The Pearl Lemon Guide to Negative Article Removal

You may have heard or read about online reputation management recently. However, with all the other things you have to worry about you may not have given too much thought to actually worrying about it as it applies to you. That may be a big mistake as increasingly your online reputation is becoming more and more important, from both a personal and professional point of view. And something as simple as one negative article can ruin it. But is negative article removal even possible?

Your online reputation – and that of your business – is made up of a lot more than just your website and/or your blog. It can consist of every mention made about you online, both by you yourself in the form of comments on other websites or on social networks, articles that may have been written about you on or offline (most newspapers and magazines have online versions of their publications these days) and comments that others may have made.

If you do not find a way to manage your online reputation effectively what you don’t know can really hurt you. It’s not just all about bad reviews on sites like Yelp! or inappropriate comments on social networks either. Some business owners have horror stories to tell about discovering negative articles, nasty social media content and worse posted in their name that damaged their reputation that was actually the work of someone else. Some of this stuff was so alarming that we knew we had to get into negative article removal.

One black hat SEO technique that has been around for quite some time is posting a comment, blog post or article that says something negative about a company – something that is often untrue – and then deliberately optimizing it so that it ranks higher in the SERPs than positive content about the company. If you think that sounds a bit far-fetched think again, it happens to companies – and individuals – all the time these days.

How important might that information be? The results of a survey of 300 consumers from the Society of New Communications Research found that “74% (of consumers) choose companies/brands based on others’ customer care experiences shared online.” These figures only confirm what a lot of businesses have already had to find out the hard way – that what consumers can find out about your company online will be a huge factor in their decision whether or not to use or purchase goods or services from you.

When you are trying to bury and push down a negative Google result, branding basics just won’t cut it. You need to give your campaign a little extra juice when attempting to bury a well-optimized negative article or bad search result with a lot of domain authority.

Bad Search Results Can Happen to Good People

While the internet and social media have created an accessible platform for anyone with an internet connection, there is a downside. All it takes is one bad blog post or status update from an angry ex, disgruntled former client, employee – OR EVEN YOU to ruin your career. Even a questionable photo can wreck an otherwise pristine reputation. Bad results happen to good people all the time. So what can you do to fix your online reputation if this happens to you?

Option 1. Get the negative search result taken down.

If you need to bury negative Google search results, in some cases, you can, get the negative search result and/or the negative article/post/review taken down directly. Remember, this won’t work in every case, but in some it is step one to building a more effective personal or company brand online. There can be serious downsides to removal requests though, so ask yourself these questions first:

Did you post the content?

Does this negative search result stem from a blog post, tweet, status update, etc that you posted? Or does it come from an account that you control or have access to? If so, DELETE IT! You don’t need to bury Google results if you control them. Remove everything associated with this content that you possibly can. While there is still a chance that content could appear elsewhere (screenshots/cached searches, uploaded on other sites or profiles, etc), start by removing anything you can.

Did your friend post this content?

Did your friend post something about you that could hurt your professional, academic or personal opportunities? If so, just ask them to take it down. As mentioned above, this could still resurface elsewhere, but this is a great first step. And try to push for full removal. For example, if your friend just de-tags you from something, your image is still associated with whatever is potentially damaging.

Did an acquaintance or someone you’re on good terms with post this? Feel free to reach out to this person as you would a friend. Just be polite and explain the situation logically. If someone isn’t focused on their own personal brand, (or has different boundaries than you do) they may be oblivious to how this content can negatively affect your personal or business reputation.

Would The “Right to be Forgotten” apply to this scenario?

If you live in the E.U.or Argentina, check if this content falls within the standards of removal based on Google’s Right to be Forgotten.

Does this content fit Google’s standards for Takedown Requests?

If you’re based in the US, look up Google’s legal causes for removal, and follow the steps necessary for submission.

While a “YES” to the questions above bodes well if you want to remove or bury negative Google results, keep in mind, you’re not necessarily in the clear. The search result is still archived.

If you are lucky enough to have your content removed through emailing the webmaster directly, filling out a request form or through legal channels, it’s still likely that the negative search result will be archived somewhere and continue to show up when your name is searched.

There are a few more questions you still should ask yourself in your takedown request. Unfortunately, if you answer “YES” to any of the questions below – you should focus your energy elsewhere while attempting to improve your personal brand.

Is the owner of this content anonymous or spiteful?

It would be great if you could just email someone and they would immediately remove this negative content, no questions asked. That’s obviously the ideal situation, and while it is possible to get content removed, there are some known risks and issues associated with taking this route.

If you’re dealing with an anonymous or spiteful troll, then proceed with caution. Asking this kind of person to remove the offending may not go as planned. There is always the chance that the owner not only refuses to take the content down… but could make the situation worse for you.

Depending on the particular circumstances regarding your negative results, if you are dealing with somebody who has it in for you, there is always the chance that this person will choose to make it worse for you by becoming even more active and retaliate against you online.

We have seen this happen, so it’s a smart idea to take a moment and analyze the situation. Sometimes it’s better left alone when it comes to contacting the site owner, and spending your time on other strategies to bury negative Google results.

Is the owner of this content a government website or news outlet?

If you’re dealing with a government site, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to get documents that are of public record removed. However, you should feel free to do a bit of digging on the government website (or by calling them) to see if there are any processes in place to maintain your privacy.

When it comes to dealing with a news outlet – if something is factually inaccurate, you can email them to write a retraction or correction. However, that may just give even more authority to a link or story that already looks damaging based on the title or URL.

Does this negative content fall outside of the realm of the Right to Be Forgotten (EU) or Google’s takedown policy (US)?

If so, it’s unlikely you can have the search engine de-index this result for your name. This means you will have to push down the negative Google result if you want it to stop being an issue.

Option 2. Pay for a service that claims to “instantly fix your negative search results”.

If the owner of the offending content refuses to take it down, you may be tempted to turn to paid negative article removal services. Unfortunately this may be a very expensive and arduous path to possible removal. Often times the negotiations associated with this process can take as long as working to bury negative Google results directly. There are a number of reasons for this but the two biggest ones are time and negotiation.

Site owners tend to be protective of their content and have spent their own time or money when creating it. This is why they tend to not be very receptive to the idea of removing it. Also, most often the contact details you can find on a site are not checked frequently which means the time you have to spend simply waiting to hear back from the owner can be very long.

There are a number of businesses and “consultants” popping up all over the place who claim that they can bury negative Google results and fix your online presence practically overnight. However, if this person or company was really focusing on building your brand with long-term results in mind, then they wouldn’t be making a promise that they can’t necessarily keep. The fact of the matter is, nobody can completely control Google results.

If someone says that they can fix your online reputation overnight, RUN! These are people who will employ some of those aforementioned black hat SEO tactics, which will quite possibly work for a few weeks, and then disappear (with your money of course).

As these shady tactics are only short term fixes the bad stuff will reemerge, but they’ll be long gone. Your attempt to push down the negative search results will fail, and after a short period of time they will resurface. This means you will be right back where you started – but with less money.

Search engines have been battling deceptive firms that use black hat tactics for years, and are now so good at flagging the activity that it often backfires very quickly, and may even end up bringing the negative Google result back into prominence.

Option 3. Run a paid social media campaign.

This approach should be handled with care, and used only in very specific cases. If you have already invested time in building out your online presence, and continue to be consistently active on these sites, you might see positive changes over time – changes that can actually last. .

However, if you need a little boost with a particular objective in mind – like getting more customers, increasing brand awareness or getting specific kinds of social media engagement, then perhaps you should consider a paid social media campaign.

This does not bury negative Google results directly, but if you do it the right way it can positively affect your campaign indirectly. This is an opportunity to create some traction for a specific goal that you can build on, and send additional signals to search engines that will never hurt your efforts.

The idea behind a paid social media campaign should be to focus on the positive content that you are creating, your business or services so that there will be more activity geared toward the properties that you control as opposed to the negative result.

Think of it this way, if more people see your content, then there’s a greater chance that you’ll get additional links (which directly help rankings) and organic social media traction (which correlates with ranking increases).

Option 4. Build and optimize the positive content you want people to find, burying your negative Google results much deeper on the page.

