How can bloggers help my brand?

How can bloggers help my brand?
Your Essential Ad Copy Checklist – 10 Things To Pack Into Every Ad!
Stop guessing! Develop a winning social media strategy with this step-by-step guide
5 hreflang mistakes you are probably making
The relationship between SEO and UX
Does My Site Have A Penalty? 27 Risks to Check

Posted: 15 Sep 2015 04:08 AM PDT

In today's digital world, brands are increasingly turning to bloggers to benefit from their influence and help promote their products and services. Working with bloggers, when done right, can be a great way to generate publicity and increase visibility. Being a blogger myself, you may expect me to be biased, but I want to prove to you how valuable bloggers can be when matched with the correct brands, and how both parties can come together to create something great.

1) Bloggers can make you the star of the story

It is well known that online research has a huge influence impacting the decision making processes of consumers. In fact 84% of people buy products based on the description in blogs and 18-34 year olds value blogs as the most important information source when making purchasing decisions.

Research Now has also carried out a recent in depth study sharing some interesting statistics on bloggers as brand advocates and the positive impacts bloggers can have.

When a blogger writes about your brand or product they have the ability to influence consumer decisions, offering their personal opinion and experience. Brands who reach out to bloggers are able to get their stories told through compelling content, beautiful imagery and informative videos.

In fact with the majority of purchases I make I search online to find reviews in order to find out if the product does as it says and to find out whether the product is right for me. This is one of the main reasons I started my own blog, in order to share my honest reviews of the products I use, recommend and love.

All in all, bloggers are often great storytellers and when they write about you and your brand/products they are able to put you at the centre of the story!

2) Bloggers are in touch with your target audience

Successful bloggers have communities who are engaged with them. When one of these bloggers writes about your brand they create a connection, direct to your target audience. Reputable bloggers write about products they believe in to maintain credibility and authenticity, however some bloggers accept payment to promote products; this is why selecting bloggers who are genuinely passionate about your brand is important, it means that the review of your brand will be genuine, and more valuable as a result.

3) Bloggers can help you to expand further into social media

Social channels can attract a huge audience, making them extremely powerful. They are a way for bloggers to share posts in order to reach followers and an even bigger audience when a post is liked, shared and retweeted. This means that when you collaborate with bloggers, your brand/product is able to benefit from this relationship.

4) Bloggers can drive new traffic to you

A good post that links to your site entices users to click through to check your site out for themselves. This is a great way to build links and gain exposure to your target market in ways that can be measured. Therefore, helping you to identify how successful a particular post has been and how you should continue to work with a particular blogger in the future.

5) Bloggers can make you look cool!

The truth is, consumers don't usually trust brands immediately. Instead, we find it easier to trust other people who have tried and tested products themselves. According to Forbes, data from Forrester states,

Forrester brand advocacy

Therefore, within a socially driven world it is vital that there is a form of legitimacy across a brand's messaging, which is where bloggers come in. By working with bloggers it helps form the proof of your product messaging, through sharing high-quality and honest reviews, the trust generated by bloggers is then shared with your brand, helping you to build trust among those who matter most (your market).

6) Bloggers are good for your SEO

A website that attracts high quality links is likely to outrank websites that don't. By working with bloggers you can benefit from high-quality, natural links. One genuinely written article, with a link for reference can prove very useful for readers, and search engines value this as a signal of quality, associated with you brand and the blogger who has written the article.

Brands that have a long list of supporters also tend to have a high number of links, built naturally by being talked about online. The fact is that the SEO benefits of brand and blogger relationships are huge and by building relationships you are creating a sustainable network that will grow alongside your brand and audience.

7) Bloggers are good sales people

Bloggers can help drive sales through their personal recommendations with the ability to influence buyers. One post from a blogger can bring huge benefits, so imagine the impact of a several bloggers talking about your brand. Bloggers can in fact be your brand's greatest advocates and when treated well they will want to write about your brand more often. The power of brand advocacy is huge and here is why:

Once a blogger has written an honest review of your brand, the relationship doesn't need to end there. You can offer bloggers things like discount codes to share with their readers, it offers the blogger a way to treat their readers whilst also reflecting well on your brand and your customer service.

Summary

I hope that I have managed to give you an indication into the various benefits of investing time into getting to know, and working with bloggers and how this can positively impact your business. What do you think is the best way a blogger can help brands? Or maybe there is something that you would like to add. Let me know in the comments below, I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

The post How can bloggers help my brand? appeared first on White.net.

Your Essential Ad Copy Checklist – 10 Things To Pack Into Every Ad!

Posted: 10 Sep 2015 12:00 AM PDT

If you are anything like me, you can't last very long in this world without writing a list. I knew the habit was bad when one Christmas I received about half a dozen notepads as gifts! To-do lists, shopping lists, wish lists, you name it. But rather than kicking the habit, I've learned to embrace it. And with the summer season upon us, the most popular list is the packing checklist.

With that in mind, we have created a handy checklist of all the things you should be putting into your PPC ad copy. With a focus on improving your click-through-rate (CTR), make sure you pack your ads with these essentials.

Never rush into writing ads without first stopping to consider the structure of your account. If you do, your quality score, ad rank and CPC will suffer.

Ask yourself: "Have I systematically grouped my products, landing pages and keywords into clearly defined categories?"

If you want to do a health check in this regard have a look at the keywords in your ad groups. You should have a small set of highly related keywords, each sharing one or two root words. Not the case? Backtrack and tighten up those ad groups!

