Digital Marketing Soft Skills
6 Essential Soft Skills For Digital Marketers
1
Savannah

6 ESSENTIAL SOFT SKILLS FOR DIGITAL MARKETERS

At the beginning of every task, you should focus on not just completing it but doing it right. The right skills and experience will get you there.

Digital marketing was brought about with the innovation of the internet. LinkedIn says the Digital Marketing Specialist role is a top 10 in-demand role with a whopping 860,000 job openings. So what skills are required to start a career in digital marketing? I would love to split those skills into two; soft skills and technical skills. In this article, we will deal with soft skills.

Let’s go through the soft skills needed.

SOFT SKILLS

They are also known as basic skills. Soft skills are those that make you who you are. They cut across everywhere and are not industry-based but contribute a great deal to your productivity. How you work and relate with others is influenced by your soft skills. So, which of those skills do you NEED in this field?

1. Communication

Marketing is communicating about a product or service to an audience that might be your potential customers. Proper communication is getting the message through in a manner that is easy for your audience to consume and understand. No one wants to keep reading/listening to the same message over and over. While communicating, ensure you check on some of these points;

  • Do you understand what your audience needs?

Before communicating, you have to first understand what your audience is looking for. Don’t go advertising a shoe to someone looking for a tire.

  • Answer THEIR questions.

Give your customers the answer they want to hear and that’s how you grab their attention. If you’re trying to sell a service/product, your client needs to understand why they need it and how they will benefit.

E.g. Stephen wants to have his social media page managed for him, he wants to understand what you will do for him and how it will impact him. If you start talking about social media statistics, how it has evolved, and it’s worth, you will be overloading information on your client. Go straight to the point and tell them what your strategies are and how you plan to manage and grow his page.

  • Do not leave room for guessing.

While addressing an issue, ensure you do it exhaustively. There’s a thin border-line between giving enough and giving too much. Give enough that the client is satisfied. Sometimes too much leaves one confused and they can’t make a choice.

  • Grab their attention and make it brief.

 Once you initiate a conversation, aim at grabbing their attention. You won’t have it for long, so once you got their attention, go directly into communicating the important part.

2. Persuasion.

As a marketer, you need to convince people to purchase a product/service. Once you’ve grabbed a prospective client’s attention, the main task is to make the client know why they need what you offer. Make it seem like they are missing something. The difference between a ‘need’ and a ‘want’ is that you cannot do without the need.

3. Multitasking

Digital marketing is a wide field that encompasses a dozen tasks. If you’re starting off or working with a small team, chances are, you wear several hats. At one point, you could have several projects from different clients, or you could also be playing different roles e.g. content writing, graphics design, analytics etc. Have a schedule of what needs to be done, their relevance and a timeline, this will help you juggle through the tasks with none being left behind.

4. Creativity

Content creation is the backbone of marketing. What message are you trying to convey and how are you going to dispense that message? That is where creativity comes in. Your audience has probably seen bucket loads of videos, pictures and text prior to yours. 

To grab their attention, you need to do something different…or better yet, what has been done you need to do it better. Don’t be afraid of trying new things. Try different methods and models and see which one works. They probably won’t work the first time but don’t stop there.

Creative Digital Marketing

5. Adaptation

As stated above, digital marketing was first heard with the emergence of the internet. Since the internet emerged, it has been 30 years but the rate of change is rapid.

Digital marketing means marketing on the internet, and to be a good marketer on an ever-changing platform, then you need to adapt to the rate of change. Advance your strategies and models. What works today won’t stay the same, always familiarize yourself with the latest developments.

6. Teamwork

A normal day for a digital marketer involves interacting with designers, videographers, writers, your client, and several individuals. Good interpersonal skills help you communicate and relate with all these individuals to accomplish the shared goal.

This list is not exhaustive. There are many other soft skills that you might require but this is a good starting point.

Local Search Ranking
Local SEO: 7 Tips on How To Improve Local Ranking
0
Savannah

LOCAL SEO: 7 TIPS ON HOW TO IMPROVE LOCAL RANKING

Being in business means that the majority of your customers will be those who are within your locality. If a customer can get something close to them, why do they need to ship or go looking for it in a further location?

According to WebFX, 28% of local searches result in a purchase, and 46% of Google searches are for local businesses. Those are some very juicy statistics and valuable traffic that could turn your business around. This is a sign to pay more attention to your local ranking.

Before we dig deep into statistics and technical terms, let’s explain what a local search is.

