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Apr 03 2020

How to Effectively Build Website Authority for SEO

Your website’s been up and running, producing relevant and valuable content that’s been resonating with your audience. This is a good sign that your site is doing great in terms of putting the right message out there. However, you notice that your site still isn’t performing as expected. There seems to be something amiss in your content marketing strategy and you’re not getting the results that you were working for.

You think you have all the bases covered in terms of optimizing content for your website, but one crucial thing that often gets overlooked and even taken for granted is your site’s domain or website authority. This is another crucial factor in boosting your rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs).

What is domain or website authority?

Developed by marketing software company Moz, domain or website authority (DA) is a search engine score that predicts how a website will rank on SERPs. The score ranges from one to 100, with a higher number indicating a greater ability to rank. DA is calculated by evaluating various factors, which include linking root domains and the total number of links. These are all combined to determine a single DA score.

It should be noted that domain authority is not a metric used by Google as a determining factor in search rankings, so it has no direct effect on SERPs. However, the score can be used when comparing websites or tracking its “ranking strength” over time.

Domain authority is scored using a 100-point logarithmic scale, making it considerably easier to grow your score from 20 to 30 compared to climbing up from 70 to 80.

To give you a basic rundown, brand new websites will always start with a domain authority of one. Generally, sites with a large number of high-quality external links are at the top of the DA scale, while small businesses and websites with less inbound links may have a much lower DA score.

Since DA is meant to be a predictor of a website’s ranking ability, getting a high DA score shouldn’t be your only goal. You’ll need to take a look at those sites you’re directly in competition with on SERPs and aim to get a higher score.

Domain authority works best when used as a comparative metric instead of an absolute, concrete score when doing your research in SERPs and when finding out which sites have more powerful or relevant link profiles than others. Essentially, it’s a comparative tool, so there isn’t necessarily what one would describe as a “good” or “bad” DA score.

The metrics involved in knowing your website’s domain authority are integrated into dozens of SEO and online marketing platforms across the web. Using Moz, you can measure your DA through Link Explorer and MozBar, which is the marketing software’s free SEO toolbar. You can also do it through the SERP Analysis section of Keyword Explorer. Authority metrics are also incorporated into all of Moz’s pro campaign products, including its API.

Outside the Moz ecosystem, SEO Review Tools works perfectly fine, too. You can also use Ahrefs to find out your website’s score. However, it should be noted that this tool has a way of calculating domain authority differently, so the same site may have different ratings depending on the measuring tool you use.

Another thing to remember is that domain authority shouldn’t be confused with page authority since they’re entirely different things. While DA measures the predictive ranking strength of an entire domain or subdomain, page authority is used to measure the strength of a single page of a website.

Factors Affecting Website Authority

Several essential factors help determine your domain or website authority score. There may be up to 40 different elements that can influence a DA score, but here are the most important:

Linking Root Domains

This pertains to the number of unique backlinks earned by your website. If it has acquired 20 external links from two different sites, then this equates to only having two linking root domains. It’s better to earn a few links from an assortment of websites than getting many links from one. This will primarily help boost your rankings in SERPs.

MozRank

This metric is used to score the strength of your website’s links, taking into account not just the links pointing back to your site, but also their quality. In this case, quality trumps quantity, which means one good external link is far better than having ten with low quality. MozRank utilizes a scale from zero to 10, with three as the average website score.

MozTrust

Similar to MozRank, this metric is used to help understand the quality of your external links. The difference is, it’s a little more specific in a sense that it measures how closely your website is connected to trusted sites such as .edu or .gov websites. This works even if a trusted site links to another site that links to you (tier 2 links), which is also considered a sign of trust and helps boost your MozTrust rating.

Quality Content

There’s no question that content is one of the main factors in ranking a website, so it shouldn’t be surprising to learn that that quality of your website’s content is a determining factor for its domain authority. While your DA may help improve your ranking in SERPs, quality content also correlates closely with it.

Social Signals

Google makes use of social signals as one of the main factors in recognizing good quality content. In the case of sending out social signals, it’s safe to assume that a piece of content that’s liked, shared, and commented on many times must be of good quality. Moz uses these signals in scoring domain or website authority.

Search Engine Friendliness

This pertains to the use of SEO in conjunction with the site structure and your site’s user-friendliness. Site structure can influence usability in the sense that poor site structure can make your site difficult to navigate. It also makes it burdensome for search engines to crawl and index your website, which would eventually hurt your rankings. Overall, this is essential for maximizing domain authority score as well.

How to Build Your Website Authority

Having a low DA score right now doesn’t mean that you should throw in the towel and give up your efforts in improving your website. Conversely, if you already have a high DA score, it doesn’t mean that you can cease all efforts. You must always keep in mind that building website authority is a continuous process.

To start climbing that DA score ladder, there are different strategies that you can use. When executed effectively, your site will be on its way to getting that high DA score, turning it into an authoritative website that other sites would purposely link to.

1. Choose an SEO friendly domain name

If you’re just starting out, you should pick a domain name that’s relevant to your website. It should be relatively easy to remember, so your visitors won’t have a hard time returning to your site trying to recall what it is.

Your domain name can have a significant impact on your SEO efforts. An optimized domain name is one that tells people what your website is all about, and the products or services it offers, among other things. It allows them to recognize your brand, business, or what your site is all about, possibly making it stand out in a sea of search results and more likely to be clicked.

You can focus on branding with a good integration of keywords when coming up with a domain name. If you’re running a website that’s all about the ins and outs of carburetors in car engines, your domain name, for instance, can be “carburetorjunkie”—it’s easy to remember, and it contains the keyword of what your site is all about.

2. Optimize your website speed

Since July 2018, when Google had a pagespeed update, the search engine started rewarding sites that load fast—like less than one second fast. This is one other way to boost your website authority because page loading time also affects user experience. If your page loads slowly, your visitor clicks back to search results, reducing your average time on site and bounce rate.

