Better Link Building for Your Business

Between the Penguin update, selective publishers and other changes in Local SEO, many businesses are reevaluating their link building efforts in the New Year, while other companies have abandoned the strategy all together. Fact of the matter is, link building STILL MATTERS and our boutique digital marketing agency, Tandem Interactive, wants you to better understand how to optimize your online marketing efforts with these updated tips for link building for your business.

1. Connect with local bloggers – Build relationships with people in your area that regularly write about local businesses to gain a mention and/or link to your company. For example, if you own a barbeque restaurant, you’ll benefit from building a relationship with a local blogger that is likely to write about the best barbeque joints in the area.

2. Go after local awards – Almost every city awards local businesses for specific efforts put forth in the community. Find out what awards are up for grabs in next year and if your business is eligible for any. Cities and local organizations usually always post awards results online and link to recipients.

3. Build out a local resource page – Put thought into the information you provide on this page to give visitors insight into things they actually want to know. For example, if your local spa is located in Fort Lauderdale, our South Florida digital marketing agency suggests creating a list of the best beaches to visit in South Florida. If it contains useful information, you’re likely to gain a decent amount of links to your site.

4. Utilize local networking sites – Websites, such as Meetup.com, are the perfect place to head to find groups that have commonality. Target a specific group you think may be interested in your business and invite them to host a meeting at your location. If they agree, you’ll not only drive traffic to your physical location but also score a link to your site.

5. Seek links from reputable resources – Gaining links from high-quality publishers increases your authority with search engines, such as Google. Work on earning these inbound links by creating content that is too good to ignore.

6. Hire a reputable digital marketing firm – Experts will always have the upper hand when it comes to properly marketing your local business. Tandem Interactive includes a team of skilled SEO managers that specialize in link building, Local search, pay-per click advertising, content creation, reputation management and more. Contact our team to learn more about optimizing your local business’ marketing efforts online today! 

How to Remove a Massive Google Penalty in 5 Easy Steps

It may be surprising to some business owners that a Google penalty from spammy backlinks can greatly affect their SEO and, in time, can greatly affect their business. For those who may not be familiar with what link building is, it is links on the internet that form a relationship between pages and sites that are important to both search engines and marketers. For instance, Google uses links to crawl the web, discover new pages, calculate the popularity of those pages, and also determine the relevancy of results to a searcher’s query.

So, you can only guess how important it is to link to a reputable website. Tandem Interactive is constantly checking and ensuring the quality of a perfect link.  But, for those who have been suffering from a manual Google penalty from spammy backlinks, here are 5 steps to recovery.

1. Creating a penalty removal sheet. 
The first step needed is to collect all incoming links pointing to your business’ website. When doing this, it is important to download all links from Google Search Console. The process is fairly simple and it involves supplementing with links from Majestic.com and sorting them on a simple Excel spreadsheet.

2. Identifying artificial links. 
Distinguishing artificial links is your next step. Unnatural links can include spammy keyword articles, link directories, bookmarks, blog comments, malware, guest posts, keyword footer links, and scrapers. Typically anything where content exists to influence rankings more than genuine content. Also, unreliable link directories or places where key-word stuffing is involved, or even giveaway links where users leave comments in return for a chance to win paid services are generally artificial.

3. Submission to Google. 
Once submitted, Google will start the process of revoking the penalties and will return links that are deemed artificial by Google. The Webspam Team will show you specific links that were sent, that are deemed official by Google.

4. Identifying the Returned links. 
If Google returns with links that are artificial, then it is best to go over these links and ensure that they are official and okay to link to. Distinguishing good links from bad links can be difficult, but general rule of thumb for Link Building at Tandem Interactive is: if it looks spammy then it is!

5. Second Submission. 
The last and final step is to submit the corrected links and any other explanations. In return, Google will revoke all penalties.

How to Read and Understand Majestic for Link Building

The first Initial reaction most people have when introduced to Majestic is usually that of confusion. While many expert Majestic users find it easy to understand, some still struggle with the ability to read it correctly. Thankfully, Majestic was designed with the user in mind. With the help of this Site Explorer, Tandem Interactive has utilized all the data collected from Majestic to perform awesome link building tactics for franchises.