The best way to combat negative results is to suppress them with positive content. Instead of spending time and money on tactics that won’t lead to any long-term solutions, we recommend that you consistently create high-quality content that is search engine friendly.

Additionally, regularly engage on various social media sites where you build and connect with relevant communities. This creates a network of relevant, accurate content and web properties that will start rising higher in Google when people search your name. Not only will this help bury negative Google results, but it will protect you from any future negative search results appearing in the future.

Understanding how to remove negative articles from Google, or ay least to minimse their impact, is actually fairly straightforward. The real trick is being patient and consistent. This is where most people flounder and get desperate for a quick-fix.

The Value of Your Online Reputation

If what we have just detailed all sounds like a lot of work, it can be. If you are not sure how to go about executing an effective negative article removal campaign that’s OK, we will be sharing some of our secrets soon. But first we wanted to address something that people sometimes fail to get the magnitiude of; the value and importance of your online reputation, whether it’s your personal professional reputation or that of your business.

When it comes to your business, its reputation far more valauble than you might think. In this Business World article one banker writes ” In the bank’s credit evaluation for granting loans, aside from Capacity, Capital, Collateral, and recently Conditions which include matters like industry structure, technology change, market distribution, and regulatory factors, there is also “Character.” The fifth “C” focuses on a borrower’s reputation in terms of behavior. Does he pay the caterer on time? Does he have extravagant and frequent vacations? Do his employees and suppliers complain about him?”

He goes on to admit that in this online dominated world that fifth C might not always be accurate, but then states that banks still take it into account anyway.

So, in other words, if someone has complained about you, wrongly in a review, for, for example, not paying them on time, technically that review might be a bar to you getting the funding you need to grow your business. If you could not get that review removed – which the chances are that you could’nt – you would at least have to counter it with reviews that state the opposite and then scour the Internet for any other reviews that the same person might have left.

It’s not just banks that will judge you, consumers will too. A great example of this just happened a few weeks ago in the States. A high end home gym equipment company, Peloton, created a Christmas ad. As all smart companies do. But someone must have fallen asleep at the wheel at their ad agency, as the commercial was more than a little sexist, at a time when that is not what any company should be percieved as.

In case you missed it somehow, here’s the ad in question

Fairly harmless? Peloton thought so. Until social media waded in. With accustaions of sexism and being generally creepy, along with comparisons to Black Mirror, it was less than 24 hours before almost everyone in the States who uses the Internet had heard about the ad.

At least it got the company some extra publicity right? Well, kind of. Remember those serious financial people and their opinions on reputation? They acted, and Peloton’s stock plunged 15% in three days, wiping out more than $1.5 billion from its market capitalization. Not a good thing when you are trying to sell a fitness bike that costs more than $2,500 (already a harder sell) at Christmas.

In light of all of that, one stock market expert summed up to Forbes how one thirty second ad could do so much damage so quickly. “It can cause companies like Peloton to exhibit a lot more stock price volatility when there are events that can cause people’s views to move up or down,” he said. “I think that is exactly what we are seeing right now.”

Will the company recover? Possibly, but only if they act to rebuild consumer trust and replace all those negative opinions with positive ones. It will be interesting to see how they do in 2020.

Our point here is that your reputation is not only valuable, its practically priceless. In that same Business World article we cited earlier, the author also explains that banks will look into the reputation of the principals as well. So, any ‘bad press’ about you, as the head of your company, or any of the major players involved, will harm your company’s reputation as much as your own.

Negative Article Removal – The Pearl Lemon Process

Pearl Lemon has been offering negative article removal services to a select group of clients for a while now, as a part of our Reputation Management Services offering. While we don’t quite want to give everything away, we thought offering an insight into how we do things would help you understand how we achieve the great results we do.

How We Push Negative Search Results Down

Step 1: We create and optimise public profiles on these platforms:

Gmail, About.me, Amazon, Angel.co, Blogger, Buffer, Gravatar, Foursquare, Followus, Pinterest, Sites.Google, Trello, Tumblr, Wordpres, YouTube Angelfire, Behance, Bravesite, Bookmax, BuzzFeed, Dailymotion, Digg, Diigo, Disqus, Edublogs.org, Issuu, Livejournal, Medium, minds.com, MySpace, Pen, Quora, Reddit, Scoop.it, Slideshare, Soup, Strikingly, StumbleUpon, Weebly, Wikidot, Wiki.answers.com, Yola. 4shared.com, Able2know.org, All4webs.com, Answers.informer.com, apsense.com, ask.fm, authorstream, Blurb.com, Bokmarkee, Contactup.io, Deviantart, Evernote, feedbooks.com, forums.adobe, Getpocket, giphy.com, Github, Growthhackers.com, Imgur, instructables.com, intensedebate.com, jigsy, Jimdo, Justpaste.it, Kickstarter, Magcloud, myopportunity.com, Onenote, paper.li, Pastebin.com, Plurk, Referralkey, Remote.com, Scoop.it, Scribd, Skillshare, Simplesite.com, slashdot.org, Start.me, Tinychat.com, Viki, Wattpad.

Yes, it’s a lot. But negative article burial and negative results burial needs to be permanent and effective, so the extra work is called for. All of these sites are places that it is easy for people to post negative articles, reviews and opinions about a company or a person. You might not even know they exsit, because some of these sites are niche and in some cases even a bit obscure. But Google bots will find them, and Google will index them. Bycreating profiles on these sites that are controlled not only can we work on any negatives but start building a great link profile that will enhance your E.A.T reputation.

E.A.T stands for Expertise, Authority and Trust. Google is taking more and more notice of these metrics. They care more now about who’s writing content, what they can back their words up with, what expertsie they can bring to the table that will make them worth listening to, or doing business with. So the more places you can demonstrate how good you are, the better.

Step 2: We build an interlinking strategy between all the profiles we create:

Another of the ways that Google determines a site’s rank in search results is by analyzing how many times other sites link to it. You can get your content to rise by linking it to itself. For example, create a Twitter account, connect that to your Formspring account, connect both of those to your Facebook page, and link to all of them on your Blogger page. Of course, the more you use your accounts and interact with other people, the more likely they are to link to your content, which drives your results even higher.

Step 3: Take back negative keywords

If a search for your name is generally positive, but including a particular keyword brings up negative or unwanted results, we try to reclaim that term. Let’s say that a search for “John Doe” is positive, but “John Doe”+ “State College” brings up negative results. John Doe should start including the phrase “State College” in his positive content creation in order to associate it with his good reputation.

The best way to take back negative keywords that will lead to that negative article or post is to create great content that Google will love and index above the bad stuff. And as we do this it serves two purposes. The first is the initial main objective; negative article burial or bad review suppression. The second is that in creating great content your brand image and reputation will be elevated. Basically, by the time we’ve finished, those bank managers will love you.

The one thing we don’t do in all this is black hat SEO. As we mentioned, it’s a bad, quick fix that does not last. We have a reputation to uphold too.

Need help burying a negative article? Not even sure what’s out there that could be adversly affecting your brand or personal reputation adversly? Contact us and togther we can find out.

The post The Pearl Lemon Guide to Negative Article Removal appeared first on Pearl Lemon.

source https://pearllemon.com/the-pearl-lemon-guide-to-negative-article-removal/

Pearl Lemon Reviews: Nightwatch For SEO

For most people the week starts on Monday, ends on Friday, and they are out of the office door every day at around 5pm. Working in SEO is different though.

An SEO specialist starts work early in the morning and keeps going until long after the sun has gone to bed. Or at least that’s the way it works at Pearl Lemon.

There’s a lot to do in SEO and a lot of delivery benchmarks to meet. There are tasks some tasks that have to be attended to daily. They range from almost constant site monitoring to ranking keywords and managing backlink profiles. And that’s all before you get around to things like content creation or social media. To say SEO specialists have a lot on their plate is quite the understatement!

To stay sane we do need tools to help us get through the day (and night) and whenever we come across one that seems like it might be a help we have to at least try it out. Recently we took an SEO platform tool called Nightwatch for a test drive, and what follows is what we discovered about it.

What Is Nightwatch?

