SEMPO Blog | Top of Search = Top of Mind ®

6 Important SEO Tips For SMBs

May 24, 2019 • Local Search • 73
Due to rising competition, it can be difficult to rank #1 on Google’s local business results. Here are 6 important SEO tips for small and medium businesses that will help you get there.

1- Optimize For Medium Tail and Question Keywords

Optimizing your website for relevant keywords should be your first port of call. Optimize for medium tail keywords that can send targeted traffic, but have less competition.

Additionally, you should also target question keywords. These will pull customers that are already deep into the buying cycle. Remember, keyword optimization is based on semantics because Google always identifies the intent of the user before it presents the results. Make use of tools like Ubersuggest to achieve optimal results.

2- Acquire High Authority Links Using HARO and Guest Posting

Links still remain one of the biggest ranking factors. As a small business owner, it becomes difficult to compete with bigger brands who have higher budgets for link building. However, there are two strategies that work effectively for an SMB. These are acquiring links using HARO and building links using guest posting.

HARO stands for Help a Reporter Out. You can register for the HARO site as a source and HARO will start sending you around 3 emails on a daily basis containing requests from journalists for story content. The key here is to sponsor local events and remain in the news so you can forward the information to reporters when they ask for it. You won’t see magic happening instantly but if you remain consistent, you will definitely be able to acquire links from highly authoritative news sites.

Another great way of building links is using guest posting. Under this strategy, you find sites related to your niche which are looking for authors or contributors and send an email to them requesting contributor status. Once you are accepted, submit your content and add links to your website in the content body or author bio.

You can easily find out the sites where your competitor is placing their guest posts by using tools like the Backlink Checker from Neil Patel. Simply enter your competitor URL and this tool will quickly find the top sites that are linking to your competitor. This tool is absolutely free to use.

3- Leverage The Power of Structured Data

Structured data is often overlooked by SMBs. I have often seen small business owners following SEO basics, such as optimizing the title tag, description tag and the content body, but failing to leverage structured data.

Structured data helps Google and other search engines to better understand the content of web pages. For example if you have a recipe site, specifying cooking temperatures, the ingredients used, and cooking times, etc. can all be defined explicitly by Google algorithm. This will help Google to display the defined information accurately in the SERP itself, improving the overall user experience.

The most common forms of structured data are of the following:
- Organizational schema markup — helps to elaborate the company information in the SERP.
- Person schema markup — helps to elaborate the information related to an individual.
- Local Business markup — lets the customers find information such as address and phone number related to a business.
- Product markup — specifies information related to a product like it’s price, quantity, color, etc.
4- Build Citations and Reviews

Citations and reviews are two important elements of local SEO. A citation is a quotation or a reference about your business, and reviews are written by genuine customers. Both citations and reviews are crucial to get your site or local business listing up on the Google search results.

For building citations, you can make use of a tool named the WhiteSpark Local Citation Finder that will help you to find the best citation opportunities for your business. The tool will identify your top local competitors, analyze their citation sources and discover relevant citation opportunities where you can list your own business.

For effective monitoring and building of online reviews, you can use a tool named Review Tracker. This tool helps to monitor your business reviews scattered around the web using a single dashboard. You can easily monitor and respond to reviews right from the dashboard. The tool also helps you to generate new reviews for your business using email campaigns and SMS, etc.

5- Keep Your NAP Consistent

NAP stands for name, address and phone number. If you want your business to rank on the top of local search results, you need to keep your NAP consistent across all the platforms where your business listing might be present.

Your business NAP should be accurate and regularly updated across the entire web. An accurate NAP signals Google about the consistency of the business address across all directories, review sites and other digital channels, allowing it to rank your business higher in the local search results.

6- Use Interactive Content Marketing

Interactive content marketing is a form of content marketing where you persuade the user to take an action, and then make the content automatically update based on that action. Below are the important types of interactive content that you can use in your content marketing strategy:
- – Quizzes
- – Contests
- – Interactive ebooks
- – Games
- – Interactive videos
- – Calculators
- – Interactive infographics
- – Polls and surveys
A quiz is one of the best ways to drive people into action. People love to play the quiz and share it with their friends and families; therefore, you are able to generate lots of social media buzz and backlinks.