Remember, better user experience generally results in higher website authority.

If your website is lacking in this department, you can consider switching to a better hosting service. Optimize your images, reduce the number of plugins, and minimize your JavaScript and CSS files—these are a few of the best methods to increase your website speed.

3. Consistently publish quality content

It goes without saying that you can never go wrong with publishing quality content, and you should do this on a regular and consistent basis to increase both your DA score and search rankings. Without quality content, that’s one less reason other sites will link to yours, quelling any hope of boosting your rankings.

4. Promote your content

Promotion is one great way of putting your content out there. You can use both paid and organic channels, which include pay-per-click advertising, influencer outreach, social media, email marketing, and syndication, among others. This method can help reach your target audience, and when users start to realize your site contains valuable content that could address their needs, your DA score will likely get a boost.

5. Include internal links in your content

Internal linking is often overlooked when creating content. But little do they know that it helps direct visitors to what they are trying to find, which in turn improves their user experience. This means that if they’ve delved deep into your older blog posts, they can still find their way around through one of your internal links.

It’s common practice to link internally by suggesting related blog posts to readers just in case they would like to know more about a particular topic. It also keeps them engaged while helping to prevent them from leaving, not to mention making it easier for search engines to understand your website architecture.

6. But never skip on including external links either

External links may seem counterintuitive since they direct your readers to a different website. But linking to trustworthy material from authority sites also helps you appear to be an authority yourself while helping search engines determine what your content is about for SEO purposes.

7. Make sure your site is mobile-friendly and responsive

A huge number of users access the web through their mobile devices, particularly smartphones. So, if your website isn’t optimized for mobile yet, then you’re lagging far behind. This will not only hurt your mobile search engine rankings, but you’ll likely lose a lot of visitors who’ll just leave your site once they realize it’s not working properly on their mobile device.

Check whether your site is mobile friendly through this Mobile-Friendly Test by Google. The tool will analyze your web page and let you know how responsive it is to various devices.

8. Remove bad links

Every so often, you should go through your link profile and search for any backlinks that are bad or toxic. Try to remove links from sources that could end up having a negative effect on your DA instead of helping it gain points. Such links include ones from spammy websites, unrelated content, or questionable material that you don’t want to associate your brand with.

Links posted throughout your website leading to bad sites or those that are simply broken should also be removed to make sure they don’t deliver a negative impact to your site.

It can be inconvenient to check on each and every link throughout your site, so to make it easier, you can use tools such as SEOPressor’s Link Manager to help put them in one place. You no longer have to go through them one by one, and instead you can check the status of your link, whether broken or not, on the tool itself.

9. Get high-quality links from third-party sites

High-quality links will always be a plus, and regardless of where they come from, the key to acquiring them is through the creation of amazing content that draws in people. This will get you not only direct links but also those from third-party sites that know that the content of your website is worth linking to.

10. Improve your site structure

A website’s structure refers to how your site is set up, such as how your individual pages are linked to each other and how organized it is, delivering a great user experience. This, in turn, boosts your DA score.

To improve your site structure, you should aim to have a clean, user-friendly site structure. Use text links extensively throughout your site and offer an easy-to-browse, user accessible sitemap. Finally, keep the average number of links on a page within a limit for a cleaner look and functionality.

There’s No Other Way But Up

Website authority is crucial in the overall performance of your business. However, having a low DA score shouldn’t be a cause for concern since you can always make it go up. The process may be complicated and time-consuming, but if you have the right tools and expertise, getting a higher score will be easier to achieve.

If you lack the resources, you can always count on SEO Company’s team of experts to help your website gain a higher website authority. We can help you reach the DA score that will make your website stand out from obscurity and eventually establish an outstanding reputation within your industry.

Need help building your website’s authority and improving rankings? Contact us today!

Apr 02 2020

19 Free SEO Tools to Help Boost Your Organic Rankings

In any line of work, you’ll be needing a special set of tools to help you do what you need to do. As search engine optimization (SEO) marketers, you’re probably one of the most fortunate professionals in this regard considering that you have not just a handful, but a whole gamut of tools to help you manage all of your SEO tasks.

However, since there is no single tool that can offer an all-in-one solution in addressing the most common challenges in SEO, you may end up using a variety of tools all at the same time. And if you’re paying for each of these, the total cost may be way over your budget.

Luckily, there are also free SEO tools that can help you get the job done. You only need to find the right ones for your specific goals. You might find a couple or more of the tools in this list, perfect for your SEO campaigns.

Keyword Tools

Keywords are the lifeblood of organic search, making keyword research the first essential step in SEO. These free tools need to be part of your keyword strategy.

1. Google Keyword Planner

With most searchers using Google as their default search engine, it makes perfect sense that Google Keyword Planner is the tool you should be using to identify keywords based on several parameters. For example, it can give you valuable insights about how popular a keyword is—that is, whether your target keywords or phrases have a low, medium, or high monthly search volume.

This tool will also tell you which keywords are being targeted by your competitors, and even suggest terms that aren’t included in your list.

2. Keywordtool.io

The fact that Keywordtool builds on Google Autocomplete’s feature makes it one of the more popular tools for keyword research. What Keywordtool does is to generate up to 20 variations of your search term, which is twice what Google Autocomplete offers.

This tool also lets you generate long-tail keywords by adding letters and numbers at the start and at the end of your search term to help you come up with an extensive list of keyword suggestions.

Best of all, you can launch this tool right away since you don’t need to create an account to use it.

3. SEMrush

SEMrush is a handy tool for when you want to track your SEO ranking for certain keywords. With its Position Tracking tool, you can enter up to 10 keywords and see how your domain performs with those keywords. SEMrush’s tracking tool also helps you track the daily rankings of your competitors, which is another reason why you need to use SEMrush in your keyword analytics.

As a free user, you’ll also find the Keyword Magic Tool quite nifty. This feature lets you enter a keyword and then returns with a list of tens of thousands of suggested keywords. You can then save the list in your keyword research history, and you can just pull it up anytime for future use.

