Content Marketing And SEO: How To Get High-Quality Backlinks

How To Get High-Quality Backlinks

SEO is constantly changing and evolving, but one thing has always been the same over the years – backlinks remain the most powerful factor in Google’s rankings. I’d hate to say this, but many businesses have overlooked this key point. I’ve talked to a few business owners before and surprisingly, some of them have no idea how impactful backlinks can be.

In fact, the best way to boost your site up is to get high-quality backlinks and you can do that by creating valuable, high-quality content, distributing your content through the right channels, and generally publishing “linkable” content.

Without further ado, let’s get started by looking at these 8 effective tips on how you can get quality backlinks.

1) Original Research With Insights

Doing a research isn’t just citing something that has been said elsewhere. It includes unique statistics and data about a given subject. Whenever someone else wants to mention the information that you’ve provided, the only way to be authoritative is to link to the original sourceyou.

How To Get High-Quality Backlinks

Once you have done your research, compile everything, and publish it. We’ve done a meta description case study and it has resulted with getting lots of backlinks.

This kind of content takes time and effort to create, but it usually results in high-quality backlinks because people who bother with citations at all tend to be fairly reputable.

With that being said, research alone isn’t the only thing you need to succeed. The best research comes with insights and interpretations that help to make sense of data. Ideally, these will come from someone who’s positioned as an expert in the field that the research is about. The better their reputation, the better your research looks. And of course, the better the backlinks you will get.

If you don’t have anyone sufficiently reputable in your own company, consider asking an outside expert to provide some thoughts and insights about your research. Trust me, many of them are quite willing to cooperate.

2) Informative Visuals

Content that has great visuals offers value that makes your content more link-worthy. There are three types of visuals that are particularly helpful for getting high-quality backlinks.

  • Infographics.
  • Charts and Diagrams.
  • Videos.

Infographics are a good way of presenting helpful information, research, and statistics.

How To Get High-Quality Backlinks

A well-made infographic can help to provide some context to the information and focus on the key points that are most important for readers to know. Make sure that your infographics have a URL at the bottom that leads to the full study since you can’t control every site on where it might be posted. So this will definitely help anyone studying it find the original material.

Charts and diagrams are ideal for simplifying the understanding of complex data. These are a lot like infographics, but they tend to focus on one specific piece of information instead of multiple pieces that all lead to a certain conclusion. Charts and diagrams can show the relationships between different people, the Return On Investment (ROI) for a given project and other types of helpful information.

They also tend to serve as good introductory images for a given piece of content, especially if you’re presenting information that follows in a certain sequence.

Finally, videos are an entirely different way of sharing information and if you can create a great video, other influencers will share it around. The ideal length of a video should be long enough to properly cover the subject. If it seems like it’s losing focus, people will just stop paying attention. Therefore, it is always best to keep it as short and direct as you can. (Don’t forget that videos are often watched on mobile devices, so small file sizes are very important.)

3) Ultimate Guides and eBooks

An ultimate guide is your definitive take on any given subject and they’re ideal for teaching people exactly how to do a particular thing. For example, right at this moment, you’re reading an ultimate guide that is all about getting high-quality backlinks. The mere fact that you’re reading this sentence proves that this strategy works.

The key concept here is that in-depth content makes your guide a go-to resource when readers have a job they need to get done. As an added bonus, it can be a great lead-generation tool because influencers will happily link to outstanding guides. But when you add SEO content focused on letting people know that you can help, you can drastically improve your ROI.

How To Get High-Quality Backlinks

You can even offer an ultimate guide or e-book to your readers on the exit pop to grow your leads.

Regardless of the exact type of content you’re making, though, every guide should be practical and something people can immediately start putting to use. Most guides work best if they cover each topic in 100-300 words each, interspersed with the occasional graphic to catch the reader’s attention and make sure they aren’t drifting off.

4) Establish A Relationship With Influencers

Other than your content itself, the presentation is also an important part of getting high-quality backlinks. Most people are far more likely to listen to their friends or at least to people that are in their social circle. This is why it’s important to engage with influencers with high-authority sites.

However, you don’t want to spam them. Don’t ring them up every time you publish a blog and ask them to share it. Instead, try to build a real relationship with them and get them to pay attention to your content on their own terms. If they’re checking you, they will be much more likely to cite your content. You may even inspire them to provide some commentary of their own when they introduce it to their audiences.

How To Get High-Quality Backlinks

We have a blog post about Honest Marketing that was shared by Hubspot founder, Dharmesh Shah that it gets huge exposure and we’ve been receiving a lot of backlinks since then.

Now, there’s no set method for starting a relationship – mostly because everyone is different. Some people, especially researchers and professionals, they tend to react well if they’re asked for an expert opinion on a subject. Others accept submissions from anyone who meets certain requirements, while still other influencers may want to trade content with you in order to maximize their views. As such, I’m not going to give you some kind of secret strategy – those don’t work.

Instead, I’ll just note what will help: Researching influencers and figuring out what kind of people they are. It’s a lot like making a buyer persona, really. Once you get to know what they care about, you can approach them in whatever way that is the most likely to succeed.

5) Submit Guest Post

A more direct way of getting high-quality backlinks is creating guest posts for high-authority blogs and adding the links yourself.

Now, contrary to certain rumors, guest posting is not dead. It’s very far from it, but you absolutely have to remember the need to create high-quality content. When you do a guest post, you’re usually talking to an entirely new audience. They’re not familiar with you, your history, or the things you’ve said in the past. So you need to approach them on their terms and provide content that’s truly worth reading.

How To Get High-Quality Backlinks

Read our blog post that we guest post at CoSchedule: http://coschedule.com/blog/social-media-engagement-tactics/.

Originally written posts are still the most popular way of making guest posts, but if you have infographics, consider sharing those as well. If you do, people won’t be focused on you as a company. They will be focusing on the content that you’re providing and if you use that to influence them, they’ll probably be more willing to follow through and click a link back to your site.

6) Send SEO Press Releases

Many companies don’t realize how useful press releases can be for getting high-quality backlinks. But let’s face the truth – press releases can be a surprisingly reliable way of getting links back to your website. They also help to increase your exposure across the Internet, which is something really worth doing.

Now, if you’re like most companies, you’re probably not familiar with the best ways to get your business seen by others. That’s okay. Press release services like MarketersMEDIA can help you get hundreds or even thousands of new views for each release you make. And many of the people reading the content are mostly professionals who really do want to know more about your business.

As with all types of content, the quality of your press releases matter. Ideally, you’ll be able to add some level of excitement to your content such as things that are new, innovative, and helpful because these content tend to go over better than announcements about minor upgrades or business happenings.

How To Get High-Quality Backlinks

You can also get a press release template that suits your business from PRShelf and start writing your very own SEO press release.

