Digital marketing side hustles provide some of the best ways to supplement your income, and there are more than a few reasons why. 

For one, you can tackle most digital marketing tasks on a laptop with an internet connection, so you’ll be able to do the work remotely. For two, the digital marketing landscape is vast, as virtually every business needs an online presence in the current era. 

The global digital marketing industry was valued at an impressive 780 billion in 2023, and it’s estimated to have a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 11.1% from 2024 – 2030. 

From affiliate marketing to graphic design, digital marketing offers a wide variety of side hustles that cater to different talents (writing, designing, influencing, etc.). 

That means you should be able to find a digital marketing side hustle that meshes perfectly with your existing skills. 

Yet, it can be difficult to know which marketing tasks are worthy of a side hustle and which are more of a full-time gig. 

For example, there are plenty of articles out there claiming that SEO consulting is a ‘side hustle.’ Well, without a massive existing knowledge base (and plenty of real-world experience), you won’t have any valuable insights to provide to your clients. 

In other words, it’s definitely not something beginners can do ‘on the side.’ 

That’s why we put together this list of realistic digital marketing side hustles, so stay tuned to find the perfect one for you.

What’s a Digital Marketing Side Hustle?

Any business that wants to survive needs promotion, and now that the majority of the world is online, digital marketing reigns supreme. 

That’s not to say that traditional marketing has gone by the wayside, although its growth is halting in certain areas. For example, it’s predicted that B2B professionals will decrease traditional advertising methods by 3.64% in 2024. 

What’s digital marketing?

It refers to promoting a brand’s products and services through digital channels, such as:

• Search engines through SEO (search engine optimization) 
• Email 
• Social media 
• Digital content (videos, blogs, infographics, etc.)
• PPC (pay-per-click) advertising 
• Paid ads (YouTube, banner ads, etc.)

A digital marketing side hustle, then, is when you perform specific digital marketing tasks for businesses as part-time work (typically through freelancing). 

For instance, if you’re a competent graphic designer, you can make extra money online by designing logos, infographics, general graphics for videos/websites, and banner ads. 

Once you build a portfolio and pick up a few clients, you’ll officially have a digital marketing side hustle (woo-hoo!). 

Since most of these side hustles involve freelancing, it’s common to look for digital marketing work on freelancer marketplaces like:

• FreeUp. Whether you specialize in cold calling, copywriting, or web design – you’re bound to find work on FreeUp’s bustling marketplace. All skill levels are welcome, as there are different rates for beginners and experts. 
• Upwork. Currently, Upwork is the largest freelance marketplace online, and they have plenty of digital marketing work available. However, it is noticeably difficult to gain traction on Upwork, which is something to consider.
• iWriter. Specifically for copywriters, this marketplace connects clients with content writers of varying skill levels – making it a viable option for both beginner and expert writers. 

Why Should You Consider a Digital Marketing Side Hustle?

Are you not sure about committing to something on the side?

If so, your hesitation is understandable. After all, we’re talking about taking on more work here, which isn’t something most people jump for joy about, especially if you’re already working 9 to 5. 

Yet, before you decide that being a human couch cushion is your new side gig instead, you should take a look at the benefits a digital marketing side hustle can bring:

• Earning potential. One of the biggest perks of choosing digital marketing as a side hustle is how much money you can earn. For example, freelance UX designers can earn up to $97,426 annually, while content marketers and copywriters can earn up to $150,000. Regardless of the avenue you choose, digital marketing side gigs tend to pay a lot more than other side hustles. 

• Learning opportunities. There’s never a downside to learning a new skill, and digital marketing skills are always in demand. Whether you choose to start managing social media accounts or writing content, you’ll be learning the ins and outs of valuable skills that can lead to full-time employment down the line. 

• Lots of demand with diverse opportunities. Digital marketing services are in demand from businesses from all industries, so there’s no shortage of work available. Beyond that, the opportunities are extremely diverse, from SEO to user experience design and many others. As a result, you’ll be able to mix and match if you so choose (like learning WordPress design while writing content for clients). 

• Work from home. Why wear out your car making deliveries when you can tackle a digital marketing side hustle from your couch? As stated before, digital marketing tasks are easily handled online, so you’ll enjoy more freedom than other side gigs (like making food deliveries). 

As you can see, digital marketing side gigs offer many attractive benefits. If you want to further your marketing education while earning great money working from home, don’t sleep on digital marketing side hustles. 

The Best Digital Marketing Side Hustles for 2024 

Now that you know why digital marketing gigs are worth your time, let’s look at some of the most popular options. 

While each hustle requires some existing marketing knowledge, they are beginner friendly. If you’re a total marketing rookie, remember that you can request beginner rates/work on marketplaces like FreeUp. 

Graphic and UX (user experience) design 

If you’re savvy with programs like Illustrator, GIMP, and Figma, graphic and UX design are the perfect side hustles for you. 

On the graphic design side, businesses from all industries need visually pleasing graphics for their websites and online content. 

For example, you could focus on creating eye-grabbing infographics for content marketers, as those are excellent for generating backlinks and social shares (both of which are integral for digital marketing campaigns). 

Infographics are a diverse content type that feature things like statistics, detailed instructions, data visualizations, and even maps. 

Besides that, every business needs logos and original graphics for their website/videos/social media profiles. 

On the UX side, you can help businesses nail their user experience, both through product and website design. UX is a crucial component of any company’s customer journey, so there’s no shortage of opportunities related to it. 

Content writing and copywriting 

If your writing skills are constantly scoring you compliments at your day job, why not monetize them through a digital marketing side hustle?

Content marketing is a HUGE industry that’s projected to reach a staggering $2 trillion by 2032 with a 16.9% CAGR. 

It’s a form of inbound marketing where businesses educate, inform, and entertain their audiences with valuable content. This not only builds brand awareness and loyalty, but it also drives traffic to crucial landing pages for products and services. 

As a result, countless businesses release regular blogs, videos, and social media posts – and someone has to write all that content. 

Enter content writing, a side hustle where you write compelling, SEO-friendly content for brands online. 

Copywriting is a bit different, as your primary goal is to convince the reader. Businesses also make heavy use of copywriting, especially eCommerce businesses (being able to write a stellar product description is an in-demand skill). 

A great way to get your foot in the door with this side hustle is to work at the beginner tiers on platforms like iWriter to gain experience and meet clients. 

Affiliate marketing 

One of the most reliable (and easiest) ways to make money through digital marketing is to become an affiliate. 

What’s that?

An affiliate is someone who promotes a business’s products and services through their own digital channels, such as:

• Their blog 
• Social media accounts 
• Their website 

You’ll receive an official affiliate link, and you’ll receive credit for every sale made through it. 

If you already have a large following online, affiliate marketing can almost become a passive source of income. Set up a few posts, get the word out to your followers, and sit back and let the money roll in. 

How do you get started?

There are hundreds of affiliate programs online, with Amazon Associates being the most popular. We also have our own affiliate program offering 50% commission and an unprecedented 120-day cookie window (more on this in a bit). 

Social media management 

If you’re social media savvy, or if you just love scrolling through TikTok and Instagram all day, you should consider becoming a social media manager. 

Practically every business has a presence on social media (definitely every major company), and they’re often far too busy to manage it themselves. 

That’s where social media managers come into the picture, who regularly handle tasks like:

• Reacting and responding to follower’s comments 
• Deciding which content to create and when to release it 
• Analyzing engagement data to determine which content types work best 
• Addressing any complaints or concerns from followers 

Being a social media manager also offers lots of flexibility, as you can easily handle the tasks from home or even on-the-go in some cases. 

Start Earning Money with a Digital Marketing Side Hustle Today 

Digital marketing gigs are great because they offer the best of both worlds: high earning potential and the freedom to work from home. 

That’s not to say that there’s no hard work involved, as the digital marketing space is fiercely competitive and results-driven. 

Yet, if you’re motivated and eager to improve and change with the trends, you can make lots of money and further your career with a side gig related to digital marketing. 

Are you looking for an easy side hustle that will earn you money?

Then, you need to check out The HOTH affiliate program, which offers generous 50% commissions for all new sales. Not only that, but you’ll gain access to branded HOTH assets that make promoting our services a breeze, so don’t wait to sign up now.   

The post The Top Digital Marketing Side Hustle Ideas for 2024  appeared first on The HOTH.

Google Ads users can now run ads on Pinterest, which opens up a new range of possibilities for marketers running paid ads through Google. 

The partnership with Reddit focuses more on improving the quality and convenience of Google’s search results. 

Google now has access to Reddit’s Data API, and Reddit gained access to Vertex AI to improve its internal search capabilities. 

It’s also rumored that Google could partner with TikTok. 

Why would they want to do that?

This is because, despite being a short-form video platform, TikTok has become the search engine of choice for younger generations (Gen Z and Gen Alpha). 

A Google partnership, then, could potentially benefit both parties. Google could lend its search algorithm expertise to TikTok to enhance its user experience, all while enjoying boosted traffic flowing from TikTok searches. 

It’s not yet clear whether the TikTok partnership will become official, but there’s currently a beta test in the works, so it’s clear both parties are open to the idea. 

Speaking of TikTok, YouTube Shorts (Google’s answer to TikTok) has some impressive capabilities that not enough businesses utilize. 

More importantly, all these partnerships pose interesting opportunities for SEOs and digital marketers. Read on to learn how you can leverage these new partnerships (and YouTube Shorts) to expand your online reach. 

Partnering with Pinterest for Ad Placements

Pinterest had a less-than-stellar Q4 2023 due to decreasing revenue. Since their earnings fell beneath analysts’ expectations, their stock fell by almost 28%. 

However, they had an ace in the hole. 

CEO Bill Ready announced Pinterest’s ad partnership with Google, which stands to boost its ad revenue by a significant margin. Ready claimed that they began the rollout a few weeks ago and that third-party ad demand is rising. 

The partnership is also an attempt on Pinterest’s part to capitalize on its sizable international audience. 

While 80% of Pinterest’s users reside outside the United States, they only account for 20% of the platform’s revenue. 

Pinterest hopes the Google partnership will boost the amount of revenue coming from international markets. 

This marks the second time that Pinterest has partnered with a third party to boost ad revenue, as they initiated a similar deal with Amazon last year. 

Much like the Amazon deal, the Google partnership will roll out over several business quarters. 

What does this partnership mean for digital marketers?

Marketers running Google Ads campaigns can now place ads on Pinterest from their Google Ads Manager. 

This is significant because it provides businesses with new ways to appeal to their target audiences. 

Pinterest is a massive platform with users from virtually every industry and niche, making it an ideal channel for third-party advertisements. 

Also, Pinterest is adding several new AI-powered features to boost user engagement and interactivity. 

The new collage feature lets users create scrapbook-style images using a combination of objects, stickers, and pictures. There’s also a new auto-organizing feature that encourages users to create boards whenever it identifies similar pins – which has led to an increase in user boards. 

These engagement-boosting features increase the chances of Pinterest users interacting with your ads, which is a plus.

Pinterest has more than 498 million monthly active users, so it’s definitely an advertising channel that’s worth your time. 

Improving User Search by Partnering with Reddit 

While Google is no stranger to Reddit (the two have a longstanding relationship), they’re taking things to the next level with their newly announced partnership. 

Google values the authentic human conversations and experiences that Reddit provides, and its goal is to highlight relevant Reddit content whenever possible. 

To make this happen, Reddit granted Google access to its Data API – providing Google with real-time, structured, and unique content from Reddit that relates to Google searches. 

This means SEOs can expect to see more SERP features from Reddit, which may be good or bad. 

On one hand, if the Reddit posts mention your brand, then it’s a way to broaden your online reach. Yet, if a Reddit SERP feature appears at the top of the page and answers the user’s question, it can lead to a zero-click search. So, if you’ve put a lot of hard work into creating a piece of content for a keyword that triggers a Reddit SERP, you may lose out on traffic. 

That’s why it’s essential to check keywords for SERP features before targeting them for your SEO strategy. 

SEMRush’s Keyword Overview tool is a big help in this regard as if you select the SERP feature filter, it’ll let you know if a keyword will trigger something like a featured snippet or knowledge bar. You can get a free trial and check out their tools here. 

The Rumored TikTok Partnership 

This one is still up in the air, so there’s no need to panic (or rejoice) just yet. 

Google has been keeping a close eye on TikTok ever since the platform took over social media a few years back. 

As stated before, younger generations are now using TikTok as a makeshift search engine. Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s SVP of search, said, “Almost 40% of young people, when they are looking for a place for lunch, don’t go to Google Maps or search – they go to TikTok or Instagram.”

The plan is to combine Google’s search prowess and credibility with TikTok’s explosive popularity amongst young people. 

There are talks of including links to Google queries straight from TikTok. 

It would work like this:

• A user conducts a search on TikTok for a new restaurant or news story 
• A built-in Google link lets the user validate the information through Google search and reviews

It’s a best-of-both-worlds type deal where users can use their search engine of choice (TikTok) while still enjoying accurate and trusted information (Google). 

While a TikTok spokesperson claimed a trial version is underway, Google declined to reveal whether a financial agreement is part of the partnership. 

Broadening Online Reach with YouTube Shorts 

SEOs need to capitalize on every channel available to them, especially in the rapidly changing search landscape. 

After all, putting all your eggs in one basket is never a good idea. 

That’s why it’s wise to take advantage of platforms like TikTok, Reddit, Pinterest, and YouTube Shorts to build brand awareness and generate more traffic. 

That way, should one channel start to falter (like strict organic SEO), you’ll have other channels to fall back on. 

Many aren’t aware that Google expanded YouTube Shorts to include video reach campaigns back in May of last year. 

What’s a video reach campaign?

It’s an AI-powered video ad campaign designed to place your ads in front of the right people at the right time. 

Google gives the example of a Paramount + Mexico movie called At Midnight that used video reach campaigns to build an audience. The campaign resulted in significantly higher ad recall and efficiencies, so YouTube Shorts is a channel you shouldn’t ignore. 

Much like Pinterest, YouTube Shorts runs the gambit of all industries and interests, so your target audience is bound to have a presence there. 

