Topic: Search Engine Optimization

Digital Marketing in 2021

As we enter the second year of COVID-19 digital marketing has never been more important. While COVID-19 upended business activity all over the world, at Insiteful Solutions, based in Markham, Ontario, we were lucky to be in the position to pivot quickly to help all of our clients restructure their websites and make sure that they all had e-commerce capability for their businesses. As Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts we also made sure our client’s SEO programs were up to date and responsive to worldwide events.

With the complexity and strain that COVID-19 has caused, it can be easy for companies and their marketing teams to forget about the vital role SEOs and the role they play in the success of your business. But now more than ever we are encouraging all of our clients to re-dedicate energy and resources to Search Engine Optimization. Maintaining and building your company’s online presence is the most important aspect of digital marketing in 2021; by positioning your company at the top of the search engine results pages you will save marketing dollars and further your company’s brand.

Successful Search Engine Optimization programs take time and dedication, at Insiteful Solutions we are experts in SEO optimization and have helped hundreds of clients achieve superior rankings across all search engines. Every year the algorithm’s for Google and other search engines evolve and digital marketers have to keep up with these changes. At Insiteful Solutions, we design our SEO strategies based on data-driven results and make sure our clients are always at the forefront of industry trends.

For 2021 these are the main areas we are focusing on for our clients.

Mobile-First Indexing

Without a doubt, mobile-first indexing on Google is the most important thing for digital marketers to focus on. What is mobile-first indexing? Simply, Google has announced that instead of using desktop search engines to rank websites they will instead use a website’s mobile ranking. This is a massive shift in SEO’s, the original change was scheduled to take place in September of 2020 but this change has been moved to March of 2021. If you have an older website then you will 100% need to make sure it is mobile friendly. All new websites we work on are designed to work on mobile phones as well as desktops. If you have an older site and you haven’t made this change (it is estimated nearly 30% of sites aren’t ready for the March 2021 deadline), then your company may be in for a rude awakening. Even if your company is the #1 ranked site on Google for your industry – without a mobile friendly site your ranking could literally plummet overnight. Why is Google Doing This? It is estimated that by 2020 there were 3.5 billion smartphone users worldwide, and the forecast for 2021 is that purchases made on mobile phones will exceed $1 trillion. The incredible global reliance on mobile phones has changed the way Google does business.

Local Google Rankings

Google has also made a pledge to improve customer service and part of that is supplying users with localized SEO results. So, if for example, you are in downtown Toronto and you are searching for a florist, Google will automatically send you results based on your geographic location. This means that it is imperative that your company make sure that you are located on Google Maps and that you optimize your listing by including all the basic information for your company (name, address, phone number etc.) making sure to include the keywords related to your business.

User Engagement

Another major change for Google will be how they gauge user engagement. Keywords have been the main way that websites can increase their ranking. In the near future that method of manipulating the algorithm, by repeating keywords over and over again in the content of your website, will no longer work. Instead, the algorithms will be looking for how you engage users to your website. Visitors clicking on embedded videos or clicking to pages within your website can help engage users and have them stay longer, this will help with the new Google SEO algorithm. Having users like, link and share parts of your website content will also assist your digital presence and SEO Google ranking.

Passages

Last October Google made the shift that instead of indexing just pages they would also index passages within the page. Previously in a 20 paragraph page, the 18^th or 19^th paragraph might not even register for Google’s index. But now Google is searching for more than just keywords, they are looking for meaningful passages where questions are answered and vital information is shared. This means that more attention is going to need to be paid to the written content of your website.

Artificial Intelligence for your SEO

Artificial Intelligence has been around since the 1950s and is a term that actually covers numerous technologies. In a simple definition, Artificial Intelligence allows machines to perform specific tasks on the same level or better than humans. You may not realize it but if you use Siri or Alexa you are using Artificial Intelligence. When you receive recommendations from Amazon or your favourite streaming service that is another form of Artificial Intelligence which evaluates your past activity and then with this data recommends other purchases or programs. In 2021 Artificial Intelligence will continue to influence how users engage with websites and will be used to help serve up answers to queries in the search engine of your website. Artificial Intelligence powered SEO tools will be used by companies to determine and define website content, increase search traffic and manage local and global listings.