Based in the cloud, Nightwatch is a platform that can, its creators claim, gather and report all kinds of site performance data any time you need it to. designed to provide your site and keyword performance data exactly when you need it.

On one dashboard, they claim, you can keep track of rankings, keyword distribution and traffic, all in real time. It also links up with Google Search Console and Google Analytics, helps you find appropriate competitors to benchmark against and even creates pretty reports you can send to clients. Sounds like a handy SEO tool to have. But what’s it like to use?

Nightwatch Features We Loved

After working with it for a while we came to the conclusion that Nightwatch had three features that meant that keeping it in our SEO toolbox going forward was a good idea:

Radical Rank Tracking

Rack tracking is a must to ensure that your SEO campaigns are headed in the right direction. Constant rank tracking allows you to make adjustments on the fly so that anything that seems to be going wrong can be nipped in the bud.

Nightwatch offers a lot here. Not only will it show you your website’s rankings on Google but also, where appropriate, on Bing, Yahoo and even YouTube. You can check out how your competitors are doing as well.

One powerful feature of the tool is how it tracks rankings for any location. These localized reports provide SEOs and their clients a bigger picture on where they stand in the local SERPs, including map results. This great local SEO reporting alone makes using Nightwatch worthwhile if you work with local businesses (which we do a lot.)

In addition to rankings Nightwatch can help you discover what keywords are trending locally and may be worth adding into your campaign. And you can compile all this information into a single report to send to clients or split it into several to share with the right teammates.

Brilliant Backlink Monitoring

We’re not going to lie; backlink tracking is boring. It’s tedious and time-consuming but it’s also a crucial element of a successful SEO campaign so it has to be done. However, any time you can hand over the bulk of the work to an automated tool it’s a wonderful thing.

The Nightwatch dashboard offers tons of information to save you time. It can tell you, at a glance, how many backlinks a site has at any given time, where they are from, how diverse the link profile is along with their current status. You can also set up alerts that will let you know when a link is lost or gained.

Robust Reporting

Clients like to know what’s going on with their SEO. And we like to be able to tell them, which is why we like the reporting that can be created with Nightwatch a lot. It creates customized reports that look good and can be carefully tailored to only report the metrics you want them to, to the people you want to see them.

The reports themselves can be as simple or as complicated as you like. We found that making use of the graphing feature was an excellent way to convey more complex data to clients. They seemed to like it too.

So, these were the features that stood out to us. But, as is the case for all good reviews, we now have to take a look at the pros and cons of this tool so that if you consider using it you’ll have a little advanced Intel to help you make the right choice.

Nightwatch Pros and Cons

Pro: Great Rank Tracking

It would, we think, be hard for any SEO not to be impressed by Nightwatch’s rank tracking ‘powers’. It delivers information on demand, can be set to provide ’round ups’ at regular intervals and, and this is a great one for local SEO, offers real time looks at the snack pack listings you might be trying to break into.

Google snack packs, for the unfamiliar, are the featured boxes that show local business listings relevant to a certain search query. With Nightwatch, you’re made aware of whether your site makes the cut or not. And when it does, you can create a report right away, so that you can show your client that your SEO efforts have garnered them one of the most desirable spots in local SEO SERPs today.

Pro: Excellent Interface

Ugly, clunky SEO tools are hard to use, so it was nice to see that Nightwatch’s creators had obviously put a lot of thought into their UX/UI set up.

Initial account setup is quick and easy and getting things connected and up and running takes less than fifteen minutes. The dashboards are clear and clean looking and for those who work well into the night – like we do – you can adjust the theme to a darker one so that the screen glare is less taxing on the eyes.

Pro: Easy to Understand Client Reporting

Clients, on the whole, like reporting. But they don’t always like feeling dumb because they can’t quite grasp what’s going on amid sheets and sheets of numbers and SEO speak words. We don’t expect them to, but we also like to make our clients smile rather than frown. This means that the fact that Nightwatch can create easy to understand reports that you do not need to have been studying SEO for a decade to comprehend is a big plus.

Con: It’s a Bit Pricey

Nightwatch is great, but that greatness comes at a price that some smaller SEO outfits might find a bit hard to swallow.

The base pricing isn’t bad; $19 a month for 100 keywords for a ‘personal’ account. But if you need to go bigger so does the price tag. Then again, if you are targeting numerous groups of keywords – it can handle up to 10,000 keywords for $699 a month – Nightwatch will probably fit your budget and may end up paying for itself.

Con: You Can Get a Free Trial, But It’s Limited

One of the best ways to get hands on with a tool you are thinking about investing in without too much risk is a free trial. Nightwatch do offer one, however you won’t have access to the backlink tools.

That being said, if you do local SEO we’d suggest taking a trial version of Nightwatch for a spin because the local reporting features alone will quite possibly more than justify you making at least the small investment in a lower level package.

The Final Pearl Lemon Verdict on Nightwatch

There are lots of SEO tools out there. Nightwatch isn’t an all-inclusive one, like some, but sometimes you just don’t need everything that a Moz like suite has to offer. Moz can show you so many things about a site that it makes your head spin. And while a lot of it is crucial stuff that an SEO needs to know, to be honest, most clients don’t.

What most SEO clients want to see is where their site is in the SERPs. And they want to see how things are changing from day to day, week to week, month to month.

SEO clients want to see something easy that shows them that their audience will find them for the keyword and keyphrase searches that are being targeted. They want to see that the linkbuilding they are paying for is getting high quality results, not collecting a bunch of spam. And Nightwatch offers a great way to show them all this. Which, overall, puts it in the win column in the SEO tools stakes for us.

The post Pearl Lemon Reviews: Nightwatch For SEO appeared first on Pearl Lemon.

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Pearl Lemon SEO Software Reviews: Long Tail Pro

Every few months various ‘experts’ in the SEO field proclaim that keywords are dead. Or that keywords don’t really matter anymore. But it’s not true. Keywords matter, but using them successfully in SEO has changed, and continues to change all the time.

The keyword strategies of the early Noughties – stuff your web content full of them – certainly don’t work any longer and are more likely to get your site kicked out of the SERPs.

Yes, these days search engines put a much greater focus on content than before, and great content is a must. But that content needs carefully inserted keywords. And some of the best keywords are long tail keywords, which is where the software we are reviewing today comes in.

But before we get to our review of Long Tail Pro, we should take a few minutes to explain why a dedicated SEO software exists to find them at all

The Importance of Long Tail Keywords

Long tail keywords are (as the name suggests) longer, more specific keyphrases. They are the keyphrases that searchers use when they are getting closer to making a purchasing decision. Increasingly they are also used in voice search, which, thanks to the plethora of devices offering built in Alexa/Google Assistant/Siri/Cortana, is increasing in volume every day.

How do they work? Let’s say that you are shopping for a new sofa for your less than spacious flat. Input the keyword sofa and the results will be less than helpful. You’ll get lots of ads, the listings for big furniture stores in your area and the search results for the biggest players in the industry, but not the inspiration you were looking for.

So, a smart searcher, which most consumers have become, starts inputting keyphrases that describe just what they are looking for. ‘Small sofa for flat’ ‘small wooden sofa’ ‘small red sofa’ etc. These are long tail keywords and if you can master their use as they relate to your product or service then they can give you a serious advantage over your competition in the SERPs.

Mastering long tail keyword usage isn’t easy though. Long Tail Pro has long claimed however to make doing so much easier. But does it? That’s what we set about finding out.

What is Long Tail Pro?

Long Tail Pro is a keyword research tool but a rather specific one. It’s designed for those doing SEO rather than PPC which is the opposite of some keyword research tools that are basically clones of Google’s Keyword Planner, a tool designed for PPC that SEOs use the best they can (with varying results).

Input a ‘seed’ keyword and it will return dozens and dozens of long tail keywords related to it. It will also display the search volume for each of them, the number of words, the ad bid price and, most useful of all, Keyword Competitiveness. This lets you see how difficult the keyphrase will be to rank for.

Using Long Tail Pro: The Basics

Before you use the software, you’ll need your seed keyword (s) There are lots of different places you can find these; other keyword research tools, Google predictive search, Google Trends, Amazon, your competitors websites, wherever you already look for keyword inspiration.