What is Local SEO (Local Ranking)?

 Local SEO means local search engine optimization. This is the process of improving your website to rank higher during local searches. A local search is when a user does a search for products or services that targets a specific location. E.g. Phone repair in Nairobi.

Local Ranking 1

80% of local searches convert and 50% of local searches result in the users visiting the locations of the target businesses. How do you improve your local ranking to get the local search traffic to your website?

How to improve your Local Search Ranking

You first must understand what the determinants for local searches of search engines are, in this case, Google. All search engines have different algorithms but Google has the lion’s share when it comes to search engine use dominating the market with slightly over 80%.

The three main determinants of local ranking are;

  • Relevance – Google aims at delivering results that best suit search queries. That means Google will look at your keywords and phrases to see if you match what the query needs. If you search for pizza joints in your local, Google will not display pasta.
  • Distance – Google will take into consideration the proximity of your business when it comes to local ranking. This is a key point since Google will want to display businesses in that vicinity or near the target location.
  • Popularity – How well a business is known weighs into the results. Some businesses or places are prominent offline and may not have a good presence online, never the less, they could come up higher in local ranking. This is because Google uses information from all over the internet including directories, reviews from all over the internet, links, backlinks, and articles. E.g. A hospital may not have a good social media presence but because of its prominence, it will come high in the local ranking.

Now that you have an idea of what is considered, let’s take a look at how you can improve your local ranking by doing local SEO.

1. Create a business profile on Google My Business

This is the most important step in the process of optimization for local ranking. Listing your business in Google My Business will automatically improve your visibility in the search results. This is a free service that you should take advantage of and is very easy to do.

Here’s what to do;

a. Go to Google My Business and click on Manage now

Local Search 1

b. Sign in to your Google account if you’re not signed in

c. Add a business name, Google may have the name of your business so you can just select it.

Local SEO 1

d. Choose your business type

Local Ranking 2

e. Add your website/ online store (it’s optional but we highly recommend filling the box)

f. Enter the business type

g. Enter your business address

Local Ranking 3

h. Select your location on map

Google My Business Registration

i. Add your phone number

Google My Business

j. Finally, upload the business

It is advised that you fully complete these stages, some have the option to skip but ensure you fill each of these boxes with the correct information.

Once you’re done with creating a listing for your business, Google will have to verify either through a phone call or via a postcard. When you’re done with verification, it is time to continue optimizing your profile. Some of the most important optimizations you can do here are;

Add photos – Photos are very important to a business. They increase the click-through rate and according to Google, business profiles with photos get 35% more clicks. There are different types of photos you can add namely; logo, cover photos, and additional photos. Logos will go a long way to help customers identify you.

Additional photos bring more personality and life to your business. You can add photos of your business from the outside, especially the surroundings, and this way, anyone familiar with the location can easily locate you. You can also add photos of inside your business and also photos that have more character e.g. a club could add photos of patrons having a good time.

Add business hours – List business hours, opening time, and closing time including special hours for the weekends and holidays. Customers will not reach out if they are not sure of your operating time.

Add business category – Add the category most relevant to your business.

Add your website – Adding your website gives Google a little bit more insight into your business and Google is also able to associate your content with your business hence giving you a better chance of ranking.

2. Do your website’s SEO

Once your business is listed in Google My Business, the next step is to do the overall SEO for your website. Fix any issues that may have negative impacts on your website for a chance to rank higher both in global and local searches. We have an article detailed talking about website SEO.

3. Local keyword research

When it comes to local search ranking, you have to know what people are searching for. Make it your priority to do local keyword research. Target words that are relevant to your business and expand the scope of your keywords.

You may be offering phone repair services and target the keywords ‘phone repair in Nairobi’ over and over. This might limit your scope. A potential customer may search for a screen repair shop, which you do but you haven’t outlined that. Always come up with a wide range of keywords and phrases and strategically place them.

If you are new to keyword research here is the guide on how to do it and there are several tools listed that can help you do comprehensive research.

4. Add Structured Data

According to Google, Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content; for example, on a recipe page, what are the ingredients, the cooking time and temperature, the calories, and so on.

In simpler words, structured data will display results in a rich format. Results may be accompanied by things such as time, prices, and other important details. Structured data appears on top of the search engine results page. If your page is optimized for structured data, then it will have a higher local ranking. Follow Google’s guide on how to add structured data or have a professional do it for you.