Insiteful Solutions is dedicated to helping existing and new clients grow their business and respond to global changes, COVID-19 related or otherwise. If you haven’t prepared your company’s website for Google’s upcoming mobile indexing change we highly recommend you get in touch with us to do this as soon as possible. Insiteful Solutions can help you with all of your Digital Marketing and SEO and website needs – get in touch today so we can get started. 905-947-8235 or you can use our Contact Us Form

SEO

At Insiteful Solutions, we work with clients in Markham and across the GTA to improve their websites and their SEO rankings. Now it is more important than ever to focus on your business’s SEO and how to activate it for success. Our last blog delved into the world of SEO and provided lots of tips that you could employ. This blog will cover some of the remaining points to keep in mind when you are developing your website and the all-important SEO.

Your SEO will Help Your Ecommerce Efforts

Even before the current COVID-19 pandemic global e-commerce was exploding. It is estimated that by 2021 online purchases will reach $4.5 trillion and will account for 17.5% of all retail sales. If you are a business, whether you sell online or not, you need to invest the time and effort into improving your SEO as it is estimated that 81% of people research purchases online before they make a final decision of what to purchase. Incredibly it’s also been reported that 75% of mobile searches end up with people visiting the store they researched within 24 hours and subsequently 30% of these visits result in an in-store purchase.

Growth in Mobile Traffic and Local SEO

At Insiteful Solutions, we have been working with clients for over 15 years addressing all aspects of their online digital marketing campaigns. One of the most important aspects of SEO is the growth of mobile traffic because so many people are using their phones to search things on Google or other search engines, the local search is an integral part to the success of a small or medium-sized business. Local SEO focuses digital results for a specific geographic area, this helps people close to your place of business find you faster. Your brand can work on messaging to target customers based on what town, city or province you happen to be located. At Insiteful Solutions, we will optimize your website content to link it to local citations and other relevant links to the location and sector your business operates in. We will also draw focus to your reviews on Yelp and Google and any other user review sites related to your industry.

Focus on Metadata

At Insiteful Solutions, we also work on your metadata. When you design your company’s website each page contains a space between the <head> tags to insert information about the contents of your page – that’s the metadata. You can review and update your metadata, this is often overlooked by businesses who still with their original site for far too long. Along with your content, your metadata should be refreshed at regular intervals.

Metadata is also connected to the ever-important keyword phrases that you develop to match your brand. The title metadata, for example, is responsible for the titles you see displayed at the top of a browser window and provides the headline within search engine results. At Insiteful Solutions, we will also help you develop your description metadata and keyword metadata. Your description metadata is the text that a search engine may use in your page search – it should be a brief informative description of what your website contains. Keyword metadata can be a few phrases made up of one to four words that describe what your business sells.

Keyword Use for ‘Click Here’ Links

Many businesses make the mistake of wasting links embedded within the text of your website. Including banal ‘click here’ links is a wasted opportunity as they have no search engine value; it is more helpful to use keywords related to your business will improve your search engine rankings as well as the ranking of the page you are linking to.

Alt Tags for Visuals and Videos

It is also important to use alt tags on your website when describing visual elements and embedded videos. For people that use text-only browsers or screen readers, this is very helpful and allows them to understand what is on your website. It also allows search engines to locate your page.

Indexing 101

Remember to check your indexing. Search engine indexing is the way in which a search engine collects, sorts and stores data for later use. This data is what informs the results for search engine queries. It is important to check your indexing to make sure Google (or other search engines) is capturing your data correctly. There are two ways you can check your indexing. The first way is to go to Google and type “site.yourdomain.com”, using this way will let you know quickly how many pages Google thinks your site has. The second way is to go to your search console and choose “index status”. Ideally, if you use both ways the numbers should match. By checking how your site is indexing you will be able to take advantage of Google analytics.

Investing in Your SEO

One of the main questions we receive from both old and new clients is how much should they invest in SEO and a quick second question is how long will it take to see results from their investment. At Insiteful Solutions we advise clients to think of SEO work as a long-term project whose investment will pay off in a few months; this wait time between and investment and results can often be off-putting to the people in charge of the SEO budget. But skimping on your SEO will be detrimental to your business in the long run. By working with SEO experts like Insiteful Solutions you will be able to work efficiently and economically to achieve your SEO goals.

At Insiteful Solutions, we work with clients to create brand new websites or improve ones they may already have. Having been in business for over 15 years you can be confident that as the GTA’s leading SEO experts we can lead you through the process of improving your internet search rankings which will result in more clients and customers buying your service or product. Contact us today to get started on your improved SEO results.

