly and solve their problems. Your content must steal the spotlight away from your competitors and put you on center stage.

Search engines reward websites with great content by placing them at the top of the results page for your keyword phrases. Google penalizes sites that resort to:

• Redirects and Cloaking—Giving Google a different view of your website than your offering for human website visitors

• Keyword Stuffing—Repeating the same keyword phrases throughout the text

• Hidden Text—Text that only Google bots can see and is invisible to human readers (white font against a white background, for instance)

• Unnatural links—Sending your web page visitors to websites that are unrelated to your subject at hand smells of taking money as bribes to benefit other website owner’s SEO agendas.

• Broken links and evidence of hacking—Avoiding the regular website housekeeping chores of ensuring links are still good, backing up your site, and updating the security marks your site as old and ignored.

• Spammy user comments, spammy hosting companies, and spammy hard-sell content—“Spam, spam, spam, lovely spam,” as the Monty Python troupe sang

• Copied material—Duplicating information found elsewhere on the ‘net sends Google rankings into a free fall

Why would Google want to include a site anywhere in their search engine results that resorted to these tactics?

Follow the rules and avoid any reason for Google to drop your site from their search engine results. But your triumph will only be temporary if you post content on your website only to forget about it. Web pages that retain stale content plummet as competitors post innovative, new material on their sites. The internet is dynamic and ever changing, and so are the search engine results.

Here at Moore Than SEO, we recognize you have more important things to attend to than constantly come up with new content to keep up with your competitors at bay. You could do your homework, or you could make the easy choice and partner with us.

Learn why Moore Than SEO is the top local agency in the greater Fresno and Clovis areas, and then give us a call at 559-978-4096. We work with you to build a campaign strategy that delivers quantifiable results-driven social media content that engages. We don’t stop there—We continue to adjust content for maximum effect. Contact us today to get started.

What is Branding and How Does It Rock Your Sales Efforts?

Posted by in Digital Marketing, Industrial Marketing

Humor us for just a moment. Think of the other kind of branding, cattle branding. The practice of marking livestock to identify ownership goes back to ancient Egyptian times. And the Romans believed that when brands included “magical” symbols, they had the power to protect animals from harm. Nowadays, as branding is under the scrutiny of animal welfare groups, the brand shifted to the logo, signage, and letterhead for many ranches, standing as a beacon to spread the indelible message of a company’s practices and reputation. Just with the brand image, livestock customers know what a particular brand image stands for.

As a marketing term, what is branding? The business application for this word can be defined as a process to create a consistent name and image in a customer’s mind. As in Roman times, this modern application of business branding conjures up magical powers. The brand image carries the power to attract buyers to your retail doorstep and retain their loyalty.

Branding can also cast an evil spell when it is mishandled, making your company appear invisible, or even make you appear substandard against your competitors. A poor brand image can tank a company’s reputation.

Branding is not only a process—It is the end result of what you convey to your customers. What do your customers expect from your products and services? How do they compare you against other businesses in your field? And finally, can your customers believe in you and trust you to deliver exactly what you promise? 

Your branding strategy is your game plan for planting the seeds of positive recognition. What do you want to convey to your customers from the get go? Business goal soul-searching is required to create a successful brand strategy:

• Define how your company and products are different and superior in the marketplace with your mission statement. Our free SWOT analysis worksheet helps you determine your niche in your business sector.

• Describe the benefits and features of your offerings, zeroing in on resolving your client’s needs. First measure your customer’s needs. Then, start writing to formulate your digital identity. 

• Research your current customers’ opinions of your company. And when you are just launching your business, research what they think of your competitors, their products, and their services.

• Determine the qualities and benefits about your company that customers should recognize. See how you fulfill their every want. What do you want your target customers and your loyal customer base to think of when they first glance at your logo, your letterhead, your storefront, your business cards, and your promotional collateral?

Here’s the bottom-line—Branding is about creating the best first impression of your company. It’s not about convincing with words and facts. It’s about your customer base instantly viewing your company in a positive light without any hard-sales effort on your part.

How do you get there? Digital (online) branding is the way to go. Consider that over 51% of smartphone users discover new products or companies while performing searches on their smartphones. Particularly for industrial manufacturers, B2B customers are increasingly using mobile devices for product research and purchase activities (42% use mobile, a growth of 91% over the past two years). (Source of stats: Google) Regardless of your industry, you simply can’t afford to ignore digital branding.