5. Name, Address, and Phone Number Consistency (NAP)

As stated above in the article, when it comes to ranking, Google will collect information and signals from all over the internet. There are several business listings available, some are big directories, some are websites linking to you, they also could be local directories, and many others.

Ensure that the name, address, and phone number stated are all correct since they have a very big impact when it comes to local ranking. Google might get mixed signals if these crucial details are different in the different directories or citations. Remember, Google will always want to give their customers the best results and if something seems a miss, they might as well rank it lower.

6. Collect reviews

Reviews have a lot of weight when it comes to your local ranking. Authentic, positive reviews can do the trick to rank you high in local searches. It will really help you appear in the snack pack ranking which has a lot of traffic.

Example of a snack pack.

Whenever customers walk into your business and you serve them, you could ask them to do a review on your business. Ensure these reviews are done in places that are relevant, especially business directories, your website, and also on your GMB listing.

Do not pay to get reviews!

7. Local link building

Link building is one of the best ways if you want your website to rank higher generally. It is very effective and as you guessed it, difficult. Backlinks from other websites will boost your domain authority, which means how much Google trusts you.

The higher the domain authority the higher you get ranked. For higher local ranking, get local websites and directories to link back to you. Getting backlinks is one of the hardest SEO strategies, it takes time, persuasion, and creativity but hey, I can promise you it’s worth all that trouble.

Conclusion

SEO is a PROCESS, results can be seen in a month to a year’s time. Be patient and consistent to bear results. The best thing with SEO is that it will be a long-run project and once you maintain your website when it ranks high, it can top for a very long time in the local search.

Facebook for Marketing
How To Use Facebook For Marketing
0
Savannah

HOW TO USE FACEBOOK FOR MARKETING

Facebook is among the oldest, if not the oldest, kids on the block (social media). For a long time, it was just a platform for people to socialize and have fun until businesses realized the potential it holds. Years later, it is the biggest social media platform leading with over 2.9 monthly active users, which is mind-blowing.

Maybe you got a business running or you have plans to set up one, how do you go about it to reap the benefits from Facebook marketing? It is simple, really simple to have a business page on Facebook.

The majority of us have a personal Facebook account and profile. Probably took you less than five minutes to set it up and now you’re ready to share. Creating a business page is as easy as creating a personal account, with a little bit of difference of course and the best part is it is all free. If you’re working on a tight budget, you can do a lot of marketing here for free, once you’re ready to bump your marketing, you can do ads, more on that later.

Why use Facebook for marketing?

We are in the digital era, we get our information online, shop online, market online and do pretty much everything online. Social media is very big in online business and you need it. Just by opening apps, switching tabs, and clicking buttons, everything can be sorted without leaving the comfort of our houses.

If you’re in business and have no online presence, you’re missing out BIG. Brick and mortar might be doing you good, but having an online presence, you could be doing great, even for businesses that just serve the locals.

Apart from the large number of monthly users that Facebook has, it also has over 200 million businesses. That’s right, if you’re not there, you’re competitor certainly is.

Facebook also has a very big advantage since it belongs to Meta platforms. The integration that is there with Instagram and other social platforms is very advantageous. You can run an ad on Instagram from Facebook.

 

Marketing means research and planning are done. How do you do the research and planning for Facebook marketing? Let’s dig in.

Types of Facebook Posts

Facebook is a very versatile platform. It can upload different types and formats of content with ease. Facebook content types are; Facebook status (text), photos, videos, live streams, 360o videos, and link posts.

The majority of you are familiar with these, but do you know how the type of posts affects your engagements?

Before we can expound, the type of post you upload is heavily influenced by the kind of message you want to send to your users. You should also identify which types of posts your users engage with more to capitalize on that. Using Facebook for marketing is not very different from general marketing, you have to try different strategies to see which one works better for you. Here are some statistics and facts to help you in the decision-making process.

Facebook for Marketing

According to datareportal, the average engagement rate on Facebook is 3.39%. Contrary to the prior days, competition is very high on these social platforms right now. The only way to get a head is to create authentic, quality content that your target audience would want to engage with. The Facebook algorithm plays a big part in what to display to the users. The algorithm changes now and then but the bottom line is that the more your content gets engagement, the more the algorithm will display it to more audiences.

Facebook photo posts have an engagement of 4.42%. Facebook videos have an engagement rate of 6.09% which is better than the average. Facebook status posts get an engagement rate of 1.44%. Link posts have an engagement rate of 2.72%.

Do not be solemnly guided by numbers, marketing is a tailor-made affair, what works for one is not guaranteed to work for you. Use different types of content mix and identify those that work in your favor.