Remember, you’re not writing for yourself. You’re writing for potential customers and what they think is important – this is the only thing that matters. If you’re not sure how you should write the press release, we have an SEO press release writing guide for you.

7) Find Competitors Keyword and “Steal” Them

This is one of the sneakier methods of getting great backlinks. Instead of just creating content, the idea here is to make content that takes attention away from your competitors. Thus, anyone who might have linked to them will instead link to you – and that’s on top of the normal backlinks you could expect to earn with that content.

Start by identifying the keywords you want to rank for. Innovative tools like RankReveal can help you figure out what keywords that your competitors are ranking for.

How To Get High-Quality Backlinks

RankReveal is a great tool to keep track of your keywords rank (even your competitors’) without having to check it manually.

Once you have that, you can optimize your content with SEOPressor or even Website SEO Checker to make sure you get high SEO score and overtake them.

How To Get High-Quality Backlinks

Website SEO Checker is a free tool to analyze your website and tells you how to get higher SEO score.

Chances are they won’t even realize you’re doing it until you’ve had the chance to establish yourself. So my advice is that it’s best to implement this strategy only after you have a solid base of keywords you’re already doing well with. Otherwise, you run the risk of them countering you and leaving you with no useful keywords at all.

In other words, this is a strategy for established businesses, and not those just starting out.

8) Build Solid Internal Linking Structure

Finally, you might be surprised at how important it is to have a solid internal linking structure for your site. The focus here is increasing the usability of your site. It’s not just about getting people onto landing pages, but helping them find other content, products, and services that you may be offering.

How To Get High-Quality Backlinks

Internal linking is when you link the pages of your website to other pages within your website. This will also help to strengthen your domain authority.

In general, people like useful websites. If your website is easy to navigate, people will remember that. But if it’s hard to navigate and find things besides the content that brought them in, they’re not as likely to link to you.

Final Thoughts

Ultimately, creating unique and valuable content is crucial to getting high-quality backlinks while improving your content marketing and SEO. It’s very important to add new content on a regular basis, yes, but the quality of your content is the main thing that determines how successful your marketing campaigns will be.

Similarly, the most effective way to get good backlinks is to create linkable content that provides real value to your audiences. This means supporting your articles with references, sharing authoritative content like research, and spreading the word about guides and e-books that can solve problems.

People don’t want answers that stop halfway. If they have a question or a problem, they want a definitive answer that allows them to move on. Don’t settle for second-rate when you’re making content. This is the material that will be many people’s first exposure to your company, and the better your first impression is, the more likely people are to think highly of you and start converting into customers.

As long as you keep your focus on creating high-quality content, it won’t be long before you start getting the high-quality backlinks you’ve been looking for.

What are your thoughts about these 8 effective strategies to get high-quality backlinks? If you’ve tried any other methods, feel free to share it with us in the comment box down below!

Updated: 22/8/17

9 Practical Ways To Reduce Bounce Rate And Increase Conversions

How To Reduce Bounce Rate And Increase Conversions

On today’s internet, many visitors and customers who visit your landing page bounce off before you have the chance to persuade them to listen to you – sometimes even before your page even finishes loading. Needless to say, a high bounce rate isn’t exactly something that’s helping your website. So today, we’re going to look at some of the things you can do to reduce your bounce rate and increase your overall conversion rate.

When you get rid of all the excess details, there are two things that help you get more conversions: Better content, and more visitors coming to your site. In fact, HubSpot did a study on this very thing and found that companies with 40 or more landing pages got more than 12 times more leads than companies with 5 or fewer landing pages.

How To Reduce Bounce Rate And Increase Conversions

Understanding Bounce Rate

If you’re not yet familiar with the term, a “bounce” is what happens when a user visits your site and leaves without visiting any other pages on the same domain. Your bounce rate is a percentage of all visitors who enter and exit on that same page. For example, if three out of every ten visitors to a page bounced off, your bounce rate would be 30%.

How To Reduce Bounce Rate And Increase Conversions

The formula to calculating your bounce rate.

A high bounce rate is a sign that something is wrong with your marketing strategy. It can be that you’re not attracting the right kind of visitors or they’re not having a good experience once they arrive.

Kissmetrics has a useful infographic here that shows the common bounce rates for various types of sites, and this really is important.

How To Reduce Bounce Rate And Increase Conversions

Average bounce rates tend to be much higher than most companies realize

In fact, if you’re offering services to people, you could possibly have as many as half of them bouncing off without needing to worry. Mobile users bounce about 10% more than desktop users.

Of course, even if your bounce rate is within the expected range for your site, you can probably improve it, especially because converting just a slightly higher percent of your visitors could make a huge difference to your bottom line. With that in mind, let’s take a look at how to reduce bounce rate and how to increase conversion rate on your site.

1) Improve Content’s Readability

A good user experience begins with content that’s readable and legible. See, large chunks of text tend to scare readers away, resulting in more bounces and a higher exit rate.

To combat this, use subheadings and bullet points to make the article easier to read. Breaking the content up this way helps people get a better sense for what the content is about, quickly find the elements that matter to them, and understand the points you’re trying to make.

You can also use images, screenshots, or quotes from industry experts to break up the content a little and help avoid the sense that they’re trapped in a “wall” of text. Every piece of content should have at least one picture, and longer pieces should have several more sprinkled throughout.

Alternatively, you can make all of your content into a single infographic. Visual aids can help make it easier to understand the context of data, and that’s important if you’re trying to persuade people to act a certain way.

For added engagement, ask questions to give your readers an opportunity to participate. To check your general readability score, check out https://readable.io.

How To Reduce Bounce Rate And Increase Conversions

Readable.io will help you improve conversion rate numbers on every content-focused page that you have.

2) Create Effective Calls-To-Action (CTA)

In 2013, Small Business Trends found that 70% of small business websites lacked a call-to-action and many of those businesses haven’t bothered to change in the years since.

How To Reduce Bounce Rate And Increase Conversions

See, lacking a call-to-action is kind of like making a sales pitch to an interested buyer without actually asking them to get your product. Sure, informing them is important, but making the deal is your real goal.

Adding a great call-to-action will improve the usability of your site. The longer people spend on your site, the more time you have to influence them, improve your conversion rate, and lower your bounce rate.

3) Improve Brand Storytelling

Storytelling is an important tool for captivating the minds of your target audience. It’s something that can help bring your brand to life and turn you from a faceless company into an interesting business.

Most people scan through sites to look for something that stands out to them, and you can use this to your advantage by connecting eye-catching parts of the page with the rest of your content.

How To Reduce Bounce Rate And Increase Conversions

Clarity is important here. Make sure your content is easy for someone to understand, even if they’re just glancing over it. Brevity is a virtue for storytelling.