Apply with your initial brand strategy research for digital placement:

• Create a brand logo. Your logo is the visual statement of your promise to your customers. Hire a professional digital designer to develop your brand style guide to ensure consistent application of your logo and tagline to online and offline marketing messages. Transform their existing traditional brand into a digital expression, adapting your logo to animation, reformatting to fit various size requirements per platform and social media profile. Your digital graphic designer helps you discover the best logo size and placement, color palette, fonts, photography styles and images, and more for each marketing opportunity.

• Develop a tagline, a succinct memorable and meaningful statement that captures the true essence of your company’s brand. Place it wherever your company information appears. You’ve hit a home run with your tagline when customers see your logo and instantly recall your tagline.

• Formulate your brand’s voice. Emotion sells, even for highly technical products and services. Hone in on the “why” for your audience to buy from you. Maintaining a consistent personality that resonates with your core customers translates to trust. Is your voice conversational or factual? Is it traditional or modern? Partner with experienced content writers who take the time to learn about your business offerings, especially for tech marketing. They find the perfect words to address and answer your customer’s pains, and most importantly.

• Build a simple and clear brand message to communicate to customers exactly who you are. Utilize your brand voice to describe in just a couple of sentences what you offer and why customers should pay attention. Don’t list what your products do—Address specific items that are important to the customer. Your brand message is a key building block to gaining quantitative results your content marketing.

Spread the word about your company by inserting your brand image into every aspect of your business. Wherever your company appears, your brand message, logo, tagline, and voice must act as a siren song for customers to click onto your website links, visit your blog, contact you for more information, and of course, make purchases. Formulate a stealth brand message, spread it wherever your target customers roam online, and you’ll see an increase your profit margin.

Online branding requires a thorough understanding of how to put your company’s best foot forward in the digital marketplace. Rely on experts to get it right the first time—Our Moore Than SEO team accumulated years of knowledge and experience executing technical, and non-technical content design, writing, and marketing. Contact us for your free consultation to rock your sales efforts at 559-978-4096.

Digital Marketing Goal Planning for the New Year and Beyond

Digital Marketing Goal Planning for the New Year and Beyond

Posted by in Digital Marketing, Industrial Marketing, Social Media

Social media platforms are the billboards to drive traffic to your website and to your brand. Like all advertising and promotion, you simply cannot rely on the same info that you’ve posted last year, last month, and last week to continue to attract customers to your brand. Your competitors are on to you, and they’ll respond in kind with their newest campaigns to promote their products and services. They’ll blow you out of the water if you sit back on your laurels.

Social media is not static. It’s dynamic. Examine the timeline on any social platform—your post will stay there for a short time and then eventually fall off the page. Sure, it will remain on your business profile page, but customers wont see that post unless they are visiting your business profile. What can you do to keep your brand alive on social media feeds?

Which brings us to the subject of your website. Have nothing new to add? Think it’s good as-is? Think again—Your competition has visited your website and is on to you, working behind the scenes to make their website stand above yours in the Google rankings. All it takes is adding fresh content—blog articles, new product descriptions, white papers, how-to videos, and press releases.

So with the New Year, it’s time to spruce up your online image. We aren’t necessarily advocating a complete overhaul, just some tweaks to keep you competitive in the digital marketplace.

Refresh your brand message. Create a digital marketing goal plan that contains these elements:

1. Start with Your Website. With a well organized website, you help search engines drive your target audience to your content. Potential customers are seeking your products and services—You just need to make your information easily visible to search engines so that you can close the sale. Update content on your web pages using the most current relevant SEO (optimizing each page with new META information, keywords, and relevant content). Add and check internal links to where other relevant content can be found within your website. Add external links to social media business profiles, reviews, and business partners. All of these actions combine to up your website’s domain authority (the likelihood of your website to rank in the search engines).

2. Be a Goal-Setter. According to Hubspot’s State of Inbound Report, businesses that calculate their return on investment (ROI) for their marketing strategies are 72% more likely to believe that their company’s marketing strategy is effective. Set marketing goals that are measurable. For instance, to increase your social media followers and page likes by X percent, to increase your blog click-through rate to other content, and to increase email open rate by X percent. Are these goals to be attained weekly, monthly, or yearly? Determine how success in each KPI (key performance indicator) contributes to improving your bottom line to set ROI benchmarks.