Facebook marketing strategy

You are done setting up your business page and can’t wait to start marketing your business, but hold up, not that fast and it is also not that easy. Marketing without a plan will lead to frustration and you will end up saying there’s no benefit in using Facebook for marketing.

These are the steps in Facebook marketing:

  • Define your audience
  • Set goals
  • Decide on content formats to use
  • Optimize your page
  • Monitor your page

1. Define your audience

The first step to successful marketing is to identify who is your potential audience. Come up with a persona that represents who your audience is. Some of the key point to identify is their; age, location, interest, time to use Facebook, and needs. The great news is that Facebook has insights to derive all this information.

A customer could want something but need something else. The needs beat the wants.

Once you have identified who your audience is, you can go to the next step.

2. Set goals

Goals are dependent on what you want to achieve, and what success means and looks like to you. A social media goal should be influenced by your business goal for unidirectional progress, at the end of the day Facebook marketing should be aiding in the success of the business.  

Some metrics used to measure success could be;

  • Lead generation
  • Sales and conversions
  • Engagement
  • Brand recognition
  • Customer service
  • Driving traffic to your website

There are many more depending on what you want to achieve.

Once you identify what you want to achieve, come up with a framework on how you plan to get there. There should be key indicators along the path to show if there is any progress made.

3. Decide on content formats to use and scheduling

We have discussed the content formats above. Now it’s time to decide what to use.

I will confidently say, there is no single solution that fits all. This is a trial and error process to see what works and what doesn’t. Keep in mind that your posts should have a balance of being informative and entertaining.

The hardest part is generating the content itself. Since you know your audience, you know what they are interested in. You could do some social listening to help you develop content. Social listening uses tools to identify what is being talked about on social media about your niche, what is in demand, and what is being talked about. Model your content around those hot topics that are relevant to you.

Once you are done with your content, it is time to schedule them. You need to know when the majority of your audience is active. Aside from that, the content should be relevant to the time you plan to post. There are several scheduling tools to use. Facebook has its scheduling tool that can schedule content for both Facebook and Instagram, other tools are paid that give more insights into these posts.

To schedule Facebook content follow these steps;

Open your business page.

Look at the left panel and you will see the planner.

Marketing in Facebook

Once the window, which looks like a calendar is open,

Click on the day you want to schedule your posts and set the time.

Facebook Marketing

Fill the boxes with the content.

Facebook for Marketing

Click on schedule once done. On the calendar-looking window, you can see the post there scheduled.

Facebook Marketing

4. Optimize your page

When in the process of setting up your page, use a catchy picture for your profile and cover photo. The about us section should detail what you do in easy and short terms.

While posting your content, use keywords. These are words or phrases that your target audience uses to search for your content. Facebook is a search engine, just like Google, and can do a good search to find relevant information.

Hashtags will also come a long way in helping with the visibility of your content during a search. The maximum number of hashtags you can use is 30 but 10 is a sweet spot. You don’t have to add every single hashtag you find, always use relevant hashtags.

Engaging with your audience will give you a good boost. When other users come looking around your page, they can tell that you respond and this goes a long way to building brand trust between you and your customers.

Messenger is a very crucial component in Facebook marketing, this is a quick way to respond to Fanyone who makes an effort to directly talk to your business. Messenger has more than 1.3 billion active users a month. The joy of having Facebook Messenger is you could have a chatbot doing the majority of work for you. A chatbot can respond to relevant questions and even direct a user to a website or relevant page. But always remember, personal interaction with your users will feel more authentic and build more trust. Whenever possible, respond very fast. Facebook has a feature that shows on your page how fast you respond.

Facebook groups are another way to get seen, this works well for service businesses. You can have a group of people interacting around topics relevant to you.

5. Monitor your page

After all this effort, it will be good to know how you are performing. Marketing has to give feedback on the progress made. Monitoring your Facebook page is very easy by using Facebook’s inbuilt insights tool.

From the tool, you will be able to derive this information;

  • Audience – age, location, gender, number of followers, new followers
  • Content – Facebook page reach, engagement per post
  • Competitors – likes, and number of posts

The steps are as follows;

Go to your business page. On the left-side menu, there is Insights

Marketing in Facebook

A window will open with the overview results. On the left side of the window, you can navigate to the different options

Marketingin Facebook

Results

Audience

Facebook

Benchmarking to see your competitors

Facebook

Content

Marketing

Compile these results using Excel or Google Sheets and you can derive further data.