4) Have Fresh Content

Businesses that regularly update their blogs with fresh, useful content tend to generate more than twice as many leads as those who don’t.

This has a snowball effect over time. Individually, a given blog might be bringing you a couple of customers a month, and that doesn’t sound like a lot. However, when you have a few hundred blogs that are each drawing in several customers a month, it won’t be long before business is booming.

How To Reduce Bounce Rate And Increase Conversions

With every fresh content added, you will have a high ROI and letting Google know that your website is up-to-date.

Regularly blogging also helps to establish trust in your business. It’s an indicator that you’re active, paying attention to the things your audience cares about, and interested in communicating.

Over time, your repeat visitors should start to exceed your new visitors. From then, people who come back to your site will tend to be far more interested in your content, ultimately helping to raise your conversion rate.

5) Target The Right Keywords

Keywords can make or break your entire content marketing campaign. This is where the real traffic to your website is at, which is also where most of your effort should be.

That said, it’s important to understand that keywords are not created equal. Some will bring you visitors who are ready and interested in converting into customers, while others will essentially leave you waiting by the side of the road for a ride that isn’t going to come. As a business, you need to understand the main types of keywords that sites can use.

Informational keywords are used to create awareness about your company. Think of these keywords as your attempt to introduce yourself and let people know you exist. That’s useful, yes, but most businesses want to spend their time on commercial keywords that emphasize interest in specific products and sales behavior.

For example, “how to clean brass” is an informational keyword. Whoever’s searching for this is most likely interested in figuring out how to accomplish a specific task. On the other hand, “brass cleaning solution” suggests an interest in acquiring a physical product and is more likely to result in actual sales.

How To Reduce Bounce Rate And Increase Conversions

You can also look at related suggestions at the bottom of the SERP to see what other keywords that users are looking for.

Aside from improving your traffic, engagement, and overall conversion rate, keywords can help you enhance the authority and reputation of your site. Use Google’s Keyword Planner to do your research and find out which keywords are likely to be helpful. Remember, traffic alone does not matter. What matters is whether or not that traffic is willing to convert.

6) Meta Description

Many companies fail to optimize their meta descriptions for search users – so, naturally, their click-through rate declines.

See, meta description is a way of telling the world what your website is actually about, and search engines display this text below the title of a page to help users figure out if a given page is what they’re actually looking for.

How To Reduce Bounce Rate And Increase Conversions

Google generally allows as many as 160 characters to describe your site. So make sure to include your keyword for each page, though, just to help convince searchers that your site matches what they’re looking for.

7) Improve Page Load Time

How To Reduce Bounce Rate And Increase Conversions

Most consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less. After 3 seconds, many people will no longer wait and will simply hit ‘Back’ and move on. This is how you can lose people before they’ve even had the opportunity to see your website. So of course, we want to avoid it.

The fundamental rule here is the slower your page loads, the higher your bounce rate will be. Slow sites can outright destroy your business by discouraging potential customers from ever buying from you.

You can check your PageSpeed right here. While you’re doing alright at less than two seconds, it’s worth using any affordable method to further reduce the speed your pages are loading at. Your hosting provider may be able to help you with this, so don’t hesitate to ask them if there’s anything they can do to speed up your connections.

8) Mobile-Friendly Site

You see, most people have mobile devices with them everywhere they go. So if your business website is not responsive enough to display on mobile devices, you’re missing out.

In fact, mobile friendliness is now a ranking factor for search results being displayed on smartphones, and even if your site is otherwise outstanding, it’s probably going to be ranked below websites actually designed for smartphones.

Surprising nobody, Google has tools to help with this, too.

How To Reduce Bounce Rate And Increase Conversions

Use Google Mobile-Friendly Test to find out if your website is mobile-friendly.

The Mobile-Friendly Test is available right here and Google will tell you not just what’s wrong, but how you can fix it. For example, you may be told that clickable elements are too close together, that the text is too small to read on a mobile device, or that some content is wider than the smartphone’s screen.

How To Reduce Bounce Rate And Increase Conversions

Google will let you know in particular where you can improve for a mobile-friendly site.

Keep in mind that you don’t necessarily have to change your main website’s structure to make it mobile-friendly. Some sites actually display differently on mobile devices, and that’s fine. Companies may also have two totally separate sites they maintain – one for desktops and one for mobile devices – but this is discouraged since it’s a lot of work to keep two sites updated instead of one.

9) Credibility

Your credibility matters. Credible websites make people trust what they say, and it eliminates the buying dilemma because people feel like they’re going to get a good deal.

How To Reduce Bounce Rate And Increase Conversions

One way to establish credibility is giving away valuable resources like how-to guides for free.

In fact, that’s what we’re doing right here. Rather than demanding payment for this very guide, we’re giving it to you for free because we want to be seen as helpful experts on this topic. If you think we know how to increase conversion rate efforts on your site, you’re also likely to believe we know more about other parts of creating a good site – and, of course, we do.

The reason we’re being so forthright about our goals here is that what we’re doing is also what you can be doing. Every positive feeling you’ve had from studying this guide can be something you inspire in your own customers, and it’s not that hard to do.

That said, be sure the things you offer are actually worth having. You don’t want to read a guide that doesn’t actually help you improve your conversion rate, and similarly, your visitors don’t want to spend their time on something that won’t help them solve their own problems.

Quality and expertise matter – the better you communicate those things, the more people are going to listen to you.

Conclusion

The methods we discussed in this guide are the main ways to reduce your bounce rate and boost your conversion rate.

You probably noticed that only some of these are technical changes and the rest are all about content. (Yes, that really is important.) Even if you use technological fixes like faster loading speeds to cut your basic bounce rate in half, people are still going to leave if the content they find isn’t worth reading.

It helps if you map out a good content strategy for your site. If you don’t know why you’re blogging or how each post should end up helping your business, then you’ve missed an important step of the content marketing process. If you’re consistently focused on helping your site’s audience, though, you’ll soon start to see the sort of growth you’re looking for.

Remember, reducing your bounce rate isn’t your goal – it’s just a step towards your real goal of making a better site, converting more visitors, and ultimately strengthening your business.

What do you think of these ways to reduce bounce rate and increase conversions? Let us know at the comment box down below if you have more tips that you’d like to share with us!

Updated: 26/7/17

9 Essential Elements For Your Inbound Marketing Strategy

Inbound Marketing Strategy

For a long time, larger businesses have had a clear edge over their smaller competition due to the ability to afford a large marketing budget.

Although traditional marketing efforts have often been too costly for small and mid-sized business owners, the rise of the Internet has leveled the playing field significantly, allowing even the smallest of companies to compete through the use of inbound marketing, which is much more cost-efficient and effective than traditional marketing strategies.