Now that you've organised your keywords, it's time to use them! It's amazing how many accounts painstakingly gather their keyword data only to rely solely on dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) in their headlines. Certainly use DKI in one of your ad variants but bear in mind that any increase in CTR from DKI does not improve your quality score.

I know it's overplayed to say use some keywords but remember that when a keyword in your ad matches your customer's search query, search engines will highlight this word in bold – like a flag to your customers it says "I'm what you're searching for, click here!"

img_5240-2

The driving force of the ad; if your headline isn't attention grabbing, your audience probably isn't going to bother reading the smaller font description underneath. Now I know I've just told you to use keywords, I'm now going to tell you not to overuse them in your heading…bear with me!

Whilst it's normally necessary to include at least one keyword in your heading to identify your product, you need to consider what's going to make your ad unique on a page of search results.

What's going to separate your ad for 'Pet Shampoo' from Joe Blogs’ 'Pet Shampoo' ad. Traditional avenues for making your ad stand out include: highlighting benefits (see below), using strong, attention grabbing words like 'Professional', 'Award winning', 'Save', 'Free' etc., using your brand name (if well-known) and using special symbols like trademarks.

Alternatively, you could test a more unconventional approach, using headlines that are completely different from the rest, appealing to a customer's needs, emotions or even humour (as with Oasis ad).

Also, don't forget that when you ad appears in the top position, Google will often combine your headline with your first description (providing the latter is finished with punctuation) so consider whether you can make a stronger statement in the heading by effectively writing across your heading and description one (see later).

As well as being attention grabbing, your ad also needs to be persuasive, highlighting why a customer should choose you over the competition. Your product will dictate which of the two approaches you will take.

Is it an original product you are trying to sell? It which case highlight why your product is better than other similar products on the market. Is it the slickest, fastest, most-reliable, easiest? Then highlight this in your ad.

Or are you trying to sell a branded product, the sort that customers can buy from other sites (like electrical goods for instance). In which case tell your audience why they should choose to buy this product from your company. Is there a special offer on your product at the minute? Do you offer free shipping, multi-buy deals or easy returns? Is it cheaper, do you offer better customer service or any guarantees? Put it in your ad.

Another overstated tool but studies still show a significantly increased CTR on ads with clear calls-to-action so it's imperative you make space for one. The decision you now need to make is whether a soft or hard line approach works for you.

If you are looking for a customer to purchase a product from you, strong CTAs like 'Buy Now!' Or 'Order Today!' might do the trick. However, it's possible this approach is putting off other potential customers and it may be necessary to try a softer approach.

Instead of simply 'Order Today!' why not try 'Save __% When You Order Today!', switching the emphasis to them saving money rather than parting with it. Or rather than focusing on the buying of the product why not focus on the acquisition i.e. 'Discover Your __', 'Find A ___ You'll Love' or 'Choose From __'.

Both subtle and direct CTA can work. Test to see which works for you!

As with CTAs, considering the mood of your target audience is really important. Stop and have a think about what is motivating your audience to search for your product. Try and encapsulate this in the tone of your ad. Is your product for children? Then perhaps emphasize its safety or durability.

Also consider the buying cycle. When customers are viewing your ads, are they in the mood for spontaneous, buy-now type shopping? Think phrases like 'Sale Ends This Week', 'For a limited time only' or consider adding in countdown ads.

Look at your search query reports; are customers attaching words like rating and review to your product? Then write ads that appeal to the comparison/review mode of shopping.

With so precious few characters it can be difficult to judge whether to put your brand name in the main wording of the text. The length of your name will obviously be a dictating factor. If you are a fairly new brand keep your brand to brand only campaigns at this time and don't waste space in your other ads – it won't mean much to your audience! Besides, remember your brand name will be in your display URL.

To gauge brand awareness of your product, see how impressions in your brand only campaign increase over time.

Ok I hear you. Lizzie, how am I supposed to fit all of that into 95 characters? The answer is by making full use of the space you get on the search engine results page – you'll be surprised how much you can fit in!

Let's start with those pesky character limits. Admit it, how many times do you remove that final punctuation from description 1 in order to fit in your carefully constructed wording? Stop it! Remember what I said above. With punctuation at the end of description 1 you are telling Google that they can swing your description 1 up into the headline. This can give your ad a much greater impact and considerably increase the CTR of your ad! Consider the impact of the following top position ads, using and not using punctuation in description 1:

Designer Handbags ads

With ad 2, the first description was incorporated into the headline making the headline and extra 35 characters longer. This meant it was able to strongly highlight both the product name (relevant to the customers search query) and offer (benefit).

Furthermore, scrimping on punctuation can also give your ad a funny look when you apply call extensions, since Google combines description 1 and 2 when your ad appears in one of the top positions making an unpunctuated ad look messy.

From now on, let's start thinking of description 1 as 34 characters + 1 punctuation!

Remove repeated messages

So many ads I see use effectively the same messaging in the headline as they do in one of their descriptions. This is wasting precious space that could be used to explain another benefit or for a CTA. It looks even worse if Google combines the headline and description 1!

Don't waste space with things you can put elsewhere

Again, don't waste space in your ad wording with things like telephone numbers, addresses and reviews as all can go in your ad extensions.