One you have your seed keyword, pop it into the interface. Within a few seconds you’ll have a screenful of long tail keywords along with their KC score, Search Volume, Bid Value, Number of Words, and Overall Rank Value.

From here you can sort them however you like. Many people go straight for that KC score, as those values let you see which of these keyphrases are going to be the easiest to rank for in Google.

Reasons to Opt for the KC Score Rank

Here’s a little SEO wisdom for you. Opting for the KC Score Rank may seem like the easy way out but SEO does not always have to be crushingly hard.

The number presented for this value by Long Tail Pro is between 1 and 100. The higher it is, the harder it will be to rank for. Usually, anything under 30 is considered easy. Anything over 40 will be much harder.

If yours is a new website, or your domain authority isn’t very high yet (35 or under) your best bet really is to stick with keyphrases that have a KC score of less than 30. The algorithm behind the software is a well established and well built one and it performs better than other softwares in this specific niche so you can rely on it.

We’ve found, in our daily work for clients that this approach works, and often works exceptionally well. So why would you make your life hard if you don’t have to?

Delving Deeper into Long Tail Pro

While a lot of people decide to strictly use the long tail keywords that are the easiest to rank for, there is a lot more you can do within the Long Tail Pro interface.

Maybe you would like to understand more about what page one traffic for the long tail keywords you are now considering using looks like. You can do that. Click on the result that interests you and you will be taken to a competitor analysis screen that is a lot more detailed.

Here you’ll be able to see all kinds of information including things like trust flow, citation flow, site age, external backlinks and more. For some people it may be a little more information than they can comprehend but for SEO experts it provides some very interesting ‘bonus’ insights.

The interface also includes a rank tracker, so that when you have chosen your keywords, you’ll be able to track their performance in real time. You can track performance in Google and Bing, and across several countries. It’s a great tool to have and makes seeing if your hard work is paying off much easier.

Other Notables

When you sign up for Long Tail Pro, you get a lot more than just the basic software, which we found to be impressive. In fact, your whole experience with the software starts with a webinar that takes you through it step by step, so that when you are ready to get started, you can dive right in. There’s also a 7 day free trial that will let you experiment with software and get a real feel for whether this will be a useful tool for you.

Who Is Long Tail Pro Right For?

Who should consider using this software? SEO professionals for sure. The keyword suggestions are wide ranging and impressive and its reporting capabilities are excellent. But we’re not the only people it can be especially helpful for:

Bloggers: Every successful blogger has a basic niche, but usually lots of other content is being written in the niche too, so even the best work will struggle to stand out if you relay solely on the same generic keywords every time.

By making use of this software you will be able to come up with a constant stream of rankable long tail keywords and as long tail keywords are easier to incorporate into content naturally making use of those suggested by Long Tail Pro should not disturb your creative flow too much.

Retailers: This tool can give you more than just good keywords to target, it can give you an insight into how consumers search for your products. Remember the sofa example at the beginning? The sofa seller may have thought people were looking for products like hers based on size, but they pull once long tail keywords from Long Tail Pro they may discover that it’s colour that matters. This can be helpful in creating product content related content – and listings – in general.

Long Tail Pro Pricing

The pricing for Long Tail Pro is a little confusing. Technically, their Platinum Long Tail Pro subscription is $37 per month, billed monthly with no commitments. There are however often specials running that allow you to pay one price for lifetime access. Whichever you score it’s not the cheapest option out there, but reasonably priced for what is an excellent tool for anyone serious about ranking their content.

Final Words

Overall, we’re fans of Long Tail Pro and think it’s worth the investment. It’s not perfect. it might be nice if you could do more daily searches (it caps out at 200 a day) but only a very busy agency would need that many. Average users will find that Long Tail Pro offers them more than enough.

The fact that you will need to do some keyword research before you use this tool may seem counterproductive. But it’s not. Long tail keywords are a great way for SMBs and individuals to compete against the big boys. And they are a large part of, as we mentioned earlier, voice search.

Voice search is growing fast but surprisingly few SEOs are paying it the attention they should be. Start ranking for some good long tail queries right now, before they realise their mistake and you’ll already be way ahead of the game.

To try out Long Tail Pro, head here.

To have the Pearl Lemon SEO team do all this hard work for you, contact us here.

The post Pearl Lemon SEO Software Reviews: Long Tail Pro appeared first on Pearl Lemon.

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The Importance of Personal Branding SEO Explained (And How to Do It)

No doubt you’ve spent time – and possibly money as well – making use of SEO to boost your business’ visibility and reputation. But have you put the same effort into your personal SEO?

The chances are good that your answer is no, because a lot of business owners, and even lone entrepreneurs, just don’t. They get so lost in the process of promoting their businesses they forget that consumers, no matter what niche a company operates in, like to see who is behind a business and what their reputation is. And increasingly Google does too.

The Power of Personal Branding

See this guy?

What’s the first thing that comes to mind?

That it’s Cristiano Ronaldo? Ronaldo? CR7? One of the world’s best living footballers? It’s probably not that, in 2019, he plays for Juventus. Because Cristiano Ronaldo is bigger than any team, he’s CR7.

Ronaldo has been branding himself since he was a teenager at Manchester United. And while all the great clubs he’s played for have enhanced his reputation, they’ve never overshadowed him.

The same is true in Hollywood. Some actors are defined by the work they are best known for.

Daniel Radcliffe will always be Harry Potter in the minds of most people, even though it’s over a decade since he last played him.

Will always be Harry Potter, even with a beard

 

The Rock, on the other hand, has been in dozens of great – and not so great – movies but none define him because the brand Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson is bigger. But his star power does get people excited about even the worst movies.

Baywatch was really bad. But people watched it because The Rock was in it.

 

Personal branding is also a factor in business. Few people who follow Guy Kawasaki in 2019 – and on Twitter alone that’s 1.4 million people – know too much about where he’s actually worked but they do know that he’s a marketing and business genius whose wisdom is always worth taking on board.

And Kawasaki has made a career of using the power of his personal brand to elevate businesses. Take Canva.

Canva is an online graphics creation software now used by millions. But in 2012 it was just an idea a very young Australian college student had. And you probably don’t know her name, because if you know anything about the people behind Canva you think of its brand evangelist, Guy Kawasaki first (her name’s Melanie Perkins and she’s amazing, just not as well known)

When Kawasaki came on board in 2014 is when Canva really began to take off. And he’s done the same for Mercedes, Pandora Radio, Tripwire and more. Even for Apple back when the Mac was first unleashed on the world in the mid-eighties.

What does this all mean for you? That you too should focus as much on your personal brand as your business’. If you build a great reputation for yourself it will only enhance your company’s. And if you move on from where you are right now, any new venture you begin will have a head start just because it involves you.

Personal Branding and Personal SEO

OK, so you’re are not a multi-millionaire footballer with several Ballon D’ors to your name and your are not a wealthy SEO (yet.) So how do you build a great personal brand? A lot of it has to do with personal SEO.

Personal SEO is just what it sounds like. The search engine optimization of your name. What people see when they Google you.

When most people Google themselves, they usually find that they fall into one of three categories:

• They have no web presence and no content. Maybe their Facebook profile comes up, but that’s about it.
• They have a web presence but it’s not a good one, as negative information comes up first.
• They have a web presence but the things that they would like people to see about them first don’t come up first.

The good news is that personal SEO can help in all three scenarios.

No Web Presence, No Content

Obviously you need to create content that links to your name. This can be as simple as taking those company blog posts that are currently attributed to ‘admin’ and adding your own name. But it should not stop there.

You need to add content elsewhere too. LinkedIn. YouTube. Medium. Quora. Anywhere where you can share what you know to enhance your reputation. You need to do so consistently and often. And make sure that what you share is SEO optimized, not just for what the content is about but for your name as well.

A Negative Web Presence

This is tricker, and where you will benefit from help from a professional personal branding SEO expert. You need to move that negative content, whatever it is, off the first page of Google results and replace it with positive content that better reflects who you are.

Here’s a hypothetical example.

Fred Frankly is a budding entrepreneur who’s building a promising company. He’s a nice guy, with nice friends and a nice family and some stellar business ideas. He’s very good at what he does and, all-in-all, a pretty good bloke.