Leveraging Google’s New Partnerships for Your Benefit 

These new partnerships are yet another example of the significant changes the search engine world is going through at the moment. 

The good news?

You can use Pinterest ads, Reddit mentions, and YouTube Shorts to expand your online influence and generate more leads and sales. 

Need help adjusting to this strange new SEO world?

Then don’t wait to try out HOTH X, our managed service that simplifies SEO and yields outstanding results.   

The post Google Partners with Reddit, Pinterest, and Possibly TikTok  appeared first on The HOTH.

Or maybe your content disappeared from search engine results entirely?

Either way, SEO ranking drops are something every website owner fears, as they can end up costing you a lot of money. 

That’s because the effect of a significant ranking drop is two-fold – you lose the ability to generate as much organic traffic as before, and the resources you spent on creating the content are now going to waste. 

We don’t want you to experience this, so we’ve created this SEO rankings drop guide for 2023. 

That way, you’ll know exactly what to do should one of your web pages experience a rankings dropoff. 

While losing a top-ranking spot is never an easy pill to swallow, there are plenty of website changes you can make to gain it back. 

With the right tweaks, you may even rank in a higher spot than you did before. 

Many factors can cause your SERP rankings to drop, including Google algorithm updates (like the most recent Link Spam Update), indexing errors, lost backlinks, and making changes to your website. 

Since there are so many causes, it can be tricky to pinpoint the underlying cause of your ranking drop. 

We will cover all the most common ranking issues in this guide, so stay tuned to learn how to become an SEO rankings recovery expert.

Why Did My SERP Rankings Drop?

Most SEO experts religiously check tools like Google Search Console (GSC) weekly to monitor their SERP rankings. 

They do this to ensure that they maintain or improve their rankings. 

However, on some dreaded occasions, they open GSC only to realize that their web pages have dropped 10+ positions – causing them to hemorrhage traffic.

Besides having to clean off their computer screens after spitting coffee all over them, SEO experts also have to gather their composure and attempt to find out why their rankings have fallen so far. 

Sometimes it won’t be such a mystery, such as if you reorganized your URL structure or made other significant changes to your website. 

In these instances, it’s normal to expect some changes to your SERP rankings, and you can even make preparations for them. 

Yet, it’s the unexpected rankings drops that really cause website owners to pull their hair out, such as when their content disappears from the SERPs entirely. 

There are many factors that can cause unexpected drops like this, including the following:

1. Slow loading speed 
2. Your target keyword lost popularity 
3. Your domain name or hosting plan expired
4. An improperly formatted robots.txt file 
5. Competitors outrank you
6. Lost/poached backlinks
7. A newly released Google algorithm update 
8. On-page SEO factors
9. Crawling errors
10. Broken links and redirects 

As you can see, there’s a long laundry list of suspects to cross off whenever you experience a rankings drop. These issues can all negatively affect your online visibility, so let’s take a more in-depth look at them. 

#1: Page loading speed 

If you aren’t able to pass Google’s Core Web Vitals test, you’ll see a drop in your SERP rankings. 

Even if your rankings don’t drop, slow loading times will negatively affect your bounce rate and dwell time – as modern internet users won’t want to wait more than 3 seconds for your content to load. 

That means you have every incentive to ensure all your web pages load as quickly as possible. 

Luckily, Google has its PageSpeed Insights tool, which is a huge help. 

It will let you know how fast your loading times are and recommend speeding things up. 

Tweaks like compressing images, using browser caching, and minimizing code are all great ways to speed up your site if things have slowed down. 

Also, Google Search Console lets you view how well you did on the Core Web Vitals test, which measures not only how fast your site loads but also how long it takes for users to begin interacting with your content (i.e., typing their email address into a newsletter form). 

#2: Your keywords are losing popularity 

Another cause for a rankings drop is the target keyword you used for the web page isn’t as popular as it once was. 

It’s normal for search terms to rise and fall in popularity, and most keywords won’t stay on top forever. 

Keywords that pertain to trending topics, fad products, and current events tend to fizzle out after a few months, which can cause significant ranking drops. 

While this is to be expected for content topics that aren’t evergreen, sometimes keywords can lose traction sooner than you thought. 

In this scenario, your best bet is to find another related keyword to target that still has a decent search volume.

Our free keyword planner tool from The HOTH is your best friend in this regard, as it includes the trend for each query – so you’ll know if a keyword is gaining or falling in popularity before choosing to target it. 

#3: Domain/hosting issues

If you don’t have an active domain name or hosting plan, all your content will disappear from the SERPs entirely. 

So if you awake one morning into every SEOs nightmare and realize that none of your content is ranking, don’t forget to check your website to see if it’s working. 

If it doesn’t appear, it could be an issue with your web hosting company, such as a DDoS attack. 

Or it could be that your domain name has expired, in which case you’d need to renew it. 

It may seem like a no-brainer, but it’s hard to think logically when you suddenly realize that you’ve disappeared from the SERPs – so don’t forget to check your website to ensure that it’s working. 

In the past, we knew a website owner that was in a full-on panic because their SEO rankings dropped, but they had no clue why. They had checked all their on-page and technical SEO factors, only for everything to appear normal. 

The culprit?

They were in the midst of a 5-day DDoS attack that caused their site not to load. 

That shows that ranking drops aren’t always within your control, so it’s important not to panic when they happen. 

#4: Improperly formatted robots.txt file 

Your robots.txt file tells search engines which web pages their crawlers can access. 

Why does it matter for your SEO?

It does because it helps you allocate your crawl budget more effectively. Crawling URLs takes a lot of bandwidth, and search engine bots will only crawl a limited amount of URLs to avoid overloading their servers. 

Crawl budget tends to matter more for large websites with millions of URLs, as smaller websites usually don’t have to worry. 

However, it could be that some of your most important URLs aren’t getting crawled because your robots.txt file isn’t granting them access. 

So if a piece of content you spent a lot of time and money on isn’t appearing in the SERPs, you should check your robots.txt file to ensure that it’s not keeping search engine bots from crawling it. 

If a search engine can’t crawl your content, it cannot appear in the SERPs, so keep an eye on your robots.txt file and noindex tags. 

#5: Competitors have outranked you 

Sometimes an SEO rankings drop occurs because one of your competitors outperformed you and dethroned your content. 

While it’s certainly a bummer, this type of thing happens all the time, and it’s the nature of SEO (and digital marketing in general). 

How can you find out if your competitors are stealing your rankings?

First, it’s likely that you’ll experience rankings drops across a few pages, not just one. Next, you can find out by simply searching for your target keyword and then clicking on the website that’s in your old spot. 

Try to identify what they’re doing that you aren’t. 

That way, you can possibly outdo their content and reclaim your previous rankings. 

There are a few key factors you should pay attention to when evaluating competitors, including:

• Their backlink profile. Do they have more high-authority backlinks than you?
• Do they have more high-quality web pages than you? Websites that have a large volume of outstanding content tend to rank higher. 
• Do they have a better user experience than your website?
• Is the content that outranked you longer and more insightful than yours?

These are all vital questions to ask. 

To get a clear picture of a competitor’s metrics, you can plug them into our free SEO Audit tool. It’ll give you an overview of their backlink profile, on-page SEO factors, technical factors, and more. 

#6: Check your backlink profile  

Your backlink profile plays a huge role in determining your rankings, especially for Google Search. 

The more high-authority websites online that point to your content, the better. 

However, if you were to lose some of your most powerful backlinks, your content would drop in the SERP rankings, sometimes by a significant margin. 

What causes you to lose backlinks?

It could be that a competitor used the skyscraper technique to poach one of your links, or the webmaster may have simply removed it for a variety of reasons (i.e., deleting the content containing the link, redesigning their website, purging old links, etc.). 

To discover if you’ve been losing backlinks, you can use our free backlink checker tool. 

Spammy and unnatural backlinks can also cause SEO rankings to drop, so you should keep an eye out for them, too. 

Here’s what to check for when evaluating your backlink profile:

• Too many links coming from the same IP address appear unnatural to Google (and they may suspect you’re using a PBN). 
• Ensure that you don’t have too many links coming from foreign-language websites. A handful is okay, but it will raise some red flags if you have 6,000 French websites linking to your American website. 
• Duplicate content will hurt your backlink profile, so use a tool like Copyscape to ensure every URL is original. Also, you should canonicalize pages that are too similar (such as eCommerce product pages). 

As long as your backlink profile is spam-free and you didn’t lose any links, you can rule out lost/spammy backlinks as the reason why your rankings dropped.  

#7: A Google algorithm update 

Google is constantly updating and changing its algorithm to resolve problems and provide a better user experience. 

However, these algorithm changes often affect SERP rankings, and sometimes in a big way. 

For example, the Link Spam Update that occurred in December 2022 made a big splash, as it negated the effect paid backlinks had on SEO profiles. 

That caused many websites to lose rankings virtually overnight due to the lost impact of paid/spammy backlinks. 

It’s an example of how Google updates can seriously affect SEO campaigns, so you need to keep up with them. 

If you determine that a Google update affected your rankings, the solution is always to optimize your website in accordance with the new update. 

Stay in the loop with the new updates with HOTH Technical SEO.

#8: On-page SEO factors 

Next, you need to check your on-page SEO to ensure that everything is in order. 

The top on-page SEO factors that can cause rankings drops include:

• Thin content 
• Over-optimization or under-optimization of keywords 
• Lack of a keyword-rich title tag and meta description 

Google isn’t a fan of thin content (500 words or less), so your web pages should contain at least 1,000 words. If they’re meant to be informative blog posts, aim for a 2,000-word minimum. 

That’s because long-form content ranks higher and generates more backlinks. 

Also, there’s a sweet spot for keyword usage. 

If you use your keywords too much, it’ll be viewed as spam. If you don’t use them enough, crawler bots may not associate your content with your target keywords. 

As a rule of thumb, use your keywords in the following places:

• Your title tag and meta description 
• Your H1 header 
• The first 100 words of the content 
• 3 – 7 times in the body content (if it’s a 2,000-word article)

Also, don’t forget to include a detailed title tag that contains your keyword and summarizes what your content is about. 

#9: Crawling/Indexing Errors 

As stated before, if a search engine can’t crawl and index your content, you won’t appear in the SERPs. 

That means you need to take measures to ensure your most important web pages get successfully crawled and indexed. 

The best way to do so is to use Google Search Console and view its Index Coverage Report and Page Indexing Report. 

Both will show you the exact number of URLs Google has indexed and the presence of any crawling/indexing errors. 

#10: Check HTTP status codes  

If a page has dropped rankings or disappeared from the SERPs, it could be due to a failed status code such as a 404 not found or a broken redirect. 

Checking your HTTP status codes will help you determine if a broken link or redirect is the reason for your lost visibility. 

Every piece of content you want to rank & generate traffic should display a 200 OK status code.

You can use this free HTTP status code checker to ensure that all your content is displaying the way it should. 

Closing Thoughts: SEO Rankings Drop Guide 

Ranking drops are never fun to deal with, but they’re a regular part of SEO – so you shouldn’t let yourself get too discouraged if you experience them. 

This guide will help you pinpoint the underlying cause of your loss of online visibility, so don’t forget to bookmark this page! 

Want to form a winning SEO strategy for your business to dominate the SERPs in your industry?

Then don’t wait to check out HOTH X, our managed SEO services that have yielded impressive results for countless clients.     

The post SEO Rankings Drop Guide: 10 Steps to Fix Common Issues appeared first on The HOTH.

The artificial intelligence-powered chatbot from OpenAI uses a series of natural language processing (NLP) models that enable it to understand user text and generate human-like responses, simulating an open-ended conversation.

From web developers on Twitter to mainstream news outlets, over 100 million people currently use ChatGPT to answer questions, solve coding problems, write college essays, and more. 

It’s proved to be a very powerful tool, with users receiving accurate responses to their requests most of the time. 

One user got ChatGPT to write a piano piece in the style of Mozart, and another got it to generate a dairy-free recipe for mac and cheese. 

There are hundreds of use cases for AI chatbots like ChatGPT that span many industries, such as using it to revamp your resume, write original jokes, solve complicated math problems, and even receive relationship advice. 

Yet, that doesn’t mean there are no disadvantages of ChatGPT, as its language model does have some noticeable flaws. 

Besides that, there are many nefarious things users can do with the chatbot, such as using it to create malware or proliferate hate speech. 

That’s why we’re here to present both sides of the coin by pointing out the big pros and cons of ChatGPT, so stay tuned to learn more.

Unpacking ChatGPT’s Features 

ChatGPT is currently open-source software from OpenAI, meaning that anyone can download and start using it for free. 

What does GPT stand for?

It’s an acronym for generative pre-trained transformer, a neural network of machine learning models that uses deep learning to understand & generate human-like text. 

GPT is one of OpenAI’s creations, and it’s currently in the early stage of its fourth generation, as GPT-4 just dropped on March 14th, 2023. 

ChatGPT was based on GPT-2, the second generation of the technology. While it features a massive amount of training data, its data sets are a tad outdated at the moment. 

Still, the chatbot’s ability to generate human-like outputs in real-time is undoubtedly impressive, and the tool is effortless to pick up and start using. You can speak to ChatGPT as you would any friend or coworker, as it can comprehend common human language patterns. 

As far as functionality goes, you can use ChatGPT for just about anything. 

For instance, if your digital marketing strategy involves a boatload of content creation, a cost-effective way to knock it out is to let ChatGPT generate it all for you. Or, if you’re simply in need of a starting point, you can use it to cure writer’s block by writing the intro for you. 

As many software engineers on Twitter found out, ChatGPT is an excellent code debugging companion. Not only does it discover bugs and fix them, but it also provides detailed explanations of what it did to fix the issue – making it a fantastic educational tool for programmers.

The Big Pros 

Now that you know a bit more about what ChatGPT is and how it works, let’s dive into the pros and cons of ChatGPT. 

There are many advantages of ChatGPT, from increasing customer engagement to automatically generating e-commerce product descriptions for boosted productivity. 

The program can converse with users on various topics, and it has massive potential for improving customer service and virtual assistant services. 