3. Create a Budget and Stick to It. Hubspot’s State of Inbound Report also confirms a strong correlation between digital marketing effectiveness and budget. We’re talking about the time devoted to creating, posting, and analyzing your digital marketing plan. How much time will you devote to managing social network profiles? How much content do you want to create for your blog? Do you need to invest in graphics and stock images? How much CPM (cost per thousand) or CPC (cost per click) impressions do you need to create an ROI on your advertising?  Regardless of your business sector, WordStream Blog suggests that as much as 20% of the gross revenue for new companies should be allocated to marketing, which established companies could get away with spending some 12% of their gross revenue (of course, a new company needs to build an audience from scratch). The good news is that a healthy return on your investment can be yours with a minimum investment, because social media management costs far less than other traditional forms of marketing.

4. Cement Your Online Reputation by Deploying Stealth Social Media Profiles. Zero in on the best social media platforms for your business success, concentrating on where your target audience is most likely to hang out:

• Facebook is the most popular social media network, which makes it invaluable for most businesses. Besides posting photos and company updates, a business profile puts powerful tools for advertising and analysis at your fingertips. Your business profile functions as your Facebook storefront, because you can customize it to go far and beyond a simple bio and contact information. Promote your business using Google maps, hours of operation, products, shopping carts, videos, and much more. Apps from other websites seamlessly integrate with Facebook, allowing you to post discounts, coupons, and business events on other sites for them to instantly appear on Facebook.

• Twitter is perfect for spreading the word in quick, brief statements (using 240 characters or less) containing relevant content. Use these short blurbs to create a meaningful dialogue with customers and potential customers—Answer questions, share praise, retweet reviews, share videos, images, and links. Build your brand with the savvy placement of hashtags (#). Include hashtags in your business profile, and change them up from time to time to keep your brand in the forefront of your customer’s minds to readily fulfill their needs.

• LinkedIn is known as the social networking hub for professional networking. For B2B companies that are particularly centered around tech and manufacturing, take advantage of LinkedIn’s offerings. Make connections with colleagues at companies that utilize your products and services to build lasting impressions, create customer loyalty, and increase your bottom line over the long term. LinkedIn profiles are akin to business resumes, and by joining specific LinkedIn Groups relevant to your industry, you’ll paint yourself as a business authority and industry expert in your field of concentration. Post information about your latest awards, white papers, product innovations, and blog articles to drive your industry’s movers and shakers to your website.

• YouTube is the standard for video sharing, where a business profile becomes a virtual TV channel that can house your business “commercials”. Capture fascinating stories about your company on a video cam is fair game: product demos, exclusive interviews with the CEO, behind-the-scenes tours of your warehouse, conference and expo action, panel discussions, and off-the-wall entertainment (for instance, trivia and polls about your products) are all fair game. Cross-promote with easy-to-post URLs and html codes to deliver on-demand video content on your web pages. Plus, the videos are all searchable through Google, as YouTube offers the ability to tag videos with META descriptions and keywords.

• Instagram is the visual platform based entirely on video and photo posts. But what makes it unique from other platforms that encourage the sharing of visual content is that Instagram is mobile—You cannot post directly to Instagram from a desktop computer. When your target audience performs most of their shopping and communicating on-the-go, Instagram can be a boon. Your Instagram Stories are designed for immediate content dissemination, since the photos and videos disappear 24 hours after posting. Create a direct dialogue using polls, questions, and sliding bars. To allow connections to continue to see your posts, use Instagram Highlights, the story reels that remain on your profile until you decide to delete them. Upload content live, as it happens, and remember to use hashtags (Instagram allows as many as 30 hashtags per post).

• Pinterest allows users to save visual content and display it by “pinning” it to their own categorized, digital bulletin boards, which they share with many connections. Pinterest is not just for fashion, food, and home decorating. Companies that sell products and parts for construction and DIY projects excel on Pinterest by posting how-to-build, step-by-step images that attract interest in their products. Get creative with a Pinterest profile, which gives you the power to align all your posts with your brand using clever descriptions of your boards. Use your keywords!