However, when you Google his name, the first thing that comes up is bad. He got arrested for drunk driving years ago and it made the papers (and a splash on social media). While he may have moved on and become a much better person as a result, Google is still serving up the bad tea rather than the good and anyone Googling him right now will not be impressed.

The key here will be to add so much good content that the bad stuff disappears onto page two of Google at the very least. And as page two of Google is a place very few people ever go, the impact of that old negative information will be seriously lessened.

You Want to Move Your Best Stuff Up

You might already have a personal website, a LinkedIn profile, or other content you want people to find, but they just aren’t showing up very high in search results. Personal branding SEO can be extremely effective in this scenario. You just need to know what to do to push that great content up the SERPs, or work with a personal branding SEO expert who does.

How Different is Personal Branding SEO to Standard SEO?

There’s a lot that Personal Branding SEO has in common with standard SEO that you might implement for a business, but there are a number of other ‘complications’ in personal branding SEO that need to be addressed in order for it to be really effective.

For example, you probably aren’t the only person in the world with your name. In order not to be confused with – or overshadowed by – those other people – the content you are found for needs to be better optimized and distributed better than theirs. Unless your name is Cristiano Ronaldo, in which case even great personal branding may not help you as even the ‘original’ Ronaldo (remember him?) is completely overshadowed online by CR7.

Personal branding SEO also often involves considerably more research than standard SEO, especially if you are dealing with negative SEO. You may have to go through all kinds of social media mentions, other people’s content and more to figure out why your name is being sullied in search. Reputation management software can help there, but only really as a tool to help your SEO efforts.

Personal Branding SEO or Business Branding SEO?

This is not a question anyone with a business should ask. Because you need both. Your business needs a great reputation but so do the people behind it. The gains made in one area of SEO should compliment the other.

If it’s your individual brand that really matters to you then that is where you should focus. Build a great personal brand and then whatever ventures you undertake will be enhanced by it.

Getting Started with Personal Branding SEO

The search results that Google and other search engines will return for a person are usually a mixed bag; various social media accounts, bio pages on company websites, author profiles on blogs and any news they happen to have appeared in (good and band.)

Given this, where should you even get started if you want to work on your personal SEO? Here are some suggestions.

The Bio on Your Website

This is a great place to start a personal SEO campaign because (in theory at least) you have almost full control over what’s there. So it should be polished, easy to read and complete. That means ensuring all the following:

• The page URL has your name in it.
• Links to your active personal professional social media accounts should displayed prominently
• The headshot you use is current
• Your name is written exactly as you want to be found online.
• Your name appears an appropriate number of times as a keyword in the text (without going overboard)

Next up, social networks. These profiles rank well as the sites are credible to Google and most of the big social sites offer users a unique URL that it’s possible to optimize for personal branding SEO.

Pearl Lemon Pro Tip: If you are trying to get something negative off page one creating profile pages on lots of social networks is a good way to do that, even if you never really use any of them.

Getting more specific, Here are some personal SEO tips for each major social network likely to rank:

LinkedIn

A good LinkedIn profile will often rank well. Yours should be as complete as possible and it should have an SEO optimized, but striking, headline and summary.

Here some good ways to get your profile ranking for your name.

• Claim your custom URL and make sure it includes your name.
  Have at least 500 connections
  Use a keyword rich headline
  Ensure that your location and employment details are up to date
  Keep your strongest and most relevant skills visible.
  Get some recommendations. No, many people don’t give them much weight because they are often all about quid pro quo but they are nice to have, especially if they are from prominent people in your niche.
  Post articles on LinkedIn.

Facebook

They may not always be the best of friends, but Google does usually rank Facebook profiles high. This is where things can get tricky. Facebook is often a fun place to share jokes and silly stuff with friends and family. Which is fine, but keep those posts private.

What you should keep public is a professional headshot as a profile picture and get a custom URL that matches your name.

Twitter

Twitter was almost dead in the water a few years ago, but then a certain tweet loving POTUS came along and gave it new life. At the same time Google began indexing tweets again, so, if you are active on Twitter your profile and your latest tweets will usually show up on page one.

Even if you rarely use it – Twitter isn’t for everyone – create a profile with your professional looking picture and a keyword optimized bio. Then pin a tweet that says something along the lines of “I’m not an active on Twitter, but connect with me on LinkedIn [add link]” or whatever social platform you are most active on

YouTube

Thumbnails of YouTube videos sometimes rank for people’s name, so a YouTube video, optimized for your name is potentially great for personal branding SEO.

Even if video is not your thing create a short one that just introduces you to the world. Use your name in both the title and the description and sneak a few business related keywords in as well.

Quora

Quora does not give you much space to create a detailed profile but they often rank well, especially if you are active on the platform. Add a short bio, a good picture, follow some topics and some people. These topics will be visible in a search result so people can get a quick overview of where you major interests lie.

Medium

Medium is fast becoming a go to destination for both professionals looking for interesting content to read and SEO minded souls looking for a quick SEO win. The profile is as limited as Quora’s, but if you create one and then share some of your best blog posts, then it creates useful no follow links to your site as well as giving your name a recognition boost.

Pearl Lemon Pro Tip: Only create as many social media profiles as you can keep updated. If you are creating profiles for personal SEO that you won’t use often keep the copy as evergreen as possible, avoiding statements like ‘3 years of experience’ as those age fast.

Head Out Onto the Internet To Expand Your Personal SEO Reach 

Once your social media profiles are nicely polished it’s time to head out onto the Internet ‘proper’ and try to find even more places to boost your personal SEO.

This can include guest blog posts or articles. You’ll be surprised at how many websites, good ones, will accept a good guest article. You can also sign up for updates from HARO – Help a Reporter Out – and pitch to journalists as things come up that you can offer insight into. You can get onto podcasts, get yourself featured with YouTubers, there are lots of opportunities out there, you just have to put in the work to find them.

Interested in boosting your personal SEO? Contact the Pearl Lemon SEO team, we’ll be happy to help. 

 

 

The post The Importance of Personal Branding SEO Explained (And How to Do It) appeared first on Pearl Lemon.

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Local SEO for Dentists – A Basic Guide

As a dentist, there is serious competition when it comes to ranking highest on in a Google search. So how can you set your practice apart and get more visibility for your practice?

The simple answer is to implement a local search engine optimization (local SEO) campaign following a proven step-by-step process. But first, let’s look at why you should be investing in local SEO in the first place…

Reason #1. The Yellow Pages Are Dead

More and more patients are using search engines to find local businesses on their computers and mobile phones. Here are the stats, according to Google:

• 20% of search queries are for local businesses
  40% of mobile searches are for local businesses
  97% of consumers search for local businesses online

Reason #2. Free Traffic (Every Month)

When you’re ranking at the top of Google, you get free traffic. Who doesn’t love free? Simply put, SEO is one of the best marketing investments you can make for your dental practice.

Reason #3: See Results Fast

For nationwide businesses it can take six months to a year to gain first-page Google rankings, but in local markets, results often come faster. Most dentists aren’t following SEO best practices. And as a result, when you follow the steps in this article, it’s not uncommon to gain first-page local rankings within 60 -90 days.

So how do you build a local SEO campaign that increases your visibility in search engines, attracts great patients and boosts your bottom line? Here are some tips.

Technical SEO for Dentists

Before you proceed with a local SEO campaign for dentists, you need to ensure that the technical SEO behind your website is up to speed.

By technical SEO we mean site navigation, site security and site speed. A website audit can help you determine what technical onsite SEO issues need to be addressed and while fixing some can be a little tricky if coding is not your thing, making the effort to do so is a must.

Keyword Research

Keywords are the backbone of good local SEO for dentists. To get started, make a list of the specific services your practice provides. This might include fillings, crowns, teeth cleaning, and orthodontics etc.

Then, making use of a keyword research tool – Google’s Keyword Planner Tool is a good free one – you can determine what keywords and keyphrases people in your market are using to find these services.

Keyword Optimization

Once you have determined the best keywords to make use of in your local SEO for dentists campaign, you will need to review – and almost certainly revise – your website copy to ensure they are included in the right quantity.

