local SEO | Wieting Design

Practices That Could Be Hurting Your SEO

February 19, 2019 by Cindy Wieting

We all know the importance of using SEO (search engine optimization) best strategies, but are you familiar with practices that may be hurting your SEO? These may often be done unintentionally yet can have a big impact on your website’s ranking.

The following can negatively affect your SEO:

Bad Website Links

Inactive links or broken links go nowhere, and should be fixed or removed as needed. You can manually search for these, or easier ways include using Google Analytics or the plugin MonsterInsights for WordPress. While auditing, also check for nofollow links and redirects – if they exist, ensure they’re correctly placed where needed. Inactive links can stop web crawlers in their tracks resulting in a page not being indexed for search engines.

Spam Blog Comments

Spam links in your blog’s comment section can affect how you’re ranked; watch out for spam bots inserting irrelevant links like these. Using bad SEO strategies, these spambots try creating their own backlinks by commenting on others’ posts but this can hurt your ranking in the process. Links on your page help Google understand what kind of page you are, so a bad or irrelevant link can give Google the wrong impression. Have a good spam filter or monitor your comments to ensure no bad links exist in comments.

Slow Site Speed

You may have tons of awesome content on your page, including videos and high resolution images, but make sure your page is not overloaded. Watch out for oversized images, embedded videos, bad code, and overdue theme or plugin updates. A slow site speed leads to a longer load time that negatively impacts user experience, leading to increased bounce rates. Additionally, search engines may not be able to crawl all your pages when your site is slow (as to not overload). Use Pingdom to check your site speed and see if it needs improvement.

Not Using HTTPS

Safety online is important – users know this and so does Google. Search engines will rank safe sites higher because they want to send visitors to pages worthy of trust. Switch to HTTPS if you haven’t already; an SSL certificate ensures secure data transmission with encrypted data between the server and your site. Check if your hosting package includes this or if you need to purchase a security certificate.

Low Visitor Engagement

Posting quality content can improve your SEO, but there’s much more to it including how users engage. How are visitors interacting with your website? Are they engaged, completing calls to action (CTA’s) or sharing? How much time are visitors spending on the page? Google ranks sites based on how relevant they are, and if you have a high bounce rate it may lower your relevancy score.

Non Responsive Design

Searches being done on tablets and phones are increasing, which means your website needs to be responsive to these different devices. If not, visitors may leave quickly when the page doesn’t load or show correctly, in turn increasing your bounce rate and potentially hurting your SEO. Google is aware of the device trend and has even started indexing the mobile version of sites to make sure that users get the best access to what they’re looking for on phones. AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) can help with mobile speed.

Irrelevant Keywords

Keyword stuffing and using irrelevant words in the hope that your page gets noticed can backfire. Words that don’t match the content on the page will most likely result in a higher bounce rate when visitors realize they haven’t found what they were looking for on the site. Stay true to what your page is about without overdoing it; remember that it’s quality content that counts. (Note: Are you noticing a trend here? It’s all about being pertinent to the subject matter.)

Duplicate Tags and Descriptions

Make sure Google can successfully index your website; factors that may affect this are duplicate content tags or noindex tags. One can confuse search engines while the other will prevent the page from being indexed. Make tags relevant and also remember to tag your images correctly by describing what’s actually on them vs just listing the words you’re hoping to rank for. Be relevant for your topic and Google will reward you rather than penalize.

At the core of SEO rankings is the question – is my site relevant for what I offer and working properly? Keep this question in mind because Google is constantly analyzing this to sort pages in search engine results. At the end of the day, search engines exist to provide users with the best results and this is based on many factors. Some are easy to do on your own while others may require help from a search engine marketing expert like Wieting Design. View our SEO services.

With more than 20 years experience in marketing for local businesses in CT (Connecticut), we can work with you to improve and maintain your search engine ranking. View our past projects or contact us to discuss your local business marketing needs.