These are, by no means, all of the social media platforms to consider for your business. Depending upon your industry and where your customers roam, you may choose to consider others. Check out the current social media demographics to determine where to concentrate. Focusing on just a handful of platforms is most productive, because you’ll be able to devote time to building a consistent voice.

5. Choose Your Plan of Attack. Map out your strategy for how frequently to post on each social channel. Determine the focus of your posts and create a schedule. Examples of posts contain info about your latest blog articles, new product releases, educational content for your customers, industry reports, appearances at expos, and more, but they must all link back to the specific info on your website.

Utilize direct messaging to establish a direct rapport with customers. Facebook and Yelp even give you the option of placing a call-to-action button on your business profile. Besides posting the best content for each social media platform on a consistent basis, respond to direct messages to drive customers through your sales funnel.

6. Employ The Secret to Successful, Moneymaking Digital Marketing. Customization is the secret sauce that brings customers to you instead of your competitors. Digital marketing is not a one-size-fits-all. Many factors come into play to make an unmistakable, winning impression on your target audience. Start with content development for your website, social media profiles, blog articles, and social media posts. Add graphic design to make your company’s story, products, and services sizzle. Strategize for the ultimate search engine optimization (SEO) for content creation that gets you ranked in Google and beyond. With Google Analytics in place, you’ll be able to adjust your social reach campaigns to increase your ROI.

But don’t rely on accomplishing all of these tasks all in-house. Call on seasoned experts at 559-978-4096 to see your digital marketing goal planning come to full fruition this year and beyond. Get started with a free website assessment and a thorough analysis of your online competition.

Shows a cartoon owl thinking about Google search with headline Industrial Manufacturers: Don't be in the dark about organic seo

Industrial Manufacturers: Don’t be in the Dark about Organic SEO

Posted by in Content Marketing, Digital Marketing, Industrial Marketing, SEO: Search Engine Optimization

By Anne Roos, Content Development

Organic SEO, also known as natural SEO, is Google’s approved way to go about promoting your website.

It’s the tried and true way to allow customers to find you on the Internet. The emphasis is on spreading the word about your website by telling it like it is—posting content that interests your clients on your website and blog, and in social networks. Natural SEO creates a meaningful user experience, offering your website visitors exactly what they are looking for.

The trick is to talk about your industry, company, and products by sharing info that is interesting and relevant. The treat is that it costs less than traditional marketing: Less than trade show exhibits and less than direct marketing. Additionally, you can quickly track behaviors and responses, allowing you to tweak your marketing strategy for better success.

Make your story fascinating, and don’t be scared off by the conversational aspects of posting information.

Consistent content that strikes at the heart of your customer’s needs helps you connect in ways that you never could with traditional forms of marketing. Feed the monstrous hunger that your industry connections want to know: Share videos of your newest technology in action, post user-friendly instructions on your blog about how to use your new products, and share behind-the-scenes information about star employees on Facebook and LinkedIn. The result: More website traffic that leads to new clients and increased sales.

But beware of the dark side of SEO, also known as “black hat SEO.”

Some SEO companies will have you believe that they own exclusive, top-secret formulas for getting your website listed as #1 in the Google Search Engine rankings for your industry. Let them wrap their tendrils around you, and you may see a temporary bump in your rank, but you can’t hide from Google. Google’s search engine spiders peruse the web, and when they come across your site, they will punish you by dropping your website ranking or make it appear invisible to anyone searching for you on the Internet.

Evil, black hat SEO techniques include:

  • Keyword stuffing

Inserting your top keywords throughout your website, blog articles, and social media renders your information difficult to read and irrelevant to your target customers.

  • Unrelated keywords

Throwing in keywords (such as names of celebrities who have never used your products) that have nothing to do with your business, just to attract readers. This strategy certainly will not attract clients interested in your products and services.

  • Content automation

Text in a product review or in your blog comment section that is randomly generated by a bot. It tends to make no sense whatsoever—Real human beings can spot fake text a mile away.

  • Doorway pages

Fake landing pages on websites that are stuffed with keywords to make them easy for search engines to find.

  • Invisible links and texts

These ghostly apparitions are seen as a sign of desperation to attract the attention of search engines, but your website visitors don’t see them. To hide them from warm-blooded humans, the text is posted in a white font set on a white background, the font is set to zero, or a hyperlink is found when clicking something nonsensical, such as a hyphen.