Make full use of ad extensions

Site links are like four additional ads for the price of one! Make sure that your ad is ready to look great in those top positions on the page. Keep your messaging in your main ad concise and to the point and expand further in sitelinks remembering to make full use of the description space they give you to maximise your presence on the results page.

Gucci without description Sitelink Descriptions Increase Ad Size & Impact in Ad 1

Similarly, don't worry if you can't get every single benefit into your ad text. Use call out extensions to tell customers about other benefits.

Think Time – Often you only have a matter of seconds to convince people to click on your ad. Keep your message clear, concise and easy to read at a glance.

Think Truth – Don't lie or over-exaggerate. Aside from the obvious immoral nature, why bother wasting a click if the product on your landing page doesn’t match your ad description!

Think Testing – Most people aren’t lucky enough to get advertising spot on the first time round. You're going to need to test and then let the data tell you. Sadly that perfectly constructed ad that came from that epiphanic moment, that would win a prize for its literary prowess, might not be the best performing! For more advice on the testing side of ads view Consider Ad Copy As A Group Of Swappable Elements.

And that’s it, your ads should be flight ready! Happy check listing and Bonnes Vacances!

The post Your Essential Ad Copy Checklist – 10 Things To Pack Into Every Ad! appeared first on White.net.

Stop guessing! Develop a winning social media strategy with this step-by-step guide

Posted: 08 Sep 2015 01:00 AM PDT

With the growing popularity of social media, businesses have a unique opportunity to engage with their fans and expand their brand's visibility. Sadly, the common misconception is that you can just jump into social media without any preparations or a strategic thinking. Sadly this approach doesn't work as months down the line businesses and their teams discover that a lack of strategy is holding them back.

To help your social media grow I've put together this easy to follow-up guide – read the post or skip to the bottom of the page to discover an infographic explaining 9 steps to creating a winning social media strategy.

Step #1: Understand why having a social media strategy is important

As of May 2015, Google started showing tweets in search results bringing greater incentive to brands using social media. While this exciting news means new opportunities, it also leaves no room for ad-hoc social media management. In order to succeed, social media must be treated like any other marketing channel. It must be supported with a strategy which could help your business plan improve and expand.

Having a social media strategy will help you:

Meet your business objectives and reach your targets
Understand what your competition is doing and how to get ahead of them
Meet your audience expectations by looking at their lifestyle, habits and interests
Overcome your business obstacle, whether you struggle with resources, time, budget or tools

Step #2: Where does your social presence stand against your competitors?

To get a true understanding of how your social media presence compares to your competitors, you need to begin with a comprehensive social media audit. By reviewing your own strengths and weaknesses you will be able to benchmark your own channels and spot further or even undiscovered opportunities.

By digging deeper into industry trends and getting to know the latest changes you will be able to learn where you've been failing so far. Equipped with these findings you will gain a strong foundation for your social media strategy.

Step #3: What are your social media goals?

The success of any social media strategy is setting up realistic goals of what you want to gain from your investment in having a social presence. Your goals should match your digital marketing strategy but more importantly, they should be tied directly to your business goals.

Start by selecting at least three social media goals for your business
The goals you choose will depend of business type and character of your industry
Depending what are your key goals are, the strategy will differ and will also require applying different tactics
Some of your social networks may require a channel specific setup of objectives
Keep in mind all your goals should be achievable, measurable and you should be defined using S.M.A.R.T. goals criteria

With your social growth and accounts expansion, you may discover the need to change your goals year after year, depending of how successful you are at achieving them.

Once you know what your goals are, you can can start working on establishing next steps for your strategy.

Step #4: What are your unique selling points?

To prevent your messaging from getting lost within the noisy feeds, a clarification of unique selling points is crucial. This important, yet often overlooked element, will help your team members understand what your company's unique proposition is and how your brand stands out from the crowd.

Empowered with this knowledge your team will be able to help you create a the social presence your customers would love and engage with.

Step #5: How do you segment your social media audience?

To discover previously unknown revenue and ways of interacting with your consumers, audience segmentation is a must have. Defining who your audience is, what their needs are and their expectations will help you deliver the right message to the users who are best suited for your product, and most likely to buy.

Different social media platforms allow you to segment your audience in different ways. Facebook offers the most options – instead of sending one message to your entire follower base, you can choose exactly who sees your post using criteria such as age, gender, interests, or life stage.

Twitter does not allow this kind of customisation, meaning that your message goes out to everyone, so you have to make sure your messages don't alienate any single group. As soon as you start paying for advertising however, your targeting options become more refined, on Twitter as well as Facebook.

Step #6: What channels are you planning to use?

The choice is endless when it comes to choosing social networks. Instead of spreading yourself across multiple networks which you have never used or don't understand, focus on a couple of channels.

This will rescue you from managing way too many accounts and not delivering on the promise of creating quality engagement and content. Go for the trending or upcoming channels only when your core channels are developed and hold a strong position, as any addition to this mixture would require extra time and investment.

Step #7: How you are going to use content?

Content is the foundation of any social media presence. Depending of your objectives and target audience, you can develop a plan which will allow you deliver valuable content on a consistent basis.

B2C businesses tend to use social media to build a community around their products and influence others with social proof stories of how their products makes people’s lives better.

B2B companies see social media as a way of positioning themselves as thought leader within the industry, promoting their company's culture and employee’s knowledge, and a way of attracting new team members.

Step #8: How are you going to use tactics to meet your goals

When you know what your key goals are you can break down each of them into one or two tactics which are going to clarify how you are going to use each of these channels, what are you planning to do and how. You should also align each tactic with a measurable metric which will help you measure performance of your activities and keep you focussed in order to reach the final goal.