4. Answer the Public

Answer the Public (ATP) answers the need for a basic keyword research tool for a newly built site. What makes ATP unique from other free tools is that it gives you a multitude of keyword ideas using its own method instead of just relying on Google’s Keyword Planner.

ATP’s approach involves finding search terms that people use on forums, blogs, and social media, and then including them into interrogative phrases using the Five Ws (who-where-what-when-why) and How type of questioning. You’ll then arrive at hundreds of keyword combinations from a single search term.

What’s more, these question-based keywords can help you start thinking about optimizing for voice search queries that are more question and conversational-based.

Page Speed Tools

Since page speed is one of the factors that Google uses to rank websites, you’ll need these tools to make your pages load faster.

5. GTmetrix

GT metrix has a wide range of features, making it one of the best options to help you analyze your website’s performance and find a fix for potential speed issues.

By using Gtmetrix, you’ll get graded reports regarding your page speed, page load time, page size, and number of page requests. The grades can then help you determine how your site is performing compared with other sites analyzed on GTmetrix. It will even test your site from different regions/browsers and give actionable recommendations for better site optimization.

6 Google PageSpeed Insights

As mentioned, Google’s algorithm pays special attention to the speed performance of websites as a ranking signal. Through Google’s very own PageSpeed Insights, you can learn how fast or how slow your pages load both on desktop and on mobile.

The tool will tell you if your page speed is slow, average, or fast. Based on your grade, it will then come up with additional information regarding the usability of your site as well as suggestions for improvement.

7. Dareboost

Just because something is free doesn’t mean it cannot stack up against other premium offerings. In the case of Dareboost, aside from analyzing your loading speed, it will also tell you which issues are causing a bottleneck and therefore you need to prioritize.

Whether your page contains an excessive amount of data or there’s a broken link from third-party sites, you’ll be able to catch any red flag with Dareboost. It also helps you keep track of your website performance against that of competitors by giving you a visual Website Speed Comparison Report.

Backlink Tools

Not all backlinks can contribute to a good ranking for your site, so make sure to check your linkbuilding history or strategy using a variety of SEO platforms.

8. Ahrefs

Ahrefs’s Backlink Checker tool lets you see the top 100 backlinks to your website, along with other key information. These may include the number of times that your website got links from other sites and the corresponding URL Rating (UR) and Domain Rating (DR) of those sites.

Through this backlink index, you can keep track if there are backlinks that you need to get rid of, such as those that that violate SEO practices or those that are not related to your niche.

On the flip side, you can also Ahrefs to look for backlinking opportunities (from competitors and other relevant brands) since it lets you see which sites are linking to your competitors.

9. Moz Link Explorer

The Moz Link Explorer is a great SEO software to have for both your link building and link prospecting tasks as it gives you a complete overview of your inbound links, competitor backlinks, and broken links that you need to fix. When monitoring your inbound links with the Moz Link Explorer, you’ll be able to see the anchor text data that other domains are using to link to your site, allowing you to refine your content ideation down the line.

Speaking of content, you can also keep track of your top performing content to help you find more link building opportunities for your site.

10. OpenLinkProfiler.org

This free link research tool is equally effective as other backlink analysis tools with its ability to check and analyze the backlinks of your website. It offers valuable backlinks data, such as your unique active backlinks from your total active backlinks, dofollow links, nofollow links, and the more harmful unnatural links that are pointing to your site, to mention a few.

OpenLinkProfiler.org is also the only free SEO tool that lets you download up to 100,000 backlinks, including the most recent backlinks you got from the past three months.

On-page Optimization Tools

On-page optimization describes the efforts you make to improve your search ranking. On-page optimization covers all the best SEO practices that you apply directly on your website pages, including the use of tags, keyword-based titles, engaging images, and the like. Use these free tools to enhance your on-page SEO techniques.

11. SEO Web Page Analyzer

This tool gives you a complete on-page analysis that may be preventing your website from landing on the top of search engine results pages (SERPs). It scours your pages for missing tags, errors in formatting your headings and subheadings, deviation from ideal page size or weight, and other potential issues with the structure and content of your web page.

Aside from giving your web page an overall score, the SEO Web Page Analyzer will also indicate either a pass or fail assessment for each section or item analyzed on your site.

12. SERP Simulator

As the name suggests, SERP Simulator lets you view how SEO elements like meta title and description will show in the search results before your web page goes live. By generating a snippet, you’ll be able to see if the characters you used to describe your content fit within the limit or if there are truncation issues that you need to fix before publishing your web page.

13. Schema Creator

Since there’s a lot of online content out there, the Schema Creator wants to help your content stand out from the rest. Specifically, the Schema Creator lets you add structured data—which are some sort of identifiable features—that help Google and other search engines in classifying and finding your content.

By using Schema Creator, you can customize the types of information that you want to include in your content so that search engines will be able to show as much information as you want about your brand, product, service, or event to users.

14. Yoast SEO

The Yoast SEO platform has been around long enough to know which techniques can help optimize your blog posts. For one, when you enter your main keyword for a blog post, Yoast SEO will suggest the necessary tweaks to make your blog more attractive for search engines.

This tool will also look at the way you write your meta descriptions, tags, and slugs to make sure they comply with SEO principles, so you can focus on creating awesome content.

15. QuickSprout

QuickSprout is the free website analyzer developed by marketing guru Neil Patel. This tool can check different aspects of SEO analysis, but in terms of on-page SEO, it also packs a lot of punch.

It’s very thorough in checking if there are web pages that have a low word count, duplicate meta descriptions, missing tags, and whatnot—all of which can negatively impact your online reputation with Google, Bing, etc. It can also check if your site has an excellent, good, fair, or poor loading speed, complete with a full breakdown of the issues found and how to fix them.

