Why is SEO important for eCommerce?

Approximately 90% of online business starts with a search conducted through a search engine. In order to capitalise on this vast number of hungry consumers, ensuring your eCommerce site has search-optimised content is essential. But what does this entail? Let’s take a look in more detail…

What is SEO?

SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, is a practice used by website owners and content creators to increase both the quality and quantity of traffic directed to your website through organic (rather than paid-for) search results.

Ensuring that you’re attracting visitors to your website for the right reasons is important and one way of doing that is optimising how you appear in search engines through SEO.

Why is SEO important for eCommerce?

Business owners who optimise their site for search engines increase the amount of organic traffic they receive. And, crucially, organic traffic is associated with engaged customers who have a genuine need for your product, which in turn means they could represent more repeat business.

Because of the increased emphasis placed on the importance of SEO, business owners no longer need a large marketing team behind them. By ensuring that you understand the basics of SEO, you can optimise your eCommerce website to be targeted towards specific keywords without difficulty.

How can I improve my eCommerce SEO and how will it benefit my business?

Establishing what your potential clients are looking for when they come across your website is key to understanding how best to use SEO within your eCommerce site.

Developing a strategy as far as keywords are concerned is particularly important. Thankfully, there are a number of generators such as Spyfu and Google Adwords Keyword Planner on the internet that help users to appropriately establish which keywords are worth targeting.

Websites such as these are there to give you insight into the types of things your potential customers are searching for. They can inform your keyword strategy to ensure that the time you spend optimising your website doesn’t ultimately go to waste.

Using only short tail keywords within the content of your website – that is, words that are single terms, such as ‘bags’ or ‘sunglasses’ – will prove more difficult to rank highly due to the increased competition.

More descriptive long tail keywords, specially formulated to target the ways in which potential customers search for results, typically convert much better. That’s because people who are looking to buy a very particular product are the ones making the search.

By discovering which search terms are used by your target audience, you are able to optimise your online store’s pages accordingly and ensure that your store is top of the results page.

At the same time, you need to avoid using terms that are too general or broad. Whilst ranking for a single keyword will give you some returns, targeting a whole field of keywords increases your chances of benefiting from increased organic traffic and ultimately increases the chance of your business making a sale.

Generally speaking, increased traffic correlates with an increase in sales so optimising your website to increase the number of people who access it can only have its benefits. In fact, some small businesses argue that by improving and optimising their SEO, they reduce the costs of other traditional marketing activities.

SEO consequently increases the bottom-line of a business, and because it is done simply by optimising existing website content with appropriate keywords, it requires minimal financial outlay. There is no cost per click or conversion, as is the case with PPC marketing, and ultimately you can attract large volumes of traffic without directly paying for the privilege – if it is put into practice successfully.

The effect that improving your eCommerce SEO has is a longstanding one, and you can see improvement in the rankings as time goes on. Focusing your attention elsewhere does not reduce its effectiveness, either, meaning that if you wanted to take a break from growing your website organically then it would carry on converting hits into business without intervention.

Once you have optimised your website to a significant degree, then you need to make sure that you’re watching the keywords that you use and measuring how successfully they are converting into sales. If a particular keyword is performing better than others, then producing additional content that uses this keyword within it can benefit you. That said, you should make sure that you don’t ‘stuff’ keywords onto a page as this can reduce its effectiveness and may cause the search engine to penalise your site.

You will also be able to establish which keywords don’t convert well and make sure that you aren’t wasting your time inserting these into your pages. All of the information you need to observe your optimisation and how well keywords are performing can be found using an analytics provider such as Google Analytics.

I don’t have time to invest in SEO… what should I do?

Often, as a business owner, time is of the essence and delegating smaller jobs can only benefit your growth. If you find that you’re quite short on time but know that your business could seriously benefit from professional SEO services, then getting in touch with a specialist SEO agency could be the answer.

If you’re looking for an SEO company London based then the team here at Pearl Lemon can help you ensure that your eCommerce store is optimised to put you at the top of the search engine rankings. Which, of course, is right where you deserve to be.

Photo: Aerial view of woman using computer laptop and a smartphone on wooden table by Rawpixel Ltd licensed under Creative commons 4

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Top 10 Essential SEO Tips for Small WordPress Sites

You’ve put a lot of time, effort and more than a bit of money into building your new WordPress site.

Even though it’s only small at the moment, you still want as many eyes on it as possible on your website — whether your goal is to entertain and inform readers, promote your work, sell your products and services, or simply share your opinions with the world while making a little cash from advertising services like Google Adwords.

Simply put, the more visitors you get, the easier it will be to build an audience you can count on.
But where to begin?