Social Goal #1: Drive traffic to the website

Social Tactic #1: Establish posting consistency between Monday to Sunday
Social Tactic #2: Post social updates linking to your website at the timings when your audience is online
Social Tactic #3: Make your content a) sharable and b) visually engaging c) snackable by breaking the information down for easy consumption
Social Tactic #4: Recycle content in clever ways by reposting the same articles using different images, wording and calls-to-action

Metric: Once you introduce regular posting, begin to track your performance to evaluate which of them are getting the most likes, favourites, shares, etc.

Step #9: How are you going to measure your success?

Finally, to determine whether your social activities are working and bring difference to your business, you need to measure their outcomes. By matching KPIs to your goals you will able to evaluate your progress but most importantly this data will help you demonstrate improvement and reveal true value of these activities.

You must also remember to tie these metrics to specific time frames by defining when you want to see results by.

Social Goal #1: Drive traffic to the website

SMART objectives: measure unique visitors from social media referrals, bounce rate, time on page, conversion rate and revenue
Timeframe: Increase number of visits to the website via Twitter by 35% by December.

The post Stop guessing! Develop a winning social media strategy with this step-by-step guide appeared first on White.net.

5 hreflang mistakes you are probably making

Posted: 01 Sep 2015 06:20 AM PDT

As a business grows and demand increases, the need and want of that business is to widen their market reach. Often businesses grow their market internationally and as a consequence, they require an international SEO strategy (you can read about international SEO here).

What is hreflang?

The hreflang tag serves as part of an international SEO strategy and was introduced by Google in 2011 to help websites increase their visibility to users in multiple countries with different language variations.

The tag also allows you to show search engines the relationship between your web pages in alternate languages. It’s particularly useful when you have created content that is specific to a local audience. Essentially, the tag signals to search engines that a user may be querying in language “x” will want this result instead of a page with similar content in language “y”.

You can also take it one step further by implementing the tag to show that you have content targeted towards variants of a single language. If this is the case, you can target pages more specifically by extending the tag to to indicate a particular region the content is localised for e.g. Spain (hreflang=”es-es”) versus Spanish – Mexico (hreflang=”es-mx”). This extension comes in handy when you want to control variations for shipping, currency, culture, etc.

If your page serves content in multiple languages or asks a user to select their preferred page, you can implement the x-default to show that the page is not specifically targeted. The code looks like:

It’s important to bear in mind that hreflang is not a directive, it’s a signal. This means that other SEO factors can actually overide the tag and therefore cause different variations of your site to rank higher. Before diving straight in, I'd recommend reading up on other international SEO best practices and taking a look at Google's documentation on using hreflang.

What hreflang will do & what it won’t

It will:

Help the right country/language version of your cross-annotated pages appear in the correct versions of Google.

It won't:

Fix duplicate content issues if you have duplicate copies of your pages targeting the same keywords, it does not mean that the right country version will rank because of hreflang.
It also won't replace geo-ranking factors. Just because you rank position 1 in the UK for 'Dell computers', does not mean you will rank number 1 for the same term in the United States.

What are some common hreflang mistakes we see?

1. Return tag errors

"Return Tag Errors" are the result of hreflang annotations that don't cross-reference each other. Often, marketers may put the proper tags on certain pages e.g.

< link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com/en/test.htm” hreflang=”en” />
< link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com/fr/test.htm” hreflang=”fr” />

But then forget to include them on other pages, creating a problem known as "Return Tag Errors". Google is simply saying: "If page A links to page B, page B must link back to page A otherwise the annotations may not be interpreted correctly". When there are return tag errors, Google Search Console will often flag up the issue and provide some recommendations.

2. Incorrect Use of Language/Country Codes

When you are adding hreflang codes to your webpages, you need to make absolutely sure that you are using the correct country and language codes. In order to function properly, a hreflang attribute must be one of the following formats:

Language Code:ISO 639-1
Language & Country Code:ISO 316-1 Alpha 2

One of the most common mistakes we see in SEO is using 'en-en' or 'en-uk' to specific English speaker in the United Kingdom. However, the correct hreflang tag that should be implemented for the UK is actually "en-gb" because ‘en-uk’ for example does not exist within Google’s language codes.

An example of using 'en-en' is Ferrari.com – take a look below at their code.

But what actually happens when you search 'Ferrari' in Google?

Technically the URL we'd like appears (minus the underscore instead of the hyphen) but this isn’t reflected within the tag.

You can use a hreflang generator tool like this one to see which values you should be using but I'd suggest reading up on Google's language/country code before diving in deep.

3. Fixing duplicate content issues

As stated earlier in the post, the hreflang tag will not alleviate duplicate content problems.

If you have two pages that are in the same language but that are targeting different regions, such as English in Canada and English in the US, the content may be similar and therefore potentially deemed as duplicate.

Hreflang won't solve the issue; it is still possible that your American page may outrank your Canadian page if the American page has significantly more link authority, and especially if it has links from Canadian sources.

Adding hreflangs will not solve this issue but they can help alleviate the issue – hence why hreflang tags alone are simply not enough. The tags only offer a technical structure that helps Google to sort through and understand your content, but to have a well-rounded international site, you need a holistic international marketing strategy that includes building links and authority to your site from the relevant languages/countries you are targeting.

