IV Digital

How do I get backlinks?

In my previous post I spoke about what backlinks are and where they come from – referrals.

Now I’d like to got through a whistle stop tour of how you could get them!

Ways to get backlinks:

Create content

Creating interesting and engaging content and sharing it to your audience in ways that are easy for them to share.

This could include data driven studies, guides, infographics and visuals.

Supplier links

If your website sells or partners with other peoples website it’s an excellent opportunity to earn good quality backlinks.

Reach out to those contacts and ask how to get your website linked.

Link gap analysis

There are tools available that can help you find out the websites that link to your competitors but not to you.

Tool such as SEMrush have specific backlink gap tools that can help you find an analyse those websites to find and contact prospective sites and even finds their contact details for you.

You can then contact them with why you are suitable for the to link to – perhaps by offering some exclusive content relevant to them.

Regain backlinks

By using free tools such as google search console you can pull reports from the top linking sites. This will show you who was linked to you in the past, by knowing this you can reach out to them to see if they will link to you again or if the link is broken either fix it, redirect it to a working page or contact the site with the correct url.

Skyscraper content

The idea of this is to create content that covers a wide scope of a topic and make it better then your competitors.

So that search will see high traffic, high time on page and prioritise your content over others.

It’s worth bearing the ‘better’ part of that criteria in mind as with searches such as Google cracking down on poor SEO and content quality keyword stuffing won’t cut it in the new world!

That’s just a couple examples of how to get backlinks, if you’re interested in finding out more or getting a backlink audit and plan please feel free to contact me.

What is a backlink?

This is one of my super simple to the point answers.

What is a backlink? It’s a link to your website from another website.

That website is then a referral site for your website. A referral website can link to yours multiple times to different pages or from multiple pages of their own.

The key thing that you want to keep an eye on is ensuring that the websites linking to you want to be quality websites. If you get too many toxic websites linking to you that makes your website look bad!

It’s a good idea to review these backlinks regularly via google search console for example and if they aren’t websites you want to be associated with either contact them and request to be taken off OR add them to your disavow file.

(If you don’t know what that is I’ll be sure to add it to my blog list for you shortly) alternatively please feel free to contact me and I’m happy to discuss.

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Traditional SEO vs Amazon SEO

During one of my recent delves into the world of digital I was asked to explore the differences between SEO for traditional web – your search engines and the like, against the eCommerce giants Amazon.

Initially I thought that there wouldn’t be much of a difference as I tend to find that at least going in and doing the basics improves content on all platforms. However, after some interesting research and personal reflection I will now concede there’s a defined difference that deserves attention and consideration.

Traditional

⁃ Page titles

⁃ Headings

⁃ Meta descriptions

⁃ Body copy

⁃ Image alt text

Amazon

⁃ Product titles

⁃ Descriptions

⁃ Bullet points

⁃ Backend keywords

⁃ Image quality

⁃ Image keywords

The bones are really the same – ensure you do your keywords strategy for products, optimise all areas you can on each platform (be that website or Amazon) and aim for the best quality you can.

The difference is really in what each platforms algorithm is prioritising. Search: traffic and CTR (click through rate) and Amazon: conversion and CTR.

If you you want to do well on Amazon it’s plain that a good knowledge of SEO is key, whether you take the time do implement that yourself or hiring externally.

If you have any questions about how to get started with your Amazon SEO feel free to contact me.

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What are referral domains?

Referral domains are domains that have at least one link from their websites/sources to your website.

Links from these sites are called backlinks. You can get multiple backlinks from one referral domain.

One of the key digital marketing jobs would be to analyse all the backlinks your website gets to ensure that the links to your site aren’t ‘toxic’. If you find toxic links it’s advised that you either ask them to remove the link first or if they refuse or are inaccessible add them to your disavow list to prevent your own website from appearing toxic.

If you’d like more information on referral domains and backlinks feel free to contact me.

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When do search engines crawl my website?

Short answer – between four to thirty days. If your website gets a lot of traffic then it’s likely to get crawled more often and it will look for new content first.

It’s one of the reasons that providing high quality content is so important. The information gathered in these crawls is processed and added to Google’s searchable index. Once there you can see how you compare and improve your website!