Superior customer service automation

Speaking of customer service, ChatGPT is available 24/7 and can handle a large load of customer queries at a time, making it the ultimate customer service chatbot.

No longer will your customers have to wait hours or days in a queue for responses to their questions, as ChatGPT is fully capable of solving simple issues by itself. That will improve your response time metrics and overall customer experience, benefiting your company. 

Your customers will also appreciate conversing with a chatbot that understands them so well, as it’s nearly identical to chatting with a live customer service agent. 

As a result, you can let ChatGPT handle all your simple & repetitive customer service calls, which will free up your live team of customer service agents so they can handle more complex issues that require human intervention. 

That will add to your bottom line through increased efficiency and saved labor costs, which is definitely a plus. ChatGPT can also help small businesses and startups provide more robust customer service, even if they don’t have many live agents or much of a budget. 

As such, AI can help smaller companies level the playing field when competing with their enterprise-level counterparts, both with customer support and other business areas.

Automate tedious manual processes

Another way you can use ChatGPT to boost your productivity is to rely on it to knock out repetitive menial tasks. 

Data entry & categorization are two examples of tasks ChatGPT can help automate, freeing up a lot of time for your team. 

Instead of spending hours entering numbers into spreadsheets, your team members will have more time for important things like strategic planning, following up with client needs, and brainstorming new ways to innovate. 

Not only that, but you can integrate ChatGPT into many existing applications, such as CRM & data analytics tools. From there, you can use the chatbot’s superior data processing abilities to aid with future forecasting, spot trends in client data, and provide insights on employee performance. 

Coding-wise, ChatGPT’s ability to instantly generate accurate user documentation is a huge timesaver for programmers. Once you paste all your system’s information into ChatGPT, you can ask it FAQs from users, and you can use the answers it provides in your own documentation. 

Not only that, but the AI chatbot has the potential to transform non-programmers into developers through its ability to create code from natural language prompts. 

Now users don’t need to know a programming language to develop an app, as they can simply ask ChatGPT to write the required code for them. Its code-writing abilities can also save seasoned programmers a ton of time and effort when developing new applications & software. 

Content generation 

Digital marketing & SEO campaigns require quite a bit of content creation, which doesn’t come cheap. 

That’s why digital marketing agencies often have large in-house teams dedicated to creating content comprising writers, editors, graphic designers, and content strategists. 

ChatGPT is capable of generating entire blog posts, rephrasing & simplifying paragraphs, summarizing topics, and even creating image prompts for other programs like DALL-E. One college student shared on Twitter that he got ChatGPT to write an essay that received an A- from their professor. 

With the content generation capabilities of ChatGPT, companies can drastically reduce the costs associated with developing, creating, & releasing content. 

Writing a brief blog post can be as simple as typing a short request into ChatGPT, which will generate human-like text that’s free of plagiarism. However, the technology still isn’t capable of producing original insights or understanding human emotions, so there are some limitations. . 

The Big Cons

Now that you’re familiar with the biggest advantages of using AI chatbots at your company, it’s time to examine the cons of using ChatGPT. 

The platform has a genuine dark side, and it would be irresponsible of us not to mention it. Particularly, ChatGPT’s machine learning algorithms still need some tweaking and development. We’ve already mentioned that its language model is based on an older generation of GPT, but it doesn’t end there. 

Besides the inaccuracies and hallucinations exhibited by the chatbot, there are also many nefarious uses for ChatGPT that raise some ethical & moral red flags.

Outdated data sets 

When OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public in November 2022, the AI’s training data only reached the year 2021, and so far, nothing has changed yet. 

That means whenever you interact with ChatGPT, the chatbot will have no knowledge or awareness of anything that occurred after 2021. As a result, you won’t be able to get information on any recent events or discoveries until the data sets get updated. 

Factual inaccuracies & limited understanding 

While ChatGPT’s language model is robust and can understand most basic human language patterns, it isn’t perfect and can sometimes get confused. In particular, it still has difficulty understanding context and complex queries. 

That can lead to ChatGPT generating irrelevant user results, which can be frustrating. Also, since ChatGPT is still learning, it has some biases and even the tendency to lie and make up facts. For example, this writer received a different answer whenever they asked the chatbot, “What was the first cartoon?” 

The only thing the different answers had in common was that they were all incorrect. 

Nefarious uses 

Lastly, ChatGPT can be used for not-so-great purposes. While it’s capable of writing code and creating software, it can also create malware. 

It also lacks emotional intelligence and a sense of morals, so it can generate distasteful content when prompted. It has also produced racist and sexist content due to some users abusing the program, which is a real concern. 

Final Thoughts: Pros and Cons of ChatGPT 

There are many pros and cons of ChatGPT, and it’s clear that the chatbot still has many kinks to iron out. 

Yet, there’s no denying that it shows massive potential for helping companies save money, automate tasks, improve customer experiences, and more. 

At the same time, there’s a growing need to keep some of its capabilities in check, such as creating malware and writing phishing emails. As long as OpenAI continues to tweak the program and as long as the AI continues to learn from interacting with users, the future should be bright for ChatGPT. 

Do you need help developing a modern digital marketing campaign that includes AI?

If so, it’s time to drop everything and check out our managed SEO packages at HOTH X, as well as our top-tier digital marketing consulting services. Our experts are up-to-date with all the latest technology, including AI, so don’t wait to book a call today.

The post The Big Pros and Cons of ChatGPT  appeared first on The HOTH.

For instance, the #1 ranked search result on Google has an average of 3.8x more backlinks than positions 2 – 10. 

Also, a study by Ahrefs found that the more backlinks you have, the more organic traffic you’ll generate. 

While these stats prove the importance & effectiveness of acquiring quality backlinks, there is a catch you need to know about. 

If Google doesn’t have your new backlinks indexed, they won’t provide any ‘link juice’ to your SEO profile. 

Just as Google needs to be able to index your website for it to show up on the SERPs, it also needs to index backlinks in the same way. 

To make things even more complicated, it takes quite some time to update Google’s index. It can take as long as 10 weeks for a new backlink to get indexed. 

However, that’s not always the case. 

High-quality websites like The New York Times and Wikipedia get their backlinks indexed the same day they’re published at close to a 100% rate. 

Yet, backlinks from less notable sites will take longer to index, and they’re the backlinks most SEOs target. 

The good news is there are ways to speed up the indexing process, which is exactly what we will show you today. Read on to learn how to index backlinks quickly & efficiently. 

The Top Methods to Index Backlinks Fast 

Tired of waiting countless weeks for your newly acquired backlinks to show up in Google’s index?

Then you need to rethink your approach to indexing your backlinks. 

There are numerous ways you can get search engines to index your backlinks quicker, including the following:

• Pinging tools 
• Social shares 
• Third-party indexing services 
• Acquiring backlinks from high-authority sites
• Google Search Console
• Backlink indexer tools

Here’s a look at the best tricks for getting your new links indexed as quickly as possible. 

Google Search Console URL Inspection Tool 

Google Search Console is an excellent free tool that will enhance any digital marketing or SEO strategy, so you shouldn’t hesitate to use it. 

In terms of using it to index backlinks, the URL Inspection Tool is your secret weapon. 

However, to use it, you either need control of the website linking back to you, or you need to know the webmaster. That’ll enable you to coordinate with them to get your backlink indexed. 

Here’s how to make it happen:

• Log in to GSC and select the URL Inspection Tool from the sidebar on the left. 
• Enter the URL of the backlink into the tool and hit ‘enter’ to inspect it. 
• Hit the ‘Request Indexing’ button so that Google will recrawl the page in question. 

That’ll trigger Google bots to crawl and index any backlinks that you have on the page, which is what you want. 

This method is fast and effective, but you’ll need to know the exact URL of the backlink. If you don’t know it, you can use our free backlink checker tool from The HOTH to see the specific URL for all your backlinks. 

In addition, you need to have a relationship with the owner of any web pages that you enter into the URL Inspection Tool, as you can’t submit another website’s pages via GSC unless you can verify ownership of the domain. 

If you aren’t able to get in contact with the webmaster that owns the site linking to yours, you’ll need to use another method on this list (one of which is a workaround). 

Third-party indexing tools 

Besides using GSC’s URL Inspection Tool, you can also utilize third-party link indexers to index backlinks. 

What are those?

They’re tools that inform Google and other search engines whenever there are changes to your website’s content. 

It could be that you’re adding a new page, deleting one, or updating a web page with new content. Whatever the case, a third-party indexer will ping search engines whenever changes are made, causing their crawlers to reindex your pages and add them to PageRank. 

One of the most popular third-party indexers is IndexNow, which features a ping protocol that notifies search engines whenever your website goes through changes. 

In addition to being a great way to index backlinks, these tools are also great for the general indexing of your website. Whenever you delete a page, Google will instantly know about it, which will make your technical SEO much easier down the line. 

However, there is a slight catch to using programs like IndexNow – as you have to implement their ping protocol for the tool to work. 

Doing so is easier said than done, as you’ll need to use services like CloudFlare or the IndexNow plugin to make it work, which takes quite a bit of time. 

Then there’s Onehourindexing, a third-party indexer that doesn’t require the installation of a ping protocol. Instead, it uses a proprietary system kept secret from the general public to index backlinks. 

It’s a quick and easy way to index your backlinks, but it does come at a cost. A subscription to Onehourindexing costs $17 per month to index 1,000 a day – so you need to include that in your link-building campaign’s budget. 

Post backlinks on social media 

Believe it or not, an excellent way to speed up backlink indexing is to share your backlinks on social media platforms. 

In particular, Twitter holds the most clout for speeding up the indexing process. 

Since 2015, Google has partnered with Twitter to index tweets in real-time. Beyond that, Google also includes Twitter carousels as one of its many SERP features. 

That means if you tweet your backlinks, Google will immediately recognize them and crawl them. 

Yet, as with the other methods, there is a catch to this process. 

Since there are countless tweets every single day, Google isn’t able to index every single tweet on the platform. 

However, there are steps you can take to increase the chances of Google indexing the tweets containing your backlinks, including the following:

• Try to get as many retweets as possible 
• Encourage your followers to like tweets containing backlinks
• Try to get as many replies as possible

The more retweets, likes, and responses a tweet gets – the more likely Google is to index it. 

So once you post a tweet containing a new backlink, do your best to encourage interaction from your audience. 

Besides Twitter, Google also indexes content from Pinterest, LinkedIn, Reddit, and Quora. Accordingly, you should post your backlink URLs to these platforms as well to increase the chances of Google crawling & indexing them. 

Post backlinks to your own website 

This tactic may seem counterintuitive at first, but it really works. In fact, it’s a workaround to help you use GSC’s URL Inspection Tool without knowing the site owner that created the backlink. 

All you have to do is post the backlink URL somewhere on your website. 

From there, head over to GSC, enter the URL containing the backlink into the Inspection Tool, and hit the ‘Request Indexing’ button. 

Voila, now Google’s bots will recrawl your site and discover the backlink you just posted. 

The best part?

You can immediately remove the backlink from your site once Google has recrawled your web page. That way, you’ll be able to quickly index your backlinks without cramming your website with a ton of your own backlinks. 

So once you’ve used the URL Inspection Tool, go back to your web page and remove the hyperlink. 

In the SEO world, that’s what we call having your cake and eating it too. 

Submit a video sitemap to GSC

This next method is particularly effective for indexing a bunch of new backlinks at once. 

It works by submitting a video sitemap to Google Search Console, but you add backlink URLs instead of videos. 

A video sitemap is just an XML sitemap that contains information about the videos hosted on your website. Yet, it’s relatively easy to replace video URLs with backlinks for quick indexing. 

To make the method work, pick any random video on YouTube or Vimeo and embed it on one of your web pages. 

Next, visit a site like XML-Sitemaps that will detect your embedded video and create a separate XML sitemap for it. After that, you can use a program like Notepad to open the sitemap and start editing it. 

Once it’s open, you need to replace the URLs contained within the <loc> </loc> tags with your backlink URLs. As soon as that’s done, save the sitemap, and head over to Google Search Console. 

On the left-hand sidebar menu, select Index > Sitemaps. From there, you can upload your video sitemap to GSC, which will cause Google’s algorithm to crawl & index all the backlink URLs contained within it. 

Obtain links from high-authority websites 

As stated previously, well-established websites like The New York Times get their backlinks indexed as soon as they’re published. 

That means if you’re able to obtain a backlink from such a reputable site, you won’t have to worry about the indexing process nearly as much or at all. 

While it may be difficult to acquire backlinks from juggernauts like The New York Times, you can always use our free domain authority checker tool to uncover websites that have outstanding DA scores – which means Google will index them far more frequently. 

Wrapping Up: How to Index Backlinks Fast 

While backlinks will boost your online visibility, they must first be properly indexed by search engines to do so. 

The indexing process takes quite some time for less notable websites, but the techniques listed in this article will help you speed things up in a big way. 

Also, don’t forget to leverage our free tools for checking backlinks and domain authority to make the entire process easier. 

Do you need help forming a rock-solid link-building strategy at your company?

If so, don’t wait to check out HOTH Link Outreach, our five-star service for acquiring backlinks from top-ranking sites. We also have plenty of tricks up our sleeves to get your backlinks indexed, so don’t wait to get in touch with us today.      

The post How to Index Backlinks Faster Than Ever Before appeared first on The HOTH.

After 6 – 12 months of creating SEO-friendly content, making technical tweaks, and doing tons of keyword research – your web pages are finally starting to rank in the top 5 on the SERPs (search engine results pages). 

After showing off your elite-level rankings to your stakeholders, they’ll likely want to know how they’re affecting your bottom line. 

In other words, how many sales and conversions are you landing from all the organic traffic you’ve been generating thanks to SEO?

That’s when you pull up Google Analytics to find out, and your heart drops to the bottom of your shoes. 

Despite your high rankings and boatloads of organic visitors, they aren’t leading to conversions – which means you aren’t earning any extra revenue despite your SEO efforts. 

What happened?

In these types of scenarios, the website owner failed to optimize their content for conversions, also known as CRO (conversion rate optimization). 

You see, you can generate all the organic traffic in the world to a landing page – but if it’s not optimized to convert – you won’t see any increases in revenue. 