Wieting Design | Website Design CT

Wieting Design is a full-service, graphic and website design agency based in Fairfield County, CT and serving all of Connecticut (CT). We are committed to sharing our experience and expertise in website design, graphic design, social media marketing, search engine marketing (SEO), and video production to help build powerful tools and campaigns that work for your Connecticut business. Whether your objective is to grow your reputation, create client loyalty, drive traffic to your website or set up a marketing strategy, we will adapt our approach to get you the results you need with the services we provide.

SEO Competitor Analysis: Key to an Effective SEO Strategy

April 12, 2018 by Cindy Wieting

It is good to keep your friends close and your enemies closer. The saying goes true also for enhancing the efficacy of your website’s SEO strategy.

The most important aspect of determining your SEO strategy is to analyze how your competitors are performing. Researching and analyzing your competitors are the key aspects of designing a successful SEO strategy.

SEO makes base for your online marketing practices and you cannot afford to have a spurious SEO marketing strategy.

Why Competitor Analysis is Important

If you do not know what your competitors are up to then how will you be able to beat them? The world of SEO is highly competitive and fast changing. Your SEO strategy needs to be analyzed at par with your competitors.

The prime aspects of analyzing your competitor’s SEO strategy are-

You can’t keep guessing about what your competitors are doing. It is important to identify the tactics adopted by them to attract customers.
Find out the areas where their strategy is performing well and try to adopt them without getting into any legal hassle.
Prepare a sound counter strategy based on data you receive and not on your speculations.

How to initiate SEO Competitor Analysis

Analyze where you stand- Before analyzing others, first, take a dig at where you are currently standing. Get accurate data of your website on following areas-

How many visits you get per month
True visit-to-enquiry conversion rate
Visits you receive from non-branded organic search
Keyword density and word count in each page of your website
Quality and number of inbound links you receive

Find out your potential SEO competitors– Use your target keywords in search engine and the first 10 websites that come up are your competitors. You are competing with them as you are using same keywords. This is an important step when you have begun building your SEO marketing strategy from scratch.
Ascertain your Competitors- Now take up keyword research to validate the companies, who are competing in your space. You need to diligently follow the online activities of your competitors. Closely monitor their successes and failures. Find out the keywords, which are really getting good page rank.

Keyword analysis usually yields data like-

average monthly search
keyword competition
CPC indicator
URL competition.

Such analyses usually open up newer avenues to design SEO strategy in an effective way.

You can’t stop here- It is not over here rather, it is just the beginning. Values of SEO performance metrics do not remain constant. The factors that ensure your visibility and higher page rank keep changing. As the market behavior changes, remember, your potential customers are also changing the way they type a query. A new competitor can also pop-up any time. So, keep analyzing and keep boosting the metrics. Also, you need to keep measuring following metrics side-by-side-

Your average visibility
Average position
Keyword distribution

Compare the performance of short-term metrics against long-term metrics. In addition, identify the pattern of how good or bad those metrics perform. It will help you in further refining your SEO strategy.

Conclusion

An effective and powerful SEO strategy comes out through intense human research along with the help of some useful SEO competitor analysis tools. You need to implement these analysis results in your regular workflow and measure their outcome religiously on a regular basis.

Wieting Design | Search Engine Marketing Fairfield County CT

Optimizing Your Images and Videos for Search Engines

February 15, 2018 by Cindy Wieting

Remember when content was king? Just a few years ago content marketing was the new concept in the world of digital marketing, but now it is more important than ever to consider images and videos. Content has taken a increasingly back seat to imagery and videos as business owners are using more photography and videos to explain what they have to offer. While content still reaps big rewards when it comes to SEO photography and videos are just as important to consider when it comes to SEO. The internet has become a very fun and visual place, and with all the great imagery to choose from why shouldn’t it be. Thats where visual search becomes important and you need to properly optimize images for Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Here are some guidelines that we put into place for clients that are using more visuals and managing their websites in-house, uploading videos and replacing imagery.