4. Incorrect implementation of canonical tags & hreflang tags together

The hreflang tag can be used alongside your rel="canonical" tags. For example, page A should have a canonical tag pointing to page A, page B should have a canonical tag pointing to page B, and page C should have a canonical tag pointing to page C. All three pages should have hreflang tags that mention all three of the pages in the group. Let's look at some examples:

On this page, http://www.example.com/usa/ the hreflang tags may be:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-us" href="http://www.example.com/usa/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-ca" href="http://www.example.com/ca/" />

So in this case, the canonical tag would be:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/usa/" />

On the Canadian page, the hreflang tags may stay the same, but the canonical tag for this page would be:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/ca/" />

5. Not using absolute URLs

This one may seem obvious but websites do make this mistake. It's best practice to make sure that URLs in rel=canonical and in hreflang tags should be absolute URLs beginning with http:// or https:// as appropriate. There really isn’t any margin for error, so always make sure you are using absolute URLs and NOT something like the following:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-ca" href="/ca/" />

Google needs to be able to crawl the entire URL path, especially since hreflang tags are often referenced by separate ccTLDs or sub-domains.

So there we have it, a run through of common hreflang issues. Have you struggled in the past with hreflang issues? Am I missing any crucial problems? Let me know in the comments.

Image credit: Nicolas Raymond – Abstract Acrylic

The post 5 hreflang mistakes you are probably making appeared first on White.net.

The relationship between SEO and UX

Posted: 27 Aug 2015 01:16 AM PDT

What's More Important: User Experience or SEO?

The answer is simple: neither.

When people think of SEO, there are a number of common bad practices that come to mind like keyword stuffing, link building and spamming the search engines with lots of low quality content.
Back in the old black hat days of SEO there wasn't a strong correlation between SEO and UX; the focus here was playing Google's system. But with the introduction of various algorithms that gap is closing and those in the digital sphere are starting to focus on the user.

SEO is now all about relevancy. It's about attracting the right people and providing them with relevant answers to their search queries. There is little point targeting a keyword if it isn't relevant, Google is good at grouping keywords and understanding what the intention of the page is. Whilst you might be driving traffic to your site, is this traffic relevant?

UX is about how your visitors behave on your site and the path to conversions. It's all about enhancing the visitors experience and loyalty by improving the usability of the site so that users can interact with your brand as well as your products and services. There is more to UX than the look and feel of a website. There are a number of layers that help to create the user experience;

Functionality– e.g. are there any broken pages on my site?
Usefulness– e.g. how useful is the content to both search engines and users. Can search engines understand the purpose of the site so they can supply users with the right search results?
Hierarchy– e.g. how deep are my pages, do they follow a logical order?

SEO and UX : An internet love story

I am going to take you through the relationship between UX and SEO so you can understand the importance of treating them like a married couple.

Love at first 'site'

SEO isn't just for Robots

There are two important considerations when designing a website, UX and SEO. Both entities should have the same goal. It's not uncommon for departments to treat these two elements separately and usually design goes first and SEO comes second.

SEO and UX have more qualities in common that they are given credit for. SEO earns your site creditability and helps to attracts users to your site. UX earns credibility by pleasing users with a seamless experience that understands how they feel and behave.

The proposal

I love you and I think we could work well together

SEO relies on UX to make informed decisions, likewise UX relies on SEO to tell them about what the user is searching for. The more we encourage them to work together the better results we will achieve.

UX loves SEO because it provides valuable information on what users are searching for and what they desire. It helps UX teams develop a user journey that is usable and allows visitors to find all the information they require.

The wedding

Enter into a partnership

Although these two disciplines have distinct roles and require different approaches they both have the same end goal. For both entities to succeed, people need to start realising they go hand in hand and must both be considered at all times.

SEO isn't something you can suddenly turn on at the end of a web design project and it will suddenly work. SEO needs to be involved at the start of a project and work alongside the design and development progress.

Divorce

Bad UX can kill SEO

Ultimately search engines aren't going to convert, it's visitors that will. Google simply points your visitors in the right direction. If visitors land on a poorly designed website that is hard to navigate the chances are they will bounce directly back to the SERPs and land on your competitors' sites. This isn't merely a reflection of the SEO efforts, but the poor user experience.

SEO and UX: Match made in heaven

Let's take a look at some of the elements that form a website and look at how SEO and UX benefit from these elements.

Meta Titles

SEO: The single most important signal that tells search engines the topic of your page. These are the primary signal which tells Google what your page is about
UX: The titles indicate to the user what the page will be able and should include the keywords the user is searching for

H1s

SEO: This is another signal that tells Google what this page is about
UX: Clearly describes the content on the page

URLs

SEO: URLs should be meaningful and following the structure of the site
UX: A clean and logical sequence that follows the natural breadcrumb of the site

Quality Content

SEO: Google does love content but it knows that users love content. Google wants quality content that is well written and isn't keyword stuffed
UX: Content should be engaging, relevant and aid the user's journey

Sitemaps

SEO: XML sitemaps allow Google to crawl your site easier and understand the structure and pages on your website
UX: HTML sitemaps are designed so your visitors can find any page on your website

Site Structure

SEO: Having a well-structured site means that robots can crawl your site more effectively and understand the site's hierarchy
UX: Make it as easy for visitors to move further around the site. Visitors don't want to think or assume anything so a good site structure means that your visitors can find what they want quickly