Majestic is a backlink analysis company that constantly analyzes domains on the Internet. It provides a detailed analysis to backlink information surrounding a specific domain, sub-domain, path, or URL.  We have broken down the website’s features into sections for an easier way to grasp the Majestic concept.

Starting at the Majestic homepage, you will find a search box where you can enter the domain, URL, or search phrase you wish to analyze. On top of this search engine box, there is a compare button you may press to compare multiple URL’s. Once you have entered your domain, the site explorer results summary page appears. Here you will find a summary of all the data collected for that domain.

Trust Flow Chart. At the top of the summary page you will find the trust flow and the citation flow, which is analyzed through a pie chart.  The numbers shown from 0-100 tell us the relative quality combined with the trust & quantity of citation of links to that URL. It is broken down further in the Topical Trust Flow section where you can see the trust flow by category or topic.

The Domain Information. Underneath the trust flow charts is the domain information center. This area provides an overview of the backlink figures collected from Majestic’s data. You will find highlights such as how many referring domains or backlinks the URL has or how many links the URL currently has from specific topics.

The Link Profile Chart is located next to the domain information. This section maps out the two key link evaluation metrics: the citation flow and trust flow. These easy to understand numbers from 0-100 show how effective a URL is based on the flow of links.

The Backlink History Chart plots the creation of new backlinks split between external backlinks and referring domain figures. Selecting either chart takes you to the backlink history tool, which allows you to compare up to five domains and to record backlink data side by side.

The Backlinks section shows your most valued backlinks sorted by the URL flow metrics scores, trust and citation. Here you will see the source URL, Anchor text, and target URL, as well as the citation flow and trust flow scores, any flags, and the dates in which the links were first indexed.

At the top of the page where the tabs are located, you can find individual tabs to all the sections in the summary page. Each page goes into further detail about the URL.

Our link building reports for franchises are measured with the help of Majestic and we continue to find trusted backlinks for our clients through this site explorer.

Creating the Perfect LinkedIn Pulse Post for B2B Industries

LinkedIn is all about representing yourself and/or your company, what you know, who you know, and how you know them. In February of 2014, LinkedIn announced Pulse, a popular newsreader for web and mobile that would make LinkedIn even more of a “professional publishing platform.” Although Pulse has been part of LinkedIn for over two years now, it seems as if a lot of B2B industries are not utilizing the publishing platform that can connect them with millions of executives, entrepreneurs, and workers. In fact, roughly 90% of CEOs turn to LinkedIn as their daily news update, since they can find industry-related topics. If you are a B2B business, NOW is the time to dominate LinkedIn Pulse. BUT, don’t jump the gun just yet – publishing to LinkedIn is nothing like creating blogs for your company. The audience, the tone, and the overall appeal of content on LinkedIn Pulse are unique.

Surveys have shown that the majority of companies, corporations, and agencies who are not yet publishing on LinkedIn simply don’t know how, so here’s Tandem’s guide to publishing on LinkedIn Pulse:

Navigation and Implementation: Creating the Perfect Pulse Post

·         The main status bar of your LinkedIn should denote: “Home,” “Profile,” “My Network,” “Jobs,” and “Interests.” Under the “Interests” section, you can select “Pulse” and then click “Publish a post.”

·         The second way to publish a post on LinkedIn is through your homepage, where it says “Share an update,” “Upload a photo,” or “Publish a post.”

·         While you are drafting up your piece to publish in LinkedIn Editor, the top left will give you current potential topics and related ideas in case you are experiencing writer’s block. However, Tandem recommends that businesses try to choose a topic that has not yet been fleshed out and published on Pulse, in order to try and dominate that discussion.

·         Choose your title wisely – a lot of the success of your published post is going to rely on your title. If your title is not either keyword rich or engaging, you can expect that it will not receive much engagement.

·         Every time you publish a post, your connections will receive a notification email that has the title of the post in it.

·         “How-To,” “List,” and “Visual” posts perform the best on LinkedIn; “Questions” do not.

