Search Engine Optimization

Top Local SEO Ranking Signals For 2016

August 26, 2016Web-Marketing

Nothing is Consistent – Everything Keeps on Changing and so as local search engine results in every year!

Local SEO is getting more and more tough every year. After the release of Pigeon algorithm update, local SEO has become most crucial for attaining a good ranking in search engine results. With the update of Snack Pack, Google has made the competition harder by reducing the ‘7 pack’ of local map results to ‘3 pack’ results (unless users click through to see expanded results).

If you want your business to be rank in the first three-pack then your local SEO must be 100% on point.
Have a look at the given image, you will see only three listings for “pizza stores New York”. Before Snack Pack, there were 7 listings shown for the same keyword.

A study conducted by Moz has released the stats for local ranking signals which includes:

On page signals – 20.3%
Link Signals – 20.0%
My Business Signals – 14.7%
External Local Signals – 13.6%
Personalization – 8.5%
Review Signals – 8.4%
Behavioral/ Mobile Signals – 5.0%
Social Signals – 5.0%

Source: Moz

Follow these factors to ensure to have a solid, strategic local SEO game plan.

On page & Link Signals: This factor includes the presence of NAP(Name, Address, Phone), keywords in titles, header tags, map, location/industry specific links, Domain authority, inbound anchor text, linking domain authority.

My Business Signal & External Local signals: Another most important factors for local SEO ranking are business and external local signals which include: keywords in business title, proximity, NAP consistency, Citation volume.

A citation means listing your business information across the web which involves the NAP of your business. (NAP stands for N: NAME of your business, A: ADDRESS of your business P: PHONE NUMBER of your business).

To achieve a good rank on local search, list your business on Google and other good authority local listing sites. Make sure that your business listing is consistent across the webspace, which helps to establish trust in the eyes of Google.

During listing your business on Google, make sure to verify your business location, enter complete data, add relevant photos. It will help to increase local ranking on Google.

Behavioral/Mobile signals: How many times your listing gets clicked from mobile, click through rate, check-in and offers are some of the factors that leave an impression on local search.

Review Signals: Good reviews on your online business shows a great impact on your business online reputation and thus local search engine ranking. Try to increase quality reviews on your business and get a good rank on local search results.

Social signals: Social signals play a 5% role in local search ranking. It covers links through social media profiles, likes and followers on social sites. Perform social media activities regularly and inappropriate way to increase the social signals which further affect your local rank.

For local businesses, a high rank on local search results is a great way to reach local customers. So what are you waiting for! Increase your local search presence by emphasizing on the above mentioned ranking signals for local search.

Amazing Performance Of A “Pizza Oven Selling” Website After 6 SEO Health Checks

July 19, 2016Web-Marketing

Is your website healthy? Can Google find your website? SEO Health Checks is the first step in answering these questions and knowing what should be done to optimize your site.

SEO Health checks involve assessing how friendly your website to search engines, technical framework analysis and figure out, what fixes and changes are needed to bring the site on top of Google’s positions.

Today, we are performing an SEO health check for ilFornino website whose purpose is to sell wood-fired pizza ovens. An SEO Audit executed by SEO specialists at Indiwork determines: where the site lacks, and what are the problems that prevent it from performing well in search engines. All those issues have been resolved by experts. Here you will also find the comparison of previous and current website health reports.

1. Content uniqueness check:

One of the most important elements in SEO is content. Unique, informative and quality content on a website is the best way to keep the audience engaged while building brand loyalty. Search engines hate duplicate content so it is necessary to have fresh and quality content.

Ilfornino Content – ilFornino understands the importance of content marketing in the context of how it will assist to grow their wood-fired oven sales. All the website’s content is 100% unique. They constantly update their blog section with the latest and informative content.

2. www and non-www versions:

SEO health check has found that the website is available with and without “www” in the domain name. Merging both URLs will help to prevent search engines from indexing two.

Current:

3. Unique Meta Descriptions and Titles:

ilFornino has too many duplicate titles, long titles, empty meta descriptions, duplicate descriptions and too long descriptions. Missing descriptions and duplicate titles on the website’s pages point towards the lost opportunity to generate more traffic and sales as well as keyword ranking.

IlFornino needs to optimize its meta descriptions which will make sure that search engines and users can better recognize what their pages are talking about.

Current:

4. Image ALT text:

All the images of the website were checked to identify the alt text attributes. Ilfornino webpage has 15 ‘img’ tags and 9 of them are missing the required ‘alt’ attribute.