Final Words

SEO is an investment. It helps you to keep your business on top and gain quality traffic. If you follow the SEO tips above, you will defeat your competitors and solidify your place in the top of the search results.
Read More »
Steps To Think About If You Want To Sell SEO Services

May 14, 2019 • Featured, SEO 101 • 119
So you have taken the best SEO courses and have proven results on a number of test cases. You are confident in your ability to help others develop their SEO and want to start your business. But what steps do you need to think about if you want to sell SEO services? And how do you start getting those customers?

Preparation

There are hundreds of quotes about being prepared that can be applied to your new business – you’ve heard them before. Thing is, they are right. If you don’t prepare for your new business and the clients, you will get then you are likely to fail or at least to find it takes a whole lot longer to build your business. There are a few things you need in place before you start approaching paid clients:
1. A good CRM system – whether this is a dedicated tool or a system that uses things like Trello, you need to organise your client relationship management process. It helps you track leads, see what needs to be done next and watch those potential former customers who could become live leads again
2. A professional email – you need to have a domain email such as [email protected] rather than relying on a free Gmail or Yahoo address. Not only is it more reliable but it also portrays a much more professional image for potential customers
3. A website that uses what you do – you not only want to have an SEO friendly website design but also have some content on there that demonstrates what you do in action. This helps people to see you really do know what you are talking about.
Understand your prospects

With your foundations in place, you can start to do some customer research and find a niche that you want to focus on. You want to know the potential customer’s business and have a system to quickly get this information when a lead comes along. By knowing what they do and need, you can better tailor your services to them.

You should also look at their competitors and use them for inspiration. If it works for them, there’s no reason you can’t tweak it and make it work better for your customer. Also, look at any general trends in SEO that will have particular relevance to your target customer.

Start to understand the right fit

When you start out, there’s the temptation to grab every customer that comes your way. But you do want to be a little discerning and establish if they are the right fit for your agency. The reason for this is simple – when they are, you do your best work. When they aren’t the right fit, it is a struggle and the results will often show this.

There are four factors to consider when qualifying customers:
- Budget – ask them to prioritise between time and budget and if they pick the latter, that’s a good fit
- Authority – do they have a work email address for proposals and other materials?
- Need – is their business digital ready and therefore your services will have an effect?
- Time frame – how soon do they want to see results? Make sure this is realistic and if they want things too quickly, this can be a negative sign
Prioritise who to sell to first

Once you have a firm picture of who you want as clients for your business, you can start to prioritise who to sell to first. This will make it easier to create customised proposals and approaches and also means you will better understand their businesses without any research to make that instant connection.
Read More »
Vital SEO First Steps For A New Website

April 18, 2019 • Featured, SEO 101 • 169
When you launch your first website, it can be quite daunting – you do all of that work, set it to live and nothing happens. But that’s okay because that is perfectly normal. However, if you don’t have the vital SEO first steps covered before you hit publish, there’s a chance that nothing will happen for a long time. Cover these key areas, however, and you have a better chance of starting to see organic traffic.

Understand what search engines look for

Before you design, write or sketch a single thing for your website, it is important to understand what search engines such as Google are looking for. By creating your website with these principles in mind, you have a better chance of catching their attention and getting that important traffic.
- Content – are you creating content that is relevant to what users are searching for?
- Performance – does your site load quickly and work properly? (If using WordPress avoid bloated code editors, like Visual Composure)
- Authority – do you have useful content linked to other authoritative sites (and are planning for other sites to eventually link to you)?
- User experience – is the site easy to use and navigate so users can get around?
Vital SEO first steps

With these principles in mind, you can then move onto looking at those vital SEO steps to use in the creation of the website to help cover these main areas and provide what search engines and, most importantly, users are looking for.

The domain name

Choosing a domain name isn’t as tricky as many would think. You will likely want to call the website after your business, but do you go for a .com, a .co.uk or one of the other variations? A .com website is considered the top level and is always desirable but if you can’t get it, a .co.uk website is great if you are based in the UK.

Do your keyword research

Keyword research and analysis is something to learn from the start because you will always be doing it. There’s no point writing a piece of content with keywords that no-one uses or phrases that are too specific for normal people to ever think about. Finding the right tools such as a good SEO checker will help you get into practice studying and analysing keywords from the start. SEMRush is a good place to start.