However, according to VentureBeat, businesses can increase their ROI by 223% using conversion rate optimization tools and techniques. 

If you’re new to CRO SEO, you’re in the right place. Read on to learn how you can successfully marry CRO & SEO together to enjoy not only more organic traffic but also conversions and sales. 

SEO vs. CRO: What’s the Difference?

There’s a prevalent misconception out there that SEO & CRO are two competing schools of thought. That’s why many companies think that they need to focus either on SEO or CRO, never realizing that they should place an equal amount of emphasis on both. 

That’s because SEO & CRO have a synergistic, co-dependent relationship. 

To understand why that is, let’s formally define both. 

SEO is short for search engine optimization, and it’s the act of tweaking your on-page and off-page content to cater to search engine algorithms while matching the search intent of your target audience. 

SEO is essential for any digital marketing strategy due to the amount of organic traffic it can generate for a website. 

In fact, 63% of all shopping journeys begin online, even if the purchase ends up being made in person. 

Beyond that, 75% of internet users never scroll beyond the first page of search engine results, which is why ranking on the top page is so crucial for any business eager to gain traffic. 

CRO is short for conversion rate optimization, and it involves tweaking your product pages and landing pages to encourage users to make a sale or enter their contact information to generate a lead. 

CRO work involves identifying ways to perfect your sales funnel to increase your revenue. That means implementing things like convincing calls to action, glowing customer testimonials, competitive pricing, and a pleasant user experience. 

If you only focus on SEO, you’ll generate a ton of organic traffic, but you won’t see an increase in sales. If you focus only on CRO, you’ll increase the earning potential of your landing pages, but you won’t generate any organic visitors to see and interact with them. 

How SEO & CRO Work Together to Drive Traffic & Sales to Your Site 

Now that you better understand the roles SEO & CRO serve, it’s easy to see why they’re a match made in heaven – and why they should go hand-in-hand when it comes to your online marketing efforts. 

Your SEO strategy will bring in a large number of visitors thanks to the following:

• Blog content that establishes you as a thought leader in your field
• Targeted keyword research that represents the terms your audience searches for the most (including transactional & purchase keywords) 
• Technical SEO tweaks to get rid of broken links and improve page speed 
• On-page SEO tweaks to your content (using keywords, excellent copywriting, alt tags, keywords in metadata, etc.) 
• Acquiring high-authority backlinks that boost your SEO profile significantly 

Thanks to these tactics, you’ll enjoy a steady flow of traffic to your site, which is ideal. 

Yet, that’s only half the equation. For the traffic you generate to translate into sales, you need to optimize your content to convert. 

That’s where your CRO strategies come into play. 

With CRO, you’ll steadily increase your revenue thanks to the following:

• A/B testing your product page copywriting, messaging, CTAs, and checkout pages
• Including convincing CTAs at the end of blogs, product posts, and landing pages
• Using visible ‘Buy Now buttons throughout your web pages 
• Optimizing each stage of your marketing funnel 
• Providing a pleasant customer experience complete with effortless navigation 

With CRO SEO in place, you’ll generate traffic that goes onto convert, which is the digital marketing equivalent of having your cake and eating it too. 

Where Can You Implement CRO Tactics?

If CRO is still a new concept, you may not know where you can put it into practice. 

Should you only use CRO techniques on product pages?

The answer is no, as there are a few areas where you can and should use conversion rate optimization strategies, so let’s take a quick look at the most important. 

Your homepage

It’s crucial not to neglect your homepage when putting together a CRO strategy. 

Why is that?

It’s because your homepage can be a goldmine for conversions as long as you make an outstanding first impression. Besides that, the content on your homepage should pique users’ interest and encourage them to dive deeper into your website. 

CRO tactics for your homepage include:

• Highlight internal links to product information. When covering what you do on your homepage, include internal links to your primary product & service pages to increase the chances of landing sales.
• Use a ‘free signup’ or ‘buy now’ button. An excellent lead/conversion magnet to use on your homepage is a ‘free signup’ button to entice users into joining your website. You can also feature a ‘buy now’ button to let customers place an order straight from the homepage. 
• Chatbots. Another homepage CRO tactic is to use chatbots to interact with users, answer their questions, and point them toward appropriate products/services. Not only do chatbots boost conversion rates, but they also improve your user experience. 

These are all effective ways to boost sales, so don’t forget about your homepage when optimizing your website for conversions. 

Pricing page 

This primarily applies to businesses that offer subscription services, such as SaaS companies (software-as-a-service). 

Your pricing page can make or break your entire CRO strategy, so you’ll need to optimize it if you want to meet your conversion goals. 

How do you do that?

In a word, be as detailed as possible when describing your pricing plans. For each tier, include the following:

• The pricing intervals that are available (i.e., billing annually or per month)
• The product features that go along with each price (i.e., security features, more permissions, customer support, etc.)
• A phone number prospects can call for price quotes and more detailed information 
• An opt-in pop-up form for your newsletter or email list to generate more leads

Implement these simple tweaks to your pricing page to fully optimize it to convert. 

Blog content 

While blogs are traditionally seen as ways to generate organic website visitors, they can also become conversion goldmines with the right CRO tweaks. 

This comes down to two factors; A) the type of blog content you create and B) the CTAs you include to encourage users to complete your desired action. 

First, you should create blogs that are designed to increase leads and sales. 

For instance, you could create blog posts describing how your products solve common pain points for your audience and then include a CTA for your product at the end, complete with a link to the product page. 

As a quick example, say you run an eCommerce store that sells kitchen appliances and tools. 

To boost sales for your potato peelers, you write a blog post about the dangers of peeling potatoes with kitchen knives. All it takes is one small mistake, and you could slash open your skin. 

The solution?

Your readers should peel all their potatoes, fruits, and vegetables with one of your high-quality peelers that will never cut their skin. 

And just like that, you’ve made a compelling case for one of your products through a simple blog post. 

As stated before, you should include CTAs even on blog posts that are educational in nature. 

Not only that, but you should inject internal links to related products and services within your blog posts for CRO & SEO purposes. 

Landing pages 

You should definitely use CRO tactics on your landing pages, as they’re inherently designed for users to take action, and they also have the highest conversion rate out of all signup forms. 

How you optimize a landing page will depend on its purpose and content. 

For instance, if a landing page is advertising an annual seminar you give, include a video from last year’s presentation to entice users into signing up for the next one. 

If the page is a lead generator offering a valuable freebie (think PDFs, eBooks, guides, videos, etc.), then a clever CRO tactic is to provide a preview of your free content. 

While it’s crucial not to give away anything especially valuable, users will appreciate being able to preview your content before deciding to enter their email addresses. 

Other CRO techniques for landing pages include the following:

• Include one clear CTA (more than one will muddy the waters)
• Try to shorten your text as much as possible – only include the most pressing information and use concise, short sentences 
• Use social proof such as case studies, testimonials, and user reviews on landing pages 
• Ensure your landing pages load lightning-fast (you can use PageSpeed Insights to help)
• Frequently test your landing page’s bounce rates, conversion rates, and dwell time to see what’s working and what isn’t
• Make your landing pages responsive to display properly on both desktops and mobile devices 

CRO techniques are crucial for landing pages, so you should spend plenty of time optimizing them to convert as well as rank on search engines. 

3 Ways to Calculate CRO Rates 

Setting conversion goals can become a bit complicated due to the nature of how conversion rates work. 

It’s different from other metrics, such as total sales. 

How is that?

With sales, say you sold 50 copies of a product the previous month. Therefore, your goal for this month could be to sell 100 copies. Pretty straightforward, right?

Well, the same type of thinking doesn’t apply to conversion rates. For instance, if you converted 50 customers with a landing page in one month, trying to add 50 more conversions isn’t a viable goal. Instead, you’ll want to add 50 more conversions for every X number of visitors. 

For example, you could try to add 50 more conversions per 1,000 visitors – which would be a 5% conversion rate (which is considered fantastic). 

As you can see, your conversion rate has an important caveat; it’s tied to the number of people that visit your website. 

So if you add 50 more conversions the next month, but it’s out of 10,000 visitors, your conversion rate is a meager 0.5%, which isn’t too hot. 

Here are 3 ways to calculate your conversion rate, the total number of new customers, and a number of leads. 

Conversion rate 

The formula for calculating your conversion rates is pretty straightforward. 

You simply divide the number of conversions by the number of visitors and then multiply it by 100 to get the percentage. 

Generated conversions ÷ number of visitors x 100 = conversion rate % 

Here are a few examples:

50 conversions ÷ 1,000 visitors x 100 = 5% 

200 conversions ÷ 10,000 visitors x 100 = 2%

An ideal conversion rate is between 2 and 5%. 

Net new customers 

Next, it’s valuable to learn how to calculate how many new customers you need to acquire to meet your revenue goal. 

To find out, divide your new revenue goal by your average sales price to get the number of new customers you need. 

Revenue goal ÷ Average sales price = number of new customers 

$50,000 ÷ $500 = 100

If you want to generate $50,000 and your average product price is $500, you’ll need to acquire 100 new customers to make it happen. 

Lead goal 

Now that you know how many customers you need to meet your revenue goal, you’ll need to learn how to calculate your lead goal. 

What’s that?

Your lead goal refers to how many leads you need to generate to acquire the number of customers you need to meet your revenue goal. Here’s how to calculate it:

Total number of new customers ÷ lead-to-customer close rate % = lead goal 

Before you can complete the calculation, you’ll need to know your lead-to-customer close rate. To find that out, divide your number of paying customers by your total number of qualified leads x 100. 

Whenever you increase your conversion rate, you subsequently increase your total number of leads and new customers. As an example, if you’re able to raise your conversion rate from 3% to 4%, you’ll double your qualified leads and customers. 

Why is this important?

It is because it perfectly illustrates why generating more traffic doesn’t necessarily translate into more revenue. 

To visualize this further, take a look at this illustration:

• 10,000 monthly visitors with a 1% conversion rate, meaning you generate 100 new leads and 10 new customers 
• 10,000 monthly visitors with a 2% conversion rate, meaning you generate 200 new leads and 20 new customers
• 10,000 monthly visitors with a 3% conversion rate, meaning you generate 300 new leads and 30 new customers 

Notice that the number of monthly visitors stays the same, but the number of leads and customers increases with the conversion rate. 

So if your SEO strategy is netting hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors, but your conversion rate is at 1%, you need to add a little CRO to your SEO. 

Creating Content That Both Ranks Well & Converts 

Another misconception is that your SEO & CRO strategies should be somehow separate. 

For instance, you work on SEO first and then CRO after. 

Well, that’s not the case. To find the most success, you should strive to blend the two together in a way that’s completely seamless. 

Every aspect of your website and content should guide potential customers down your sales funnel. 

Even if a blog post exists to educate your audience and answer their questions, there should be CRO elements at play that nudge readers closer to becoming customers. Otherwise, you aren’t getting the most out of the content you spent valuable resources to create. 

How do you mix CRO & SEO together?

It’s actually pretty simple. 

Sticking with the example of an educational blog, you can weave in a few conversion optimization techniques to heighten the chances of landing a sale. 

The most obvious way is to include a CTA at the end of the post for one of your related products or services. Another tactic is to include some targeted internal links to product pages and service offerings – so long as they’re relevant to the topic. 

After that, you can create several versions of the blog posts for A/B testing purposes. After a few months, take to Google Analytics to check the conversion rates of each post. Whichever post has a better conversion rate is the one you should go with & emulate for future posts. 

Here are some proven effective tips for creating content that will tear up the SERPs and increase your conversions and leads. 

Match user search intent with SEO content 

Creating a content release schedule is a core practice of SEO. After all, without lots of high-quality content containing targeted keywords, search engines like Google wouldn’t have anything to rank. 

Yet, beyond identifying keywords your audience is actively searching for, you also need to understand how to match a user’s search intent. 

What’s that?

Search intent refers to the intention behind the search or the reason that a user is using a search engine in the first place. 

What was the last thing you looked up on search engines, and why did you do it?

If you’ve ever taken to Google to learn the definition of an unfamiliar term, your intent was informational. 

In other words, your goal was to educate yourself by finding the information you needed online. 

If you’ve ever looked for a specific product using a search engine, your intent was transactional – meaning you were ready to make a purchase right then and there. 

Conversely, if you’re looking for the cheapest locksmith services in your town, your intent is commercial. That means you intend on making a purchase, but you need a little convincing first. In this case, you’d likely visit several local locksmith landing pages to compare their pricing. 

What you need to realize is that every keyword you use in your SEO strategy has some type of search intent. To optimize for conversions, your content needs to cater to the search intent of each keyword. 

Tips for catering to search intent 

If you ignore search intent in your CRO SEO strategies, you could wind up costing yourself loads of leads and conversions. 

Say that you are searching for a specific product and are ready to buy right now (transactional intent). If the first result you choose from the SERPs (likely the #1 spot on Google) takes you to a lengthy informational blog describing what the product does, you’ll likely return to the SERPs to select another result that more closely matches your intent. 

The first website nailed its SEO, as they were the first result that showed up on Google. 

Yet, they completely flubbed the CRO side of things, as they failed to consider the search intent behind the keyword they worked so hard to rank #1 for. 

As a result, they’ll generate a ton of traffic, but next to none of it will lead to conversions. While a small percentage of users may be willing to accept the blunder and navigate by themselves to the product page (which they should have been directed to in the first place), a large portion will not. 

How can you nail search intent every time?

It all starts with awareness, as you’ll need to first understand how crucial search intent is to CRO. After that, it comes down to analyzing every keyword you select to determine its intent. Once you do that, you need to match the content you create with the intent behind the keyword. 

So if you determine the intent behind a keyword is transactional, do yourself a favor and create a concise product page for it containing a clear CTA. 

Using CTAs to Boost Conversions 

Speaking of CTAs, they’re one of the most powerful tools in your CRO bag of tricks. If a website isn’t having trouble with conversion rates, it’s likely due to poor, unclear, or nonexistent CTAs. 

As stated before, the purpose of a CTA is to encourage a user to complete the desired action. 

