Tag: seo

The Most Effective Strategies and Tips in 2023

  • 30/04/2023
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Mastering Cannabis SEO

As the demand for weed products on the market increases, cannabis SEO is quickly becoming crucial for businesses to be successful in this industry.

Cannabis dispensaries and other cannabis businesses face unique advertising challenges. SEO for the cannabis industry is the only way that your website will get any traffic, as most platforms don’t allow paid advertising.

Learning cannabis SEO on your own is ineffective, as it can be complex to navigate and ineffective if you don’t know what you’re doing. Using a professional cannabis SEO agency is the best way to put your website on the first page of Google.

Cannabis SEO vs. Other Industries

The cannabis industry has been evolving rapidly in the United States over the last 10 years. As more states loosen regulations, the demand for weed has surged. The market is estimated to reach over $31.8 billion in annual sales by the end of 2023.

You’d be hard-pressed to visit a city in a legal state and not find more than a couple of dispensaries available. The online cannabis market is booming as well, with website-based dispensaries providing cannabis to those who cannot visit a physical location.

The cannabis marketing vertical is highly competitive. This is largely because cannabis brands have to use SEO as their main form of advertising due to the regulations surrounding weed.

Cannabis SEO also presents a unique problem in that it is constantly evolving based on trends and ever-changing regulations. Customers are doing more research than ever before  and as such, changing their user search intent.

Keywords don’t work on their own in cannabis SEO. With the advent of voice options on devices, long-tail queries create organic searches, providing cannabis  brands with a way to specifically target their audience.

For example, customers are now taking advantage of voice options on their devices, which means their search queries are more complex. Instead of searching “CBD near me,” they are searching “Where is there a store that sells CBD near me?”

Why Should You Use SEO for Cannabis Companies?

The simple answer is that organic search results from SEO strategies work. Organic search results accounted for 41% of website traffic for retail and eCommerce websites. This means that it outperforms both display advertising and social media campaigns.

One of the main issues with marketing cannabis is that, since the industry is so new to the US, people aren’t as warmed up to the idea of buying weed yet. It takes a lot of time to develop a brand that people trust. On top of that, figuring out where you can promote your brand can be a bit of a hurdle.

An SEO company can develop a strategy to help gain the trust of your customers by understanding what it is that they’re searching for. Everyone has questions, and if your website can provide the answers, you’ll become credible and recommended on search engines. SEO specialists know this and can help drive that traffic to your site through diligent keyword research and other

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9 SEO Tips for Writing FAQs That Win Rich Snippets

  • 28/04/2023
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Frequently asked questions (FAQs) are often used as a clump of generalized questions and answers on a single FAQ page. However, they can work much harder to improve your organic search rankings, even earning you rich results when correctly implemented for search engine optimization (SEO).

When Google adds extra information to a standard search result listing, it’s called a rich result or rich snippet. FAQ-rich results (shown below) are just one of the many forms of rich snippets available, including reviews, how-to, videos, sitelink search boxes, and more.

Google uses FAQs to help provide answers to searchers directly in the search results. FAQ-rich results are also good for your site, though, because they make your results more visible and help push the competition lower on the page.

The Benefits of Using Optimizing FAQs

The power of FAQs goes beyond answering your customer’s most frequently asked questions. When you place optimized FAQs on various pages on your site — category pages, product pages, information pages, blog posts — you are enhancing the page with more useful content and providing a better user experience. FAQs allow you to work question-based keywords naturally onto the page. You can also add internal links in the answer section to increase the flow of link authority through your site.

Frequently asked questions are excellent for eCommerce clients, as there are many questions that customers have when purchasing products. You can stand out among the competition by answering searchers’ most frequently asked questions.