16. SEOWorkers

This tool offers a comprehensive report about the efficiency of your website based on different on-page elements. For example, it alerts you if your heading or title contains too many stop words, which are function words that give structure or meaning to your text but which may take up valuable space in certain platforms that allow limited use of characters.

SEOWorkers also promotes diligence in checking for other SEO details that you probably don’t give much attention to even though you definitely should, such as an error 404 in the HTTP header status code.

17. WooRank

WooRank is a browser plugin type of tool that lets you analyze standard on-page SEO metrics, but with more data and insight on mobile optimization that very few web analytics tools in the free category care to cover.

18. Google Analytics

Of course, when it comes to website metrics, you cannot ignore what Google Analytics (GA) offers to help you succeed with your SEO efforts.

GA enables you to track all the important data from traffic sources to search volume and page load times. It can identify the behavior of your website visitors and check if they’re contributing to a high bounce rate on your site, which is a signal that there might be problems on your website design, structure, or content.

SEO Auditing Tools

19. Screaming Frog SEO Spider

An SEO audit is a critical process of analyzing whether your website qualifies for a positive user experience, and consequently, higher search ranking. The Screaming Frog SEO Spider lets you do an SEO audit for free.

This tool has the ability to crawl individual pages on your site to analyze all of its technical aspects, including broken links, redirects, and other errors on your script. It’s also used for assessing how enjoyable it is for users to navigate through a site using different types of devices or browsers.

The free version of the Screaming Frog SEO Spider likewise makes it possible for your webmaster to generate XML sitemaps or files, which Google uses as reference to discover the URLs for your site.

The Best Things in Life are Free

As cliché as the above sounds, having free SEO tools at your disposal means it’s not always necessary to spend large amounts of money when you can achieve the same positive results at no cost at all for your business.

Having SEO professionals who know how each of these tools work should also be part of your SEO strategy. You can trust SEO Company’s brilliant team of SEO professionals to help you choose the right tools and get your SEO game into full swing, while you watch us from the sidelines. We’d, of course, appreciate you cheering us on.

Want to know how you can add these tools in your SEO aresenal? Contact us today!

Apr 01 2020

How Much Should SEO Services Cost?

Outsourcing search engine optimization (SEO) requirements has been an effective business strategy for many companies for all the right reasons. For one, companies with the question “What is SEO” looming over their head can answers straight from experts. SEO professionals help you recognize the value behind SEO and identify the best strategies to improve your visibility on search engines.

In addition, a good SEO firm will make sure that you only pursue white hat SEO, referring to SEO practices that don’t break the rules set by Google and other search engines. Altogether, this means you get quality SEO services that can give you more visibility in search as well as drive traffic to your website.

Budget-wise, you won’t run out of options too, since most SEO services are customizable according to your needs and resources. Although the general rule is that higher costs equate to better quality, this isn’t always true, especially for service-based products. So, you’ll need to do your due diligence when selecting your SEO service provider.

So, how much should you actually pay for SEO? In this post, you’ll learn about several key indicators that may tell you if you’re getting just about the right price.

Factors Affecting the Cost of SEO

As with other services, SEO is priced based on a combination of factors. This is what counts when drawing up plans with a potential SEO partner:

Current search ranking

SEO consultants may look at your existing position in organic search and then use it as a base point on how to run your campaigns. If your website happens to have low domain authority or rankings, you can expect to pay for longer before your online visibility reaches a desired level.

Company objectives

Along with the current condition of your website or link profile, you and your SEO agency will also need to discuss where you want to be within a particular timeframe.
Needless to say, if your SEO partner anticipates a large volume of work to pull up your search rankings, the more expensive SEO services become.

Level of competition

This factor is closely tied to your niche, meaning the more popular your target keywords are, the more competitive SEO should be. Your SEO agency will have to put in greater efforts and more time to bring your brand on par with other players in your industry, which will affect the cost of SEO.

Urgency of work

SEO work is time-consuming. It may take anywhere from three to six months before you start seeing results, and way much longer to build on those results further. What most SEO companies do is to allocate their resources several months ahead of time, so if you come to them asking for a priority spot in their client or work lineup, they will have to charge higher in order to accommodate your request.

Specific business needs

There are many reasons why you may need SEO services from experts, which may range from a website audit to link cleanup and link building. These are specific requirements that also need to be factored in when computing for SEO costs since they require different processes and tools.

Target audience

Whether you want to break into a local market or an international market will also spell the difference on how much SEO services will cost for your business, but the bottom line is you should expect to pay more for a wider audience reach.

Expertise of SEO service provider

Generally speaking, the higher the level of expertise that an SEO firm demonstrates, the more they are in a position to ask for higher rates. Some of the trust signals you can use to tell which ones are SEO experts include their years in the business, knowledge of all SEO work types, familiarity with your industry, track record with other clients, marketing know-how, and even mastery of language.

Different Types of SEO Payment Models

When hiring an SEO company, you’ll want the price to be right so you can get the most out of what you’re paying for. Here’s how different SEO pricing models stack up against one another:

1. Fixed Fee

In this payment model, you pay a flat price for entering into a contract with an SEO company. Your payment will cover specific work or services, regardless of the amount of work to be done or the size of the project.

Benefits for Your Company: Since the coverage of your contract is across the board, you don’t need to fuss over every little detail that relates to the service you signed up for. The fixed fee pricing model also saves you from the trouble of performing a cost analysis, where you need to study and report on each item that’s part of the overall costs.

2. Pay-for-Performance

A pay-for-performance pricing model is one wherein you only pay the SEO agency you hired if the work they did for you resulted in you hitting your targets. Usually, these targets or goals will have something to do with how high you want to rank for certain keywords or how many more sales your company made based on the performance of your agency.

Benefits for Your Company: This payment model is ideal for when you want to be strict with your budget or when you’re trying to test the waters first before committing to work further with a particular SEO company.