Internal links

SEO: Helps to establish hierarchy for a website and means robots understand the architecture of your site
UX: Helps aid website navigation and the user's journey from page to page

Breadcrumbs

SEO: Robots can track a visitor's journey through a site and make sense of how the site is structured
UX: Likewise these offer an easy way for users to track their process through the site

Site search

SEO: Gain an insight into what your users are searching for on your site
UX: Search and find products/services quickly

Page Speed

SEO: It's not uncommon knowledge that Google now favours mobile friendly websites
UX: Users want a seamless service no matter what device they are on and don't want to wait for pages or images to load
In essence UX encompasses a number of elements, there isn't one thing that makes or breaks your user's experience. Likewise you can't treat every marketing activity you do as a separate feature as they all work in union. Google is becoming more human so don't try and fool it with a beautiful looking website that doesn't work well for the Googlebot.

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Does My Site Have A Penalty? 27 Risks to Check

Posted: 25 Aug 2015 02:59 AM PDT

“It's a Google Penalty.”

Followed closely by “we're out of coffee“, these are four words that every digital marketer hates hearing.

Receiving any Google penalty can be damaging to a website, from algorithmic updates that will decrease your rankings a little, to more serious manual actions that will banish you from the search results. They have the potential to be very harmful to a business, especially those who rely on being found through Google and selling over the web.

We’ve looked at this in the past and have made an updated list to, as the kids put it, get with the times (thanks go to Tad Chef for his original post back in 2011).

So (for those who might be new to the industry), what is a penalty?

The first point to clear up is that there is more than one kind of penalty: Algorithmic, and Manual, and in Google's eyes, only a manual action is considered an actual penalty. Both are harmful to your website, but will do varying levels of damage. For most users, any drop in visibility and organic traffic as a result will be called a penalty, even if they’ve actually been caught in one of Google’s algorithmic filters. We'll start with the greater of the two evils: a manual penalty.

Manual Penalty

Matt Cutts has told us that Google's definition of a penalty is when manual action is taken against a website – meaning an actual human being has analysed your site, and decided to take action against it. This type of penalty can be extremely harmful for a website, and is only applied when a website is clearly breaking Google's rules. There are two types of manual penalty actions, 'site-wide' and 'partial'.

The length of time that a manual penalty can be applied for is based on how badly the guidelines were broken, and can only be removed once Google feels the website has taken sufficient action to rectify the issues.

While the penalty can be removed, this in no way guarantees that you will recover your prior visibility, but you will be able to rank once again, and needless to say it will have a substantial effect on your visibility.

Algorithmic 'penalty'

The lesser of the two evils, an algorithmic 'penalty' is different to a manual one, in so far as it will not show up in GSC, and it will often not throw you from the rankings entirely. Algorithmic 'penalties' (technically filters designed to catch manipulative tactics or low-quality content) are results of updates in Google's search engine algorithm; these updates look to penalise sites for doing something wrong, while rewarding those for doing things well.

For example, Penguin, originally released in April of 2012 was aimed at cracking down on over optimisation of links (overly-commercial and unnatural anchor text, comment spam or large amounts of paid links for example), so sites that looked unnatural were affected, thus rewarding those lower down in the rankings.

How to spot if you've been penalised?

Spotting a manual penalty is easy, for two reasons: your traffic will drop, often significantly, and you will find a message in your Google Search Console account.

Algorithmic penalties aren't so easy to spot, especially which update/filter it is you've been affected by. The easiest way to determine whether you’ve been affected is to check your analytics data. You will be able to see where your traffic dropped and correlate this with when algorithms like Panda and Penguin were released. There are certain tools that can help you spot if an algorithmic update has affected your site, like FE International's.

How to recover

Recovering from a penalty is not easy. If you've been slapped with a manual penalty, don't expect it to go away quickly. You will need to understand what exactly you've done to earn Google's ire, and then prove that you have taken appropriate action to rectify the issue and that you are indeed, very very sorry.

If you’ve been struck by an algorithmic penalty, you need to understand what algorithm you’ve been penalised by, what you can do to help recover your rankings, and then hope for an update or for your site to no longer be caught in the filter.

So what will get you penalised?

Let's now look at the real reason you're here, to find out what will get your site penalised.

1. Paid Links

Google states that buying links is against its rules, although it's still a popular tactic for those willing to risk the fallout if caught, and many site owners are taken in by sellers promising that their paid links are undetectable (hint: they're usually not).

Buying links can get you penalised by both the Penguin algorithm and in severe cases you can even receive a manual penalty.

2. Reciprocal links on a large scale

To a certain extent, link exchanges and reciprocal links can be natural For example, bloggers regularly link out to other bloggers who have linked to them. The problem comes when you have this happening on a substantial level, and exchange schemes and networks can be detected algorithmically, so you'll likely end up getting penalised sooner or later.

On a page regarding reciprocal links, Google even ask you to report any sites that are participating in schemes to manipulate PageRank, so this may or may not lead to Google giving reported sites manual actions…

3. Over-optimised anchor text

We've seen first-hand that brands with large number of links using exact match anchor text get penalised. If, for example, you're an SEO company, and your backlink profile is made up of links that use the anchor text SEO Agency, then you are, in the words of South Park 'gonna have a bad time'. Your backlinks should use a natural mix of terms, including a significant number of branded phrases, as well as generic terms, as this is how many people will introduce your site.