1. Name Your Image With The Right Title

First, you should never upload photos to your website with the standard camera-applied filename, like DSC_9764.jpg! This tells Google nothing at all. If your using an image from a stock house or taking your own photos take the time to change the name of that image to fit your business and your message or the product your selling. For example, if you want to upload a shot of automobile name the car. When it comes to SEO, it’s important to use acceptable keywords to help your site rank. Creating descriptive, keyword-rich file names is absolutely crucial for image optimization. Search engines not only crawl the text on your webpage, but they also search for keywords within your image. Describe your images in plain English, just like you do for image file names, make it short and sweet and make sure nothing is misspelled.

2. Choose The Right Photo To Communicate Your Message

Choosing the right shot is key to help Google and “the user” understand your business. You should choose a high quality photo meaning – use stock photography. If you want to take your own photos don’t use your phone as the quality is poor. Use a quality digital camera for high resolution pictures or better yet hire a professional photographer. You want your imagery sharp can crisp to help support your message.

3. Make Sure You Save Your Photos Correctly.

Make sure you use the right file format when saving your photo. JPEG’s are the most common, however PNG files are sometimes better for detailed photos. Make sure the size of your photo is small, saving it as a JPEG or PNG file will compress your image. Compressing your photos will mean faster loading times and better search rankings for your website. You don’t want a website that loads slow due to increased imagery or videos because you can bet the user will lose patience and leave your site. No one wants to sit there waiting for a page to load. Users want it fast, interesting and to find what they are looking for quick.

4. The Same Rules Apply For Videos

Using videos on your website can be a great way to grab attention of viewers. Videos has become increasingly popular and will only continue to grow. Compressing videos like your imagery is a must. Videos that are to large is a big issue as limited bandwidth and poor internet connections can lead to videos pausing and buffering. Large videos are bad for overall page load times and provide a negative user experience thus losing the visitors.

Videos you get from colleagues or editing studios can often be in the wrong format and can cause problems. Make sure whoever is taking the video or editing the video knows where the video will end up and make sure they save it in the correct file format.

Wieting Design | SEO Fairfield County CT

How to compete in Google Adwords and keep the cost down

November 9, 2016 by Cindy Wieting

Google’s main focus is to make sure users find what they are looking for, and Google Adwords is a great marketing tool to drive more traffic to your site. However, if you’re not careful it can also be a costly venture that can put you out of business. To start in google adwords, consider your lifetime value of a customer (LTV). If your predicted LTV is $10 per customer and your spending $12 to acquire these customers, you’ll eventually put yourself out of business. So, how can you capitalize on Google Adwords and keep the cost down?

Follow this step by step guide to keep your Google Adwords marketing budget in check:

Set a Budget. This is the single most important step. What are you willing to spend across all channels of marketing? Go back to the LTV of your customers and how much you’re willing to spend to acquire them. If your budget is too small you won’t have enough of a budget to test your ads.

Switch from Automatic Bidding to Manual Bidding. Google’s built in bidding system is very competitive and is a great starting point if you’re not sure where to start. Once you get a little more experienced, you’ll want control over how much your spending.

Use a Keyword Planning Tool. Examine keywords that relate to your business and how many average searches are performed per month. Start with the low competition keywords and then gradually work your way up to the higher competition keywords. Another great asset is to use your competition’s website to suggest keywords. This may help you identify new keywords for your site.

Group your Ad Sets Together. If you have a series of keywords and ads that pertain to one product offering group them together. This will help you to avoid spending unnecessary money showing ads that are unrelated to a search phrase. Take Apple for example, they group their ads together based on product. If they showed you a Mac-Book while you were searching for an iPhone, how likely are you to click on the laptop ad? If you’re not grouping your keywords and ads together and leaving them in one giant bucket, you wasting your marketing budget.