SEO Issues
10 Most Common SEO Issues and How to Solve Them
0
Savannah

10 MOST COMMON SEO ISSUES AND HOW TO SOLVE THEM ​

A website grows as you publish content and do touch-ups here and there. At its launch, you might have done everything perfectly to have a website with the potential to rank very high. Along the way, some issues will begin encroaching.

They might not be notable or you might ignore them thinking they have no major impact on your website but the truth is, they do have an impact and if they are not fixed sooner, it could lead to a downhill path very fast.

Working on a page to rank highly is a very engaging task and it takes its sweet time to rank, but going downhill is quicker than a Formula 1 race. You don’t want to find yourself in a position of stagnation or plummeting after all that work.  Besides, other SEOs are working on their websites, why shouldn’t you?

PRO TIP: ALWAYS KEEP CHECKING FOR SEO ISSUES ON YOUR WEBSITE PERIODICALLY.

So, what are these SEO issues that we’re talking about? They are both technical and non-technical issues.

Here is a list of the 10 most common issues affecting SEO:

  • Page speed
  • Website architecture
  • Duplicate pages
  • Broken links (internal and external)
  • Mobile-friendliness
  • Redirects
  • Website optimization
  • txt
  • Sitemaps
  • Crawling

1. PAGE SPEED ​

You have been on Google searching for an article or page and then, Bam! You think you have found the perfect one from the snippet. You click on it and to your surprise, the page is just loading and loading. How did that make you feel? Probably closed it or opened a new tab and left it to load. You might go back to the page or forget about it completely.

The slow loading speed will also eat into your crawling budget. Not as many pages will be crawled as they could have before. This means that Google might not be able to display some of your pages since it has no idea of their existence or Google won’t be able to know if there are any changes to the pages not crawled. The average loading time for a good page is 3 seconds. For e-commerce pages, most conversions happen on pages that load between 0-2 seconds. That’s right, no one has time to wait for your page to load. If it’s too slow, then it’s on to the next.

There are several online tools (free and paid) that could be useful in testing your website and knowing its page speed. Some of the tools are Solarwinds Pingdom, Google’s PageSpeed Insights, Google’s Test My Site (mobile sites), WebPageTest, MOZ, Google’s Lighthouse, and many others.

Some of these tools will go a step further and state the specific issues that are affecting your website’s speed.

The most common issues that affect website load time are; redirects, large files (images, videos, and attachments), CMS plugins, bandwidth, choice of the website host, extra page elements (fonts, sliders, etc.), number of pages and many more. The list is not exhaustive but here are the most common ones.

SOLUTION

The more you continue using your website, the more it grows. At first, it may have been very fast, but what happens when you continue uploading files? The website becomes heavier. This SEO issue manifests itself very fast when not curbed. Compress files before you upload them to your pages.

A flashy website is very appealing to the eye, what you don’t know is that all the custom elements added will make your website heavier. Keep the elements minimal but have a beautiful design.

When it comes to plugins, delete all the unnecessary plugins. It will save you a fraction of a second which may not seem a lot but adds to the overall speed.

When choosing a website host, you have to know how dependable they are. We always say that cheaper is expensive. Look for a host within your budget and do a background check to know if they are reliable.

Bandwidth is very important. It dictates how many people can visit your site without having issues. As a website grows, increase your bandwidth whenever necessary. You might start with 100 visitors a month and down the line, you have 10,000 visitors a month. Monitor your website and decide when the right time to bump up your bandwidth is.

Redirects mean your users have to wait for your page to load to another page. Minimize the number of redirects on your website for a better user experience.

2. WEBSITE ARCHITECTURE

Website architecture is your website’s layout, and how your pages are linked. The website architecture should make it easy for the users to find information, moving from one page to another, it will also help in crawling. Breadcrumbs could be of help so that your user can know where they are at the bat of an eyelid.

URLs are a big SEO issue here. Have you seen those URLs that look like this; https/shoes/product/019474d89s9d? This is a very poor way to display your URLs. They might think that this leads to something unrelated to what they are looking for. This might cost you conversions, especially on e-commerce websites.

Poor website architecture also means poorly linked pages will not be crawled optimally. Google aims at giving a good user experience to its audience and on the realization of a poorly designed website, they will not rank you high. You might have the most amazing content but if your audience will have to maneuver on your page to find it, then it’s worthless.

SOLUTION

Ensure you have a good hierarchical structure. It should be well linked for crawlers to find all your pages and users to easily navigate.