Keyword stuffing is a no-no in the eyes of Google and the other search engines, so keyword optimization does have to be executed with care. On your website, the initial focus of local SEO for dentists should be keyword optimizing your “core pages” the homepage and service pages.

This will often involve rewriting, or adding to the existing content while also ensuring that the meta descriptions associated with each page are optimized as well. The meta description, while not visible on the page, is what will be displayed in search engine results, so it is important to get it right.

Your Google My Business Page

It’s great that you have a wonderful website, but in local SEO optimizing your Google My Business page is every bit as important as optimizing your website. However it is a crucial step that many dentist’s marketing plans skip.

Your Google My Business page shows up in the “Map” results for local dentist-related searches. Google search is increasingly localized, so even if a searcher only inputs a very non specific phrase like ‘cosmetic dentists’ they will be served local results most prominently, and the information presented is usually from the business’ Google My Business Page.

How do you optimize this very important piece of Internet ‘real estate’? Here are some tips:

Verification

To make any edits to your profile page, you must first claim and verify your page with Google. You can confirm that your profile has been verified by logging into your dashboard and finding a checkmark with the word “Verified” next to your business name.

If you haven’t verified your business, you’ll see a “Verify Now” prompt on your dashboard to start the process. If you see that you have multiple pages for the same location, you’ll want to merge them so only one is displayed.

Name, Address and Phone Number

Use only the official name of your practice, and be sure to include your exact address, because that’s how Google maps your location. When it comes to the phone number, use your local number (not an 800 number) to strengthen your presence as a local business.

It’s critical that you use consistent Name, Address, and Phone number information across your Google My Business page, your website, and other pages and directory listings including your Facebook page, Yellow Pages online listings, and so on.

Categories

As per Google’s guidelines for local pages, each category should describe what your practice is, not what it does. For example, you could add a category that states “orthodontics”, but not “teeth straightening.”

You’ll want to include all the relevant categories for your practice. Some examples of available categories for dentists are: Dentist, Cosmetic Dentist, Dental Clinic, Dental Implants Periodontist, Emergency Dental Service, Endodontist and Pediatric Dentist. You’ll should pick the three to five categories that are most relevant to your practice.

Description

In this step you’ll be introducing your business to potential patients, so make sure that your description is well-written and free of spelling or grammatical errors. The description of your practice should be written in a conversational tone, but you should incorporate your SEO keywords for your dental services/specialties.

Hours

Make sure the hours of operation posted on your local page (and your website) are always accurate. This is especially important if you have seasonal hours or are experimenting with being open earlier in the morning, later at night or on weekends.

Images

Google allows exterior and interior practice pictures, as well as the logo for your practice. Images increase engagement, can help patients find your location and help to tell the story of your business.

The images you use should be of the highest quality possible. This means they should have have a sharp focus, be sized between 10KB and 5MB, have a minimum resolution of 720px x 720px and be well-lit. Replacing the generic Google My Business background image with a branded image is also an excellent marketing for dentists best practice.

Citations and Links

Optimizing your website and Google My Business page are the initial steps you need to take to begin to rank better in Google. But to compete in a crowded field, you must do more. Building citations and links is the next major step to separate yourself from the other dentists in your area.

Citations

Citations are mentions of your practice in the form of Name, Address and Phone number (known as “NAP”). You should begin by ensuring that you include a citation for your practice on your own website, on your contact page and ideally also in the footer of your website.

You should then begin building these NAP citations offsite by getting listed in relevant directories. Your Google My Business page, which we’ve already covered, is very important, but there are dozens of other business directories you can list your practice in to build more citations, and therefore help you rank higher in Google.

Links

By “links,” we mean hyperlinks pointing from another website to your website. These are also known as “inbound links.” Google places a lot of emphasis on what types of websites are linking to you.

Links act as a vote in favor of your website’s authority and relevance. As a general rule, the more high quality links that you have, the greater your website’s authority in Google and the higher your website can rank for competitive terms.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking lots of low quality links will trump fewer high quality ones. That is not the way search works anymore. Good SEO for dentists call for a concentrated link building campaign that focuses on gaining the best links possible. And never buy links. That’s one of the fastest ways to sink an SEO campaign – and maybe even your website – and should be avoided at all costs.

Get Into Content Creation

If your website does not have a blog, you need one ASAP. If you have a blog, but only add to it once or twice a year, that needs to change too. Content creation is another vital component of SEO for dentists, as not only is it a great tool for link building but great, informative content will enhance your E.A.T rating – expertise, authority and trust – which is increasingly important to Google.

Great content is also an excellent way to engage patients. Dentistry is something that lends itself to a huge number of topics that can be covered and if you don’t have the staff available to blog regularly for you hiring an experienced content writer is an excellent investment to make.

Reviews

Reviews are another factor that can give you an edge over local competitors and give you higher rankings on Google’s SERPs. There are lots of places you can get reviews, including on Yelp.com and on medical sites like HealthGrades.com. But we recommend focusing your attention on gaining positive reviews on your Google My Business page.

Getting reviews on your Google My Business page will help it rank higher, so you get more exposure to prospective patients. Plus, when prospective patients see all of your positive reviews, they’ll be more likely to contact you.

How to Get Reviews

What’s the secret to getting reviews from your patients? You need to provide excellent service. But aside from that, you need to ask patients to review you, and you need to make it easy for them.

One of the best ways to ask, and make it easy, is to send an “review request” via email, with a link to leave you a review on your Google My Business page.

If you are familiar with Yelp! you might know that they prefer you don’t ask for reviews. Google do not take the same stance. They encourage you to seek reviews and even provide a special link you can give to patients to make it easier for them to do so.

We recommend sending out review emails to all patients who haven’t yet left you a review and ensuring you include that special link. Make this part of your business process, so you receive a steady stream of reviews on an ongoing basis.

Tracking

These SEO efforts do need to be tracked. Google Analytics is an excellent way to do this and is relatively simple to add to any website. As for your Google My Business page that has a built in analytics dashboard of its own that should be monitored as well.

Why bother with all this tracking? There is no such thing as a standard SEO plan for dentists and a successful local SEO campaign requires tweaking and testing in order to get things right. By carefully tracking your efforts you will be able to see what is working and what isn’t and then make adjustments accordingly.

Conclusion

When managed properly, a local SEO campaign can be one of the best marketing investments you can make for your dental practice. At Pearl Lemon, we specialize in local SEO for dentists. If you’d like help with your SEO, contact us for a free quote.

The post Local SEO for Dentists – A Basic Guide appeared first on Pearl Lemon.

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How Multilingual SEO Boosts Your Site in the SERPs and Your Bottom Line

There are lots of reasons to consider translating the text on your website. Doing so increases your potential audience, can boost conversions and makes your site more accessible. But these are only the basic benefits, there are more.

Did you know that creating a multilingual site will help boost your SEO efforts? You’ll need some guidance on how to do so the right way, but if everything is implemented correctly translating your site into other languages will improve your website’s standing in the SERPs as well as your reputation with your audience.

In this article, I’m going to explain how you could improve your SEO by making your site multilingual.

The Basic Benefits of a Multilingual Site

If your website is an English only site it is hardly in the minority. More than half of the websites on the Internet are. Which is rather shocking, as half the world does not speak English. Some will point to the fact that English is the most commonly used language among Internet users, but isn’t that really only because other native tongues are poorly catered to?

For example, nearly a billion Internet users speak Chinese as their primary language. Yet only 2% of the sites on the web are offered in Chinese. By the same token, only 5% of websites offer content in Spanish and yet it’s the native tongue of 500 million internet users across Europe, North America, South America and the Caribbean.

Basically it seems that many site owners just focus on the most popular language among users and skip over the vast numbers who don’t otherwise speak English. Even, in many instances, if they know that non native English speakers make up an important sector of their audience.

There are plenty of benefits to stepping outside of this narrow mindset and opting for a multilingual site. For example you can:

Expand Your Audience

Considering the numbers and statistics I just mentioned, this one is rather obvious. There are billions of Internet users out there who don’t speak English as a first language. For many businesses, catering to them opens up a new, untapped audience and possible new sources of revenue.