There are many desired actions that you may want your customers to complete, which is why there are quite a few different types of CTAs. 

Here’s a quick overview of the different types of CTAs you can use on your website to increase conversion rates. 

Read more CTAs

While social proofs like case studies and testimonials are important CRO tactics for landing pages, you don’t want them to take up too much space. 

The same is true for any blog post previews you want to include on your homepage or in other locations. 

The solution is only to include a snippet of text from each case study, testimonial, and blog. After that, include a ‘read more’ CTA button. Whenever users click the button, it will expand to reveal the rest of the text. 

These CTAs are so useful because they drastically improve your user experience by decluttering your page – while also accommodating users that would like to see more information. 

Lead generation CTAs

Of course, you want your content to generate qualified leads, which is where this type of CTA comes into play. 

Common areas to place lead generation CTAs are at the end of blog posts & squeeze pages. 

A squeeze page offers something free in exchange for an email address, so you’ll definitely want to include a concise lead generation CTA – otherwise, users may not know what you want them to do. 

Purchase CTAs

A purchase CTA is as it sounds – it encourages users to ‘buy now’ without beating around the bush. More than any other type of CTA, it’s imperative to be direct & confident with your purchase CTAs. 

That’s because being timid with a purchase CTA communicates that you don’t truly believe in your products or services, which isn’t what you want. 

Social sharing CTA 

This type of CTA is excellent for SEO, CRO, and brand-building. A social sharing CTA asks your audience to share your content on their social media profiles. 

Prime candidates for social sharing CTAs are your blog posts, infographics, videos, and podcasts. By sharing your content, you’ll turn your audience into loyal brand evangelists, spreading the word about what you do far and wide. 

Concluding Thoughts: CRO SEO & How They Relate 

One final word of advice: it’s best not to pit CRO & SEO against each other. It’s also counterproductive to overthink things. 

That’s why once you realize how CRO & SEO gel together, the best thing you can do is take a step back and let them do their thing while you focus on providing the highest quality user experience for your audience. 

Need help putting together a CRO SEO strategy for your company?

Then don’t wait for another second to check out HOTH X, our managed SEO services featuring excellent CRO tactics. Our gurus are always available for consulting sessions, so don’t wait to book a call today.    

The post How to Integrate SEO and CRO for More Traffic and Conversions appeared first on The HOTH.

It will contain a brief paragraph describing who the company is and what they do, as well as  other important information.

But why should you care about knowledge panels?

Because they significantly affect SEO click-through rates. 

Let’s say that one of your web pages has snagged the top organic position for a query. You’re ranked #1, which means you should enjoy an average click-through rate (CTR) of 28%, right?

Not if a Google knowledge panel shares the SERP with you. 

In that scenario, your CTR would drop from 28% to 16% due to the presence of the panel, as most searchers will click on the panel instead. 

Yet, if YOU had the panel instead, you’d be the one enjoying all those extra clicks. 

Read on to learn how you can acquire a Google knowledge panel for your brand name. 

What is a Google Knowledge Panel?

A Google knowledge panel is a SERP feature that provides general information about an identifiable entity (a person, place, building, product, company, etc.). 

To generate a knowledge panel, Google must first identify factual information for a user’s search query. To do so, Google’s algorithm pulls data from trusted public sources, such as:

• Wikipedia 
• Wikidata 
• The CIA World Factbook 
• LinkedIn 
• Crunchbase
• Facebook 
• Zoominfo

Once it has enough data, Google will generate a knowledge panel containing relevant information about the query. 

Important note: The algorithm must be confident that the information is 100% factual before creating a knowledge panel. It stores the data that it feels is accurate in its Knowledge Graph, and the rest of the data remains classified. 

The type of information Google generates for a knowledge panel depends on the query. 

For instance, if you search for a well-known company, the knowledge panel contains information on its CEO, location, founding date, parent companies, etc. 

Yet, if you search for a famous celebrity, you’ll see different facts, such as:

• Popular quotes 
• Their filmography 
• A brief biography 
• Their birthday, spouse, and children 
• Any notable awards 
• People also search for (related actors) 

As you can see, Google alters the facts it provides for each query to provide as much relevant information as possible. 

If you search for a building instead of a person or company, such as the Guggenheim Museum, you get facts such as customer reviews, hours of operation, address, architect, and more. 

For the most part, knowledge panels tend to be for people, places, and things. Yet, they can also show up for abstract concepts, such as influencer marketing or SEO. 

When and Why Do Google Knowledge Panels Appear?

Google is a search engine, and its goal is to provide content that matches the user intent as closely as possible. 

The team at Google wants you to be able to search for a keyword and find the perfect information you need within a few minutes (or seconds). That’s why Google created SERP features and knowledge panels in the first place – to enhance their user experience. 

Besides Google knowledge panels, there are other SERP features that can show up in the Google search results, such as featured snippets, video carousels, and image packs.

The purpose of these features is to make the search experience faster and more convenient for the user. 

For instance, instead of having to scroll through countless text-based search results, users can quickly select a product from an image pack to find what they need in a few seconds. 

According to Google’s patent, the purpose of a knowledge panel is to:

“Improve users’ search experiences for queries directed to learning, browsing, or discovery.”

So on Google’s end, it’s all about improving its user experience. That explains why, but what causes a Google knowledge panel to trigger?

After all, not every search results page features a knowledge panel, and some queries don’t trigger any SERP features at all. 

Well, knowledge panels trigger whenever Google can recognize what it calls an entity. 

Knowledge panels and entities 

As stated previously, Google defines an entity as:

• People (celebrities, scientists, notable people from history)
• Places (countries, museums, shops, etc.)
• Things (companies, products, etc.)

Yet, this definition is a bit too simplistic, as knowledge panels can also appear for concepts at times. For instance, searching for search engine optimization on Google brings up a knowledge panel. 

It provides a definition of the concept via Wikipedia (which is likely the reason why it showed up as a knowledge panel, but more on this in a bit), a list of SEO books, and some popular SEO blogs. 

However, if we get a bit more specific with our query and search for white-hat SEO instead, no knowledge panel appears, nor does any other SERP feature. 

Whenever a Googlebot decides to display a knowledge panel, it considers three factors:

• Its confidence level in the accuracy of the facts it found
• The probability that the search user is looking for the entity 
• Whether or not a Google knowledge panel will be helpful for the user

If the algorithm decides against one of these three factors, it won’t display a knowledge panel. 

That’s why searches with the most popular entities (well-known movie stars, enterprise-level companies, etc.) are the ones most likely to display knowledge panels, as it’s easier for Google to uncover accurate facts and spot user intent. 

For example, if you search for Microsoft, the chances are high that you’re looking for information on the technology company – so it’s easy to identify the intent behind your search. 

Google’s use cases for knowledge panels 

In the official patent we linked to previously, Google lists primary four use cases for its knowledge panels, which will help you get a better idea of which types of queries will trigger them:

1. Supply basic factual information from a number of different sources on the entity (Wikipedia definition, social media links, etc.). 
2. Help users navigate to other web pages with related content (i.e., the ‘people also searched for’ section of the panel). 
3. Centralize content that would otherwise be spread out amongst several search results (definitions, company founders, social media links, related sites). 
4. Expedite the search process, so users have to visit fewer pages to find all the information they need. 

From these use cases, we can gather that if a query wants to display a knowledge panel, there has to be a lot of reliable information about it online from various trusted sources. 

That’s why queries with corresponding Wikipedia pages (one of Google’s data sources) almost always display knowledge panels. 

It also helps if the entity has a large online presence spanning a multitude of sources, such as social media sites, Google My Business (for local businesses/local SEO), and educational sites like Wikipedia. 

That’s how Google decides whether a knowledge panel is worth it. 

The good news?

You can take advantage of the algorithm to increase the likelihood of acquiring a Google knowledge panel for your brand – which will bolster your digital marketing efforts. 

What Can a Google Knowledge Panel Do For Your Business?

Google knowledge panels have been around for long enough now that they’re often expected for brand searches. Google any major brand right now for proof, and you’ll see what we mean. 

As a result, if a brand DOESN’T have a knowledge panel show up in the SERPs, it can lead some to assume that the brand is less credible. 

After all, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook all have knowledge panels, so why doesn’t your brand?

Besides the credibility issue, having a knowledge panel will lead to boosts in organic traffic and higher click-through rates. Remember the statistic where knowledge panels reduce the CTR for the top organic search result by 12%?

Well, those lost clicks don’t simply disappear – they go to the knowledge panel. 

If you aren’t sure if your brand already has a Google knowledge panel or not, do a quick Google search for yourself. If one pops up, congrats! That means you can skip the rest of this article, right?

Well, not quite. 

First, you need to verify that Google is displaying information about your brand that’s 100% accurate. Double-check the logo, description, factual information, and social media links. If everything looks good, you’re all set. If not, you’ve got some tweaking to do. 

For everyone else that’s yet to acquire a knowledge panel, let’s learn how to encourage the algorithm to make one for you. 

How to Get a Knowledge Panel for Your Company 

We’ll cover two methods for acquiring a Google knowledge panel. The first involves tweaking your existing content, and the second entails creating a Wikipedia page. 

Step #1: Identify your ‘entity home’ 

The idea here is to uncover the webpage on your site that Google considers your ‘entity home.’ 

What’s that?

It simply refers to the spot where Google draws information about your company to use in the knowledge panel. To its algorithm, the ‘entity’ (your company) lives here. 

You can actually designate this page by centralizing important information about your company in one spot. Ensure that the page ONLY talks about your company and nothing else; otherwise, you could end up confusing the Googlebot. 

Our recommendation? Make your ‘About’ page your entity home, as it makes the most logical sense. 

Having your entity home on your website is far more ideal than a website that’s out of your control, such as LinkedIn or a Wikipedia page someone else created for your company. 

Step #2: State the facts 

Next, ensure you include all the important information about your company on the entity home page. To ensure Google doesn’t misinterpret anything, add schema markup – which you can think of as Google’s native language. 

Also, use multiple headings to separate all the information in your business profile, such as company bio, founding date, subsidiaries, etc. 

Step #3: Corroborate sources 

Last but not least, you need to corroborate all your sources to ensure everything is accurate. 

Also, the schema markup from step two should include links to trustworthy (in the eyes of Google) sites talking about your company (LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Business, Google Books, etc.). 

Before you do that, take a look at all these websites and verify that the information they have posted about your brand is true. 

If you can, use the exact same description for your company on each one, or at least descriptions that are very similar. While SEO gurus will tell you that duplicate content is always harmful, this is the exception to that rule. 

Consistency is critical, and the more the algorithm sees the same description for your company, the better. 

What’s even more impactful is if you can include links to your entity’s home page on each website. That will create an infinite loop of content that confirms your brand identity. 

Creating a Wikipedia page for your brand 

If you don’t have one already (or if it’s inaccurate), you should create a Wikipedia page for your company. That’s because Wikipedia is one of the most frequently used data sources for Google knowledge panels. 

Signing up for an account on Wikipedia is free, and anyone can do it. 

When writing your page, ensure that everything is grammatically correct and easy to read. Also, do your best to avoid fluff at all costs. Ideally, each paragraph should be information-rich with relevant facts about your brand. 

Not only that, but you need to provide sources for your information for Google to take your page seriously. The types of sources that qualify include:

• Books 
• Newspapers 
• Magazines 
• Journals

Do NOT include sources from social media sites, press releases, or blogs, as they aren’t seen as credible. 

Once you submit your page, Wikipedia will post it after declaring it reliable. Besides posting it, you should also update the page regularly to keep all the information up-to-date. 

Concluding Thoughts: Google Knowledge Panels 

Knowledge panels are one of Google’s most useful SERP features, and they can do a lot for your digital marketing campaign. 

Acquiring a Google knowledge panel for your brand can seriously boost your credibility while generating tons of organic traffic. 

Google displays knowledge panels for entities such as celebrities and well-known brands online. By enhancing your online presence, you can increase the likelihood of getting your own knowledge panel. 

Do you need some expert help to get your SEO strategy off the ground?

Then don’t wait to check out HOTH X, our renowned managed SEO services. Our trained experts can provide unique insights you won’t find anywhere else, so don’t hesitate to book a call today.     

The post Everything You Need to Know About the Google Knowledge Panel  appeared first on The HOTH.

If so, a local SEO strategy can help you raise brand awareness and attract potential customers. 

The proof?

According to research by BrightLocal, 85% of consumers used the internet to find a local business in the past year. 

While digital marketing may seem unnecessary for brick-and-mortar franchise locations, that couldn’t be further from the truth. 

Research by Google showed that 74% of in-store customers searched online for details before showing up, such as store hours, locations, directions, products in stock, and contact information. 

Online reviews are another huge selling point for untapped prospects. In fact, 93% of users admit that reviews had a serious impact on their buying decisions. 

So if your local franchise lacks a serious online presence, you’re missing out on a huge chunk of your audience. 

The most effective online marketing strategy for these types of businesses is known as franchise SEO. 

It bears many similarities to local SEO but also has some completely unique challenges that franchisors need to understand. 

With a savvy SEO strategy in place, you will generate a ton of organic traffic that you can convert into leads and sales. Yet, there’s quite a bit to know if you want to climb to the top of the search rankings, which is why we put together this extensive guide. 

Read on to learn how you can develop a winning franchise SEO strategy for your business. 

What Are Franchise SEO Services All About?

The ultimate goal of franchise SEO is to attract new customers to your brick-and-mortar franchise locations. 

Since this revolves around local search (such as for dog groomers in Dayton, Ohio), franchise SEO and local SEO are closely linked. 

That means franchise owners need to employ classic local SEO techniques like:

• Creating a Google My Business listing (or claiming an existing one) 
• Uploading your franchise website to local directories (Yellow Pages) 
• Using location-based keywords 
• Setting up a Google business profile 

These techniques will increase the online visibility of your franchise websites in local searches. Not only that, but your locations will appear in Google Maps and in SERP features (local packs and map packs). 

The whole idea behind SEO is to match your target audience’s search intent (the reason why they searched for the keyword) with content that educates, informs, and answers their questions. 

That way, you attract customers to your website and not the other way around. This is known as inbound marketing, and it’s incredibly effective. 