However, to have any hopes of competing, you need to implement an effective inbound marketing strategy. The following are some of the essential strategies that you should incorporate into your inbound marketing campaign:

1) Pick Your Keywords and Optimize For Them

SEO is the key to marketing your website. While a number of different factors are involved, the singular goal of SEO is to improve your search engine ranking. By improving the ranking of your site’s pages, you increase exposure of your site on search engine results pages, thereby bringing in more organic web traffic.

One of the key factors for strong SEO is the use of keywords. The use of good keywords will help Google and other search engines identify your content and will help your target audience to find your content through relevant search queries.

However, choosing the right keywords can be a challenge. Keywords that are too vague won’t rank very high. This is because you’ll have a tough time competing with other businesses using those keywords as well as with attracting relevant visitors. For example, if you are running a fruit of the month club and you use the keyword “apple”, you’ll be competing against Apple computers and potentially attracting the wrong type of audience.

You should make sure that your keywords are relevant and specific to your content. There are many tools out there that can help you find new keywords as well as determine what keywords will be effective for your brand. In fact, you can find out what keywords you are currently ranking for by using RankReveal. This can help you identify effective keywords you didn’t even know you were ranking for.

When it comes to optimizing your site, make sure that the keywords you use are relevant for the page they are used on. You’ll want to use them in the following ways:

  • Body of your content.
  • H1 and H2 tags in your content.
  • Image titles and ALT text.
  • URLs.
  • Meta titles and meta descriptions.

Just make sure that you don’t overuse your keywords throughout your body content. Doing so can result in Google levying ranking penalties onto your site for “keyword stuffing,” which is a black hat practice that is severely frowned upon.

Inbound Marketing Strategy

To avoid going overboard, SEOPressor Connect is our go-to tool to help optimize on-page SEO.

You can also check your SEO score for free on Website SEO Checker.

Inbound Marketing Strategy

Simply insert your targeted keyword and get suggestions to fix and optimize your score and rank higher in search engines.

2) Publish On-Site Content

Creating content is a must for any inbound marketing campaign. Without content, your inbound marketing efforts are going to be useless. Content is not only what gets people to visit your website, but that gets people to stay on your website. Without it, you have nothing to offer and you give visitors no reason to convert. The following are a few ways in which content can benefit your inbound marketing campaign:

  • Increase page rankings.
    Google rewards good content with higher page rankings, which will in turn help bring in more traffic. This requires you to optimize your content using SEO keywords and links. Good content may earn external links as well, which Google does use as a factor for ranking pages.
  • Increase web traffic.
    Page rankings aren’t the only way to boost your web traffic. Sharing links to your content on your social media platforms can help to bring in traffic as well.
  • Increase brand exposure.
    Good content will get shared on social media and may even be linked to by other websites. This helps to boost the exposure of your website as well as your brand in general.
  • Build brand authority.
    The better your content is and the more it’s shared, the better your reputation will become. This increased authority will go a long way in establishing both trust and loyalty amongst your audience.
  • Keep your audience engaged.
    Good content will keep readers coming back, thereby nurturing them until they are customers. Even after they become customers, you’ll want to keep them engaged with your brand so that they not only become repeat customers, but also brand advocates. You can encourage readers to share content via social media or share their opinions on your content with a comment section to keep them engaged.
  • Drive conversions.
    Your content should contain call-to-action in the conclusions that encourage readers to perform an action, such as signing up to an email list. It’s hard to convert visitors do perform such actions without having good content.

As you can see, on-site content is vital to all of your inbound marketing goals. However, this particular inbound marketing strategy isn’t going to work effectively if your content isn’t of high quality or relevant to your audience.

Additionally, you need to make sure that you publish new content regularly. Publishing new content once a month won’t cut it since readers that were interested will have forgotten about you by then. Generally speaking, you should publish new content a few times a week – and always at the same time so that readers know when to expect it

Last but not least, it doesn’t matter how amazing your content is or how relevant it is to your audience’s problems, if you don’t promote it, nobody will find it. Use email marketing and social media marketing to promote your on-site content.

3) Write Content as a Guest Blogger

While publishing high-quality content on your own website on a regular basis is certainly important, you should also look to write and publish content off-site as well. For example, writing a blog post for another company within your industry (that isn’t a direct competitor, of course) can have a huge impact on your marketing efforts.

Inbound Marketing Strategy

Fostering friendly relationships with other businesses that are relevant to your industry can be extremely beneficial for both sides.

First of all, you’ll sustain your reputation as an authority within your industry if you’re writing guest blogs on other reputable websites. Secondly, you’ll be exposing an entirely new audience (that of the company whose site you are guest blogging on) to your brand.

Odds are the site will link your blog post back to your website, thereby directing new traffic, most of which is probably of high quality, to your website. So basically, you’ll be exposing your brand to a large number of high-quality leads with a single blog post.

You can help boost each other’s exposure as well as market each other’s products and services, thereby increasing both of your customer bases.

4) Send Out Email Newsletters

Inbound Marketing Strategy

Email marketing may be an older strategy, but it certainly isn’t an outdated one. By sending out regular newsletters to anyone who has chosen to opt in, you can accomplish the following:

  • Boost trust and loyalty by providing valuable content that is informative and helpful.
  • Nurture leads into eventually making purchases.
  • Nurture customers into becoming regular customers as well as brand advocates.
  • Promote deals and special events to improve sales.
  • Increase traffic to your blog or social media channels by encouraging readers to visit for new content.

As you can see, email newsletters can have a big impact. However, you have to do it right. This means finding the right balance between sending them out often enough to keep recipients engaged, but not so often that it becomes spam-like.

Not to mention that you have to ensure the newsletters contain good content that’s relevant to your readers. One way to do this is to ask the right questions on your opt-in form so that you can segment your audience and automate your emails.

5) Free Guide Giveaway

Inbound Marketing Strategy

Producing free in-depth guides is an excellent way to provide your audience with vital information that’s relevant to your brand, whether the guide goes into detail about your services or your products.

Not only will in-depth guides improve the SEO of your site, thereby bringing in more organic traffic, but they can be extremely effective in helping you to convert your leads.

This is because in-depth guides that provide relevant information will help to build brand authority, which in turn will increase the trust that visitors have in your business. The more trust you build, the more likely visitors are to convert. You can make your guides available for free download on landing pages linked from blog content, on your homepage or via email newsletters.

6) Create an Email Popup

Popups, in general, are a bit controversial because they can disrupt the website experience of your visitors. Because of this, you’ll want to be careful with how you use them. Having an email pop up disrupt your visitors experience every time they visit a new page on your site is probably a bad idea. However, picking and choosing specific places for an email popup can be effective.