Engage a More Diverse Group of Users

Many businesses, especially ecommerce and service businesses, already know that some of their target audience are not native English speakers. For example, those operating in very diverse areas of large cities all over the world know that their customer/client/patient base is likely to comprise people who speak several different languages.

If a business then translates their web content into several languages to better serve their audience, they almost instantly gain an advantage over competitors that do not. If users can read your content in their own language, then this is likely to increase trust, leading to increased conversions and greater customer loyalty.

The Multilingual SEO Boost

Going back to the beginning of my article, you’ll remember that I mentioned the fact that making your site multilingual could actually also help it rank better in search engines. Let’s look at why this is.

Translated Versions of Your Site Improve Its Overall SEO Juice

The easiest way to explain this benefit is to offer a hypothetical example.

Let’s say you own a site called example.com. Your company sells clothing to countries across Europe and to consumers in North America (as many ecommerce companies now do.)

To better serve you target audience you translate your site from English into French, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian. Each translated version of the content gets its own unique URL. This can be achieved by either using a separate domain name for each – example.fr perhaps – or, more simply, by making use of use a sub-domain or subdirectory, such as example.com/en/ and example.com/fr/.

Whatever way you choose to implement this -and the latter is much easier – Google and other search engine bots will read both versions as parts of the same site. This means any traffic you get from the various different versions will improve the search engine ranking for the whole site. It also helps search engines better understand your site, as it’s clear which languages you’re providing the content in.

To make all of this work as it should for multilingual SEO, you will need to avoid a translation solution that places all languages on the same page, or uses a # symbol in your address or cookies to determine the language. These methods will negate the SEO boost that a multilingual site can offer, so make sure you structure your translated versions correctly as per Google’s multilingual SEO best practices.

You Can Implement Improved Location Targeting

While a multilingual site will help you to reach a wider international – or a wider ethnic – audience, you still need to understand exactly who you want to target. One important aspect of this is performing keyword research for each of the languages you intend to use.

This can be a much harder part of your efforts to create better multilingual SEO and you may benefit from hiring an SEO team to help you at this point. An experienced multilingual SEO team can conduct the targeted keyword research you need to properly determine which countries and/or languages to aim for.

In order to get the most out of your work, you should also aim to create a multilingual SEO strategy. This will help to ensure users from the locations you want find the right version of your site. For example, it’s not much use to translate your site into French if those within the country see the Spanish version instead.

More Visitors = More Visibility in Search

This last point may seem rather obvious, but it’s worth mentioning as it’s ultimately one of the key factors in any successful SEO strategy. Search engines value quality content and user engagement. If you provide content that drives traffic, Google will notice and rank your site higher as a result.

If you provide content in various languages, driving traffic from specific locations all around the world, or from several different ethnic communities, it will be noticed. Google looks for sites that provide the best possible user experiences. Ensuring your site provides value to your visitors, regardless of language, will help you see improved SEO results.

The Problem With Google Translate

Some people believe that they can add a Google Translate widget or plugin to their site and that will do, in terms of multilingual SEO, But that is far from the case.

Firstly, doing so will not create the additional SEO boosting URLs I mentioned earlier. All it will do is refresh the existing page in a ‘translated by Googlebot’ form. And that is where an even bigger problem arises.

Google Translate is OK. It’s definitely better than it was just five years ago. But does it ever create a translation that a native speaker would consider accurate, or even understandable? Very rarely.

Google Translate is fine for lending you a helping hand if you are trying to order a beer or find a bathroom in a foreign country, but for anything more than that it can be wildly – and sometimes even hilariously inaccurate.

Taking the time to translate your site manually will almost certainly incur greater expense. However, if you serve – or want to serve – a multilingual audience its a must.

Working With Pearl Lemon’s International SEO Team

One of the great strengths of Pearl Lemon as a company is that we have a staff that is comprised of professionals from all over the world. One of the many things that this has allowed us to do is build a multilingual SEO team that can work in a number of different languages and also understand the nuances of several different cultures. Combine that with a strong knowledge of both standard and multilingual SEO best practices and you have a team that is hard to beat when it comes to global SEO.

Interested in multilingual SEO services for your website? Contact us today to learn more.

 

The post How Multilingual SEO Boosts Your Site in the SERPs and Your Bottom Line appeared first on Pearl Lemon.

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Vape Store SEO – What It Is, Why You Need It

Vape stores and retailers face a rather interesting – if annoying dilemma in 2019. The industry is booming, in the UK, in the US and across Europe. However, traditional Internet based PPC is out of the question as Google (and Bing) do not accept advertising for tobacco products and they included vape supplies in that ban. So how is a vape supplier supposed to get noticed fast online, the very place where people are looking for the latest products? The answer is via vape store SEO.

Google won’t let you pay for PPC ads, but they will index your website and its content. And they will rank you and your competitors against one another in the order they see fit. If you make good use of SEO, searchers will be able to find you when they are seeking what you sell. The ‘trick’ is, however, that you will need to follow and SEO plan that is a little out of the norm to succeed.

Understanding How People Are Searching For You

The vape market is a fairly specific one, wherever you operate. In terms of ages, the majority of users who vape fall between the ages of 18-29. It’s a ‘young crowd’ and to understand how to target them with SEO you’ll need to understand how they search, and what keywords and keyphrases they use when they do.

For example, e-liquids bring in about 39% of all the revenue made from the vaping market. But ‘e-liquids’ is a clunky, awkward search term that very few vapers would actually use. Vape juice is a far more popular term.

People also search for certain products in very general terms ‘vape pen’, ‘vape tank’ and the will search for ‘buy e-liquid’. These are just a few examples, but the point is that before any vape store SEO campaign can begin there must be some serious keyword research involved.

Setting Up an SEO Friendly Shop

When lots of vape shops get new stock when writing product descriptions they copy and paste what the manufacturer has to say about them. It’s fast, easy, and everyone uses the descriptions, so why not?

The last line IS the problem. Everyone uses the descriptions. Contrary to wildly popular myth, Google won’t penalise you for using the manufacturer copy, but its bots have decide which version of the copy to index first, and sorry to say, the manufacturer is going to win every time.

This means that writing your own, original, keyword optimized descriptions is a vape store SEO must. And they should be written to appeal to your audience as well. By doing this every one of your product descriptions stands a chance of helping you climb the SERPs in a search for that particular offering, no matter how many of your competitors are also selling it.

Get Your Technical SEO S++T Right

Even if your online store is built using an ecommerce platform like Shopify, Magento or Bigcommerce, which are technically ‘shops in a box’ there are right and wrong ways to set up the technical SEO side of things in order for the site to be ‘good’ for SEO.

For instance. Those little meta description boxes for each product. Are yours filled in? And if they are – which many shops don’t bother to do – are those descriptions keyword optimized yet appealing to buyers? They should be, as it is these descriptions that Google will display as search snippets and will use to help determine what you are selling.

The there are images. Are yours original or the manufacturers stock option? Do they have proper ALT tags? Again, if your images are not optimized, you are missing out on a big SEO boost.

Google Image Search – that’s when you hit the tab at the top of a search results page for images – is the third largest search engine of all, after Google itself and YouTube. But Google’s bots can’t see your images, they have to be given a code prompt – in the form of an ALT tag – to see them.

If they are given that prompt they will index them in the Google Image Search. And if your images are original and eye-catching they’ll get noticed by the vapers you want to target more often than they will if you plaster them all over Instagram.

Content Creation is a Must

I get it. You’re busy. Hopefully you are anyway. And despite the fact that you have probably heard that business blogging is great for SEO you don’t really have the time or inclination to blog as well as run your vape shop.

However, by not devoting resources to content creation you are missing out on what is often the biggest vape store SEO boost of all. And not just because you have nothing to feed the content hungry Google Search bots.

Vaping, as you know, is a controversial subject. It has its raving fans – and those are increasing in number – but it also has increasingly vocal detractors. The research on the health effects from vaping is minimal at this point, but that does not stop people from espousing some rather ill-informed opinions.