An example of Franchise SEO in action 

Let’s consider an example of how you can use your content to attract new customers. 

Say that you board and groom dogs in Dayton, Ohio. After doing some research, you uncover the location-specific keyword ‘how to board dogs in Dayton’ and decide to create content around it. 

You write an informative blog post called ‘Preparing to Board Your Dog in Dayton, Ohio.’ 

It provides numerous tips for getting your dog used to being away from home, which a reader finds helpful. 

At the end of your post, you include a call-to-action that directs the reader to your service page, where you advertise your dog boarding services. The reader decides to convert and book a week’s stay for their dog. 

As you can see, your helpful blog content brought the reader to you. In other words, they chose to click on your website and interact with your post of their own volition, which is a great way to build customer loyalty. 

While this example involves textbook local SEO techniques, franchise SEO also involves some unique challenges that other local businesses don’t have to worry about. 

What Makes Franchise SEO Different From Local SEO?

Franchise businesses have multiple locations, which muddies the SEO waters a bit. 

In particular, duplicate content is a considerable challenge for franchise SEO strategies. 

Why is that?

It has to do with the fact that most franchises have multiple websites for each one of their locations. 

An example would be having two sandwich shop locations in the same city. Ideally, you’d want to create a website for each location to provide their unique:

• Hours of operation
• Location
• Contact information 
• Products available 

The problem is that each franchise website must be unique to avoid duplicate content. If you have two identical pages that you want to rank on Google, they’ll wind up canceling each other out. 

Duplicate content is a notorious no-no for SEO because it confuses Google’s algorithms. 

Yet, with a franchise, your websites are likely to be very similar, especially if you want to maintain consistent branding. That means product images, fonts, graphics, and logos will be the same across the websites – which can lead to duplicate content. 

Another major challenge has to deal with the scope of your strategy. 

For instance, do you want to focus on marketing your products and services to local customers, or do you want to go nationwide?

It will usually depend on how many individual franchise locations you have and how spread out they are in the physical world. 

Local SEO techniques will work best if you only have a few locations in the same town. Yet, a nationwide approach can work if your franchise has spots all over the country or a few states. 

Tips to Avoid Duplicate Content 

Since duplicate content is the biggest challenge for online franchise marketing, here are some tips for avoiding it while maintaining brand consistency. 

Provide branch-specific information on the site 

Including branch-specific information is a great way to distinguish between local landing pages. That will help Google (and other search engines) realize that each branch’s website is unique and not a duplicate. 

Not only that, but this information is valuable to your customers and will provide a better user experience. 

Here’s the information you should include for each branch:

• An embedded Google map of the franchise’s location 
• Location-specific target keywords in the title, tags, metadata, and body content 
• Detailed directions for how to get to each location
• Include testimonials unique to that location 
• Unique hours of operation 
• Pictures and bios of the staff 
• Local schema markup for each location 

These tactics will help Google recognize each franchise location as a separate website, which is what you want. 

Localize your content for each branch 

Next, you’ll need to create original content for each one of your franchise locations. If you’re currently sharing blog content across all locations, that’s not the best way to distinguish them from one another. 

If you have the budget for it, localizing your content strategy will yield impressive results, and it will help you avoid duplicate content. 

Instead of creating content for general topics within your niche, get as location-specific as possible. 

If you own a restaurant franchise, you could blog about the preferred cuisines in each branch’s city or neighborhood – as well as mention exclusive items only available at specific locations. 

Pro tip: Pay attention to each area’s local news, especially community events. Neighborhood festivals and holidays make excellent content topics, and you can also develop special promotions and offers for them. That way, you’ll be able to pick up a few sales in addition to avoiding duplicate content. 

Double-check the NAP for all franchise locations 

Some franchises run into duplicate content because they haven’t formatted the NAP (name, address, phone number) for each branch properly. 

That poses two problems; not only does it confuse search engines, but the wrong NAP misinforms customers and can lead to lost business. 

For instance, if one branch lists the same address as another, Google will see it as duplicate content, and your customers won’t be able to find it. 

That’s why it’s so crucial to double-check the NAP for each branch. 

Here are some NAP formatting tips:

• Assign a phone number to each location and ensure it’s consistent across all your listings (Google My Business, Yelp, etc.). You never want to use more than one phone number for a single location. 
• Permanently delete any duplicate listings you find for the sake of your SEO. 
• Use the same business name for each branch. The only difference should be the address and phone number (i.e., don’t number the locations). 
• Don’t forget to update all your listings whenever you move locations or close a branch. 
• Delete any inaccurate data you find to ensure consistency (i.e., wrong addresses or phone numbers). 

Sometimes franchise owners forget to update their business listings whenever they move locations or close one of their locations. 

That can lead to an abundance of false information about your brand online. 

The last thing you want is for potential customers to attempt to visit or call one of your locations only to be misinformed. To avoid this, set a reminder to update your listings every time one of your locations moves or closes down. 

Creating a Franchise SEO Strategy 

Now that you know what makes franchise SEO a category of its own, it’s time to start developing a strategy. 

Search engine optimization is an ever-changing and evolving tactic, but the fundamentals tend to stay the same. 

As such, you’ll need a solid understanding of its basic concepts to create a winning franchise SEO campaign. 

After that, it’s time for an in-depth audit of all your existing content, including making any necessary technical SEO tweaks (page speed, broken links, etc.). 

Then there’s localized keyword research, content marketing, link-building, and setting up your franchise on local directories. 

That’s a lot to take in, so let’s cover each step in greater detail. 

The essential components of SEO 

An SEO campaign aims to rank a website (or websites) higher in search engine results for specific search terms. 

Most SEO strategies center around Google search, but others focus on search engines like Bing and Yahoo. 

SEO differs from PPC (pay-per-click) ads in two ways. First, SEO is a form of inbound marketing where customers willingly come to your website to view your content. PPC ads are outbound, meaning they’re placed in front of customers against their will – which can be a good or bad thing. 

Next, SEO aims to generate organic traffic, not paid traffic. In essence, you won’t have to pay a dime for an SEO strategy if you do all the work yourself (which isn’t feasible most of the time). 

That means that SEO is only sometimes free. There are plenty of SEO agencies that charge for SEO due to their expertise and proven track record. 

Here’s a quick overview of the ‘building blocks‘ of SEO.

Keyword research 

Every type of SEO campaign involves discovering relevant keywords through research, and franchise SEO is no different. 

You can use our free keyword planner tool to uncover localized keywords used by your target audience. 

What’s a keyword?

It’s a search query that a user enters into a search engine to find content. An example would be ‘dog groomers Dayton.’ 

After entering it into the keyword planner, we see that the keyword ‘dog groomers Dayton Ohio’ is the top result. There are also important metrics for each keyword, including its search volume and keyword difficulty (KD) score.

The ideal keyword will have a high search volume but a low keyword difficulty score. That means that lots of users are searching for it, yet there won’t be much competition from other websites, thus making it easier to rank for the term. 

This keyword has a search volume of 210 and a difficulty score of 28, which isn’t bad. 

Last but not least, pay attention to the search trend graph that’s next to the KD score. It’s a line graph representing the term’s interest over time. This keyword is currently on an upward trend, which means it’s gaining traction. 

You always want to go for keywords that are trending up. 

Even if a keyword has tremendous search volume, it will soon run out of gas if it’s trending down. 

On-page SEO 

When a search engine like Google crawls and indexes your website, it looks for on-page optimization factors. 

These include keyword usage and frequency, title tags, meta descriptions, headers, images, videos, and more. 

The crawlers also look at other on-page factors, such as your content’s relevancy, quality, and trustworthiness. 

Therefore, any tweak or edit you make to your website counts as on-page SEO. 

Off-page SEO 

This is the other side of the coin to on-page SEO. It refers to everything that affects your SEO that does not occur on your website. 

Besides your web pages, search engine crawlers will also look at the following:

• Online reviews of your brand
• Your citations (websites that mention your business, like Yelp and Yellow Pages) 
• Backlinks (links that point to your site from other sites) 
• Brand mentions (both linked and unlinked) 
• Social media accounts and posts 

It’s crucial to note that some of these factors, such as your brand mentions on other websites and user reviews, will be out of your hands. 

Others, such as your social media activity, backlinks, and citations, are all factors that you can tweak to improve your SEO. 

Technical SEO 

Besides the written content on your website, the technical aspects of your website need to be to avoid confusing search engines. 

This is known as technical SEO, and it involves tweaking factors like:

• Page loading speed 
• Broken links 
• Duplicate content 
• Missing sitemap 
• Lack of SSL/HTTPS 
• 404 Not Found pages
• Mobile-friendliness 

If you neglect technical SEO, it won’t matter how good your on-page and off-page SEO efforts are – you likely won’t rank at all. 

For instance, if you don’t have a responsive website design or a mobile version of your website, you’ll get thrown to the back of the line during the indexing process. 

That’s because Google uses mobile-first indexing, which means it will always look at the mobile version of your website first. The best solution is to use a responsive design, where your website’s dimensions will change depending on the user’s device. 

Link Building 

The final core component of any SEO strategy is link building. Google wants to ensure the content it ranks the highest is accurate and trustworthy. 

To do so, it needs a way to judge the trustworthiness of a website – which is where backlinks come into the picture. 

If your website has links pointing to it from trusted websites (educational institutes, government agencies, etc.), Google views your website as trustworthy as well. That’s a big reason why link-building is so essential. 

Without high-quality backlinks, it will be next to impossible to crack the top 5 SERP results for any given keyword. 

Conversely, bolstering your backlink efforts can help push you over the edge if you’re having a hard time penetrating the top spots. 

A logical and all-inclusive internal linking structure is also a component of link-building. Internal links help search engines quickly find all your content, and they help readers stay engaged with your site. 

Get listed on Google My Business (GMB) and other local directories 

Creating a GMB listing is a core aspect of local SEO, and it’s crucial for franchise SEO, too. 

The twist is that each franchise location needs a Google business profile, not just one. You’ll also need to include the proper NAP for each listing, so don’t forget to double-check them before going live. 

There are a few ways you can manage GMB access for each location. You can have each franchise owner create an account, or you can manage them all from one centralized account. The choice is yours, as both methods can work. 

Why is GMB so important?

It’s because Google has a SERP feature called the Map Pack (also called Local Pack), which displays several local GMB results. This is significant because the Map Pack appears above the organic results and often snags a majority of the clicks. 

In fact, research shows that 44% of users opt for the Local 3-Pack whenever it shows up. 29% of users choose organic results, 19% go for paid ads, and 8% choose other local results. 

A GMB listing will also cause your franchise to show up on Google Maps, which is a plus. 

While GMB is the most important, it’s far from the only directory you should use. Other significant local directories include:

• Apple Maps 
• TripAdvisor
• Yellow Pages
• Yelp 
• Moz
• Foursquare
• City-Data
• Angi
• Yahoo 

The more directories you can list your business in, the better, so don’t stop at GMB. 

Stay consistent with your branding 

While you want to ensure that each franchise website is different in a few key ways to avoid duplicate content, you don’t want to lose your brand’s identity in the process. 

After all, each franchise location provides a consistent customer experience, and your websites should follow suit. That means it’s okay if certain things stay the same across all your franchise sites, including:

• Logos 
• Brand colors 
• Navigational layout 
• Common design elements (fonts, images, call-out boxes, etc.) 

Keeping these consistent won’t get you flagged for duplicate content (as long as you incorporate content and store information unique to each location), and they’ll provide consistency for your customers. 

That way, there’ll be no confusion whenever a regular customer visits one of your franchise websites. If your branding is too different from site to site, customers may leave thinking they clicked on the wrong link. 

Build local backlinks 

Lastly, you need to incorporate link-building into your franchise SEO strategy. You can’t go for just any backlinks, though. You’ll want to target trustworthy local backlinks to see the best results. 

That means you’ll need to work with reputable local organizations to acquire backlinks. At the same time, you don’t want to link to your competitors or get any links from them, which makes it a bit tricky. 

Our recommendation?

Target local schools, charities, events, and churches. These are all seen as trustworthy by Google, so their backlinks will carry a lot of influence. They’re also hyperlocal, which will work in your favor. 

For instance, you could sponsor a church food drive in exchange for a backlink. Or you could endorse a scholarship for a university and acquire a backlink that way. 

Concluding Thoughts: Franchise SEO 

By now, you should have a solid understanding of the core components of a franchise SEO strategy. 

It’s a special type of SEO that involves some tricky challenges, such as avoiding duplicate content and maintaining accuracy amongst all your business listings. 

Yet, with the right tactics in place, a proper SEO strategy will yield a ton of organic traffic which you can convert into visits to your brick-and-mortar stores. 

Are you a business owner that needs help formulating a franchise SEO strategy?

Then don’t wait to check out our managed SEO services at HOTH X. Our team consists of seasoned SEO gurus that are always willing to share their expertise, so feel free to book a consulting call today.     

The post How to Create a Winning Franchise SEO Strategy  appeared first on The HOTH.

Traditionally, SEOs prefer targeting keywords with high search volume and a low keyword difficulty score. It makes sense, as you don’t want to spend valuable time and resources optimizing your content for keywords that get ZERO search volume, right?

Or is there actually merit in targeting zero search volume keywords?

It turns out that keywords with zero or very low search volume can actually be extremely valuable if they have the right search intent. 

As such, you can generate a ton of traffic without having to worry about competition with zero search volume keywords. After all, 16 – 20% of all keywords searched for on Google each day are brand-new – meaning no one has ever searched for them before. 

These keywords are an SEO loophole of sorts, as they often fly under the radar without a ton of companies competing to rank for them. 

Yet, there’s a lot to know when targeting one of these keywords. While some are true goldmines, others are worthy of their null status. That makes it pretty tricky to find the right keyword to target if you don’t know what you’re doing. 

That’s why we put together this guide explaining how you can uncover zero-search volume keywords that will generate tons of untapped traffic. 

Along the way, you’ll learn more about long-tail keywords, the unreliability of keyword planner tool data, and how to use the Keyword Golden Ratio (KGR) technique – so read on to learn more. 