Identify the Right Keyword Matches. Broad match keywords or phrase match keywords, are both beneficial in their own set. When you first start an ad campaign, you should set up two ad series to target both types of keyword matches and compare the results. Broad match means your keywords can be loosely matched whereas phrase match requires your exact keyword phrase to be a 100% match.

Use Negative Keywords. If you’ve built your ad campaign using a broad match phrase, you can use negative keywords to avoid certain terms that would not pertain to your product. For example, if we were to run an ad series on website design, we could use “theme” as a negative keyword as we do not offer pre-built themes.

Bid on your Own Brand. It’s your company, and it’s natural to assume that you are already ranking for your company brand searches. But, a good competitor may also be using google adwords to redirect traffic looking for your brand, to their site instead. When you bid on your own brand, you’re promoting your business and reaching more customers.

Direct Click Through Traffic To the Right Page. Have you ever seen an ad, clicked on the link, but couldn’t find the product advertised? That’s because the ad wasn’t set up properly. If you’re not controlling your traffic, you’re wasting your Google Adwords budget. The link should take them to exactly what your ad offered. If your website has a lot of services on one page, consider using a landing page just for that particular product.

Get Involved in your Ads. You should be checking on your ads weekly, or hire a company that will monitor these results for you. If you have keywords that have a lot of impressions, but they’re not converting sales than those bids should be lowered so you can avoid wasting money. Likewise, increase bid spends on keywords that are producing sales. This is another reason why you should manually control your bidding from the start. If you start off with automatic bidding on an ad, you won’t be able to change this later on.

Invest in Retargeting. If someone clicked on your ad, but then bounced from your site, these potential leads didn’t say they were not interested, they just said not right now. Don’t lose these valuable leads, bring them back with retargeted emails.

The above steps will help you get started in Google Adwords and keep the cost down. Before you start advertising, make sure your website is user-friendly on mobile, you’ve optimized your pages for SEO and Local SEO too, and lastly make sure the interface is easy to follow. If your goal is to sell a product, can a user complete the checkout process quickly or is it cumbersome to locate the “buy now” buttons and checkout?

Contact us to find out if your website is ready for Google Adwords and how to get started.

How to Set Up your Facebook Business Page for Success

October 26, 2016 by Cindy Wieting

Rule #1 in business is to get in front of your market. As the largest social media site for small businesses, Facebook is still king. If you’ve been fighting the trend, you are missing out on a great opportunity. Three reasons you should have a Facebook business page is to connect with customers, it is a free way to market your business, and it brings traffic to your website and store. Now you know why you need it…

Here’s how to set up and optimize your Facebook business page for success.

Create your Facebook Business Page connected to your personal Facebook account.
Choose which category you fit into out of the following:
1. Local Business or Place
2. Company, Organization, or Institution
3. Brand or Product
4. Artist, Band or Public Figure
5. Entertainment
6. Cause or Community
Complete your business profile description in 150 characters or less so visitors know exactly who you are and what you do . Add categories that your business applies too like what type of food your restaurant serves or what services you offer, then finalize the profile with your business website link.
Upload your profile picture. Your goal with your images is to draw viewers in and show off your brand. Be sure it’s a high resolution shot.
Claim any duplicate pages. Facebook may have a user generated page about your business and during set-up they will prompt you to claim this page(s).
Choose your audience. For example, if you’re a hair stylist in Wilton, CT your audience could be women ages 13-65 that are located in Wilton. You can also target based on people’s interests, but be careful narrowing your audience or your views will be limited.
Setup a Cover Photo. This picture is different from your profile picture but is equally important as it’s the first big image of your brand viewers will see. Your cover photo should be 851 pixels by 315 pixels and visually show your services.
Create a Call to Action. Choose a button to include on your page that prompts viewers to engage with you. I.e. Book Now, Contact Us, Shop Now.
Create a posting strategy with compelling content. Start off slow and steady with a daily post. If you have a blog, pull snippets from your website and add images to your posts. Visuals and video get the most views.
Invite your Friends to like your page. It’s important to wait until you have a stream of content before going for likes. Once you have a few posts and images, go for the low hanging fruit first. Like your own page and then ask friends and family to also like your page.
Advertise on Facebook. You don’t need to spend hundreds of dollars a month, but consider starting with a small budget to grow your audience. When you are first starting out, it can be hard to gain an audience but once you’ve established 1-3K likes, you’ll start gaining more organically.
Measure your Growth. Facebook has a built-in analytics tool to help you measure your growth and you can add a tracking code to your website to track how visitors are interacting with your website.