3. Hourly Consulting

As the name suggests, in an hourly pricing model, the amount you’ll be paying will be computed based on the number of hours that an SEO firm will spend working on your project. SEO companies might offer this option as a way of compensating their efforts, especially if they anticipate a lot of revisions or improvements before the project reaches the finish line.

Benefits for Your Company: Aside from stating the obvious that you only pay for the actual hours spent on your project, paying by the hour also gives you flexibility in managing a particular project. You can easily make arrangements with your SEO partner to add or reduce their consulting hours based on your needs or budget.

4. Project-Based

Similar to the fixed fee model, project-based pricing means you’re paying a flat rate for the SEO agency’s services but the terms of the contract or project are more specific. This makes project-based pricing very popular in the SEO services industry.

The agency will advise you about the extent of the work to be done, what deliverables are part of the project, the resources that will be needed, and timeline projections, among others. The agency may also lay down the rules for additional tasks that may come up but are outside the scope of work, usually through hourly pricing.

Benefits for Your Company: A project-based pricing model gives you a crystal clear idea of what to expect out of the service agreement with your SEO agency. It also allows you to stay within your budget since the SEO company cannot easily make changes to the pricing in case it needs more resources than what was indicated in the original plan.

5. Monthly Retainer

This pricing model involves paying a monthly fee to your SEO partner for overseeing your SEO project. The monthly fee is fixed and covers a predefined set of tasks that goes on until the agreement is in effect, usually for a long term.

Benefits for Your Company: Making monthly payments means you’re not going to pay huge upfront costs in order for your SEO work to be up and running. In addition, monthly retainers are a way to ensure continuity of success since you’re working with the same SEO agency for a long period of time.

6. Profit Sharing

The idea behind this type of pricing is to compensate your SEO partner by way of sharing a portion of your profit or revenue to the SEO company. This makes it similar to the pay-for-performance pricing model, but you can set a time limit, payment caps, and other reasonable restrictions in your profit sharing agreement with your SEO agency.

Benefits for Your Company: Profit sharing encourages your SEO agency to make more sales for your company, so they can get their piece of the pie. However, you will still have control through the limitations you attach to the revenue sharing scheme.

SEO Industry Benchmarks

Despite the fact that it can be difficult to ascertain the cost of SEO services due to several variables, you can refer to industry benchmarks to get an idea of average price rates for hourly, monthly, or project-based campaigns.

Note that there are levels or tiers available for whatever pricing model you sign up for, as you can see below:

Pricing Tiers for Hourly Rate: Less than $75 to more than $1001, with the most popular being the $100 to $150 per-hour tier.

Pricing Tiers for Monthly Rate: Less than $50 to more than $250,001, with the most popular being the $501 to $1000 per-month tier.

Pricing Tiers for Per-Project Work: Less than $100 to more than $250,001 with the most popular being the $501 to $1000 tier.

Other Industry Pricing Factors to Consider

The figures above are general representations of SEO pricing packages, but there are other ways of breaking down SEO cost—including by region, agency type, length of SEO experience, and size of market.

Here’s how much majority of SEO companies and contractors typically charge based on certain criteria:

SEO Hourly Rate by Region	SEO Hourly Rate by Agency Type	SEO Hourly Rate by Length of Experience	SEO Hourly Rate by Size of Market
United States – $101 to $150 United Kingdom – $76 to $100 Europe (Germany, France, Italy, Spain) – $76 to $100 Europe (Other) – $41 to $50 Canada – $101 to $150 Australia and New Zealand – $101 to $150 Latin America – Less than $25 / $51 to $60 India – Less than $25	Freelancers – $68 Consultants – $122 Agencies – $135	2 years or less – $79 2-4 years – $111 5-10 years – $119 More than 10 years – $143	Local Market – $96 Worldwide Market – $119

SEO Monthly Rate by Region	SEO Monthly Rate by Agency Type	SEO Monthly Rate by Length of Experience	SEO Monthly Rate by Size of Market
United States – $2501 to $5,000 United Kingdom – $501 to $1,000 Europe (Germany, France, Italy, Spain) – $501 to $1,000 Europe (Other) – $251 to $500 / $501 to $1,000 Canada – $501 to $1,000 Australia and New Zealand – $2,501 to $5,000 Latin America – $501 to $1,000 India – $251 to $500	Freelancers – $1,364 Consultants – $1,906 Agencies – $2,820	2 years or less – $1,266 2-4 years – $2,563 5-10 years – $2,563 More than 10 years – $2,563	Local Market – $1,566 Worldwide Market – $3,614

SEO Per-Project Rate by Region	SEO Per-Project Rate by Agency Type	SEO Per-Project Rate by Length of Experience	SEO Per-Project Rate by Size of Market
United States – $1001 to $1,500 United Kingdom – $501 to $1,000 Europe (Germany, France, Italy, Spain) – $501 to $1,000 Europe (Other) – $501 to $1,000 Canada – $1,501 to $2,000 Australia and New Zealand – $1,501 to $2,000 / $2,501 up to $25,000 Latin America – $101 to $250 / $501 to $1,000 India – $101 to $250	Freelancers – $1,530 Consultants – $4,482 Agencies – $5,222	2 years or less – $1,235 2-4 years – $4,630 5-10 years – $4,630 More than 10 years – $4,630 up	Local Market – $2,756 Worldwide Market – $4,479

If the Price Is Right

With several SEO pricing models to choose from, it’s important to remember that your actual SEO costs will depend on the extent of your brand’s SEO requirements. A particular pricing model may be better suitable for certain projects than the other, so you should do a thorough and careful assessment of what you really need and expect to get, including the ideal price that will work for you.

Bigger and long-term projects will always be more expensive because of the additional man-hours required, but choosing the right agency will mean getting the best bang for your buck or return on investment (ROI).

SEO Company offers flexible pricing models to suit the size and needs of your next project. Contact us today to find out more about our SEO services!