5. Mobile Friendliness Check:

The website has analyzed for mobile-friendliness and it has successfully passed the test.

6. Social Media Activity:

ilFornino website doesn’t have any social media activity. Search engines are increasingly using social media activity as an indicator of site credibility, and to determine which sites are relevant for a keyword. So it is important to link social media platforms with website.

Current:

A complete SEO health check is the necessity of a website that will make the site SEO friendly and assist to attain the top position in search engine results.

After resolving all the issues, the website is now performing well as it was before 2 months. See previous and current website’s performance snapshots which will give you an idea about how your website can increase the ranking and online performance with SEO Health Check.

Current:

If you want to do an SEO health check for your website, then make a call to us at +1 (646) 736-7919 or email: info@indiwork.com

10 Most Important Elements In SEO Health Checklist 2016

July 8, 2016Web-Marketing

“With the everyday changing search engine scenario, is your SEO campaign designed to do more? How can you make your website updated with the crucial changes that affect your visibility and thus sales?”

If you’re still stuck on the same old SEO practices, it’s time to wake up, and figure out what’s up in 2016. Explore an updated SEO health checklist which is essential to make a website SEO friendly and helpful to increase online presence by keeping your website on the top of search results.

SEO Health Checklist:

1. Create Unique & Informative Content:

Unique, informative and engaging content point towards excellent website performance, i.e. more engagement, more visitors, and huge revenue. Whereas, copied content can become the reason for website penalization by Google which will adversely affect your ranking. To perform a duplicate content check to ensure that your website’s text is not copied from anywhere else which can be easily done with tools like Copyscape.

2. Productive Keywords:

Your website might have great content, but missing targeted keywords that can attract visitors from search engines which may cause a lack of relevant traffic and potential customers. Targeted keyword research is also a fundamental component of an SEO Health Check. Figure out relevant keywords and then target the website’s pages according to those keywords. Now keep an eye on the results which those keywords are delivering. If they are not bringing expected results, then you should reconsider your on-page optimization strategies or try to discover some more pragmatic keywords. Some of the best keyword research tools are Google Keyword Planner, Wordstream, Search Engine Console, etc. Choose the keywords based upon their competition & searches. Try to prefer keywords with low or medium competition and high search volume.

3. Unique Meta Descriptions and Titles:

Same title and description for more than one website’s page is a bad SEO practice as it can confuse search engine spiders who assure that you are trying to spam search engines to get a better ranking. An SEO health check makes sure that a website is free from duplicate title and description issues. Check the “HTML Improvement Section” in the webmaster tool to identify meta and title errors such as duplicate, too long, or too short. Keep your Title length less than 60 characters and description length less than 155 characters.

4. Alt attributes:

Search engine crawlers are not able to see images, they rely on the alt text attributes to identify relevance to search query. Alt-text is the way to get your images to appear on the Google image search. So make sure to use accurate and relevant text in your website’s images.

5. Heading tags:

Use keywords in the heading tags. Make sure to use the most relevant keywords in the <h1>tag. For better results, it is essential to have <h1> tag on the website’s every page but never use more than one <h1> tag on a single page. Instead you can use other header tags i.e. <h2> – <h6> tags.

6. Remove Broken Links:

Broken links send users to non-existent web pages. They are bad for the site’s credibility and reputation which shows a bad impact on SEO. So make sure to get rid of all broken links as it not only improves your website’s SEO efficiency but also ensures that your site visitors’ experience is always at its best.

7. Make your website Mobile Friendly:

According to Mobilegeddon update which was released in April 2015, mobile-friendly website pages will get more exposure on search results and help to increase ranking. To perform a Mobile-friendly checkup to analyze that whether your website is mobile-friendly or not. Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to analyze a URL and check if the page has a mobile-friendly design.

8. Canonical Issue: If a website is accessible with both www and non-www versions of the URL, then search engines will consider them as different sites with both the versions and create the problem of duplicate content. Check your site for the canonical issues and resolve this issue by implementing a 301 redirect or by setting the preferred domain on Google webmaster.

9. Site Speed Check:

Site load speed also plays an important role in SEO ranking. Thus, it is crucial for businesses to pay attention to their site’s load speed, especially for those who have a large audience on mobile devices. For better SEO results, website load time should be less than 5s. Tools to check website speed and load time: Google Page Speed Insights, GTmetrix

10. Schema Markup:

One of the latest evolutions in the SEO process is schema markup which helps to boost your website in SERPs. Schema markup helps search engines to identify what your content is about and display your results in a way that leads to the greater click through rate. Use Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper Tool to create the schema for web pages.