Tandem Interactive is a boutique online marketing agency in South Florida, and is always implementing industry-best-practices for our clients, including LinkedInPulse articles. Your LinkedIn publication should not be a simple re-sharing of a blog or article on your website, but constructed to be informative for your industry, readable by executives and potential B2B partners, with a very soft sell. LinkedIn Pulse is a great way to show that you have the experience and knowledge that your profile denotes and gives you ownership to the content in which you publish on its platform.

Best Practices for Local SEO in 2016

With the majority of people turning to mobile devices to perform their searches, local SEO has become more crucial than ever.

Find out how you can enhance your local SEO efforts in 2016 from Fort Lauderdale online marketing agency, Tandem Interactive:

1. Geo-tag your images on Google My Business – Google My Business (GMB) now has a feature that allows you to tag the location of an image you upload to your GMB page. Many businesses have reported receiving great results from doing this.

2. Prepare for voice search – More people are becoming comfortable with using voice search on their phones, such as Siri and Google Now. In 2016, be sure your local SEO marketing agency is using voice-friendly keywords to prepare for the future of voice search.

3. Use an address in the area you are attempting to rank in – Even if you don’t have a physical location in that area, use a virtual office or mail forwarding service to claim an address in a desired city. For example, if you run your business from your home in Jacksonville, Florida but want to target customers locally in Miami, find a virtual office in Miami that offers mail forwarding services and obtain a unique address from them.

4.  Pay attention to your site’s Direct Data – Google is constantly improving on its ability to give people exactly what they are searching for. For example, if a person is searching for a hair salon, they will most likely want to know prices, hours of operation and services provided. Therefore, Google is going to show results for hair salons that list all or most of the pertinent information customers are looking for.

5. Acquire and respond to customer reviews – Encourage your customers to leave reviews on your Yelp and GMB pages. Businesses with 4 and 5 star reviews have greater authority and better local search results.

6. Update your local listing – Build your business’ online credibility by taking the time to complete a local SEO audit of your company to determine where you currently stand as far as listing consistency and completion. Software, such as Moz Local, makes this process easy and can be done for as little as $84 a year. Once you complete your local SEO audit, prepare a schedule to begin fixing any incorrect, inconsistent or missing listing information. Every listing should have the exact same name, address and phone number of your business.

7.  Make sure your site is mobile-friendly- Although our online marketing firm doesn’t consider this a “new” local SEO effort, there are still businesses that have yet to update their websites to mobile-friendly status. These businesses are significantly losing out on local visibility.

8.  Maintain presence on social media platforms – If you haven’t already, incorporate social media engagement into your local SEO strategy in 2016. Try to interact with your audience on a regular basis, whether it be twice a week or twice a month.    

Social Media Tips to Improve SEO

Using search and social data to create content was one of the biggest SEO trends in 2015, and it’s not going away anytime soon.

Long gone are the days of creating content for content’s sake, as search and social data are a huge part of increasing engagement for clients and to attract the right customers. While content is imperative to the conversion of customers, search optimization plays just as important of a role.

Social media presence can greatly increase your search rankings, while quality SEO can improve your social media reach. Having a website that is well integrated with social media platforms will start to define successful online marketing in 2016 more so than a site’s ranking. Having a prominent online presence means that companies will have to optimize their social media as well.

Coupled with the growing importance of mobile apps and the increasing amount of customers using it, social media content needs to be optimized for these searches. This means using vocabulary that customer’s use along with targeted keywords. Engaging content, high-quality images, and links back to the website’s blog will be one of the most important SEO trends in 2016; website development and social media are getting more and more integrated together.

In order to improve your SEO in 2016, check out these three social media tips from Tandem:

Optimizing posts. Pre-existing content allows for another way to search. Along with articles, Google favors popular social media updates in the top sections of its SERPs. In order to optimize a post, you need a strong anchor. It can be anything from a video, infographic, or a link to an article. Once you have a strong foundation, perfect your posts with text that is SEO optimized in order to grab your customer’s attention, as well as improve your chances of showing up in search results.

Brand awareness. Increasing your reputation on social media leads to increased brand awareness, which translates into more branded searches on Google. The more branded searches your company receives on Google, the higher it is going to rank for non-branded keywords. Social media will give your company greater search visibility across the board.