Have a good menu that is displayed on your pages for easier navigation. Does a user want to go back home? It is right there on the menu from whatever page on your website.

Have a good consistent design. Do not keep changing the design of your website page after page. It looks shoddy and the inconsistency might make the users leave. Design from page to page should be familiar.

URLs should be simple and user-friendly with a bit of information. An example, instead of having a link like this; https/shoes/product/019474d89s9d, name the link in words users can understand. This link could be as such; https/shoes/product/nike_slides. This way a user can tell that this link will take them to a page with slides from Nike.

Website architecture is a technical SEO issue, have professionals handle what is too technical for you.

3. DUPLICATE PAGES.

Duplicate content means pages that are similar to the core or have a very huge percentage of similarity. Duplicate pages confuse Google on what page should be displayed. This is a very old technical SEO issue and continues to bother SEOs. 

Duplicate content may come from having the same version of the page on different protocols (HTTP and HTTPS). Dynamic websites might create several pages or URLs that contain the same content. For international websites that have websites in different languages, this might lead to duplicate content too.

SOLUTION

Use the attribute rel=”canonical” to tell Google which is the preferred page.

It is advised to use the robots.txt file to tell Google which links to crawl and which not to. This directive could help you to stop crawlers from accessing duplicate files.

4. BROKEN LINKS

The more pages you have, the higher the probability of having broken links. This is because you will link both internal and external pages. You have no control whatsoever over the external pages that you link. They may decide to take down or redirect a page you linked to. You might decide to also do the same for pages on your website.

The biggest SEO issue with this is that you will not easily notice if you don’t do periodic audits on your website. Websites with many pages are even harder to control and find out what is going on with their links.

Poorly redirected pages will also cause major SEO problems as the crawler will report a dead-end when they find such. You should know what redirect to use for what situations so that when the crawlers and users go through your page they could understand what’s going on. Users finding numerous broken links, especially on your website may lose trust and will offer a bad user experience. Your crawl budget will also be majorly affected by these broken links.

SOLUTION

Luckily, fixing this SEO issue is not complicated. Use website auditing tools to give you the broken links. Large websites cannot be manually audited and why do it manually for smaller websites when we have free tools to audit your website?

Remove all broken links highlighted. If they are your pages, use the right method to redirect them.

When redirecting pages, you have to know the aim of it. If it is a temporary issue, use a temporary redirect. If you are completely done with the page, use a permanent redirect to any relevant materials or your home page. Do not use one in place of the other lest you mess with your ranking. It will not happen immediately but it will happen over a period.

5. MOBILE-FRIENDLINESS

Mobile-friendliness is a very crucial ranking criterion. Google implemented a mobile-first indexing policy a few years ago. This shows you how important mobile compatibility is for your websites. 54% of the global website traffic comes from mobile devices. Most of us are on our phones and when we are searching for something online, we just switch to search engines directly.  A greater part of improving your SEO is to have a conveniently designed website.

You will be losing a lot of traffic once users discover your page but they have to struggle to see, click and scroll your website. It goes without saying, the spiders are after you. Some might prefer to have separate web pages for their mobile users but that will be a compromise. Losing out on all the link juice you could have and users might feel a bit insecure being redirected to another page automatically.

SOLUTION

Such technical SEO issues require you to engage your developer to assist you in solving them. The best way to handle this is by having a responsive page. This is a page that automatically adjusts itself depending on the screen size. This way, you do not have to have separate pages for desktop, tablet, and mobile users.

Ensure the elements on your screen are clickable comfortably. They should not be too small or too big but just the right size for a user to click them without interfering with the other elements.  Pictures and videos should fit perfectly on the screen size too.

6. REDIRECTS

As said above, a big website with many pages is hard to monitor. These SEO issues will not have a direct impact on the feel of your website until you find yourself on these broken pages. Redirects help us inform users of what is going on and if the page is a temporary or permanent redirect and takes them to the relevant functional pages.

The problem is that the more the redirects on your pages, the slower it is to load. This will mess up your crawl budget and have a general effect on your user experience.

SOLUTIONS

Don’t get me wrong, use redirects whenever necessary. They are life savers when you cannot permanently delete a page or a page is under maintenance. However, keep the redirects to the minimum. This will let crawlers crawl more pages.

7. WEBSITE OPTIMIZATION

Website optimization in this article will mean the files that you upload on your website. These are blogs, images, videos, etc.