Create the website

When it comes to creating the actual website, a good priced web design company will be your friend. There are some great DIY options out there, but the time involved in learning all of the things you need to learn is often counter-productive. A good web designer will be able to create a site that is attractive but more importantly functions well, loads quickly and is easy to navigate, two of those key areas mentioned above.

Create the content

Armed with keywords and having a website to hold it, you next want to create content. There is plenty to do and you can do this yourself, hire a freelancer (www.peopleperhour.com) to do it or a mixture of the two. You will want web page content for sales pages, product pages and other core pages such as About Us. You will probably also want blog content for using in content marketing.

Technical SEO

These vital first steps are then backed up with technical SEO elements which can include things like meta descriptions, title tags, XML sitemaps and more. While I would recommend you set up Google Search Console and go and use an onsite website crawler which will highlight any low-level issues. Ahrefs.com and SEMRush are worth a look.
Read More »
6 Strategies to Level Up Your Affiliate Marketing in 2018

April 4, 2019 • Uncategorized • 173

Whether you are a beginner or a seasoned affiliate marketer, you know that the concept itself
is simple. Using any number of strategies, you market/recommend products or services of
other companies with links to those companies’ sales pages on your own site or blog. You
will then receive payment for consumers who visit those sites, and especially if they should
make a purchase. While many think of this as “passive” income, the strategies you must use
to make good money as an affiliate are anything but passive.
Affiliate marketing can be lucrative, but it is competitive and takes work and continued
experimenting with new tactics. Low quality content and setting up websites that do little
more than attempt to link visitors to the products of others are not going to get traffic and are
not given value by search engines. You need to have a quality site or blog, attract traffic, and
use proven tactics to motivate your visitors/followers to click those links.
Here are some of the latest strategies that could boost your affiliate income in 2018.

1. Be More Discerning

The biggest mistake anyone can make is to become an affiliate for low-quality
products/services or for products or services that do not relate to your own niche. It’s time to
drop those companies that are not worthy of your recommendation and seek out those that
your followers will appreciate. Re-evaluation should occur regularly – after all, your
reputation is at stake too.
Most worthwhile companies that allow affiliate marketing will evaluate your site or blog
before allowing you to become an affiliate, so focus on your own quality first.

2. Take a Lesson from Groupon

Groupon is probably the most extreme example of an affiliate marketing site. People flock to
it because there are coupons for virtually every type of product or service. Visitors can search
by specific niches, and they continue to come back to check on any new deals.
You may not be a Groupon, but if you have established yourself as an affiliate to any
company, ask for coupons that you can post on your site or blog. Everyone wants to get a good
deal, and if you offer quality coupons, they will come back for more. What’s more, they
should be able to sign up for emails of new coupons – you build your own email list while
increasing your chances for those commissions.

3. Sell Private Label Rights (PLR) Products

You may want to dive into affiliate marketing full blast. This is especially lucrative for
individuals who do not have their own products to sell, but are skilled in writing engaging
marketing content. There are a number of PLR websites, such as InDigitalWorks, at which
you can pick from any number of products, and then market and sell them under your own
brand name. You get to keep the bulk of the profits. This will be a continually growing
industry in 2018. Your work is to set up a great website, write stunning content for the
products, accumulate email addresses for future marketing efforts, and continually evaluate
sales numbers from each of the products. You can add, modify, or delete at will.

And the best part? You are totally in charge. You can offer discounts, and encourage your
customers to get involved by providing feedback on products they buy and sharing their good
feelings about your site on social media.

4. Increase Your Use of PPC

This is a great way to leverage search engines to drive very specific traffic. Your ads show up
when searches are conducted by keywords/phrases, and you only pay per click. You can drive
traffic to your website or directly to the vendor’s website.
This is not a tactic you can just dive into. You need to do a bit of studying on PPC
advertising. For one thing, search engines do evaluate the ad quality and response, and place
the better ones in more favorable positions. You need to get creative with those ads.