4. Links from wrong language websites

An English site that gets a lot of its links from Russian or Chinese websites is likely going to be flagged up. Google is smart enough to compare the language of your website to those that are linking to you, especially if the (translated) anchor text makes little contextual sense.

5. Rented links

Not a common occurrence, rented links are where websites pay for links for a certain amount of time, thus increasing rankings. The first, and most serious problem, is that these are essentially paid links, and we know that Google really doesn't like this, and if you're caught, it may slap you with a big manual penalty.

The second issue is when you come to end of this period, those links disappear, and you either lose that authority boost, or you keep paying to keep your site up in the rankings, which is a bit of a double edged sword.

6. Blog networks

Back in September 2014, Google reportedly took action against a number of large blog networks (also known as PBNs), by handing out a number of manual actions to the sites for 'thin content' spam.

Private Blog Networks are usually a set of blogs or websites which may be controlled by one party, and the goal of these sites is to build up links within this network to help rank certain content better in the search results. Some webmasters and SEOs use these networks to help artificially manipulate their rankings through either linking to target pages or sites, or even through comment spam, although there are PBNs that work, and are used more ethically as a primary way to rank.

7. Unnatural guest posting

The topic of much debate, guest posting was crucified back in January of 2014, when Matt Cutts declared it all but dead. As with many SEO tactics, it had become overused, at which point Google stepped in.

Why is guest posting seen as bad? It became an easy way to get links on an external website, and in many cases these opportunities were paid for or on websites on unrelated topics. So if you're paying websites to allow you to write rubbish guest posts with links back to your site, you might want to reconsider.

It should also be noted that guest blogging done correctly is a great way to reach your target audience and to get your name out there. It's become somewhat of a myth, but actually good guest blogging isn't dead.

8. Too many links too fast

The more links the better isn't always correct, and even good links gained too fast can result in a penalty. Google not only checks the quality of your incoming links, but the rate at which you've acquired them.

If you're gaining a lot of links over a sustained period of time (I assume that Google must somehow take viral success in to account), this is going to look somewhat unnatural, and Google is likely to assume that you are gaining these links in ways that break their rules. If Google feels you're getting more links than you deserve (even if they're perfectly legitimate) you my friend are risking a penalty.

9. Site-wide outbound links

While we want to link our pages together across the site, it's easy to accidentally make this look unnatural. For example, if you have a link to an external site in your footer that appears on every single page of your website, Google could see this as manipulative. So if you're going to include these links, such as a link to your developer, make sure it's nofollowed.

10. Hidden links/ links hidden in third party services or tools/plugins

Google hates hidden things, especially links (and text), and it’s a violation of their guidelines. Commonly, web spammers will hide links in a number of ways, including using hyperlinks on a white background so their invisible, using CSS to make the links tiny, or just linking using a single character in a sentence, and these links will likely point to porn, viagram or casino websites. Google hates these types of links because they’re decepetive, and they ruin the user experience.

One easy mistake we've seen a number of webmasters make is installing non-verified plugins to their site, without checking the source code. Some of these tools, services, and plugins have sneaky business models where they sneak a hidden link in to their offering, such as a CSS menu, sidebar widget, or visitor counter. We’ve also seen websites receive penalties through links within widgets that had over-optimised commercial anchor text.

Sometimes these links are not only hidden; they are also off topic and downright spammy. So make sure to check the source code of anything you add to your site.

11. Duplicate content

While Matt Cutts has said that you needn't stress about duplicate content (unless it's spammy or stuffed with keywords), it can definitely have an effect on your site, even if it's not classed as a penalty. The problem is that Google needs to know which URL to show in the SERPs, and if it has confusion choosing your content, it might choose someone else's entirely.

Whether it's an actual penalty or not, as Dr Pete puts it "If a page isn't ranking (or even indexed) because of duplicate content, then you've got a problem, no matter what you call it".

12. Thin content (Panda)

The Panda update rolled out in 2011 to target content lacking in substance. When Panda 1.0 was released, it did a fairly good job of understanding when content was 'thin', but as time has gone on, and subsequent updates were released, Google has got better at not only understanding the quality of the copy, but more importantly, the value that the content gives the user. One aim of Google's Panda update was to penalise sites that were serving users with low-quality as well as thin (or shallow) content. Panda targets websites that have a large amount of content lacking depth, and treats it similarly to overt spam techniques. More recent updates, such as the recent Quality Update, have taken this quest by Google to reward content that does a good job of with user experience even further. Panda updates and refreshes happen regularly, and have become more sophisticated.

Examples of thin content are pages with automatically generated content, thin affiliate pages, doorway pages, as well as pages with scraped content or low quality blog posts. Unfortunately it can sometimes be easy to overlook these pages on your website, and Google has stated that it can and will give out manual penalties for this as well, so it's a very serious issue to look out for on your site.

Google likes to see content that is not only relevant and of a good length, but is going to be of use to your users. So get your whey protein out, do your keyword research, and bulk out that content.

13. Scraped content

Scraped content (i.e. content taken from someone else's website) displayed on your website is enough to get you a good old penalty. Don't do it. Enough said.

14. Unreadable content

Content that's written in broken English can be seen as scraped and then 'spun' (where words are replaced with synonyms to try and fool Google – pro tip: Google aint' no fool). So make sure a human being can understand what you write, because if a human quality rater hired by Google (yes that's a thing) might not see it too favourable.