Triggering Rich Results with faqPage Schema

To enable FAQ-rich snippets to display in Google’s search results, you’ll need to mark up your FAQs with faqPage structured data. This structured data, which is just data that informs a search engine what type of information it’s crawling, helps Google determine whether a piece of content should be eligible for rich results or not. However, using structured data doesn’t guarantee that Google will show your content as rich results in the organic search results for a given search query. To see how your marked-up FAQs could appear in the SERPs, try testing your pages with Google’s Rich Results Test.

9 Tips for Writing Optimized FAQs

If you are trying to win the FAQ-rich results in organic search, we have compiled nine of the best ways to optimize your frequently asked questions with SEO in mind. Here are nine tools and ideas that you can use to help choose the best types of questions to include based on the things people search for.

  1. AnswerThePublic

This tool gives you suggestions of the types of questions people are asking related to a specific keyword you enter. The downside to this tool is that there is no data on search volume, but it gives you a starting point with which to do additional keyword research. For example, if you were to input the keyword “lipsticks” into the tool, this is what it would look like:

AnswerThePublic will give you “Questions” in a graphic that can be downloaded into a spreadsheet. When

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5 Tips for Using Images and Video for SEO

  • 24/04/2023
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Listen

NEW! Listen to articles

When seeking to improve organic search result rankings, you often first evaluate keywords, content, backlinks, metadata, and the likes. And although those are important to the SEO workflow, it’s also important to consider high-quality images and videos.

Images and video ensure that your content is in front of potential customers—in Web search listings, Google News, Google Discover, Image Search, and elsewhere in search results.

The time and effort you spend on SEO is vital to connecting with new customers: Fully 61% of B2B decision-makers start the buying process with a Web search, while a whopping 87% of retail shoppers do the same—vastly exceeding other channels, including displays and social media.

So, how can you improve the rankings of your websites, content, apps, products, and business listings in search engines, whether Google, Bing, Yahoo, or others?

Optimizing imagery can be a game changer for businesses looking to boost their SEO strategy. In fact, it has become increasingly important over the last few years; many search results now contain images, and in some situations search algorithms require imagery in order to rank in content.

That can be seen in this screenshot of Google search results for “conference room” from an incognito browser in the US. Imagery appears in a large amount of space at the top of the results page, and it is therefore critical for ranking.

Google search for 'conference room' results

Here are five tips on how to use imagery and videos for stronger SEO drivers.

1. Use stock photos and stock imagery if they look authentic and relevant

You don’t need original imagery for your company’s content to rank. Stock photos and imagery can actually be good for SEO.

We often see iStock’s content in our customers’ search results and in featured modules, proving that the original imagery isn’t necessary and the old myth that stock photos impede SEO just isn’t true.

Stock imagery and video work well to represent the content they’re paired with for organic search, and they are used around the world every day.

For best SEO results, choose imagery that helps customers identify with your brand, the content you’re creating, and that content’s objectives.

2. Prioritize high-quality images and use the right file size and dimensions

As of May 2022, more than 50% of searches had a group of images or carousel of images in the organic search results on Google. That number has grown by more than three times in just the last 10 years. Choosing high-quality and correctly sized imagery is important for making the most of such results.

Use a high-resolution image—at least 1,200 pixels (px) wide—and one with an aspect ratio of 16×9, 4×3, or 1×1. When selecting images, make sure your images aren’t too big, or of low quality or resolution. For example, if your hero image space is 1200 px wide and 628 px high, do not use an image

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Tips For Social Search Engine Optimization

  • 22/04/2023
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Vice President, Digital at Clearbridge Branding Agency, overseeing clients’ digital and social media efforts.

Search engine optimization (SEO) has been around in various iterations for over 20 years. Traditional SEO focuses on optimizing a website’s content and structure to improve its ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs) for relevant keywords. This typically involves tactics such as keyword research, on-page optimization and link-building. But what is social SEO?

Social SEO focuses on optimizing a brand’s presence and visibility on social media platforms, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram, among others. This can include creating and sharing high-quality content, engaging with followers and building a strong social media following.