Understanding Zero Search Volume Keywords 

A zero search volume keyword is a search query that has little to no search volume – at least according to SEO tools. A keyword may also show zero search volume if the research tools don’t have any data for it yet – especially if it’s a relatively new keyword. 

Zero search keywords are always long-tail keywords that contain for or more words and are highly specific as a result. 

Why is that?

It depends on how most users enter search terms into Google and other engines. More often than not, users search for brief keywords that contain only one or two words. 

These short-tail keywords are often the ones with the highest search volume. Typically, the more words you add to a keyword, the lower the search volume gets. 

Let’s take a look at a real-world example with the keyword organic traffic.

Using our keyword planner tool from The HOTH, we can see that the term has a search volume of 1,300 and a keyword difficulty (KD) score of 62, which is pretty steep. 

Yet, if we add a few words to the phrase, it becomes a different story. Let’s try SEO for organic traffic now. 

Once we do, the tool shows 0 search volume and 0 KD score, which is a picture-perfect example of a zero search volume keyword. 

Going by the planner tool alone, you’d assume that the keyword has no traction online and isn’t worth pursuing at all. 

Yet, is that true?

Let’s learn more to find out. 

Zero Search Volume and Long-Tail Keywords: What’s the Difference?

Essentially, zero search volume and long-tail keywords are the same things. That’s because most long-tail keywords have little to no search volume at all due to their complexity. 

However, there are many different ways that users can phrase long-tail keywords. Going with the example of SEO for organic traffic, users could also search for the following:

• How to do SEO for organic traffic 
• Organic traffic for SEO 
• Using SEO to generate organic traffic 

These are all different ways of saying the same thing, and they’ll count as phrase matches for the base keyword SEO for organic traffic. 

Why does this matter for zero search volume keywords?

It does because while one keyword may have no search volume, all the related keywords combined could have a considerable search volume. 

That’s why zero search volume keywords can be so deceiving. At first glance on a keyword planner tool, it seems that they have no value – but in actuality, they could generate a ton of traffic for you due to phrase matches. 

The best way to determine if a zero search volume KW is worth pursuing is to determine its search intent. 

In particular, if you can optimize your content for one variation of a pertinent user question (such as How to do SEO for organic traffic), your website will likely appear in the SERPs for all related searches. 

That’s because Google’s algorithms are savvy enough to understand that the phrase matches have the same intent, which is why your webpage will show up in the SERPs for them all. 

Keyword Planner Tools: How Accurate Are They?

According to almost every SEO guru out there, the winning ticket is to go after high-volume keywords with low competition. 

To them, all you need is a keyword planner tool to get the job done. Simply enter a keyword, check the search volume and KD score, and that’s all you need to do. 

But is it really that simple?

While that’s by no means a losing method, it fails to see the whole picture. In particular, it’s too trusting of the search volume data generated by these tools. 

While keyword planner tools are excellent for conducting research, their search volume data is by no means concrete or set in stone. All it takes to prove this is to check the volume for the same keyword on two different tools. You’ll likely find that the two numbers vary, sometimes by a wide margin.

For instance, our Google keyword planner has the search volume for link building at 9,900, while Ahrefs has it at 14K. 

Which one is correct?

There’s no way of knowing, and it has to do with how these types of tools get their data (more on this in a bit). 

These tools also struggle to capture low-volume keywords. That’s because most tools require keywords to have a certain amount of data to register in their database. 

For all these reasons, it’s best to use keyword planner data as more of a general guide than treating the metrics as stone-cold facts. Since most companies (especially larger ones) take keyword planners at their word, zero search volume keywords are largely an untapped market that startups and small businesses can take advantage of. 

How keyword tools acquire search data

The reason search volume data is so off with keyword planners is that they get their data from Google’s Keyword Planner. 

The problem with that is Google’s tool is primarily used for commercial intent searches only. As a result, it does not provide search volume data for informational or exact match search queries, which means it excludes thousands of searches. 

That’s why queries with informational intent often wind up as low search volume keywords – or they don’t register any volume at all. 

Beyond the unreliable data source, there’s also the fact that Google search generates a whopping 5.6 billion daily queries. 

That’s way too much data for any SEO company or planner tool to handle, which is why these tools make their “best-educated guess” when it comes to calculating search volume. That means the number you see on these tools is an estimate, not a concrete number. 

Google’s Keyword Planner is to thank for this, as it uses traffic buckets to group keywords by volume – something discovered by Moz back in 2015. 

What are those?

A traffic bucket is a number representing the accumulated volume of many different keywords, which form different ‘thresholds’ for search volume. For instance, one traffic bucket might be 21,000. 

Suppose a keyword shows a search volume of 21,000 – that only means that it was the closest to that bucket. The next bucket may be 30,000 – which will encompass all the volumes higher than 21,000. 

That’s also why you’ll see inaccurate traffic/search volume numbers for your website if you enter it into one of these tools. 

The Benefits of Targeting Zero and Low-Volume Keywords 

By now, you may be wondering, “What’s in it for me? Is there really enough benefit in targeting zero search volume keywords? Will it deter me from my already successful SEO strategy of targeting high-volume keywords?”

The answer is no, it won’t – and you stand to gain quite a bit from zero search keyword phrases if you do it right. 

Instead of targeting low-competition keywords, you’ll be targeting keywords with next to NO competition. 

While everyone else is competing to rank for a handful of short-tail keywords, you can dominate the long-tail ones (which may turn out to generate more traffic than the others) with nary a competitor in sight. 

Even with a relatively low keyword difficulty score, you’re still having to compete with countless other companies and bloggers, which is a lot of pressure. 

With the perfect zero search volume keyword, you’ll be able to operate in a space with virtually no competitors, which is an incredible advantage. That dramatically increases your chances of ranking on the first page of search engine results pages, and who’s not a fan of that?

Higher rankings aren’t the only perks of targeting keywords with no search volume, either, so let’s take a look at some of the most attractive benefits.

#1: Be the early bird for hot new search trends 

Monitoring search trends is an essential aspect of SEO, so you must sign up for Google Trends if you haven’t already. 

Articles that dominate the short-tail keyword space have often been around for quite some time and are extremely difficult to outrank, especially for smaller companies and startups. 

These established sites often have thousands of high-quality backlinks that secure their high-ranking spots. 

However, while competing with these SEO behemoths may be a fruitless endeavor, there are ways to solidify your website in a top spot for new queries about to take off in popularity. 

If you know your niche well enough, you’ll be able to spot trending keywords before anyone else. Sure, they may show zero search volume at the moment, but that’s about to change. By targeting these keywords now, you’ll be one of the first to ride their upward trend. 

As the search volume skyrockets, your website will lead the fray in terms of content and keyword optimization – all because you beat everyone to the punch by targeting keywords that weren’t trending at the time but showed potential. 

Uncovering keywords that are about to start trending 

How do you spot keywords that show potential to trend?

This is where it really pays to know your niche. If you have considerable expertise in your field and stay up to date with the latest news, you’ll likely be able to predict what users are going to start searching for online. 

For instance, if you’re in the gadgets and technology niche and a new tech giant is about to release a new product, targeting long-tail keyword phrases surrounding it is a great way to get the jump on queries about to start trending. 

Besides that, you can also take to social media to discover what users are starting to buzz about. A valid strategy is to search for trending hashtags on Twitter and Instagram to get a headstart on keywords that are soon to take off. Social media hashtags can also provide a glimpse into user intent, such as #OOTD (outfit-of-the-day, which shows interest in buying clothing). 

Google Trends is your best friend here, as you’ll need to not only run each keyword through it to see if it’s about to trend – but also monitor it after you optimize your content. That way, you’ll be able to spot the spike in popularity. 

If it never happens, you’ll need to tweak your strategy and choose a better keyword. If it does spike, you can pat yourself on the back, knowing your webpage will be one of the first discovered, indexed, and ranked by Google’s algorithms. 

#2: Generate more organic traffic 

Even if your website already ranks well for high-volume keywords, it’s still worth pivoting your strategy to include some long-tail zero-search volume keywords to reach an even wider audience. 

Why is that?

Think back to the stat shared at the beginning of this article – 16 – 20% of all searches on Google are brand-new. 

That means you could be missing out on 16 – 20% of your potential traffic, which is significant, to say the least. That’s why zero search volume keyword targeting is a smart move for all companies, regardless of how successful you currently are in the search. 

The fact is that most companies don’t target long-tail keywords at all because they blindly follow the data from keyword planner tools – which is ironic because long-tail keywords account for a whopping 70% of search queries. 

So by targeting these longer queries, you’re tapping into a largely untapped pool of potential customers that have shown interest in what you do. 

#3: Far less competition 

The sheer number of competitors out there is what hinders most traditional SEO strategies. Even with outstanding content and flawless technical SEO, you can get outranked due to a number of factors, such as:

• Competitors that have more backlinks with higher authority 
• Optimized local business listings 
• Competition from industry behemoths (Wikipedia, Amazon, Facebook, etc.)
• They’re already established pages that have secured their spot for a long time 

As you can see, even with an airtight SEO strategy, quite a bit can get in the way that’s out of your hands – and that’s only in the organic search listings. 

We haven’t even mentioned the PPC ads and SERP features that can outrank your content and steal a ton of clicks. Featured snippets, knowledge panels, and image carousels all show up in position zero, which is above the organic results. 

In this regard, zero search volume keywords are the best queries to target. 

You’ll get the chance to establish your content as the authority on the subject, with little in the way of competition. Google and other search engines will see your content first during indexing, increasing your chances of ranking in one of the top spots. 

To dominate even further, you can optimize your content for SERP features like featured snippets and knowledge panels to snag position zero for your targeted long-tail queries, too. 

Once other companies catch on to these topics, you’ll already be at the top of the castle, and they’ll have to compete with your established, thoughtful content. 

#4: They help you pin down your target audience 

Another benefit of long-tail zero search volume keywords is that they’re highly specific, which means they’re extremely relevant to your audience. 

Yet, there’s a noticeable shortage of content created specifically to answer these long-tail queries. 

As such, your content will likely be the first of its kind, which will place your content directly in front of your target audience. 

Let’s consider an example of how this can happen. 

Say you’re producing content for the long-tail keyword ‘increase SEO for SaaS companies.’

Currently, on Ahrefs, this keyword has a search volume of zero, so it’s an ideal target. The chances are high that many SaaS digital marketing managers are searching for this term or one of its phrase matches – but they’re redirected to content focusing on the shorter keyword string ‘SEO for SaaS.’ 

Yet, if you’re able to create content optimized for the long-tail keyword, you’ll be the first of its kind. 

Once you become indexed on search engines, those same digital marketers will find your content instead, which closely aligns with the needs of your target audience. Since your content goes into more detail on how to enhance SEO for SaaS instead of just generalized tips (like the other articles), you can start to win more traffic. 

This may even lead to discovering new insights about your audience, such as the types of keywords they search for and the content they prefer. 

That’s just one example of how you can use zero search volume keywords to cater to the needs of your niche audience. 

How to Target Low-Volume Keywords 

Now that you know that targeting zero search volume keywords is more than worth it, you need to learn how to discover and target them. 

After all, a keyword with zero search volume doesn’t automatically make it an untapped goldmine. 

Plenty of low-volume keywords live up to their reputation – and if you target them in your content, you likely won’t see any results at all. 

So are zero search volume keywords one giant gamble?

Not at all, as there are plenty of ways to discover if a low-volume keyword is worth the time and money or not. So before you go targeting every long-tail keyword you can find that relates to your niche, stop and read this section first. 

As a business owner/marketing strategist, you must be very careful with the keywords that you select, long-tail or otherwise. Make the right choice, and you’ll enjoy a mountain of organic traffic, leads, and conversions. 

Make the wrong choice, and you’ll wind up wasting a significant chunk of your budget, as well as waste valuable and costly work hours. 

It’s akin to selecting the right Holy Grail from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, so think long and hard before making a decision to ensure you don’t choose poorly. 

Nobody wants that to happen, so before you target a keyword, you should:

• Conduct detailed keyword research 
• Ensure its relevance with your audience
• Focus on keywords that have commercial intent 
• Add strong supporting keywords (LSI)
• Try the KGR method (keyword golden ratio)
• Test your conversion rates and tweak accordingly 

It’s imperative that you follow these series of steps before pulling the trigger on a zero search volume keyword, so let’s take a more in-depth look at each one. 

Step #1: Conduct keyword research 

The keyword research you’ll need to conduct for zero search volume keywords differs a bit from the traditional route. 

Instead of relying on keyword planner tools, you’ll want to search for specific long-tail keywords on Google. 

Pro tip: To uncover some frequently searched long-tail keywords, check out the ‘People Also Ask‘ section on Google’s SERPs. It will contain four long-tail queries directly related to what you searched for, which is a great way to find related keywords. 

To see this in action, let’s try it out with the short-tail keyword ‘SEO for SaaS.’ 

Once we enter the term into google, here are the long-tail keywords that show up under the People Also Ask section:

• Is SEO important for SaaS?
• How is SEO for SaaS different?
• Is SEO good for B2B?
• What are some commonly used software programs for SEO SaaS?

As you can see, these are all excellent long-tail keywords (that likely have low search volume) that you can target and create content for online. 

Another secret weapon you can use is Google’s autocompleting feature. 

What’s that?

It’s where you type a few letters of a keyword into Google, and it lists several suggestions via its autocomplete capability. This is huge because these aren’t random suggestions; they’re real keywords that users search for – so they’re all valid KWs you can use. 

To make this feature even more effective, get the Keyword Surfer add-on. That way, you’ll be able to see each KWs search volume next to it in the autocomplete section. 

Step #2: Ensure the KW has relevance with your audience 

Here’s where targeting zero search volume keywords become a bit tricky if you don’t know what you’re doing. 

Conducting searches online is all about relevancy. In other words, when you search for something online, you want to find the most relevant webpage as quickly as you can (hence the search rankings). 

Yet, when dealing with zero search volume keywords, you have no data to check to see if the KW is relevant. 

So how do you find out?

This is where you have to do a bit of detective work. It also pays to have some knowledge of your niche audience, which will help you determine if a KW is about to explode in popularity or not. 