  • Outsourced content creation

SEO writing that is farmed out to people who have no command of English and have no understanding of your industry will save you money in the short-run. But it sends customer loyalty to the grave in the long run.

White hat, natural, organic SEO comes to the rescue.

Here at Moore Than SEO, we take pride on the fact that our team specializes in following the Google rules for search engine optimization. We make it a point to get to know your industry, your products, and what makes your company stand out among your competitors. Our experts have the technical backgrounds to explain how your company ticks to potential clients.

Trust Moore Than SEO to never farm out your content outside of our company, relying on good ol’ American SEO. We understand that you have specific technical information that must be explained with an exacting touch. With our ability to interpret the complex, we create valuable industry-specific website content, blog articles, and social media posts that are share-worthy and click-worthy.

We perform the research to hone in on your niche keywords and keyword phrases. We write copy that includes links within your website to bring customers to the specific information they are seeking. On your website, we add internal links that keep visitors digging for more information on your site. And we never ignore META descriptions and write them to attract the attention of people, not just Google spiders.

Avoid the dark side, the methods that wicked black hat SEO companies are serving up. Don’t bite into that poison apple. Instead, arm yourself with the garlic of white hat SEO, the specialty of Moore Than SEO. All Halloween references aside, we’re here to help you attract new customers and increase client loyalty by sharing the unique information about your products, services, and technologies. Contact us at 559-978-4096 to get started.

Shows manufacturing machinery

Manufacturers: How to Increase Your Bottom Line Using an Integrated Marketing Approach

Posted by in Digital Marketing, Industrial Marketing, SEO: Search Engine Optimization

You’ve seen it work across non-technical industries—Retailers grab social media by the horns and get the word out about their products and services, connecting with customers and creating a dialog to drive up sales. But when it comes to industrial marketers, they lag behind. Why is it that only 30% of manufacturing marketers say they are effective at content marketing? (Source: ContentMarketingInstitute.com)

Creating engaging material to attract your target audience is one of the biggest challenges to content marketing. Technical writing that takes an integrated marketing approach meets this challenge by engaging both new and existing customers.

Which marketing strategies have the potential to increase your bottom line in the manufacturing industry?

Deliver meaningful documents into the hands of your target audience

Do you possess a wealth of content in a hard copy format and/or have content hidden on non-searchable, private areas of your website? Put these archived materials to work for you to attract interest in your brand and solidify your reputation. Content development professionals transform old documents, papers, and sales resources into online marketing fuel for increased outreach and awareness.

Ensure your website is as technologically sound as your company’s products

Is your website up-to-date? Is it mobile friendly, viewable on all the latest digital devices? Expert content marketers understand that obsolete website technology puts you at a disadvantage against your competition. Work with technical content marketers to leverage modern tech to fully integrate online marketing tactics.

Create a meaningful, cohesive, quality message across all platforms that resonate with your audience

Are you sending out different messages on different platforms? Solidify your brand by understanding the key phrases that potential customers use to find you online. Create your niche with powerful technical writing, and spread that message across your website, social media, blogs, emails, and beyond. Take that message offline, too, building a one-two punch against your competitors.

To bring this integrated online/offline marketing strategy to full realization, put the technical content writing into the hands of experts. Using effective methods of SEO (search engine optimization), graphic design creation, and social media know-how, you’ll see an uptick in your sales bottom line.

Here at Moore Than SEO, our senior staff has decades of experience understanding and conveying technical concepts. We are attuned to writing for the manufacturing sector to build that competitive edge. Give us a call at 559-978-4096 or drop us a line for your complimentary, no-obligation evaluation of your current marketing presence.

Shows website navigation with title, Top SEO Tips for website promotion

Our Holiday Gift to You—Top SEO Tips for Successful Website Promotion in 2017

Posted by in Content Marketing, Digital Marketing, Industrial Marketing, SEO: Search Engine Optimization

Happy Holidays! Merry Christmas! Happy Chanukah! Happy Kwanza! Happy Festivus! And Happy New Year from the entire staff here at Moore Than SEO!

No matter how you celebrate the holiday season, this is the perfect time to regroup and dive into successful website promotion strategies to get ahead of your competition in the New Year.