Insiteful Solutions SEO

The Important Role of SEO in Digital Marketing

Insiteful Solutions are SEO experts. For over a decade we have been helping companies in Toronto and the GTA and across Canada build websites and develop digital marketing campaigns that propel them to success. Every company should have knowledge of what an SEO is and why it is vital to your company’s success in reaching potential customers. At Insiteful Solutions, we have worked with hundreds of companies to improve their SEO ratings and are always excited to pass on the knowledge we have to others.

SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. It is the practice of increasing the quality and quantity of traffic to websites by increasing the visibility of a website to gain spontaneous, un-paid, visitors to a website. It is vital for your company to invest in promoting your SEO efforts. At Insiteful Solutions we take the time to learn about your company, your desired customer and we analyze and implement unique strategies to make sure your company’s website ranking is as strong as possible.

You may not realize it but every time you do a Google search you are witnessing the power of the SEO. If you own, for example, a flower shop in Ottawa you will want your company to pop up on the first or second page of the Google search. If your company doesn’t appear until page 40 it is highly unlikely people would order from your shop. Investing in your SEO can’t be underestimated – if your customers can’t find you they can’t buy your product or service.

While Google isn’t the only internet search engine it is by far the most powerful. Recent estimates that there is a mind-boggling 3.5 billion global internet searches a day, and Google has a whopping 92% of this traffic. Dedicating resources to your SEO as part of your digital marketing strategy can also help search engines locate, crawl and index your website in their catalogue.

To increase your SEO you will most likely need to make certain changes to the design of your website and make sure the content you create is attractive to a search engine. With time and some effort, you can greatly increase your company’s chances of landing on the first or second Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Google (and other search engines such as Bing or Yahoo) want to provide the highest quality products to people who use their sites; if they produce search results for shoddy products people are less likely to use their search engine. This means that your website has to be one of quality and highly relevant to what an individual has searched for.

To make sure the people using their search engines find what they are looking for Google has devised a search algorithm that will scan (or crawl) different websites; from this, they are able to identify the most relevant websites that will be valuable for people. They also scan for related topics and keywords – this is how the search engine links up searches using related terms and keywords with websites. The search engine algorithm will also scan the site to figure out if it is user-friendly or not – the easier your website is to navigate the higher ranking you will receive on the search engine page.

There are numerous other factors that impact the success of your SEO:

One of the most important, yet often under-considered, factors in SEO success is the content of your site. Your website needs to contain up to date, relevant information about your business and the product or service you deliver. Beyond how this helps the Google algorithm identify your site as valuable, potential customers are more likely to spend time on your site if they see that it is constantly updated with quality material.

Before you start to create content for your site you will need to determine keywords and phrases related to your business. If you are, for example, a bakery in Toronto, you will want to include words related to a bakery: bake, bread, cupcakes, delicious, fresh etc. You will also want to include geographic parameters: Toronto, GTA, Ontario, Canada. Your keywords and phrases will help the search engine algorithms identify what you do and in turn inform people searching for, taking our example into consideration, bakeries in Toronto.

There are numerous ways you can create content for your website; its best to develop a variety of different forms of content. Everything you create should be well-written and most important, relevant to your company’s product or service. Here are some content ideas for your site:

Blog Posts

Blog Posts should be at least 1,000 words and be written in a clear, concise manner. The content of your blog post should focus on keywords and phrases related to your business.

How-To Guides

Creating and posting explanatory content can attract customers who wish to learn in-depth about your product. A How-To Guide is a way you can show potential customers how unique your offering is.

Articles

If there are informative articles published about your product you can repost them. People that look for the author’s name or topic will search and could find your site.

Videos

If you have videos of your product or service available embedding them into your website is a great way to increase visits to your site.

You also want to remember to include your keywords and phrases throughout your social media channels.

By investing time and energy into improving your SEO you can most definitely boost your search engine rankings and drive more business to your site. A proper SEO campaign can take weeks to months to actualize – so it’s important to get started today!

If you’re not happy with how your company is currently doing in your search engine ranking we recommend you give us a call today. At Insiteful Solutions, we apply our years of experience to each and every client and their SEO. We can help improve your ranking and drive business to your site.

Give us a call today (905-947-8235 x 102) or pop us an email so we can help your business grow.