In this regard, Twitter, Reddit, forums, and Facebook groups are your best friends. Look for the specific keywords that you want to target in your target audience‘s discussions and news updates. 

If you’re able to find them, that’s a sign they’re about to take off on the search engines. Tools like Moz and Semrush can help out with this, as long as you remember to eliminate the brand names. 

Also, make your article’s title longer while keeping your URL slug as short as you can. That will make it effortless to change your title as many times as you want without having to compromise any backlinks you picked up along the way. 

Step #3: Focus on keywords that have commercial intent 

Do you want to boost your sales and conversion rates?

If so, you’ll want to focus on zero-search volume keywords that have strong commercial intent. In other words, the prospect has their wallet in their hand, and they’re ready to buy something. 

Commercial intent keywords often contain the phrases:

• Vs. (or comparison) 
• Best 
• Top 
• Suppliers 
• Discount
• Coupon
• Deal 
• Providers 
• Get 
• Where to buy 

All these phrases represent an intent to buy, so you should pepper them into your long-tail queries whenever possible. 

Here’s a clever way to see if a keyword has commercial or transactional intent. Head over to Google and enter the keyword into its search bar. 

If there are any paid advertisements at the top of the page, that’s a sign that the KW has the intent to buy. You should be all set as long as you add the correct phrases to your KW and double-check it has the right intent through Google. 

Why is it beneficial to focus on these types of keywords?

It is because commercial and transactional intent keywords stand the most excellent chance of increasing your revenue and conversions. If you focus on informational keywords, you may generate some traffic – but it’s highly likely that most visitors will leave without making a purchase. 

Step #4: Add supporting keywords 

Next, adding latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords to your primary keyword is a good idea. 

What are those?

LSI keywords are supporting keywords that directly relate to your target keyword. Adding these keywords can help you rank for additional, related keywords – often referred to as ‘low-hanging fruit.’ 

Yet, the accumulation of traffic from these additional keywords can be quite profound. In fact, it’s possible to boost your overall traffic 10x due to adding variations to your seed keyword. 

These keywords often take the form of questions (such as the queries found in the People Also Ask section of Google). As such, answering these questions in your content will increase your chances of gaining additional search engine real estate for those queries. 

Step #5: The KGR method 

Affiliate marketing guru Doug Cunnington coined the keyword golden ratio method, which involves finding long-tail keywords that are underrepresented (sound familiar).

It’s a data-driven strategy that follows a strict formula:

• KGR = allintitle results (all results on Google containing your keyword) / total search volume 

Using this formula, you can predict (with surprising accuracy) where you’ll rank in the SERPs and how long it will take. 

For instance, if your KGR is less than 0.25, you should rank in the top 100 results as soon as Google indexes your page. As such, you should go after keywords if they score under 0.25. 

Step #6: Test conversions with PPC advertising 

If you have the budget, you can test the effectiveness of a low-search volume keyword with PPC ads. 

Pair a product or offer with a zero search volume keyword and see how well it performs. You can also run A/B testing to determine which variation performs better for a more significant return. 

You can also use retargeting with Facebook Ads to take another crack at customers that left your webpage without buying anything. 

Concluding Thoughts: Zero Search Volume Keywords 

If your SEO efforts have hit a snag, it could be that you’re targeting keywords that are too competitive. Everyone and their brother goes after short-tail keywords, so be a trendsetter and do the opposite. 

With the proper research and preparation, zero search volume keywords can generate loads of traffic and conversions for you. 

Remember to do thorough research, focus on commercial intent keywords, and use the KGR method wherever possible. 

Do you lack the manpower or resources at your company to launch an SEO strategy?

Then don’t wait to check out our managed SEO services at HOTH X today.     

The post Targeting Zero Search Volume Keywords That Bring Loads of Traffic and Conversions appeared first on The HOTH.

Keyword research is one of the most important aspects of SEO and 93% of keywords only get ten monthly searches or fewer. 

With that said, I see a lot of people struggle with keyword research, and it doesn’t have to be difficult!

Want to know the most effective (and fastest) methods to find great keywords to target?

The remaining content will define what keyword research is, why it’s important for your SEO strategy, and how to target the best keywords for your website. 

Let’s jump in!

What is Keyword Research and Why is it Important?

Keyword research provides valuable insight into the search intent of your target audience. The insight that you can get with these search terms can then help you create an informed content strategy as well as boost your marketing strategy. 

Searchers use keywords to find solutions to any given problem when conducting research online. If your content is successful in SEO, then you get the chance to expose your brand to new audiences.

In fact, 60% of marketers say that inbound (SEO, blog content, etc) is their highest quality source of leads. 

In addition, it’s best not to create content around what you want to tell your audience, it’s a good method to create content around what people want to find. Basically, you want your audience to come to you. 

All of this can be accomplished with easy keyword research methods.

When Do You Need Keyword Research and Where Do You Start?

It’s generally a good idea to perform keyword research before creating any new content for your website. 

Collecting information can be useful when you begin your keyword research. 

It will also help ensure that the content you’re creating is actually something that your audience is looking for.

For example, if you know that only around 8% of search queries are phrased as questions, then you may not target keyword phrases that contain too many questions. 

Google Search Console is also a great tool for research. Your ranking data can help you identify some of your underperforming keywords that are attached to your content. 

You can also find keywords that Google associates with your website that you may have missed. 

When researching for keywords in your industry, you might come up with a set of recurring keywords that also show up on your competitors’ websites. 

Make a list of your competitors, visit their websites, and observe their target set of keywords.  

By knowing which keywords they are using to rank highly, you have a better idea of how to create content for a successful digital marketing strategy.

Let’s move on to some phrases and terms you should know: 

Keyword Research Metrics and Terms To Know

When using keyword research tools, you might see metrics about the keywords you analyzed.

Similar to this:

Here’s a quick overview of each of the major keyword research metrics:

Keyword difficulty

Keyword difficulty is representative of competition. This is the metric we use to determine how difficult it is to rank for a focus keyword. Most keyword research tools provide you with a ranking of keyword difficulty.

If too many high-authority websites with many quality backlinks are ranking highly for your focus keyword, it might be a good idea to search for another keyword with less competition. 

Monthly search volume 

Monthly search volume represents the number of times a keyword was searched in a month and how often it shows on results pages.  

Free SEO tools like Google Trends provide you with an estimate on the number of search queries across longer time periods. It’s also known as keyword search volume on some tools.

Cost-per-click (CPC)

Cost-per-click is the amount of money you spend for each click on one of your PPC ads. This metric is essential because it allows you to quantify the expenses of your Google Ads or Microsoft Ads. 

Here are a few additional terms you may see regarding keyword research:

Keyword stuffing and cannibalization

Many times, keyword cannibalization is the result of keyword stuffing. 

Keyword stuffing is the practice of stuffing pages of content with keywords in hopes it will boost your ranking in SERPs. 

Not only does this not work, but it could also cause Google to penalize your website. 

Keyword cannibalization happens when you have one too many identical or similar keywords that are spread throughout the content of your website. 

As a result, Google can’t tell what content to rank higher. 

That can sometimes mean it will give a higher ranking to the webpage that you aren’t trying to prioritize. 

How to avoid keyword stuffing:

• Pick a primary keyword for your website
• Keep up with keyword density
• Create longer content
• Select secondary keywords
• Add target keyword to page elements

The solutions for keyword cannibalization:

• Restructure your website
• Create new landing pages
• Consolidate your content
• Find better keywords
• Use 301 redirects

With that said, let’s move on to how to conduct SEO keyword research:

How to Conduct Easy Keyword Research 

Now that we’ve talked about the importance of keyword research, it’s time to focus on how to do it. 

Additionally, you can use these steps: 

1. Come up with a keyword topic list

Brainstorming content ideas for your website is a good starting point for keyword research. This is a great time to step in the shoes of your buyer personas and identify which topics your target audience will search about. 

What kind of topics do you want your business website to rank for? If you’re a business in the computer parts industry, for example, you might come up with a list that looks like this:

• Does overclocking damage your CPU?
• What is the difference between CPU and GPU?
• How to assemble a custom PC?

These topics are relevant to the computer industry and represent evergreen content for your website. 

An alternative to finding out what your audience is researching is by looking on online forums such as Reddit and Quora. 

Once you have assembled a sizable topic list, it’s time to identify the keywords that you’ll be using to rank the content in the SERPs. 

There are three major types of keywords:

• Head keywords are popular search terms that have high search volumes. Think of a very general search term like “Christmas cards”.
• Body keywords are two to three words long. For example “digital Christmas cards”.
• Long-tail keywords are phrases that have several words, usually four or more. These tend to be more niche-oriented and hyper-focused on a result. Take a look at “Christmas cards for kids”. 

2. Find “easy win” keywords

Did you know you might be sitting on a hidden pile of gold?

If your site has been around for a while, there’s a good chance that with a few changes you could drastically improve your traffic.

The vast majority of the traffic is on the first page of Google – especially in the top 3 positions, which can account for more than 30 percent of the total traffic!

It’s great to be in the top 3, but what about all the keywords that you’re ranking for below that in positions 4-30?

Google already “likes” you for these keywords and sees you as relevant, you just haven’t broken into the top positions.

So if you could find these keywords that your site is ranking for, and boost them up, you could see a massive jump in traffic!

How do you find these keywords?

You can use our free tool: HOTH Google Rankings Checker.

First, enter your URL and click search. After it gathers the data, it will display a list of keywords that your website is ranking for.

Because most clicks go to the top three positions, look for the keywords ranking in the 4-30 slots and focus on boosting those up.

3. Uncover your competitor’s keywords

The task of brainstorming for new keywords can be daunting. Especially in small niche industries, how many keywords are actually relevant to your company?

The good thing is you can just uncover what your competitors are ranking for!

First, go to our free tool HOTH Keyword Gap Analysis, and type in your competitor’s URLs.

They can be direct competitors (where they sell the same thing you do) or indirect competitors (meaning they just market to the same people you do).

Examine the list of the right keywords and take note of the phrases that you aren’t targeting.

Start creating content based on these keywords and give your competitors a run for their money!

4. Find related keywords

When you’re going to create a new piece of content, it’s a good idea to understand the topic at hand to maximize the amount of search traffic you can get from the long tail.

You know your main keyword for the article, but what other facets of the subject should you be including to help rank for additional long-tail phrases?

Here’s how to find those long tails:

First, go to our HOTH free Keyword Planner alternative and put in a seed keyword.

Our tool will spit out a list of awesome long-tail keywords you can use throughout your article to rank for more phrases!

Make sure to include these variations while writing your content.

Understanding Keyword Intent Types 

Keyword research identifies the words that best describe the content on your website or content page. It also helps you rank well for the searches that people look for every day. However, there’s more to it than simply matching words to phrases. 

Because you know your brand better than anyone else, you may not have the same mindset as potential customers. The terms and phrases you might use to search for your products on the web may not come close to what shoppers are searching for. 

As you begin your keyword research, you will want to consider the buyer’s journey and the search intent behind particular phrases, and whether or not your content matches it. 

Here are the keyword intent types you should consider: 

• Informational: your audience wants to learn something from your content.

• Navigational: your audience is looking for something specific from your website.

• Transactional: your audience wants to compare specific products and is almost ready to purchase.
• Commercial: ready to buy!

When your content keywords match your customer’s intent, they tend to stay on your page for longer. That can help you rank on search engines and even build relationships with your audience. 

Let’s move forward to the best free tools for easy keyword research:

Best Tools For Keyword Research

The best part of keyword research is that you don’t have to break your marketing budget to perform it. 

There are quite a few free keyword research tools available. Here’s a brief list of the best keyword research tools you can use to come up with your keyword list:

AnswerThePublic

AnswerThePublic is one of the easiest and simplest free SEO tools out there. AnswerThePublic prompts search questions and provides you with raw search insights.

By typing into the prompt, AnswerThePublic will show you long-tail keywords organized in several subcategories: questions, prepositions, comparisons, alphabetical, and related.

AnswerThePublic’s free version only allows you to search up to 3 keywords or phrases per day. 

Moz Keyword Explorer

With this tool, you enter an URL or keyword and it’ll take you to the best keywords to target for a specific search. 

It shows monthly search volume, keyword difficulty, CTR, keyword opportunity, and suggestions for each term. Its free search results also feature a SERP analysis with 10 pages that rank for your focus keyword. 

Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is a Chrome extension that shows you monthly search volume, CPC, and keyword queries on Google, Amazon, Yahoo, and YouTube. 

It has a respectable keyword database and provides you with the number of backlinks you’d need to rank on the first page of Google for a keyword phrase. 

Its free version only allows you to search for a single website and three keywords per day.

Ahrefs Keyword Generator

Ahrefs automatically generates up to six keyword ideas reports that contain your seed. To use their keyword tool, you just have to enter up to ten words or phrases for free.

SEMRush Keyword Magic Tool

SEMRush Keyword Magic Tool lets you create an account for free and gives you access to a report featuring monthly search volume, competitive density, and difficulty. 

It has useful organizing figures that allow you to sort out your keywords and export your findings to your email. 

You’re given access to 10 searches a day with a free account. It can be useful for analyzing your homepage, landing page, and any other subpages on your website.

Google

Google is one of the underdogs of keyword research tools. By using the search engine’s auto-suggest feature, you can get some great ideas about what people are searching for. 

For example, if you were to type “cakes”, some options that come up are “cake toppers”, “cake topper happy birthday” and local brands that have the cake keyword as part of their name.

Google’s Keyword Planner can also be used to research keywords. This tool gives you suggestions for keywords related to your products, services, website, and the average cost for your ad to show on searches. It’s also known as Google Adwords.

That’s it!

Keyword research doesn’t have to be a guessing game. You can drastically and quickly improve your traffic by using these methods. 

Never forget to analyze the competition for that keyword. 

Schedule a call with The HOTH’s team for a step-by-step tutorial on how to perform keyword research for your website.

Also, don’t forget to sign up for free and check out all of our other awesome free SEO tools and resources!

The post Easy Keyword Research Methods You Can Do In Less Than 10 Minutes appeared first on The HOTH.