The naming of files you intend to upload is very important. E.g. if you want to attach a file that has documents of shoes, name the file shoes, shoes for sale, and naming that will increase your chance to rank for a search term similar to what you want to be found for.

When uploading images and videos, do the same. Name them accordingly. This applies to links

8. ROBOTS.TXT

This is one of the most important files you can have on your website. The robots.txt file gives directives to crawlers on what pages they can access and those they can’t. You might find a page on the file that you have all the intentions to display to the public but have crawlers blocked. Sometimes we don’t want some pages displayed. Some of these pages are sensitive documents, pages that you intend to display after a user carries out a certain action, etc.  

If you have a problem generating one, seek professional help to avoid giving unwanted directives. The robots.txt should be placed in the root directory.

SOLUTION

Always review your robots.txt file. It can be found by simply typing the URL to your home page and adding ‘/robots.txt’ after that. Below is a snippet example of Google’s robots.txt file.

SEO Problems

Pages that add no value should be disallowed. Sensitive pages should also be disallowed.

9. SITEMAPS

Sitemaps are like treasure maps to the pages you want to be found. Just like the robots.txt file, they should be placed in the root directory. Big websites might have several sitemaps which are placed inside a sitemap index. The wrong format and the wrong placement might cause SEO issues for your website. If you are not conversant with it, use professional services to generate one. There are many free sitemap generators but you have to do some editing before uploading them.

10. CRAWLING

In our previous article, we covered crawling in depth. Issues that crawlers face and how to sort these issues. Kindly take a look here: What is Website Crawling?

Some of the SEO issues are very technical and need a knowledgeable hand to fix. Look for professional help to fix your website. You could reach us through info@savannahdatasolutionslimited.com

Web Crawling
What is Website Crawling?
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Savannah

WHAT IS WEBSITE CRAWLING

Have you ever wondered how Google search delivers results for your search queries? It is definitely not magic. There are over 1.7 billion websites with over 250,000 websites being launched every day. How does Google manage to sift through all these websites and deliver right results?

Google uses something called a crawler which discovers websites through the process of crawling. This takes us to the next question, what is crawling?

Web crawling is the process through which Google discovers new pages and updates pre-existing pages by using bots that circle the archives and collecting information pertaining to these websites. If you have a new website and it is not crawled, then it is likely that your website will never be found. For your website to be registered in the index, it has to have been crawled at least once. What are these crawlers used? Let’s cover that down below.

What are Website Crawlers?

These are bots also known as web spiders that crawl the archives to find and index websites. Think of these bots are explorers who go to uncharted territories.

Every browser has its own type of bots that they use. Big search engines like Google have more than one bot and some are task-specific. Here is a list of examples of search engines bots;

Examples of Search Engine Crawlers

Search Engine

User-agent

Google

Googlebot

Bing

Bingbot

Baidu

Slurp

Yahoo

DuckDuckBot

DuckDuckGo

Baiduspider

Facebook

Facebot

Alexa

Ia_archiver

Amazon

Amazonbot

This is just a small list as there are very many types of crawlers used. Google itself has more than three bots.

How Website Crawlers work.

Website Crawling

These web crawlers discover pages through links from other pages. When a bot is crawling a page and comes across a link, it stores the link to crawl it later. If your website is new, you can ask for it to be crawled through the search console. This whole process happens in the background and minimally affects your website.

 You could also request for a page to be crawled again through the search console. A point to note is that this will not make the process hurried but will only notify them of the request.

Once a bot is on your page, it looks at the Meta tags and after crawling your page, the information is stored in the index. The data is sorted and from the index, the results will be displayed once there is a search query.

Before a crawler starts moving around a website, they first take a look at the robots.txt file. A robot.txt file is a file that holds the rules that govern these bots. On a website, not all pages need to be crawled. Some of these pages are sensitive, or you only want them to be visible once a user takes a certain action.

A robot.txt file will tell these website crawlers what pages they are allowed to view and those they aren’t. This file will also control other aspects such as the crawl frequency. You can target specific bots or all bots in general. Inside the robots.txt file, you can also include a sitemap. A sitemap is like a treasure map that holds all the pages that you deem important and want them crawled.

The bots do not crawl every inch of the internet, instead, they have something called a crawl budget. A crawl budget is the number of pages that can be crawled within a given time frame. A crawl budget is very important since it will control how the bots crawl your pages. Imagine a situation where there is no crawl budget. Your website could easily get overloaded and affect its performance. There are several things that determine web crawling. 