15. Cloaking

Imagine walking in to a pub and ordering a pint, only for the barman to give you a glass full of Viagra: not cool right? You were expecting a pint, because the shopfront said 'Pub', so why did you get a glass full of Viagra? The same goes for websites, rigging your website so that Google sees one thing, and your users another is not cool, and Google hates it. Funny story, Google banned itself for cloaking once.

Another form of cloaking is hiding text within your web page to help it rank. This is bad. This is commonly done by hiding white text on a white background, manipulating the CSS so the text is hidden off screen, or even just placing an image over the text. Google’s pretty good with detecting this these days, and it will not hesitate to slap you for it.

Cloaking is not something that is generally done by accident, and this is why it carries such a heavy penalty. You're deliberately trying to game and manipulate the search engine results. If you're caught, don't expect much mercy.

16. Spun content

Article spinning is the process of generating 'rewritten' version of content, through the use of synonyms (which hardly ever make sense anyway), and then placing these articles on low quality directories and article websites. Pre-Panda, this would have worked, but don't even think about it. It gains you nothing (except penalisation), and it gives us SEOs a bad name!

17. Comment spam

Don't even. Just don't.

18. Giving out blackhat SEO advice

This has only been hinted at by various sources, but some have said that if you're caught actively giving out blackhat SEO advice, Google may choose to give your site a penalty, as you're technically telling people to break Google's guidelines.

19. Doorway pages

Google doesn't like doorway pages. They have a 'long-standing view' that doorway pages created solely to manipulate search engines, can harm the user's experience, and because of this they have said that sites which do this may see a reduction in rankings.

Doorway pages are pages (or even whole websites) that are created solely to rank high in the search results, but instead of providing the user with information that they wanted to find, they send them through to another part of the website – like a doorway!

20. Over optimised footer links

An old tactic, and one that we still see way too often is the over-optimisation of a website's footer. What websites do is use keyword rich anchor text for internal links as a way of trying to rank for these keywords by using them many times as possible. But, these days, if you’ve got a large number of keyword rich anchor links in your footer, you're heading for a nice bit of penalisation.

Over-optimisation in any aspect doesn't work anymore, and it will get you in trouble, so cut it out.

21. Keyword stuffing

Back in the early days of the internet, and for a long time, keyword stuffing was how your website was ranked. The more keywords = the better ranking. As time went on though Google realised that this couldn't work, and it was obviously easy to manipulate, so along came Panda to destroy those sites like canes of bamboo.

Search engines tell users to use words that you want your pages to be found for, so naturally for some new site owners they assume that if they just write the same phrase repeatedly in their content, this is going to rank them. Wrong. While you have to go to quite an extreme to see an actual penalty, chances are if your content repeats the same phrases 30 times, it's not going to be great content. There's no set rule on how many times is too many, but try to use natural language to avoid this. Google is much better at understanding contextual relevance, and grouping your keywords in buckets, rather than by the actual phrase.

22. Too many 404s

While too many 404s are unlikely to get you a manual penalty, the fact remains that if your site is full of them, Google is going to see this as a mark of low-quality, and this in turn may hurt your rankings through a quality filter.

Keep an eye on your 404 errors in the Google Search Console or by crawling your site with Screaming Frog, and redirect or fix those where appropriate.

23. Overuse of meta keywords

No-one uses them, surely… Meta keywords were once a good method of search engines understanding your website through a number of keywords, but of course these began to be manipulated, so Google did away with them.

While Google doesn't penalise you for these, Bing has said it sees it as a mark of low-quality, so just get rid of them unless your site uses them for internal search mechanics. It will take you 5 minutes and covers all bases, just in case.

24. Hacked website

This is an unfortunate one, because this is not your fault. If your site is hacked, what usually happens is hackers will insert malicious content on to your website, which can be used to collect email addresses etc. They may also insert links to malicious and spam websites on your popular pages, as well as creating completely new pages on your site, which are optimised and rank for certain terms. For instance we have seen hacked sites where they have created thousands of pages around designer handbags, which rank, then subsequently cause the website to incur a penalty.

Good web hosting companies should notice this and pull down your site before any serious damage, but you can't always guarantee this. Keep an eye on your site by regularly doing a crawl.

25. Poor mobile experience

The most recent of Google's updates, Mobilegeddon was aimed at improving the search results for those on mobile, by ranking those with user-friendly mobile sites higher (only in mobile search results though).

While you will not get an actual penalty for not having a mobile friendly site, you may well see a drop in traffic from mobile users, and depending on how users access your website, this could be a large proportion. Making your website mobile friendly is not an overnight job, but there are ways you can begin to improve.

26. Domain has a bad rep

Buying a new domain is not easy, and unfortunately, some domains can come with a bad history that new webmasters may not know how to spot. There have been countless cases of webmasters buying old domains, only to find that they have been given a manual penalty for shady tactics, and they subsequently have to go through the hard task or having it removed.

Google's Matt Cutts gave some good advice on this topic, although sometimes it may be better to cut your losses and start again…

27. Too many adverts

Google released a page layout algorithm in 2012, know as the top-heavy update, that was aimed at penalising sites with too many adverts above the fold, or where the content on the page was hard to find. This won't get you a manual penalty, but can cause your pages to not rank so highly.

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So there we have it, a fairly exhaustive list of ways that your website could get penalised!

Have you experienced any of these, and are there any that we’ve missed? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below, or over on Twitter! Or let me know!

The post Does My Site Have A Penalty? 27 Risks to Check appeared first on White.net.