What are email pop-ups? Basically, they are popups that allow visitors to sign up to your email list right then and there. One way you can use them is to have them pop up automatically when a visitor clicks on the call-to-action at the end of one of your blog posts that encourages readers to sign up to your newsletter.

Inbound Marketing Strategy

Having a popup on the page itself is actually more convenient since it won’t require them to leave the page.

There are also email pop-ups available that can automatically track if a user is about to leave your page by the gesture and velocity of their mouse movements as they browse through your site. Once the user is about to leave your page, the popup can show up. In effect, it’s like an extra page view that doesn’t disrupt their experience since they were leaving anyway and it won’t prevent them from leaving either.

7) Perform Q&A Sessions on Social Media

There are a number of social media marketing strategies that you should consider using in general, but one of the easiest ones to do is to host a Q&A on through your social media channels. Social media should be used as a way to connect with your customers, thereby building trust as well as increasing brand awareness. A Q&A can do all this and more.

Inbound Marketing Strategy

By hosting a Q&A, you give followers the opportunity to communicate directly with you. This in itself helps to make your brand appear more personal, which in turn makes you more relatable. It also gives you the opportunity to provide valuable information about your brand, your products or your services. This can help to nurture leads into regular customers.

Converting people on social media is even more effective because once you convert one person, there’s a good chance that they will begin sharing your content with their own social circles on a more regular basis, thereby boosting your exposure and potentially bringing you more leads.

Keep in mind that Q&As don’t have to always be scheduled events, although scheduling a Q&A with someone of importance within your company is a great strategy for building anticipation and drawing more exposure to your brand.

However, you can also simply post questions to Twitter, Facebook, and other social channels on a daily basis to incite conversation and engage your followers. These can be questions about your products or services in order to receive helpful feedback or even fun questions that could be helpful to other followers and customers.

You should also keep track of any questions asked by followers across your social channels and make sure that you answer them. This shows that you care about what your customers think and helps provide you with good PR.

8) Enhance Your Personal Brand

Focusing on personal branding will help to strengthen your corporate brand. This is because your audience will have an easier time relating to a personal brand – and if it’s linked to a corporate brand, it will become easier for those audience members to trust that corporate brand.

There are many ways that you can enhance your personal brand. For example, writing on-site content with your name and photograph attached and then syndicating that content on social media. You may want to have some of the higher ups in your company write content as well so that they can build their personal brands, all of which will connect to your corporate brand.

Inbound Marketing Strategy

Writing quality content will also help to build your personal brand because then more people will feature your content on their websites.

As previously mentioned, guest blogging is another effective strategy for strengthening your personal brand. All of this will make your corporate brand more human, more accessible and more trustworthy. It will also make it easier for you to connect with industry influencers using your personal brand.

9) Target Industry Influencers

Influencer marketing is a strategy that isn’t used as often as it should be. The idea of influencer marketing is to target the individuals who hold influence within your industry, such as thought leaders and reviewers. They have large audiences on social media that trust what they have to say, which means that if they mention your brand, product or service in a positive light, it could have a big impact on your reputation.

The way to connect with industry influencers is to identify who they are and to begin following them on social media. Share content that they post and engage in discussions that they start on their channels. This will help bring you exposure to their audience while also giving them exposure to your audience, something that they will appreciate.

Inbound Marketing Strategy

When our teammate published his blog post about Honest Marketing, he immediately got noticed by Dharmesh Shah, the founder of Hubspot and his post even went viral.

Eventually, you can contact them directly to find out if there’s a way you can collaborate or find out if they would be willing to review or highlight one of your products or services.

These are some of the inbound marketing strategies that have proven to be highly effective when properly implemented. Remember, when running an inbound marketing campaign, it’s a good idea to use multiple inbound marketing strategies that are integrated into an overall marketing plan. If you choose to only use one or two strategies, you’re in effect putting all of your eggs in one basket. If one of those fails, then your entire inbound marketing campaign will end up failing.

Updated: 18/7/17

13 Reasons Why You (Really) Need Inbound Marketing

Why You Need Inbound Marketing

Hello and welcome! You might have found yourself here for a number of reasons. Maybe you’re wondering what inbound marketing is, or maybe you’re worried you’re wasting your time on something that doesn’t deliver. Perhaps thirteen is your lucky number.

Whatever the reason, I’m glad you’re here. We have a journey to go on, and it has the potential to transform your business for the better. That’s right, it’s a journey through inbound marketing.

But first, let’s understand the difference between inbound and outbound marketing.

What Is Inbound Marketing?

Why You Need Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is a technique for drawing customers to products and services via content marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimization, and more. You essentially create free things people like to draw them in (lead generation) and then use the good will to promote your paid products (conversion).

What Is Outbound Marketing?

Why You Need Inbound Marketing

Outbound marketing refers to things like cold emails, cold calls, billboards, print ads, radio ads etc. These are traditional methods that, thanks to increased saturation and changing consumer habits, are not as effective as they used to be.

Inbound marketing, when done well, is now the most successful means of marketing in a modern context. It’s not about reaching out, it’s about drawing in.

To achieve this, you need a well-planned, strategic campaign that will enable you to work smarter and maximize your ROI.

With inbound marketing, you are already being more targeted. You are addressing people who are already qualified and have some knowledge of your topic area. What’s more, those same people are already actively looking for answers in your product or service area.

This alone allows inbound marketing to be more effective.

Why You Need Inbound Marketing

According to HubSpot reports, inbound leads cost 61% less than outbound leads.

Equally, when it comes to converting leads into sales, inbound marketing has shown to be 10x more effective. As such, it really is the King of marketing strategies.

This is true for many reasons, and those reasons are the topic of today’s post. Still not convinced? Read on to discover why, and how inbound marketing can be so much more effective.

Defining The Mad Science Of Inbound Marketing

A competent inbound marketing strategy works so well because it’s a potent cocktail of several different elements, all of which work together to create a preferable experience for customers.

    Fun fact: a majority of inbound marketers think their strategy is effective. A majority of outbound marketers think theirs is not.

So what is the alchemy that goes into an intoxicating marketing elixir?

Why You Need Inbound Marketing

An Attractive Scent

Why You Need Inbound Marketing

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? If you have a great product and no one knows about it, does it make money? Hint: No. No it doesn’t.

For almost every business, it’s true to say that the majority of the population are blissfully unaware you exist. Harsh at that may seem, your bank balance will thank you if you take efforts to change that. You have to attract customers to your business.

People may be a stranger to your brand. So you have to build awareness, reach new audiences, and draw new traffic to the website.

How do I attract people?

I’m not a pick-up artist, that’s a different conversation. You can attract customers, however, through blogging, SEO, social media. Creating content creates opportunities for people to discover you. What’s more, these people will already have a vested interest in your sphere of operation (provided your content is relevant, which it should be).

