Welcome to the winter edition, of what is now becoming a monthly roundup of what I consider to be some of the best SEO and internet marketing article. Without much ado, here are some of the most exciting and informative articles I came across during the month of December 2018.
“Tips To Increase The Website’s ROI With A Footer” by Prasid Chakraborty on coregensolutions blog.
- Useful Hints That Could Help You Out
- Focus Completely On Your Main Idea
- Using The Footer As Your Support Unit
- Copy The Page’s Primary Features
- Proper Organization And Order
- Socialization Within The Footer Area Is Important
“Part 1 of 3: SEO of the 50 biggest E-commerce websites in the UK” by Kenneth Wernst Christensen on novicell blog.
Conclusions:
- The SEO visibility score for the 50 websites on average decreased by 9.17%.
- The highest increase in SEO visibility is for Travel Republic (78.96%).
- The biggest SEO visibility decrease was seen for Itsu (92.75%).
- British Airway, EasyJet and ASOS are the websites with most incoming links due to high quality, shareable content.
- Companies are still lacking on technical SEO, long redirect chains and Hreflang were twoof the points that were especially surprising in the analysis.
- Looking at PageSpeed, the average scores were 75.14% for mobile and 58.16% for desktop. The best performers were Ticketmaster, Expedia and John Lewis.
- On the other hand, Tesco, Screwfix and Qvcuk have problems with PageSpeed. The worst we recorded was Itsu with a PageSpeed score of 43% on both mobile and desktop.
- The On-Page SEO analysis showed that websites still have major problems with URLs, H-tags and word counts below 300 words.
“Blueprint: How to Rank on Page One using The SEO Imitation Framework” by Reeve Yew on funnelduo blog.
- Traditional Keyword Research Strategy
- Competitor-based Keyword Research Strategy
- Step-by-step to Competitor Research using Ahrefs
- Top, Mid, Bottom Content Funnel
- Blueprint for New Websites
“71 Powerful Amazon Ranking Factors that Rank Your Products #1 of Amazon (Updated for 2018)” by Sarwar Abdullah on vatask blog
- Product Title Factors
- Multimedia Factors
- Product Bullet Points Factors
- Product Description Factors
- Product Specifications Factors
- Product Listing Completeness Factors
- Customer Reviews Factors
- Sales and Product Listing History Factors
- Customer Satisfaction Factors Factors
- Outside Traffic Sources Factors
- Brand Factors
- Seller Account Authority Factors
“Google Search Algorithm Update Hits Friday November 30th?” by Barry Schwartz on SE Round Table. There seems to be another update on November 30th according to Barry and some tweets for webmaster forums:
Yeah, I only started noticing it after around 6-7pm EST. I think the coming days will show some movement in the trackers.
Yeah, I just started noticing some big changes in the SERPs. Quite a few of my articles which ranked well still have been thrown to pages 2 and 3.
“7 Search Ranking Factors Analyzed: A Follow-Up Study” by Jeff Baker on Moz blog.
Keys:
- Time: It took 100 days or more for an article to fully mature and show its true potential. A content marketing program probably shouldn’t be fully scrutinized until month 5 or 6 at the very earliest.
- Links: Links matter, I’m just terrible at generating them. Shame.
- Word count: It’s not about the length of the content, in absolute terms or relative to the competition. It’s about what is written and how resourceful it is.
- MarketMuse: We have proven that MarketMuse works as it prescribes, but there is no added benefit to breaking records.
- On-page SEO: Our data demonstrates that it still matters. We all still have a job.
- Competitor content length: We weren’t successful at blowing our competitors out of the water with longer content.
- Keyword density: Just stop. Join us in modern times. The water is warm.
“12 Tips for Creating Signup Forms That Convert” by Neil Patel on Quick Sprout blog.
- Reduce the number of form fields
- Know when to use one or two columns
- Offer an incentive to sign up
- Enable autocomplete
- Allow social signups
- Avoid CAPTCHAs
- Focus on opt-in placement
- A/B test your CTA
- Highlight incomplete information
- Showcase social proof
- Use sentence case
- Eliminate distractions
“7 of the Most Important SEO Takeaways This Year” by Steven van Vessum on Search Engine Journal.
- This Year’s Google Updates Were Unparalleled (And No One Really Knows What Changed)
- It’s Google’s World – We Just Live in It
- Google’s Mobile-First Index Hasn’t Had Much of an Impact (Yet)
- SEO Pros Are Creatures of Habit & Dislike Change
- DuckDuckGo’s Growth Has Picked Up, by a Lot
- Search Intent Is Extremely Important
- Google’s Far from Perfect
“9 of the Biggest Social Media Monitoring Mistakes (and How to Avoid Them)” by Aleh Barysevich on Social Media Today.
- Not making use of filters when setting up a search
- Not including all brand name alternatives in a query
- Not monitoring your competition
- Not paying enough attention to sales opportunities
- Not taking the time to learn Boolean
- Not tracking industry keywords
- Not making use of analytics
- Not taking the time to deal with negative reviews of your company
- Not researching your target audience
“6 Facebook Lead Generation Mistakes + 4 Proven Ways to Get More Leads” on adespresso.
4 proven ways are the following:
#1 – Offer something for free
#2 – Pop the question
#3 – A video’s worth a thousand leads
#4 – Exploit the power of mobile (SMS included)
“72 SEO Statistics To Understand SEO in 2019” by Hristina Nikolovska on seotribunal blog.
SEO Statistics You Have To Be Aware in 2018
- 67k searches are performed on Google every second
- 39% of all global ecommerce traffic comes from search
- 93% of all online experiences begin with a search engine
- Nearly 80% of users ignore paid ads in search results
- 50% of all searches will be voice searches by 2020
- 58% of searches come from mobile
- 97% of page-one results have at least one image on the page
- 46% of all Google searches are local
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