Apr 01 2020

User Experience: The SEO Factor You’re Probably Ignoring

When you hear the term user experience (UX), what often comes to mind is web design and development. While UX is primarily a part of those disciplines, it also plays a key role in SEO. When webmasters optimize standard procedures, they usually consider factors like content, keywords, and linking. What most sites may tend to miss out on, however, is how fine-tuning the site’s SEO user experience can greatly affect search rankings.

With a look at Google SERPs now, you’ll find a compact list of results that directly address a query. Often, the small grids which encase content are already rich with what a user needs, be it copy, images, or video. This development is mostly thanks to Google’s consistent stream of algorithm updates, which puts quality of experience at the forefront.

What is User Experience?

According to the International Organization of Standardization, UX refers to a “person’s perceptions and responses resulting from the use and/or anticipated use of a product, system or service.” In simpler terms, it’s your impression of whatever is presented for you to use as you’re using it.

There’s actually a lot to consider when you think about user experience. It’s more than just about whether or not you can actually use a product or service. You need to look into questions that ask your audience the specific hows, whats, and whys, too. Such as:

How do you use the product? Is it easy or difficult?
What can you do with it? Is it helpful to you?
Why is it relevant? Is it credible and accessible?
And ultimately, does your experience in using the product make you want to come back and use it again?

User testing delves deeper into the definition of UX and identifies how it’s something that will always be around. This kind of thinking—putting the user first—has the capability to build both trust and loyalty between a product and a consumer. The value of a product increases when convenience is elevated. Therefore it only makes sense to want to continue using the product.

How UX and SEO Go Hand in Hand

As a good business owner or marketer, you’d know that to get to your target audience, you need to provide the kind of product or service that addresses a potential client’s needs. SEO shares the same goal in aiming to provide answers to any question a user might have.

But of course, getting a user to your website isn’t enough when the true purpose of a website is ideally to gain customers and hopefully a strong following for your product or service.

UX now holds the power to turn a page visit into a conversion. Taking UX into full consideration when creating your website opens up the path for the different personas you can attract. When visitors enter your page, you can greet them with information that’s easy to digest. Offer better page navigability according to who they are and what they need, and eventually, they’ll become a returning visitor.

Marrying UX and SEO brings more value to your business because you are not only creating a wall of content to rank higher, you’re essentially making your content worthwhile for a user—which is really just about making them happy.

With SEO user experience, you make finding a user’s answer much easier by surfacing well on SERPs. UX then makes sure queries are addressed the second a page loads. Once you get a good grasp of how these two work together, understanding a user’s perspective becomes much easier and puts engagement and activation at the forefront of your site’s achievements, which is all the better for your business.

Let Data Guide the Way

Search engines, in general, go through tons of updates in a year. Most, if not all of these changes, are geared towards making a user’s efforts in finding information a much easier process. For instance, Google has declared RankBrain as the engine’s third most important ranking signal. The machine learning system contributes data to the core algorithm, helping identify the most relevant results for queries punched through.

RankBrain employs the observation of your site’s impact on a user with behavioral statistics. Context from patterns in this sense is what becomes the basis for producing results. Depending on the kind of question entered, SERPs could count on time relevance, content depth, or other related subjects. In turn, your site and content should have the answers based on the aforementioned factors. Crafting your copy this way will help build your brand reputation.

Key metrics that you should always be mindful of when optimizing for RankBrain are bounce rate, organic CTR, pages per session, and dwell time.

If a user stays on your site enough to read through your content and visit different pages, it recognizes good UX. Otherwise, if a user exits faster than you expected and never returns, it sends Google the message that your page may need optimization improvement or is generally irrelevant to a user’s search.

At the end of the day, RankBrain’s purpose all boils down to determining how well visitors and users like your site. The happier you’re able to make a user, the bigger the chance of getting the same user to come back and try other things.

Aligning your UX and SEO Strategies

1. Mind your buyer personas and user paths

Your target audience are people you want to attract to your business as clients. And then, you also have your buyer personas who are basically a more refined and better-identified audience. Knowing your buyer personas brings you behind the psyche of the user you want to attract and can ultimately help you figure out the ideal user path to your website.

2. Keyword research

This kind of research goes beyond pulling together a list of top searched terms and stuffing your content with it. Keyword research necessitates putting thought into the context of these terms and understanding the reason behind why and how they connect to your brand.

Tip: Once you’re able to map out the psychology behind the keywords, you’ll be able to identify your product’s worth from a user’s perspective. You can then better plan out the type of content you need to create.

3. Improve your site structure

Similar to the purpose of creating appropriate headings, minding your site’s structure improves your site’s crawlability. Having a simple structure that allows all your pages to be accessible gives users the opportunity to find out more about your business, too.

Tip: To improve, start with a map of your website. Once you’ve listed everything out, you can then figure out a way to restructure or tweak it so it’s much easier. Take the opportunity to organize pages by category or what you identify as important.

4. Navigability

Improving your site’s structure directly affects the navigability of your website provided that the relevant links are in areas that can be spotted instantly. Always double-check that links are correct and working.
Tip: Don’t forget to keep all existing pages of your website accessible with a simple click or tap.

5. Design your website according to SEO principles

There are a number of simple but effective ways to ensure you’re hitting the right balance of UX in standard optimization processes. The idea is to keep search engines and your target audience’s best interests in mind at all times—especially when crafting your content.

Here are some things you can do:

Maximize headline potential. Front load copy in your headlines with the important information your user might need. Have the answer ready to catch attention at a glance. This cuts the time and effort spent in finding answers from other websites.

Strengthen your site’s link equity. Optimize your site’s menu and functionalities for better link equity. Where can you link the important pages of information effectively? Are labels in your menu easy to understand for even a non-niche user? Can your menu have another category added or should it include a dropdown to better organize a user’s thought process?

Provide intuitive product names and straightforward descriptions. Again, we’re looking to effectively optimize your page as well as reel in quality UX signals. Giving your product or service an intuitive name and easy-to-digest descriptions will make recall and relevance much likelier to happen. This isn’t to say you should abandon your brand’s voice and tone. You can always adjust it in a way that works for your business.