A Transforming Agent

Why You Need Inbound Marketing

So you create your content and lo! Visitors start to arrive. Job done? Well, not exactly. Once you have visitors, the goal then becomes transforming them into customers. This can be immediate, like a sale then and there, or indirect, such as sharing contact information for future marketing. This is called conversion. “convert” or share their contact information with you for future marketing.

How do I convert people?

Through religious experiences I guess? You convert customers through lead generation, content offers, conversion rate optimization.

A Binding Agent

Why You Need Inbound Marketing

Once you have leads, you need to close. This means making the sale you always intended to make when you started them down this road. Think of your marketing as a corridor, and your product is behind the final door. Leads may not be ready to walk through that door, and you need to give them the support and guidance they need to feel confident to grab the handle.

How do I close customers?

Aha! Now you’ve got it. You can convert customers in a number of ways, but some of the most effective are:

  • Sales Alignment: Positioning your messaging to match the needs, wants, style and dialect of your target audience.
  • Email Marketing: With direct appeals and offers.
  • Marketing Automation: To save you time and increase ROI.

A Sweetener

Why You Need Inbound Marketing

If you want people to drink this magic marketing potion, you’d better make it taste nice. In real terms, that means making all your communication an enjoyable experience for readers. By doing this, you’ll encourage repeat business and establish long-term loyalty from your customers, converting them once again into your most powerful weapon: promoters.

Keep the relationship alive and well to encourage repeat business, referrals and positive reviews. This is how you earn loyal customers and promoters.

How do I delight customers?

You can delight your customers through personalizationmaking your messaging speak directly to them as individuals and spending time responding to their unique concerns. This can be achieved through community engagement, either through social media comments sections or forums. You can even use surveys to discover what your audience wants more of.

So, now we’ve discussed how inbound marketing works, let’s look at what inbound marketing enables you to do. After all, a methodology is only as useful as the advantages it gives you, and that’s what I promised you at the top of this post. Fortunately for me, the importance of inbound marketing comes from its advantages, so it’s an easy sell.

The Advantages Of Inbound Marketing

1) Outbound Strategies Are Failing

Outbound Strategies Are Failing

A few years ago, it was easy to create a piece of content or an outbound message and grab the attention of your target audience. Both online and offline, the density of messaging was much more sparse, which meant you could easily stand out in the ‘whitespace’ of life.

In 2017, that whitespace is GONE. People are bombarded with advertising everywhere, on every device, at home, and at work.

Now that consumers are confronted by outbound strategies constantly, people have become incredibly skilled at narrowing their attention to focus only on what they want to see. Outbound did that, and we’ll be living with that legacy for a long time to come.

2) Outbound Marketing Attitudes Are Broken

People, which lest we forget includes marketers and salesmen, are sick and tired of “Buy! Buy! Buy!” ads. Traditional TV advertising has changed, most notably through the use of what I call the ‘viral non-sequitor’.

They try and get ‘virality’ by juxtaposing unrelated elements together to try and surprise people, shocking them out of their practiced and automatic ad-filtering. Virgin’s Sofa Bear is one example, but there are thousands.

It comes off as shallow attention seeking, because it doesn’t actually change anything that matters to an audience. It doesn’t solve a problem and it doesn’t connect to their lives.

The problem is this: no one cares that you want to make money. So don’t be a salesman who just wants to make a buck.

Inbound marketing inverts this relationship. It puts the customer first, and makes you work hard to give them what they really need.

Take time to listen to your target market. The simplest form of content marketing is this: give a name to their problem, give them a list of solutions, and then introduce yourself. This is how to gain respect.

3) Inbound Builds Trust

Think of inbound marketing like a friendship. What are the qualities you want in a friend? Trustworthiness, reliability, a sense of humor, basic competence, and a unique perspective.

 Inbound Builds Trust

When customers see that you are creating useful content, that you’re professional, that you’re knowledgeable in your field, they can’t help but have more respect for you. Respect multiplies in time and becomes trust.

If someone trusts you, of course, they are more likely to buy from you. If you have educated people as to their problems, and your products equip to tackle the challenges in their lives, however abstract, people are exponentially more likely to purchase.

This is the essence of inbound marketing. If you remember nothing else from this article, remember this.

4) A Warm Lead Is Better Than Cold Lead

A quick thought experiment:

You are walking down the street desperate to sneeze. Seeing your plight, a passing pharmacist produces a handkerchief and some anti-histamines and offers them to you, explaining his shop is just around the corner.

The next day, you are feeling better. All of a sudden, someone thrusts a handkerchief at you and explains the thread count, who made it, what it can do, and that you can get it today only, for a price, in a shop around the corner.

The first is a warm lead, the second a cold. If the customer is in need and has reached out to you, you know they are interested. As such, a lead created through inbound marketers is much more likely to close than someone who might feel pressganged or pressured into entertaining a pointless conversation a little longer, wasting their time and yours.

5) Momentum Works In Your Favor

With outbound, as soon as you stop paying, you stop seeing results. With inbound, your content is always there and if you’re in the right business, so is the need. Leads are drawn over time, and the longer your article gets traffic, the higher it will rank, making it even more likely to gain traffic. That’s why blog content creation is the number 1 priority for a majority of marketers.

This, in turn, will lead to increased recognition among people searching for solutions, and make them more likely to share your articles with people in a similar position. Put simply, it’s a gift that keeps on giving.

6) Learn More About Your Target Market

Inbound marketing is all about communication and dialogue. By engaging in this, you can learn useful things about your audience that will help you convert. You can create more accurate buyer personas, which will help you speak their language. This will enable you to ask the right questions on your landing page forms. Social listening will enable you to pick up trends and anticipate what content you should be producing.

Actively listening to your customers is a huge key to success in inbound marketing and importantly, in PR.

Why You Need Inbound Marketing

Elon Musk achieved widespread press for taking a twitter complaint and turning it into a policy inside a week. People respect responsiveness.

7) Learn More About Your Marketing

Marketers struggle with metrics. Unlike outbound marketing, where tracking the impact of actions taken can be described as ambiguous at best, inbound marketing is supported by a wide range of software designed to make metrics as revealing and detailed as possible.

With tools like Hubspot, SEOPressor, and RankReveal, you can have all your analytics plugged into your WordPress website, not only reporting on how your published material is doing, but actively making your new content better.

Use SEOPressor to optimize your on-page SEO to be ranked on Google.

Why You Need Inbound Marketing

Use RankReveal to discover what keywords you’re ranking for.

Why You Need Inbound Marketing

With these reports, you’ll be able to refine your marketing process.

8) You’ll Save Time

Time spent on inbound is time spent on strong leads. Time spent spamming emails to hundreds of people who don’t know or care what you offer is time wasted.