Some of the factors to pay attention to are;

  • Website loading speed
  • Website architecture
  • Broken links
  • Page titles and headings
  • Internal links
  • Page authority
  • Duplicate content

Website Crawling Tools

Web crawlers are used by the search engines majority of the time. The only setback is there is no feedback and the whole process happens in the background. You will not know if the website crawling process has had any hindrances. This is why there are tools that you can use to check for any issues that might affect the website crawling process.

Some of these tools are;

  • Semrush
  • Link-Assistant
  • Hexameter
  • Deepcrawl
  • Visual SEO Studio
  • Contentking

Use these tools to highlight any issues your website might have and sort them out. The more seamless your website is, the more web pages can be crawled within the budget.

You can learn more about Search Engines and how it works though googles documentation at Google Search Central

Do you have a website and want it improved? Contact us info@savannahdatasolutionslimited.com

SEO Issues
Let’s Talk About Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
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Savannah

LET’S TALK ABOUT SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization/ SEO is a term very common in the digital marketing field. Whether you have a website or planning to get one, you have probably come across this term. Search engine optimization is a broad topic that covers very many concepts. In this article we will do a summary, and answer these questions;

What is Search Engine Optimization

How Search Engine works

What is Search Engine Optimization/ SEO?

When you have a website built, you aim at getting the most relevant traffic whether you are selling products, doing blogs, or just for visibility. To get the most relevant visibility, you have to optimize your website so that it is easily found by anyone looking for anything similar to what you offer.

In simple terms, SEO is the process of improving your page rank and getting organic traffic. To rank organically, you cannot pay, it all depends on your efforts to optimize your website. Ranking through SEO is a process and do not expect to rank within the first week of optimizing your website. The only way to appear on the top of searches at such a quick rate is through paying for ads, but when it comes to SEO, it may take anything between 3months to years to see the results. And yes, you have to be patient with the PROCESS. 

How Search Engine works.

There are three main stages in which search engine optimization works. These are;

§  Crawling

§  Indexing

§  Ranking

1.    Crawling

This is the process by which your website and its pages are discovered. Crawling is done using bots sometimes called spiders which move freely around the internet through following links from page to page and site to site. These crawlers are what first discover your page once your website goes live.

There are different types of crawlers and they are dependent on the search engine used. 

How does the crawler find your website?

As stated above, crawlers follow links on the internet to discover pages. When following the links, they discover new pages and update already indexed pages.

What if your site is new and no one has linked to it? Once your website is up and running, you can make a request for your site to be crawled, whether you make the request or not, as long as your site is live, the crawlers will just get to it.

There are also several factors that affect crawling on your website e.g. you may not want some pages crawled to avoid indexing, then you can give that command on robot.txt file, more on that later, not to crawl those pages. As stated before, SEO is wide and today we will to the basics and expound further in the coming weeks. 

2.   Indexing

Once your website is crawled, that information has to be stored in a database, where it can be retrieved later. This process is called indexing. The websites are stored in the Index where google tries to understand more about them.

By using an XML sitemap, you can outline the important pages that you want to be indexed. A sitemap is more like a treasure map for your website. You can request for your pages to be indexed and just like crawling, you can also request for certain pages not to be indexed by using the noindex rule. We will cover these in detail later. External links are important when it comes to being discovered, indexed, and ranked.

Without being indexed, your website will not be available during the search. USE Google Search Console to upload your XML sitemap to Google for indexing and reindexing of pages. Use the search console to help you keep an eye on how your site is indexed and any issues when it comes to the process. 

3.   Ranking

After crawling and indexing, ranking is the last step. Ranking is where we want to focus our efforts. SEO is primarily optimizing your website to RANK high. Ranking is complicated and is dependent on several factors.

Some of the factors that affect ranking are:

·         User experience

·         Page speed

·         Quality content

·         Optimized content

·         Mobile-friendliness

·         Backlinks

·         Security

·        Site architecture

Each of these will be covered later. When it comes to ranking, you have to ensure you check all these boxes and more for your site to be competitive and have a chance to rank high. One thing to keep in mind is that Google will always value user experience and the kind of content that it provides to its audience. Quality content and a well-built website is the place to start before digging in for more.

Today we have done a small introduction to what SEO is and how the search engine works, next week we will dig deeper into each of these topics as we help you understand how the search engine works. Again, do not expect miraculous results within a short period, SEO is a process and takes time, but when done right, it produces valuable results and it is economically feasible. Do not ignore your SEO.