6. Focus on quality content

Your business is only as good as its content. If you have duplicate content or pages that don’t offer relevant information, then there’s a higher chance of users dropping off. With the keyword research you’ve done, you can churn out informative content that could potentially boost your worth to a user and keep them coming back.

7. Include big, bold CTAs

Call-to-actions should have clear, straightforward messaging that directs an action rather than deliver a vague, cryptic one. Google’s UX practices make a solid case for an effective user-centric copy.

Tip: Make sure you’re also adding the right relevant links to these CTAs as well.

8. Create appropriate headings

Search engine crawlers use headings to understand your website while your audience uses it to know what they will be getting. Creating appropriate headings in effect can help define the relevance and worth of your website from a UX and SEO perspective.

9. User Signals

Always keep track of user signals as Google uses this (via RankBrain) to track behavioral patterns. Some of the most important user signals to track are bounce rates and click-through rates. This, respectively, measures the amount of time a user spends on your site while the other checks how many people took action after seeing CTA buttons.

10. Fast Site Speed

Site speed is just as crucial to a user’s experience as it is for SEO. As a user who wants to find answers quickly, if your website isn’t loading fast enough, there’s a bigger chance that they’ll be dropping off your page and moving to your competitor’s.

Tip: Test your site speed on Google PageSpeed Insights.

11. Optimize Your Site for Mobile Experience

Seventy percent of online traffic occurs on mobile. More than just searching the web on your desktop, mobile devices are much easier means to access the internet. You can bring them anywhere with you, after all, so it makes sense to make your site responsive to any mobile device.

12. Always Run Tests

Just as Google consistently updates its search engine with new tech developments, it’s a best practice to run tests for both SEO and UX. Keep your site in good shape with routine checks for SEO improvement as well as user testing to ensure you’re offering page visitors the best experience.

Tip: There are tons of tools readily available to test without shelling out the extra cash for it. Ahrefs has a great compilation of SEO tools you can check out here.

SEO User Experience Must Never Be Ignored

User experience might not seem like much to account for when you’re building your site and its content, but the longer you observe, the more you’ll notice that you might not be getting the engagement you want. It could be because of a number of factors, but at the very end of it, you may come to realize that it’s something as basic as customer satisfaction.

Understanding what a user wants and needs, and being able to deliver it in a clear and concise way is the most effective way to acquire your target audience. Continuing to give them the same high-quality content with relevant information is what will keep them coming back.

With consistent output and improvements to your content (no matter how small), you’ll be able to build loyalty and trust. That’s additional customers and a step closer to being recognized as a valuable online resource.

The formula for a successful website isn’t as complex as it might be painted out to be. When a marketer or business owner recognizes how good UX and SEO work together and puts it to practice, then the website can really be set up for success.

Mar 31 2020

What is SEO and Why Does My Business Need it?

You’ve probably come across many digital marketing articles interjecting that SEO is one of the most vital elements in your online strategy, or that you can’t possibly skip this in your process, whether you’re a small business or established brand. Well, these blogs are right—but if you’re new to SEO, you might be wondering what precisely this tactic entails and how it can help you.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of enhancing your website so that it can rank higher on search engines like Google and Bing, thus getting higher organic traffic. This “enhancement” can be done via a six-stage process, together with learning the most influential search ranking signals and applying these on your site. It’s also worthy to note that you can’t just do SEO once; it’s a continuous process that you have to polish every six months or less if there are significant search engine algorithm updates.

The practice of SEO dates back to more than 20 years ago, near the time the internet launched. Back then, there was no way to know if you were getting the best or most relevant result to your search query—as long as you typed in a relevant keyword present in a webpage, it would appear. This is the reason why in the early 2000s, it was easy to apply black hat SEO tactics such as keyword stuffing and work your way to the top without much effort.

Over the last couple of decades, Google slowly but surely became a household name and eventually created policies to catch these cheats—and the proper practice of “clean” SEO began. This forced the practitioners to prioritize users and create accurate posts that would entice users to click, creating a much more relevant search experience.

What Factors Affect Search Rankings?

Content Quality

Search engines can understand the kind of content that you publish for your readers. Specific signals will let them know if this is worth presenting at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs), such as word count/length, keywords used, internal and external links, readability, and image optimization if applicable. It still pays to produce expert articles for your users, regardless if your business isn’t in digital publishing. Writing quality content also includes your landing pages, services pages, and any other webpage on your site. For instance, this lets Google know that you’ve put a lot of thought in your branding and you care about the experience your users will have when they browse through your site.

Mobile-friendliness

Mobile devices have been successfully outpacing desktop usage over the past couple of years, and this will continue to be the trend. Mobile search also owns 52.2% of the internet’s search traffic, which already indicates the majority. If you haven’t transformed your website to something more responsive on mobile devices, Google is ranking you lower on search engines. It makes sense to adopt since there are a lot of people who own smartphones now and searching via mobile is one of the most intuitive things to do when your potential customers are out and about.

Volume of backlinks

Gaining inbound links are a signal to search engines that you are putting out content that’s valuable enough to merit a citation. Link building is a common SEO tactic to boost the number of your backlinks, but it doesn’t take overnight to accomplish. You have to start with publishing great content that’s worthy of linking out to in the first place before you even think of executing guest posting and other forms of link building outreach. Racking up backlinks will also boost your website’s domain authority, another ranking signal, and tell Google to prioritize your site at the top of search results.

Domain Authority

Your domain authority (DA) is a “grade” assigned to your website, assessing its age, relevance, credibility, activity, and overall perceived value by search engines. The higher your domain authority is, the more your webpages will appear at the top of search engines. Besides gaining backlinks, you get to increase your DA by consistently satisfying Google’s guidelines and updating your other on-page and off-page optimization tactics.