Inbound allows you to focus your time effectively, which means less time on marketing and more on building your business infrastructure to cope with the influx of traffic you’re building.

9) You’ll Save Money

Sales reps, paid advertising, PR. All these things come at a cost, and their ROI is dubious at best. You can track and optimize the investment you make in content, which itself requires a fraction of the workforce. It creates 10x as many leads, meaning your money is working harder, allowing you to achieve more on a smaller budget.

10) You’ll Make More Money

Why You Need Inbound Marketing

Search Engine Watch suggest 50% of all mobile searches are conducted in hopes of finding local results, and 61% of those searches result in a purchase.

An important thing for marketers to recognize is that people aren’t just looking for a product anymore. They are looking for a local business to buy from. The business they choose may be based on convenience, user ratings, trust, reputation and more. All these factors are actively managed by inbound.

In order to secure these potential customers, businesses need to make sure they provide the information customers are searching for. They may not know when they start their journey into Google that it will end in a purchase, but your job is to reveal this as the best possible solution.

11) Your Competitors Are Already Doing It

Why You Need Inbound Marketing

According to the State of Inbound, 84% small business are already using inbound marketing.

That’s a vast majority, which means if you aren’t using inbound marketing, you’re in trouble. Your competitors have you at a disadvantage and will hoover up traffic that may have once gone to your website. Inbound is the future of your marketing, and for your competitors, it is their present.

12) Promote Long-Term Growth

We’ve talked about the momentum inbound content creates already, but we haven’t discussed the amplification that comes with an accumulation of content.

Why You Need Inbound Marketing

One piece will grow more powerful over time, but every time you add a new piece into the mix, it will compound and add value to previous and future content.

I’m sure you’ve heard of the importance of a first impression. Inbound makes that first impression helpful, informative and actionable. Outbound techniques are more likely to make it easily ignorable or annoying. As such, they can’t help but have less effect.

If you are building your business, build it on something that can last forever, not as long as you keep pay. Think of it like building your offices as opposed to renting – it may take longer to start with, but it’ll be yours forever at the end.

13) Grow Your Business

As I’ve just pointed out, inbound marketing takes time. But that also allows you to pace yourself. You can grow sustainably, instead of perpetuating the boom and bust culture that has caused so many problems in the world economy.

You can carefully select the employees you need to continue to grow as the inbound marketing snowball gets bigger, in turn bringing in more leads. It should pay for itself, and always deliver more than it costs.

The snowball effect is precisely why it is so important: after a small initial push, it will gather momentum with less and less energy required from you for it to grow. It will grow itself.

Inbound Income Incoming!

Let’s recap. Inbound marketing describes a mix of website optimization, content creation, search engine optimization, email marketing, lead generation, and social media marketing.

That’s a diverse array of approaches, but there are tools and resources that can help you master each affordably. Taken together, they can act cohesively to produce extraordinary results.

So don’t find yourself stuck in the noughties. We are closer to 2020 than 2010, and existing marketing has shown very clearly what the future holds. Inbound means going onward and upward.

Next week, we’ll talk about the inbound marketing techniques that you can try for your businesses.

If you have any inbound marketing tips and tricks, feel free to share them in the comments below! Were you sceptical about inbound marketing only to realise the keys to success – your story could inspire others to make the change, so share it with us!

Updated: 7/7/17

Mobile Ranking 2017: What Techniques To Use (And Avoid) For Your Business

Mobile Ranking 2017

Let me take you back in time for a moment. It’s 2015 – mobile search overtakes desktop search for the first time across ten countries including the US, UK, Japan, and other major economies. Then? Mobilegeddon. Google updated their algorithms to preference websites that gave a better mobile experience.

That same year, 72% of marketers reported relevant content creation as the most effective SEO tactic.

Fast forward to 2017, and Google has created a mobile-first indexing system, meaning the mobile version of the web will prioritized in generating rankings, because most of their users are on now on mobile.

Yet in 2017, only 61% of marketers say improving SEO is their top inbound marketing priority. As an online marketer, this makes me ask – What’s going on here? That figure should be 100%!

I understand that the world of SEO is one of constant change and flux, but mobile is now the largest source of traffic for businesses around the world, and SEO is still the key to increasing your share of this traffic and maximizing your successful conversion of traffic into sales.

It’s time to put two and two together and make four (hundred, thousand). Mobile traffic. SEO. Mobile SEO.

Fortunately, there’s a lot you can do to improve your mobile ranking, and doing so will in turn drive more business to your site.

Today, we’re going to cover three essential elements to creating a mobile friendly website, and the many factors that affect success. These include what to do across Technical, User Experience, and Content categories.

Then, we’ll break down what not to do, across all manner of unusual little things you might never have thought of otherwise. So, on with the show!

What You Should Do: Technical Factors

Fast Loading Website

Who doesn’t like fast-loading web page? A better question would be, who doesn’t like a slow loading website? The answer? Google. Google doesn’t.

When it comes to mobile, users tend to show even less patience than usual. Searchmetrics performed a study of mobile ranking factors, and found the top ten ranking websites on mobile had an average page load speed of 1.10 seconds.

Being even a tad slower will see your site shunted down into the top 30. If your site doesn’t load in 3 seconds, mobile users will simply close the tab or navigate away. Fortunately, Google has a mobile-friendly checker that will take this into account and give you feedback accordingly.

Mobile Ranking 2017

Alternatively, you can use Pingdom to check how fast your pages are loading.

There’s also another option.

Mobile Ranking 2017

You can use PageSpeed Insights from Google for suggestions on how to make your page loading speed faster.

Get AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) Ready

Mobile Ranking 2017

Accelerated Mobile Pages are cropping up more and more these days and you may not even have noticed.

Facebook’s ‘Instant Articles’ are signified by a little lightning bolt in the corner, while on Google the initials AMP are used.

These pages are light on their HTML and CSS codeminimalism increases performance.

By keeping this cut down, this makes pages easily pre-renderable and cacheable for browsers, resulting in load times that are up to 30 times faster than regular pages.

Despite resistance from some content creators, Google are pushing AMPs as a solution for consumers, and have calibrated their algorithms to reward websites using the AMP format.

That means if you do so, it will have a positive effect on both your rankings and click-through rates.

Fortunately, the folks over at AMP Project are helping as many people as possible understand how to enable this for their site.

User Experience

Use Unordered Lists

A quirk of the new mobile first indexing has been that Google seems to reward mobile sites for having unordered lists even more generously than desktop sites.

Mobile Ranking 2017

The advantages of lists for making information easy to absorb and process are well documented, and unordered lists feel less arbitrary and more focused on providing actionable advice to users.