Creating a Facebook Business page is free and simple to do and with all of the benefits, it’s a no-brainer. Having a Facebook page also helps you with Google’s new local SEO ranking algorithm. One of the most important steps is to make sure your presence on Facebook is consistent and aligns with your brand. If you share a funny video that gains new likes, but it doesn’t pertain to your brand, you’ve earned a like, but not a customer.

If you’re ready to start marketing on social media but not sure where to start, let the social media experts at Wieting Design create a social media strategy for your business. Email us for a complimentary consultation or give us a call at 203.414.9692.

5 Step Guide to Understanding Local SEO

October 11, 2016 by Cindy Wieting

Pay close attention to local SEO optimization. Local SEO is an essential component to every business and brand that wants long-term success across search engines. Although it has a lot of similarities with organic SEO, it’s ultimately very different. Here is our 5 Step Guide to Understanding Local SEO.

What is Local SEO and how does it differ from your current SEO Efforts?

Local SEO refers to optimizing a site or pages on your site to show for organic queries in the search engines where the intent of the searcher is to find local information.

Why should you care about local SEO?

Local Search queries are the new consumer trend. Think SEO Expert in Wilton, CT or SEO Expert near me. Local SEO is your toolbox to let your community know you are here and ready to meet their needs. Local SEO services, when done right, can capture a lot of business for you and is so powerful it actually helps businesses that don’t have business websites.

Are you optimized for local search results?

Do you have a business name?
Do you have your local phone number and physical address on your website?
Do you have reputable links back to your site showing the correct name, address, and phone number?
Do you have a “claimed” Google Business page and Yelp page?
Are your social media business pages locally optimized?

Can you ignore local SEO?

Yes, if you’re looking to retire and/or close your business there’s no benefit in focusing on boosting your website traffic. For all other business owners, No! Google’s Pigeon update (search algorithm) makes local results more important than ever. Web traffic will automatically be led to businesses that are closer to the right consumer. This has a double effect on your SEO. The more you show up locally, the more traffic opportunities your website has, the more traffic you receive, the more google rewards your page by moving your business up in the rankings. More visibility also boosts your business’s credibility.

How can you optimize for local search engine results?

If you’ve been purchasing local advertising in a newspaper or television program, these results can have a one-time pop effect. Spending your resources on local search optimization has a steady consistent ROI. Start by making sure you website has a local address visible, claim your business on local review sites, and build healthy reputable backlinks to your website. As with all SEO efforts, it’s not something you do once and forget about it. It’s a slow steady fire that needs to be nurtured and fed by consistently adding new links and content. If you fail to add wood to fire, it burns out, right? In addition, your online presence should be monitored for reputation management as well. Are you getting reviews, suggestions for edits to your information, or comments from unhappy customers? Bad publicity or incorrect information will have a negative impact on your SEO and your business.

By choosing an experienced SEO company, like Wieting Design, we will build a Local SEO strategy that optimizes your local presence both on and off site, increases reputable links directing traffic to your site, and expands and monitors your online reputation.

Wieting Design | CT Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is no longer optional. In order to remain competitive in today’s internet marketplace, you need a successful online presence for your Connecticut (CT) business. At Wieting Design, our revenue-driven approach to SEO services in Connecticut is designed to attract, engage, and convert high-quality leads, faster. Our #1 focus is on obtaining long-term, residual results for our clients through organic search engine optimization (SEO).