5. Create an Affiliate Blog and Write Reviews

If you are a beginner, this is a great strategy. Consider this: how many products or services
have you purchased just within the past year – products that you really like? Contact the
website administrators/owners and ask about affiliate marketing. It is unlikely that they will
turn down someone who can write compelling content and who has a blog that is already
recommending quality products and services. You can create “how-to” or explainer videos
and drive traffic to your blog through social media and other blogs to which you become a
contributor.
This too will take a bit of study and practice. You can check out the basics of writing and
publishing affiliate reviews here. It’s a worthwhile read. You are basically becoming a brands
ambassador, and are more trusted because these are products you actually use.
This is not an overnight strategy. You have to write genuinely valuable content about the
product; you have to speak to its value; and you have to place the link to the vendor
appropriately. And it takes time to develop organic traffic through keyword research and
SEO.
You can also engage in product and services reviews without your own blog. If you are a
skilled writer, you can post on other blogs, link to the vendors, and collect your commissions.

6. Using Webinars – It’s Pretty Hot Right Now

Webinars are, first and foremost, visual – and visual trumps text anytime. Consider this: if
you are in the process of looking to buy an expensive or sophisticated product, you have two
options:
● You can read about the product directly from the vendor; you can read reviews of the
product.
● You can view a webinar in which the product is actually displayed, and the use
instructions are visually demonstrated. You get to ask questions and have them
answered in real time by a real product expert.

You would probably take the second option, because you can actually see the product in use.
If you should decide to add webinars to your bag of strategies, you have some work to do.
You have to practice being a host; you have to outline the important points you intend to
make. And you have to promote your webinar with everyone on your email list, on social
media, and often offer an incentive for others to market that webinar too.
And once the livestreaming is over, you can save that webinar on your site or blog and
promote/replay it in the future.
Whether you are a beginner or someone who is just not realizing the income you want from
affiliate marketing, these six strategies are a good start point. As you become more
sophisticated, you will develop more important strategies, such as A/B testing, etc. There are
successful affiliate marketers who do write about their strategies, and you should read these
to see what takeaways there are for you.
Read More »
The First 6 Things You Should Learn In SEO

April 2, 2019 • Featured, Get to Know SEMPO, SEO 101 • 222

There’s no doubt when you look at SEO, there is a huge range of topics to learn. Then there are trends which come and go and the best SEO tools to help you manage it all. Don’t forget those local SEO tips if you are working with local customers or businesses! Sometimes it can seem a bit overwhelming so here are the first 6 things you should learn in SEO to help you focus.

Understand your audience and user intent

This might seem off-topic at first glance because SEO is all about getting traffic to your website. But the key to getting that traffic is to understand your audience, what they want and how you can use that to bring them to your website. SEO is about a lot more than just adding the right keywords – for example, are your audience readers who love a good blog post? Or do they prefer audio content like a video or podcast? You need to understand the user intent and your audience when you plan everything you do.

Create amazing content

Once you know how your audience consumes their content, you can move on to creating amazing content that answers their questions, solves their problems or even just makes them smile. Not only that, but exceptional content will rank better with search engines than mid-level, mediocre content. This is both a core part of SEO and an on-going trend – it isn’t so much about hitting a specific length of content but about having the best possible content with the most important in it.

Build expertise, authority and trustworthiness

Talk to non-marketers and someone is bound to make a comment about all that ‘dodgy’ stuff on the internet. There’s a perceived distrust of the internet that is made worse by things like fake news. And this is why a big part of SEO is building expertise, authority and trustworthiness or EAT as Google calls it.

Building EAT helps to boost your SEO ratings but also makes the site authoritative, a reliable place to get information or buy products and this shows in real life. Say what you like about Amazon, for example, but people trust it. It has built that EAT factor and even dodgy sellers on it can’t shift that perception.

Get help with technical SEO

While learning the basics of on-page SEO is something every business owner should do, the technical SEO stuff is often best left to experts. Things like site speed, JavaScript and Progressive Web Apps are unknown territory to many business owners and even some SEO experts – that’s why working with experts in this area is the best way to handle this area.

Work on on-page SEO

On-Page SEO is definitely more accessible for everyone and that’s why it is one of the main parts of SEO any website owner should learn. It includes a host of little pieces that fit together to help improve the general SEO of the website. It also includes optimisations that make for a better experience for the user and this is something that Google prizes.

Learn the basics of Featured Snippets

Optimising content for Google search also includes elements such as Featured Snippets and other SERP features such as answer boxes, knowledge graph, recipes for food businesses and even carousels. Again, you might want to grab some help on these topics but once you have the basics in place, you are well located to start securing more traffic from Google by getting these key elements to improve your rankings. And we all know the aim is to be as high on that first page as possible!
Read More »