Page speed

The amount of time it takes for your webpages to load can also affect your search rankings! Page speed is a mobile search ranking factor now, in line with Google’s priority over mobile-friendliness, known as the mobile-first index. The average webpage on mobile devices takes 15.3 seconds to load vs. 3 seconds on the desktop. Your goal is to make your site load as fast as its desktop counterpart or even quicker. Think about it: First-time visitors will exit your page if it takes too long to load, translating to lost business as well!

Social shares

Social shares aren’t so much a popularity contest or a desire to go viral, but rather, it’s a way for search engines to recognize content that seems to be getting extra attention from users on social media and community websites. This clues in Google that you probably shared something worth the time and effort of users to read, which is a good thing. In a nutshell, they would want to bump your ranking higher so that more people can see this great piece of content that they’ve observed many people are talking about.

Local SEO

97% of people expect to see location information from a brand, and Google knows this. They’ve created Google My Business and Google Maps to help users find establishments like yours easily, and if you’re not taking advantage of this, you’re missing out. These searches turn to in-store visits and most of the time purchases as well. Optimizing your local SEO strategy will quickly put you at the top of Google’s priority list when someone in your area searches for “fitness store near me.”

The Importance of SEO for Modern Businesses

While some argue the importance of SEO, there are also the naysayers. You might have heard that SEO is dead or that it’s an outdated strategy that your business doesn’t need. The following points will prove non-believers otherwise.

Improves user experience

Planning and executing a strong SEO strategy forces you to do a full audit of your website. This means fixing errors, replacing broken links, deleting duplicate content, and fortifying existing content. Not only will this reflect professionalism and show Google that you care about your readers, but you’re also continuously giving your visitors a better experience since their last visit. In turn, your users will be more pleased and will be more inclined to do business with you.

Boosts your brand visibility

93% of online activities begin with a search. Everyone hops on to Google, Bing, etc. to look up for information—and all your potential customers will too. Search engines allow brands to market themselves for free, as long as they show that they’re worthy of being at the top spot. Consider this free marketing with a great bonus of being able to maintain your website in the process.

Gains more web traffic

Users want information quickly. This is why 75% of users don’t click beyond the first page of search engine results. If you take any of the top three spots on Google, you naturally increase your chances of attracting people to click on your website. Those visits can turn into desirable actions, such as newsletter sign-ups, online purchases, and more.

It complements other strategies

SEO results take a while to manifest, but it’s still paving the way to rack up organic traffic without the use of an excessive amount of budget for ads. It’s essential to invest in different tactics, both paid and organic, to elevate the performance of your business. If you skip SEO and focus on social media or perhaps only SEM, you won’t be able to optimize the other parts of your site.

Opens your business to global opportunities

If your brand consistently shows up at the top of search engine results, the brand recall will be stronger. This will inevitably open the possibility of expanding your operations, perhaps to areas outside your geographical territory. This can open up exciting avenues for you—and you may not even have to move your HQ to those new cities or countries you will be working in. Growth is a vital aspect in business, and SEO can help you achieve that.

How to Improve Your Company’s SEO

Now that you’re realizing the value that SEO can bring to your business, you might be wondering what you can do to implement this strategy. Generally speaking, you have two options to beef up your SEO performance: hiring SEO experts or outsourcing from an SEO company.

Before you conclude, reevaluate which path will benefit your business. Below are a few questions to ask:

How much control do you want over your SEO team?
What’s your budget range for this?
Do you want to lead a team or gain new partners?
How many people would you need to implement your vision?
Is your industry already in digital marketing or not?
Will it be easy or difficult to recruit a team?
How much knowledge do you have on SEO?

Build an in-house team of SEO practitioners

One of the most significant advantages of having an in-house team will focus all of their time to the SEO performance of your business. Since they will be a part of your business for the long haul, they get familiar with your company’s goals and mission. This is the option to take if you’re comfortable that you can manage an SEO team so that they can follow the direction you want to set for the company. Having a considerable amount of knowledge about SEO will come in handy here as well.

It’s worthy to note that building a team will take time. You need to ensure that the dynamics of the group are great and that they’re a culture fit. This may also cost more in terms of recruitment, onboarding and training, and office space accommodation. If you’re a startup, this option may not be one of the best choices if you’re working with a limited budget.

Keep in mind that you’ll be responsible for further training and certifications if you want them to keep up with the trends.

Outsource SEO services from experts

Outsourced SEO practitioners are more like partners. This is a recommended option to take if you don’t have much knowledge of SEO and would like a group of experts to work on this with you.

Outsourcing can be a more cost-effective option for you than hiring in-house. Since they won’t have to take up space in your HQ and the nature of their jobs are digital, it’s doable to discuss strategies online. You won’t have difficulty with the recruitment process either, which is another plus.

Usually, SEO companies are more in touch with the latest trends in the business, such as algorithm updates and search engine guidelines. There are plenty of SEO agencies who have outstanding portfolios with companies they’ve previously worked with, meaning they’ve been exposed to plenty of industries and have a broader knowledge of SEO.

The result of the selection process will boil down to your company’s needs.

Invest in SEO Today!

There you have it: the complete low down on SEO. It’s simple and straightforward, yet also meticulous and demanding. It’s a universal strategy that applies to any business you have, whether it’s a startup or a huge corporation, purely digital or a brick-and-mortar shop.

SEO may have been born in the 90s, but that doesn’t strike out its relevance in modern marketing practices. It’s not enough to rely on SEO plug-ins on your CMS either—instead, it’s better to dig deep and examine where you can be doing better so Google will up your ranking and expose you to a broader, international audience. Getting experts who know what they’re doing will ensure long-term success will elevate your brand and help you achieve your marketing goals that much faster.

Plenty of smart companies have been doing SEO for years. It’s time to follow suit and take advantage of this marketing strategy. Every second you’re not practicing SEO is lost business, and once your competitors realize this too, they can beat you at the game.

Contact the search experts at SEO Company to learn more!