If you’re wondering what the golden number of bullets for mobile devices is, it’s nine. This will sit comfortably on a single page on most screens (provided they proper bullet points and not paragraphs), and strike the right balance of detail and brevity.

Optimize Your Images

A picture is worth a thousand words. The internet is becoming more visual. Mobile connections are getting faster, data allowances more generous.

Images are easier to perceive, and leave a stronger impression on the viewer than raw text. Image processing takes up the largest single expanse of the human brain – 30% of the cortex, compared with 3% for hearing. Humans are optimized for images.

Mobile Ranking 2017

You can optimize your images for web. Reduce dimensions so they’re still clean and sharp for mobile users, while compressing to reduce file size. This will help you avoid slowing down the site’s loading speed.

Kraken offers superb image optimization for mobile.

Content Factors

Limit Your Keywords

Watch out! While ‘keyword stuffing’ was in vogue for a while a few years ago, Google has long gotten wise to the practice, and having too many keywords will now actively harm your site.

This isn’t calculated in absolute terms – it’s relative. If you have long form content, you are allowed more keywords, as they form a lower proportion of the total.

To avoid penalties, you want to make sure your keyword density is below 3.5%. To be super safe, you want to stay below 1.8%.

However, this may be the wrong way to think about it. A consensus of SEO sages now suggest that simply having the keyword in the content, in the title, the URL and a header is better for ranking than density in the content.

Avoid over-optimization and keep it natural. This should ensure a good distribution throughout the total amount of words you have.

Conversely, if you’re new to this and want to know what keywords you SHOULD be targeting, we here at RankReveal have the tool for you.

How To Improve Website Ranking

If you use RankReveal regularly, you will be able to know exactly where and what your current position is in Google search results.

Additional Factors

Make Use Of Social Signals

Rich social engagement provides a ranking boost for any site, regardless of the platform. It’s important to remember that when it comes to mobile, users are browsing social networks and apps more than they are the internet.

Mobile Ranking 2017


The average mobile user spends around 40 minutes a day on Facebook alone. The ranking effects may be indirect, but they are real.

There is an extremely high correlation between social signals and ranking, and links shared on Facebook and Twitter are used as a ranking signal.

Aside from this, social media’s primary purpose is communication, and for you, communication equals feedback. Feedback helps you target your content more effectively, and in the long term, will make you a better marketer.

Utilize Local Search Optimization

Local SEO is essential for business with brick-and-mortar location.

HubSpot paints a clear picture:

  • 72% of consumers who did a local search visited a store within five miles.
  • 30% of mobile searches are related to a location.
  • 28% of searches for something nearby result in a purchase.
  • Local searches lead 50% of mobile visitors to visit stores within one day.
  • 78% of local-mobile searches result in offline purchases.
Mobile Ranking 2017

According to data from Q4 2016, desktop websites got a 26% cart conversion rate, while smartphones brought only 16%.

Don’t be deceived. That isn’t a reason not to use Local SEO when targeting mobile ranking. Users will search on a mobile device to find what they want, then switch to a desktop machine to enter payment information, or buy in store.

SEOPressor has a great guide to setting up Local SEO which will help you cover the basics.

What You Shouldn’t Do:

So, now I’ve steered you toward a lot of helpful things you can be doing to improve your mobile SEO ranking by creating a mobile friendly website.

However, it’s equally important for me to steer you away from things that can do real damage to your mobile ranking.

Kill Flash

Mobile Ranking 2017

Flash used to be the darling of web design in the early noughties. However, mobile browsers don’t support Flash and therefore, can’t display any flash content.

Flash has become an albatross around the neck of your website. It results in a poor experience for mobile users, and Google may also penalize you for ‘hidden content’.

Eliminate Technical Errors

Mobile Ranking 2017

Technical errors are punished by Google because they’re annoying as hell for users.

They reflect bad design and bad maintenance, and sending your mobile users to the site’s desktop version, or to non-existing pages (no matter how witty your Error 404 page is) will aggravate customers, and Google doesn’t want that.

Fortunately, SEOPressor is a handy WordPress plugin that can help you prevent such embarrassment by running the SEO audit to fix your broken links.

NO Interruptive Pop-Ups

Mobile Ranking 2017

Pop-ups are the most universally reviled concept in all of internet marketing.

They are annoying enough on desktop, but especially annoying on mobile, where the screen size is smaller and therefore the intrusion blocks more of the content.

Everyone hates them. Don’t do them. Just don’t. No. Stop it.

Don’t Use Small Fonts

Mobile Ranking 2017

Small fonts are another of the most complained features on mobile sites.

Incredibly to me as a regular writer, people actually want you to use 16pt font (the kind I’d normally use for titles) as your general body copy.

This is because the sizing is relative, and when reading on a small screen with a huge resolution, 16pt is actually easily readable (where on a larger screen with lower resolution, it’s huge).

Expand Small Touch Elements

Do you use interactive elements on your site, like buttons or check boxes?

Mobile Ranking 2017

If so, they shouldn’t be so small that the user’s finger has trouble pressing them. Long gone are the precision days of the mouse. Touch screen is, for better or worse, the new king, and making sure your design is touch friendly is essential.

Imagine the frustration from trying to hit a pixel on a screen and missing ten times in a row. I said ‘imagine’, but the right word is likely ‘remember’. We’ve all experienced a badly designed website, but that shouldn’t give you permission to let yours be one of them.

Streamline Your Internal Links

Mobile Ranking 2017

Mobile pages tend to have around 75% fewer links on them than desktop pages. You need to be far more targeted about where you’re sending your audience.

This is because hitting the screen is used to scroll up and down the content as well as to click on things. Too many links, you’ll be pushing your audience away from your site, and making it harder for them to successfully engage with your content.

Limit Your Word Count

This is a tough one because you’re getting squeezed from both sides.

A higher number of words places makes it harder for you to get the top position in the rankings. BUT, URLs ranked worse than the top 10 have roughly the same text length as those in the top 3.

That ‘spare seven’ spaces in the top ten can be taken up by long form content. So it’s all about striking a balance that will give you the best chance for success. I calculate the ideal length for mobilized content to be between 700 and 1000 words.

Mobile Ranking 2017

Make your content rich by the mobile screen’s standards, rather than the desktop’s. Fewer words, fewer links, better images, and a smoother, more minimal experience that puts the focus where it needs to be, and nowhere else.

Master Your Mobile Ranking 2017

You’re now armed with all the knowledge, and a lot of the tools you’ll need to take action based on that knowledge. What tools can’t achieve, perspective can. You should now understand why mobile-first works the way it does, and how to manipulate it to your advantage.

Any questions? Leave them in the comments section below! If you have personal experience of adapting to mobile-first in 2017 and you’ve discovered something we’ve missed, please share it with our readers in the comments section!

Updated: 1/7/17