All of this means that vapers – and especially new or would be vapers – go searching for information they can trust. Your blog can give it to them. Or they search for information about how to vape, or what vaping accessories are the best buys. Your blog can provide them with that information as well, setting you up as an authority in your industry and a trusted source of information. And, at the same time, you can make sure those informative articles include the keywords that will help you rise in the SERPs…

Moving Offsite with Vape Shop SEO

Eventually your SEO campaign has to move offsite and into the big World Wide Web. That excellent content you will be creating will be a large part of that, as it can be leveraged to gain valuable backlinks and shared across the social media platforms your target audience frequent.

If your business has a physical, as well as an online presence, local SEO is something you’ll need to get into, and whether you operate on or offline, or both, directory citations and backlinks need to be created to give you an even bigger SEO boost.

Getting the Help You Need

If you’ve made it this far, the one thing you are probably certain of right now is that this all sounds like a lot of hard work. And it is. In order to be successful, vape store SEO has to be a project embraced fully and executed on an ongoing basis. And did I mention that the SEO tactics you plan out so carefully can be turned upside down in a second if Google issues a major algorithm update? Which they do several times a year? Yes, welcome to the fun world of SEO! Never a dull moment, and things certainly don’t stay the same for long.

The good news is that help is out there. Companies like ours. SEO agencies that don’t pass moral judgements on what you do – yes, we know that some agencies won’t work with you, they don’t work with gambling sites or adult products either – but we will. And we’re good at what we do.Having worked with vape shops before we’ve taken the time to research the industry. And we’re ready to put what we’ve learned to work for you. So give us a call, and start harnessing the undeniable marketing power of vape shop SEO today.

The post Vape Store SEO – What It Is, Why You Need It appeared first on Pearl Lemon.

source https://pearllemon.com/vape-store-seo-what-it-is-why-you-need-it/

Gambling Site SEO – Why Is It So Hard?

SEO, in general, is not easy. Actually, SEO is hard. However, gambling site SEO – for a sports betting, poker or online casino site – or an affiliate site built on the gambling promotion model- is especially hard. Hard, but not impossible, as you’ll discover if you read on.

The Importance of Catering to User Needs

These days Google likes websites that offer a great all-around experience to their target audience. And when it finds these sites, it rewards them with higher search placement than their competitors.

Just a few years ago you could get a page to rank well simply by answering a user query directly. That is no longer enough. Now you need to ensure that visitors are satisfied with the answer you give them. If you don’t manage to do that, they’ll bounce off to the next result, Google will take note and your page won’t rank as well, because it did not do its ‘job’.

This is especially crucial in the gambling niche. Most online gamblers of any kind are 1)pretty impatient and want to get started right away and 2) often only search for gambling related queries at a certain time or when they are in a certain mood.

So, if Joe is searching for ‘best poker sign up bonus’ at 11pm when he’s feeling flush that’s exactly what you have to give him. And fast.

If you operate an affiliate site, this is pretty easy. You create a table or infographic like this one to make some easy to see comparisons.

For a gambling site operator however, it’s trickier. Legally it’s unlikely you can make these kinds of direct competitor comparisons. One solution is to update your homepage title to reflect the nature of your current best offers and then ensure that the copy is as helpful and relevant as possible, mixing in terms like ‘highest’ and ‘best’ carefully (so that your legal people don’t start screaming.)

Ensure That Your Site is Easy to Crawl and To Use

Most people in the gambling industry want to present a website that is as visually engaging as possible. After all, whatever the niche you are essentially trying to recreate a real world experience online, whether that is a day at the racecourse or an evening at the casino. And great graphics are often considered an excellent way to do that.

The problem is that some graphics can cause trouble with Google and other search engines. Google is less than happy with sites that still make use of JavaScript. There are some great things you can do with HTML5 which not only Google would love but also your visitors, so ideally that is the way to go in order to please search bots and visitors.

If you need to use JavaScript try implementing dynamic rendering which means that users see one thing and bots see another. This solves the problem of bots not seeing any of your content that is embedded in a script.

Focus On Giving Users What They Want

Find out what your potential customers look for and serve the content all the way through the funnel.

The first thing a potential customer sees is the page title and you must grab them from the start of their sign up journey. Here you have a chance to lure them in, grabbing their interest with a promise.

The page title is more than just a ranking factor and needs to be thought of as a small text ad as it is the very first interaction with a new potential visitor.

Improve Your Meta Descriptions to Improve Your CTR

Google tries to understand what people like by measuring click through rate and it is believed by some that they use it as a ranking signal. This may or may not be true but it’s actually almost irrelevant whether they do or not.

The fact of the matter is that you want to get as many clicks as you can from the SERPs.

There are a number of strategies that can help with improving CTR, from using better headlines, to getting the keywords write in the 160 ish characters you have to work with, to numbers, emojis, and other sort of visually captivating elements.

Unfortunately, there is no one size fits all solution. It will take research and A/B testing to get it right.

One thing is true, though: you title is both your first point of interaction with your potential visitors in Google and also an important ranking factor. You will need to test, adapt, learn and improve.

Improve your Page Load Time

For Google, speed is a ranking factor in a mobile first index world. This means that if you are slower than your competitors, you might not outrank them, even if you have all the other SEO boxes ticked.

Test how fast your site loads with Google’s Pagespeed Insights Tool. Input a few of your competitors URLs to see how they stack up. Take notice of the suggestions you are given for improvement and if you don’t know how to implement them hire someone who does.

Typically, the things that matter for speed are how many requests are sent to the server, how good your CDN is, how many scripts you have, what sort of level of compression you have on images, and whether scripts are kept at a minimum in both quantity and size.

Write Truly Unique Content

Unique content is critical for SEO.. Google expects websites to have unique content so unfortunately there isn’t much you can do about it but being, you know, unique.

Keeping the content unique is a struggle for all websites, though. In the casino business this is particularly tricky for affiliates as they need to write huge amounts of content for each game and operator they review.

The solution is to have dedicated resources for content production. If that’s not your forte, or if you don’t have time, hire someone who does. Your content needs to be keyword driven without being keyword stuffed and it needs to be informative and engaging. That is quite a tall order, and sometimes (most times) only a seasoned SEO copywriter can get it right.

You Need to Build (Good) Links

We have encountered affiliate operators that build thousands of links each year  and then there are those who have built far fewer but rank higher and have stayed on the right side of Google.

Why? Because of those thousands of links, often maybe only a hundred are worth anything. The rest are useless. So the person who takes the time to cultivate good links – by creating great content and developing genuine relationships with publishers and influencers – will win, even if it takes time.

Why is Gambling Site SEO So Hard?

The short answer is that the competition is extremely high and there is little to no organic online coverage.

Operators and affiliate companies fight for the same customers and few publications cover gambling without being either an affiliate or being paid to write about a brand or game.

This means that in order to rank well in Google, you’ll need to up your SEO game significantly. It’s not enough to cover some areas of SEO and try getting away with a semi-optimised website.

To win the SEO game in the online gambling industry, your SEO needs to be at the heart of your digital strategy, and your website performance and user experience need to be phenomenal.

Doing SEO in the Most Competitive of Niches Requires Patience

As you can see, the usual success factors for SEO apply in the casino business too. The difference is that need to nail each and every one of them.

In other words, it’s survival of the most optimized.

And, more importantly, customer expectations are different in the three main categories – casino, sports, poker – are different. Your website offering, therefore, needs to reflect that, both in regards to the overall user experience and SEO.

For instance, if you run a online casino, if users land on a casino games page they expect for the page they visit to:

• Load super fast. How fast? Faster than 3 seconds, ideally
  Display snippets and previews of the game.
  Launch a free version of the game in the browser.
  Have an easy signup page
  Explain the benefit of the game. Data around like RTP (return to player) and jackpots, etc
  To work on all devices. And being mobile friendly means being par with desktop when it come to the entire experience. Are you thinking mobile first?

A poker site, for example, will need to explain why players should play there instead of a huge site like pokerstars.com, have a playable browser game, a customer-targeted look and feel, and offer free signup bonuses. And load fast, especially on mobile.

All of this is a lot. Which is why seeking help is never going to be a bad idea. And yes, you will actually come across SEO agencies that don’t want to work with you, based on some moral objection of some kind, or just a general lack of understanding of the niche. But there are some great agencies out there who are ready to step in. Pearl Lemon is one of them.

The post Gambling Site SEO – Why Is It So Hard? appeared first on Pearl Lemon.

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