Our gift to you is…drumroll please…Our New Years top SEO Tips! This list is designed to increase brand awareness of your company across the internet.

1. Stay current on Google analytics trends.

What keeps your website in good favor with Google, and what can cause your website to drop off the first page of search engine results? Find out about Google’s cast of characters and the latest Penguin update. Review your present site and make corrections to avoid Google penalties, and take note of how to skirt penalties before launching a new site.

2. Take the temperature of your present online competitive climate.

Know how your business can create a niche in your industry. This measurement of Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT assessment) is the starting line for low and high tech SEO alike. Even if you completed a SWOT assessment this year, check your business climate again to lay claim of your product niche for the New Year.

3. Create or update your buyer personas to remain relevant to your customers.

Your customers’ wants, needs, and regular hang-outs change according to your industry’s competitive climate. Having an understanding of your target customers, beyond simple demographics, helps you target content to attract them to buy. Use our Developing Buyer Personas DIY Worksheet to improve online engagement, and thus, improve your website rankings.

4. Get to work using our 5 Fast and Easy SEO Growth Hacks.

Have you installed Google Analytics on your website? Are you regularly refreshing META information for each of your pages? Are links to your social media profiles integrated throughout your site? Is your site free of duplicate content? Is your location and contact info plainly visible throughout your website? If this is all new to you, or you’re just getting started with your new website, download our free white paper to get SEO right the first time.

5. Refresh your content.

Double-check to ensure your website content is not duplicated elsewhere on the internet, or duplicated within you’re the pages on your website (use copyscape.com to check your web page content for free). Duplicate content has a negative impact on your website’s performance in search engine rankings. Update your content to make it fresh and unique. Not a writer? Use our tips for online writing and formatting. Create content that leads your target customers to your website, delivering a visible digital identity for your company, your products, and your services.

These five steps form the launching pad for improved SEO results in the New Year.

It’s a lot of material to digest. No wonder savvy business owners elect to turn to SEO experts to avoid taking missteps and incurring Google penalties. We’re here to help. Our SEO team steers you in the right direction, creating a sound online reputation for your brand. Our goal is to drive your target customers to your website where you can close the sale.

Get started with successful web promotion in 2017 and beyond. Contact our SEO experts today for a free website health assessment, and give us a call at 559-978-4096 to discuss your SEO goals for the New Year. We look forward to hearing from you!

Is Your Company’s Digital Identity Invisible?

Is Your Company’s Digital Identity Invisible?

Posted by in Content Marketing, Digital Marketing, Industrial Marketing, SEO: Search Engine Optimization, Social Media

By Anne Roos, Director of Content Development

What is your company’s online footprint? What makes your business stand out on the Internet? This is known as your digital identity, or how your company is perceived in the digital world. In other words, it is your online branding.

Factors that contribute to your online identity can range from your logo, your URL (website address), and even the style of fonts and graphics on your website. Social networking takes the temperature of how your company is perceived online.

With over 3 billion worldwide Internet users, your goods and services can’t afford to be invisible on the worldwide web. Build a digital presence for your business and you’ll increase sales and have power over your online reputation.

Here are 4 steps to creating your company’s searchable identity:

1. Take over the reigns—When someone performs a Google search for the kinds of products and services you sell, your website and social media profiles must be on display. Get listed as a viable choice against your competition and don’t be invisible in the search results. Establish a powerful website for your business, and utilize best SEO practices to define your company in social media.

2. Use consistent branding across the internet—Develop the logo, graphics, and tag lines to brand your company’s representation on your website and on each social media profile you create. Discover the best keyword phrases that will lead people searching on Google to your company. Single out your company’s niche–Always include tags in your blog posts and META information on your website and blog pages.

3. Mingle, mingle, mingle—Don’t be a wallflower. Discover where your target customers converse online and make those social networking platforms your go-to places to schmooze. Post regularly, and include meaningful, interesting info that attracts readers to your website and blog. Reply to posts immediately to demonstrate that your company cares about the opinions of your customers. Join LinkedIn and Facebook groups that are relevant to your company’s best interests, and chime in on topics that are in your business wheelhouse. Online mingling, or social networking, drives customers to your website and strengthens your branding. It gives you control of what people are saying about your company.