In Google search console you can request indexing if your page isn’t showing as expected but there’s no guarantee it will be done as quickly as you’d like.

With all the algorithm changes our search engine friends like to make without telling us we do believe high traffic sites could be getting crawled every couple of days but it’s important to remember it is done on a case by case basis.

If you’d like more information on search engine crawls feel free to contact me.

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How do I find my keywords?

First – what are keywords? It’s a term digital people use to describe words that are ‘key’ to our strategy. They are words that are relevant to what you want to sell/advertise/gain traffic for and the name of the game is to find the most relevant words to you that have the highest volume, achievable difficulty and lead level you are looking for.

But how do you to that?

Know your product. Start by making a list of all the obvious words you think is related to your product. Then, pop over to a keyword search tool (there are free ones online) and search for those words.

These tools will show you what volume of monthly search that term gets and give you an idea of other terms you could target instead that might be easier to rank for.

Once you have those keywords you need to go through the pages on you website and ensure the are on there! You have to add them in a the that makes sense and adds value. This could involved titles, meta descriptions, image names, urls, descriptions or anything.

And… that’s it! It’s important to note that you should do a keyword review at a minimum annually to ensure your word hasn’t lost value. In which case you need to start the optimisation process again.

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What type of SEO should I use on my products?

Each of your product pages should take into consideration technical and content based SEO as a way to optimise them and help the search engines appropriately rank you as highly as possible.

Things you’ll need to do:

◦ Choose and research your keywords, choosing the most appropriate, with the highest search volume and aiming for obtainable keyword difficulty

◦ Ensure that those keywords are organically used in many places on your product page, e.g. titles, descriptions, meta descriptions, image titles, urls and keyword sections

◦ Ensure page load is below 2 seconds, that the page is crawlable and there’s no back end issues with the URL

I may go into technical SEO at a later date as that’s an art form by itself, that is often a team effort between content managers and developers.

For an example of what you should be aiming for you should have a look at your competitors product pages and see what they’re doing that’s enabled them to rank for your keyword.

I recently worked in a site who’s competitor had managed to get the keyword on page 55 times in an organic way that made sense, compared to their 9. Who is the search going to choose?

The search engine will also take into account your sites web authority when choosing rankings so it’s important to bear those in mind when working on SEO as a whole.

If you’d like more information on product SEO and how to rank better please feel free to contact me for a consultation.

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Should I be using recommendations?

Would I recommend recommendations graphic

If you are running an eCommerce website with a range of products you may be wondering if using a recommendation block could increase your conversion, or whether it’s just a fad we’ve all jumped on.

Recommendation blocks are usually showing things such as ‘you’ll also love’, ‘best sellers’ and ‘recently viewed’. They work on our cultures habits and expectations for ease. People don’t want to be searching for ages looking for things and if there is a way to make the buying journey easier and increase cart value by up selling… there’s hardly a marketer out there that wouldn’t jump on it.

But should you be using it? The answer to that depends on your traffic, your range of products, your expectations and your budget.

I have seen companies make thousands through recommendation blocks – the key is in testing them. Whether you’re using them on content pages, category pages or product pages – one does not fit all! And you should never assume your first thought will be the best one. Move the position, test different versions and views and use actual data from your customers to create a website that suits their buying styles.

If you would like an opinion on whether your website would benefit from recommendations please feel free to contact me for a consultation.

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Google analytics 4 – initial thoughts

Google analytics 4 initial review graphic

On the 1st July 2023 google analytics will switch to its new system G4. But what does that mean?

In its basic form it means from that date google analytics users will be using a new interface and the look and functionality will be changing.

There will also be a bit of tech wiggling that needs to happen to ensure you are still accurately tracking your metrics (although hopes are that the new system will do even better then before).

You can and should setup the new system to run parallel to the current system asap. This is so you get as much historical data built up as possible- it won’t be back dated.

This requires a new tag type in the back end and some goal configuration (depending on your setup type).

From a users perspective it looks like someone finally took the system off the developers and went ‘can we please make this easy for sales and marketing teams to find things!’. It looks split into areas for different needs and hopefully will be clearer in reporting. Fingers crossed!

If you’d like advice on moving onto G4 please feel free to contact me.

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