Number of followers. How many followers you have will play a major influence in your rankings. Because Google can detect the quality of your followers, building your brand following organically is imperative. Growing the number of followers you have may take a while, but it is effective; the key is to be consistent. Your brand should post consistently and uniquely, with helpful articles, tips, questions, and discussion starters shared on a regular basis. Following up with any users by engaging them in conversation are the key to growing your number of followers and to increasing your conversion rate. 

5 Google Analytic Strategies Critical to Measuring SEO Success

Unfortunately, Google does not provide a step-by-step set of instructions for optimization that encompasses every single website. Every website is unique and every Search Engine Optimization strategy is specific to each website and is critical to the website’s success. All of the websites on the World Wide Web represent new and interesting optimization challenges and all require a degree of experimentation. Most SEO strategies follow strict methods of testing, monitoring, and measuring so that we know what is working for your strategy and what is not working.

At Tandem Interactive, we know that keywords are a great measure of SEO success but, reporting solely on keywords devalues the marketer’s roles and does not paint a full picture of exactly why SEO is so important to an organization. Once you go beyond keyword rankings, marketing teams will be able to showcase what is truly effective, how organic search is bringing revenue and profit to a business. Fortunately, there is an amazing tool that is freely available to measure SEO success- Google Analytics!

SEO specialists know that every enterprise is unique and that each website has different metrics that contribute to its success; however, this blog aims to encompass the 5 universal Google Analytics techniques to convert data that directly correlates to the success of your business’s SEO efforts.

1.       Viewing only organic search traffic.

Contrary to popular belief, the decline in overall website traffic does not mean the loss is due to a decline in organic search traffic, which is a common conclusion drawn by companies. Digging a little deeper will actually reveal that organic traffic is up while other sources of traffic are down, resulting in an overall traffic decline.

The first step to looking at Organic Search traffic will be to open your Channel Grouping report, where you will be able to see traffic sources segmented by channels. Selecting the “Organic Search” channel will bring you to a more detailed report that includes only organic search metrics. From this report, you will be able to determine the top landing pages for search traffic, keywords that drive the most traffic, search engines that contribute the most to search traffic, top exit pages and much more.

2.       Measuring the quality of SEO traffic.

Many people hold the notion that “quality” is subjective and therefore cannot be measured. However, SEO agencies in South Florida believe that there are a lot of ways to measure the quality of a traffic source. One way to measure the improvement or decline in the quality of search traffic is via the Assisted Conversions report. 

You will have the option to select a month-to-month comparison of conversions directly from search, or conversions where search played a role but is not directly attributed to the conversion. If you noticed a decline in conversions from search, yet your overall search traffic is steady, it’s easy to determine that the traffic from search is either un-qualified or of high quality.

3.       Identification of slow landing page time.

This aspect to an SEO strategy is often overlooked. Slow loading pages affect the user’s experience and have become a major factor in search rankings. If a company is investing time and money into SEO and keyword rankings, it will be useless if your website has slow loading times.

The report that measures page load times will show the average page load time site wide, and the average exit percentage on a page-by-page basis. As page load time surpasses the site’s overall average, the exit percentage will sky rocket. Once the page load time is optimized, you will be able to compare the new report with the old data to show how much search traffic is being retained.

4.       Assign monetary value to organic traffic.

This is a good strategy for businesses who seek a more traditional way of understanding the value that SEO strategies bring to their business by assigning a dollar value to their organic traffic results. To assign a monetary value to a site’s organic traffic, you can compare how much the keywords would cost if they were purchased in a Google AdWords campaign, then cross compare them with the keywords that are being targeted in their SEO campaign. This is great strategy to visualize the amount of money a business’s SEO strategy is saving them, that they would otherwise have to pay for.

5.       Create an SEO dashboard.

Present Google Analytics and SEO data with the use of the built in Dashboard interface, which will pull all of the individual reports into a single view that is easy to access, share and print. Having this dashboard will also cut down on time spent reviewing, analyzing, and interpreting Analytics, which will allow you to focus on physically doing the SEO work.