4. Keep the discussion about business—Use social media as an educational forum, sharing information about the newest trends and how-to’s of your industry. Don’t use it as a carnival barker for hard selling your products, and don’t use it for posting what you had for lunch (unless, of course, you are in the food industry). Be professional and always take the high road to help potential customers find what they are looking for.

It takes time to build a successful online digital identity. It takes a delicate balance of website, blog, and social media finesse. The process is never finished—maintaining your digital identity is dynamic and requires constant updating, because the online conversation about products and services is never static.

Rely on the content experts at Moore Than SEO to curate and create the social media posts and profiles, blog articles, and web pages that attract attention and make your company a rock star in your own niche. We’ll help you create and maintain the digital identity that makes you shine against your online competition.

shows paper and pen for writing

The Non-Writer’s Guide to Creating a Digital Identity

Posted by in Content Marketing, Copywriting Tips, Digital Marketing, Industrial Marketing, Social Media

By Anne Roos, Director of Content Development

The Internet world expects business owners to be great writers, even if it isn’t their cup of tea. Rules of grammar, spelling, and punctuation reflect on your business just as much as the information you share. And it gets even more confusing, because some of the standard rules of writing were made to be broken for social media posts, blog entries, and web pages. For creating a digital identity, a unique voice online that attracts clients and customers to your brand, you also need to mind the rules of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

SEO websites will have you believe that there are hard-and-fast formulas to follow to get on the first page of search engine results for your specific keywords. It’s a soft science, and because Google frequently changes its algorithms for ranking, no set formula is going to work.

Follow our 3 standards that apply across-the-board for anything you are writing online:

1. Write for human consumption.

Forget about stuffing keywords into paragraphs and pages—one or two mentions will do. Focus on the information that interests your customers and clients.

2. Never copy content from another source, even if that source is a page on your own website.

Search engines like original content, and they’ll drop your page in rank, or remove you from search engine results altogether, when you duplicate content.

3. Text is more important than graphics.

The major search engines place high importance on content that is relevant to your website visitors. They also pay attention to your website’s layout. Find out Why Content Trumps Design.

How your content looks on the page is important, because most people scan an article with their eyes before delving into its contents.

Follow these 8 standards of formatting to entice your readers:

1. Put the good stuff at the beginning. As of May, 2015, Google announced that more searches are performed on mobile devices (smartphone, tablets, etc.) than on desktops and laptops. Therefore, you need to concentrate the important texts in the first few sentences to avoid scrolling on small-screened devices.

2. Focus on one idea per paragraph, use shorter sentences, and include 6 lines maximum per paragraph. Content is digested in small bites, not big meals. Make it easy for your readers to pick out important points. Embolden key sentences and key phrases within the paragraph.

3. Add lists and bullet points for variety. They are easy to read, easy to write, and everyone loves lists. Try to limit your lists to a manageable number of items—If you have too many items, add subheadings. Speaking of which…

4. Employ subheadings to shift topics. Lengthy blog posts and web pages are ever so much easier to read when each new topic is introduced by a cleaver subheading—Think of them as mini-chapter headings for your article.

5. Always insert links within your content. They stand out from the rest of the text, because they are underlined and highlighted. Use more inbound links (links to your web pages) than outbound links (links to other relevant websites). Use inbound links within your social media posts to send your friends and followers to your blog posts and web pages.

6. Rely on the 7-minute rule for blog posts and web pages. Each blog article or web post should take no longer than about 7-minutes to read out loud. If you’re counting words, they should be no shorter than about 300 words. Each social network has rules for maximum numbers of words or characters—Stay within those rules to avoid truncation of text. Including media with your social network posts reduces the amount of text you can use.

7. Be conversational. Unless your copy is of a highly technical nature, keep to simple sentences. Proof your copy by reading it aloud. If you find yourself stumbling as you read aloud, or each sentence is taking up more than two lines, split up sentences and paragraphs so that your information reads like a friendly chat.

8. Get to the point. Always include a call-to-action: a website to visit, a phone number to call, a product to check out. What’s the point of writing if you don’t create sales?

The entire reason for building a web presence is to increase your bottom line. You can have a gorgeous website that attracts customers, but they need to know what to do once they’ve arrived. Your content wins over customers when it engages them and moves them to buy.