The goal of social SEO is to drive more traffic to a website from social media platforms, as well as to improve the brand’s visibility and credibility. It’s especially important as social marketers are seeing a shift by some users moving away from using traditional SERPs like Google and Yahoo, instead utilizing social media platforms as search engines.

Optimize YourPage

The first order of business is to optimize your social media pages and profiles. To get started, determine the most important keywords relevant to your business. These keywords should be what you want your organization to be found for when someone searches for a particular product or service. Then, add copy into the about and description sections of your page using those same keywords. On the company’s page, be sure to check that addresses and phone numbers are added and correct. Also, remember to ensure that the website link is visible and working properly.

Optimize Creative

Next, when creating images for posts, be sure to include alt text. Not only is this important for social SEO, but it also assists with ADA (the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990) compliance. Image alt text describes the appearance or what is happening in your image, so remember to describe the image in the alt text section and include any relevant keywords.

Images aren’t the only creative you should be optimizing. Subtitles are also beneficial in video content, and while certain platforms like Instagram have auto-generated captions, manually adding subtitles will get your keywords on the screen. This will provide context for search engine crawlers and can improve SERP rankings for your creatives and keywords.

Aim For Engagement

Engagement and referral traffic (traffic that comes from posting clicks to your website or blog) can also help with SEO. Quality content is key for social SEO, but also because followers are most likely to engage with content that compels them to take action. Actions could be to learn more about a product or service, read a blog, download a white paper or even play a game—and, hopefully, encourage them to come back for more.

Strive to make the content valuable and shareworthy with compelling captions and appealing visuals, as this can help boost engagement and widen your audience while improving social SEO. The best content tells a story and influences audiences to share—so give them

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6 Technical SEO Tips to Improve Website Traffic

  • 13/04/2023
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If you have great website content that other sites link back to, you’ll rank highly in search engine results. But that is not enough to ensure success; if your technical SEO is lacking, you’re limiting how well your website will do in Google searches.

That’s why it’s important to get technical SEO right. We’ll examine what technical SEO is and share our top six technical SEO tips for getting high traffic and more conversions.

What is technical SEO?

Google “spiders” crawl hundreds of millions of websites every day to collect the information they need to power search results. The time Google spends on your site is limited, and it’s your responsibility to make the job as easy for these spiders as possible.

You need to do four things to get an advantage:

1. Fix your site structure.

Ensure that the structure of your website is simple and logical. If it’s easy for your visitors to find what they want on your site, it’s easy for Google, which will reward you by indexing more of your pages.

2. Add labels and metadata.

Follow these tips to help Google understand what’s on every page:

  • Label each part of a page with descriptives such as “navbar,” “footer” and “article.”
  • Add alt tags to images, graphs and charts to describe their content.
  • Provide a page title and meta description.

3. Secure your website.

Your website needs to be secure. Make sure you have a secure certificate so that your URL starts with https://.

4. Make your site fast.

Your website needs to load fast on any device, so go for a responsive design. [Read related article: How Page Load Speed Affects Customer Behavior.]

All of this sounds more complicated than it is. You just need to put these four factors into your website from the moment you start designing and writing it.

Bottom line: Each search engine has a crawl budget – the number of pages it indexes on a given day. You can get search engines to crawl far more of your site if you take care of technical SEO.

Technical SEO tips to increase traffic and conversions

If you’re building a website for the first time or you want to improve your current site’s rankings, follow these six steps:

1. Choose a secure, reliable host.

Selecting a top web hosting service is important for two reasons. First, Google confirmed back in 2014 that site security was an important ranking factor. Given two equal sites – one with secure HTTPS hosting and one without – the site with secure hosting will always rank higher.

Second, website downtime hurts your rankings badly. The first time Google finds nothing there when it crawls your site, each page on your website can drop two ranking spots.

If the search engine’s spiders keep finding nothing to crawl, Google starts visiting your site less often, and it’s really hard to come back from that. Therefore, it’s important to choose a hosting service that has as little downtime

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