Besides these points, there are some more factors that must be considered such as upload sitemap.xml file, 404 error pages, link social media accounts to the website. Also, track your website’s performance on daily basis by using the Google Analytics tool.

“How healthy is your Website? Is your website performing to its potential! – Give Your Website an SEO Health Check to Ensure The Better Results.”

Feel free to contact us anytime, if you want to give your site a complete SEO Health Check. Our professionals will thoroughly examine your site and provide you a detailed analysis report.

Email us at info@indiwork.com or Call:+1 (646) 736-7919

What is the Panda 4.2? Will it affect your site? What can you do about it?

July 18, 2015Web-Marketing

Google says “a Panda refresh began this weekend but will take months to fully roll out”

A new Panda 4.2 update has just rolled out on 17 July 2015 and is expected to take effect over a few months. It will take a while to see what the fallout will be.

“Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed that 4.2 would be rolled out over a period of months and that it would affect up to 3% of queries. While it might not seem like much, 3% is a lot of queries!”

It is going to be difficult to measure ranking changes and search traffic because of slow rollout. It is tough to analyse when and if the algorithm will affect your site. That means: what exactly the update is gratifying and punishing is somewhat of a mystery. But we can assume that it will reward sites with quality content which is the main purpose of Panda.

After the Panda 4.2 release, it is too late to make changes and your search ranking will surely going to affect no matter what you do.

Will Panda 4.2 Affect your Site?

Panda 4.2 is a refresh of Panda update which contains some enhancements to provide more accurate search results by focusing on quality content.

One bad news for sites with poor quality content is: if your site is affected by this update then you will have to wait for a long time to get recovery until the next release of Panda.

Sites penalized by the previous update (Panda 4.1) has a good chance to recover, if the right content changes were made. But if site is penalized by Panda 4.2, then you will have to wait for the next Panda refresh to fully recover.

Keep an eye on website traffic and ranking to see the effect of Panda 4.2 on your site. If you notice a drop in ranking or traffic then it may be due to this recent update.

What Can You Do For Panda 4.2 Recovery?

For Panda 4.2 recovery, you must need to consider the quality of content. Although it will take a while to recover but you must start to work on improving content quality so that you get ready for the next Panda Refresh.

Essential Tips For Panda-Proof Content:

Create Informative Content
Write authoritatively
Don’t duplicate
Write for users
Proof-read to avoid any grammatical mistakes or spellings

Want more information about Panda 4.2 or need recovery from this update! Call us on:+1 (646) 736-7919. Our SEO experts will help you to get rid of Panda penalty.

Google Panda 4.1 Is Rolling Out – Impact Of Update On Websites Ranking

September 25, 2014Web-Marketing

First Google Panda Update was released in February 2011 whose purpose is to stop sites with poor quality content from working their way into Google’s top search results.

On September 23, 2014, another version of Google Panda update has been released “Google Panda 4.1”. Another monotony of Google’s algorithm which emphasis on low quality web content.

Have you recently noticed a significant drop or rise in search rank or traffic! Then it may be due to Panda 4.1 update. Some brands have seen 90% loss in their organic search footprint which was due to thin quality. It is just a reminder for all the website owners to place only unique, informative and quality content on the website if they want to win the race of online business or want to beat their competitor’s in online search engine results.

Make yourself ready for the next update and ensure your position on search results above those that doesn’t play by Google’s rules.

How will Panda 4.1 update affect your SEO?

Numbers of websites are still offering poor quality content and many of them compete for top ranking within the search engine against your business. But with the recent updates including 4.1, search engine is working towards removing them entirely from the search results which means less competition for your business. Google is working on penalizing those websites that contains poor quality and irrelevant content.

Panda 4.1 has shown worst effects on number of top rated websites and some of them are quite surprising! Here is snapshot of some of the Panda 4.1 losers in US:

Who are most affected by this update?

Most affected sites by the update are: games or lyrics sites and medical or health related sites.

If you are among the losers of Panda 4.1 update then take some essential measures to get fast recovery.

Helpful SEO Tips For The Panda 4.1 Update:

Remove low quality content
Block indexing of low quality content pages from your site
Remove duplicate articles and irrelevant content from the website
Replace or remove content written in poor english and contains spelling or grammar errors
Write unique, informative and quality content for website pages