How do you engage customers? Follow our 6 insights of what to say in social media and on your web and blog page and you’ll see a return of investment (ROI) in your website costs:

1. Keep both eyes on your competitors—Building a digital identity is about developing an online and offline brand strategy. See our Beginner’s Guide to Competitive Intelligence for a primer.

2. Publish consistently—Fresh content sends website visitors and social media fans back for more. Plus, Google wants to direct searchers to new, interesting content. Post regularly; at least once a month on blogs, and at least once a week on social media platforms.

3. Establish a goal for each post—Do you want to get website visitors to sign up for your newsletter? Do you want to tell your readers about your company’s next public event? Do you want to introduce customers to your newest product line? Hone in on your goal, and then answer the question, “Why is this important to write?” when you begin writing.

4. Write an irresistible headline—Touch an emotion. Draw the reader into your article, your story, and your post.

5. Activate action verbs—Can you envision what that verb says to do? This is what defines an action verb. You can visualize the words drive, hit, aim, get. You can’t visualize verbs like be, was, and were. Action verbs get readers to move, respond, and buy.

6. Use a different mode of storytelling for each post—Ask a question, tell a tale, reveal secrets, challenge assumptions, offer a different point of view, alleviate fears, disclose a mystery, educate your readers, and more. The path of storytelling is only limited by your imagination.

Is this content writing task overwhelming? Staring at a blank computer screen with no idea where to start on your content writing journey? Too busy getting your business off the ground to focus on writing for the web?

Here’s the answer: Partner with a team of professional, seasoned online marketers, and avoid cheap alternatives. Going outside the U.S. for content and SEO assistance may look like a money-saving idea, but you’ll want to stick with American SEO.

Be careful when hiring content writers. Everything you publish online reflects your business reputation. Why trust the empty promises of SEO websites that don’t take the time to get to know your company, products, and services before creating content? Here at Moore Than SEO, our writers build custom content that attracts your target audience and gives your competition a run for their money.

Contact us for a free assessment of your online content.

Why Are Google Analytics Important for Web Development?

Posted by in Content Marketing, Digital Marketing, Industrial Marketing, SEO: Search Engine Optimization

By Anne Roos, Director of Content Development

How do you know where your website visitors are coming from? How did they find your site? Which keyword phrases did they insert into Google to find you? Google Analytics answers these questions and more. It’s your web development tool for discovering how to maximize your site’s ability to attract customers.

By monitoring how traffic gets to your site, who is visiting your site and sticking around, and which pages interest them the most, you’ll know how to tweak your website so that it can reach its full potential.

Here are just a few of the questions that Google’s powerful analytical tool can solve:

• Which pages do your visitors initially land on when they enter your site? Your website visitors may not always start on your home page. Perhaps they clicked on a link to one of your products, or a link to your blog, or a link to another interior page on your site. Armed with this information, you can increase the appeal of individual pages.

• Do your visitors continue to explore your site once they enter your site, or do they leave to surf elsewhere on the net? The Bounce Rate is an indicator of your website’s staying power. If this rate is high, you are not engaging visitors, and you’ll need further investigation to determine why.

• When your website visitors explore the pages on your site, which pages interest them the most? The Top Pages report will reveal the content that is working successfully on your site.

• When is the most traffic visiting your site? The Visits tool will tell you when to publish to your blog and launch new products. It will also tell you when to make site updates without presenting any downtime for visitors.

• Which pages are referring the most traffic to your site the most? This information can reveal volumes about your visitors and what attracts them to your site, just by knowing what other sites draw their attention.

• How often do visitors complete their purchases, sign up for your newsletter, download a brochure or e-book, view your videos, and fill in forms requesting more information? This data is found with the Conversion Rate tool. If you have a low rate of conversions, you’ll need to examine the content and design of the pages where you invite visitors to take action.

The speed of your site has a major influence on all of the above Google metrics, particularly the Conversion Rate. If your site is not mobile ready, or if it takes too long to load, you’ll lose visitors. From a web development aspect, the download speed of your website must be addressed in order to adequately assess the results of your Google Analysis.

To get a full picture of how your website is performing against your online competitors, contact our SEO experts. We’ll go through your Analytics with a fine-tooth comb and offer recommendations to improve your website’s bottom line. Contact us at 559-978-4096 to receive your custom-fit website performance review, or drop us a line at info@moorethanseo.com.