There are a lot of ways to drive traffic to your site, but Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most effective.

SEO is a collection of strategies and techniques aimed at helping your pages rank higher in search engines results.

This increases your site’s visibility and can help it really take off.

What’s more, there are plenty of simple ways to improve your WordPress site’s SEO, even if it is very small. And we are going to take a look here at some of the best of them.

An Introduction to WordPress SEO (And Why It Matters)

Think about it. When you sit down to find something on the internet, there’s one place you turn: a search engine.

This means if you want to get your WordPress website noticed, you’ll need to make sure that it appears in searches on Google. More importantly, you’ll want your site to appear as close as possible to the top of the list.T

he best way to do this is through SEO, which is a wide range of strategies and activities based off what we know about how search engines determine their rankings.

When compiling this list of SEO strategies, we started with one assumption: you’re busy. So these techniques are ones that you can implement right now (long-term commitment not required). Obviously, there are plenty of other techniques, but this is a great place to start.

Also, we’ll be focusing on advice targeted at Google since it’s by far the most popular search engine and releases the most information about its algorithms. That said, many of these strategies should also help you on other sites, such as Yahoo Search or Bing.

1. Choose Your Hosting Provider Carefully

The one thing that many people just don’t take into account enough is the importance of having a good plan with a great web host. It’s vital, of course, to have a good one to try to ensure your site actually stays visible to the world but it’s important to SEO as well.

Since Google takes speed into account when ranking sites, a good host can help push you to the top of the SERPs. Your host also affects the amount of downtime your site experiences and the physical distance between servers and visitors — both of which are ranking factors.

Even if your WordPress website has been up and running for a while you may want to consider switching hosts if your current provider doesn’t meet these criteria.

2. Choose a WordPress Theme That’s SEO Friendly

Your theme is one of the most important choices you’ll make for your WordPress site. It determines your site’s appearance and layout, can provide extra functionality, and also plays a role in its SEO.

For example, your theme can affect your site’s speed — which (as we’ve already discussed) is vital. The way a theme was developed also matters since clean code gives your site the best chance in SERPs.

When picking a theme you’ll want to opt for one built with SEO in mind. These themes are often referred to as ‘SEO-friendly’. You may also want to look for a theme that offers features specifically designed to improve your SEO, such as new heading tag options. Fortunately, there are plenty of themes available that fit the bill.

Here’s an extra tip. Don’t go with a free theme UNLESS you get it via the WordPress theme marketplace. There are hundreds of these free themes available (do a quick Google search, you’ll see what we mean) but many are hiding a secret.
Deep within the code of many free themes are hidden links to the developer’s interests, giving them an SEO boost but detracting from your own SEO efforts. Some of them even harbour viruses. So while yeah, free is nice if you can get it but not worth risking your entire site for.

3. Use a Dedicated SEO Plugin

If you’re new to WordPress, you may not yet be familiar with WordPress plugins. These are small pieces of add-on software you can install, which add new features and functionality to your site. There’s a plugin to help your site do just about anything — including rank higher in search engines. In fact, there are lots of plugins designed specifically to improve your site’s SEO.

These plugins provide small, targeted features such as creating a sitemap (we’ll talk more about that in a moment). For even better results, you can also opt for a comprehensive SEO plugin such as Yoast SEO, which will add a whole suite of optimization-focused features to your site.

A word of warning though. These plugins do not do anything automatically. They simply serve as a guide to remind you of the SEO best practices you should be following, it will still be up to you to ‘put in the work’.

4. Change Your ‘Permalink’ Structure

Permalinks are the permanent URLs that point to your site’s individual posts, pages, and other content. They’re what people will use to reference and link back to your site, and their appearance matters.

Clear, descriptive links that describe their content are easier for search engines to make sense of and tend to give your content a small ranking boost.

WordPress offers a number of automatic permalink options. The default settings are based on numbers which aren’t ideal since they convey little useful information to search engines. Instead, you’re probably best off with the Post Name structure since it communicates clearly what the linked content is about.

Some people prefer the Post Name and Date setting as it can help search engines and readers determine the age of the content. But not everyone likes the idea of their content being specifically dated, so that may be a choice to be made based on your unique content. Whatever you decide to do though, you can easily change your permalink structure in WordPress – or even create a custom one by visiting your site’s back-end and navigating to Settings > Permalink.

5. Create a ‘Sitemap’

A sitemap is a list of all the pages and other content on your website. It provides a quick way to see how your site is laid out and what it includes.

While these sitemaps were once designed to help users navigate websites, their primary purpose now is to communicate information to search engine bots.

While adding a sitemap to your website doesn’t directly boost its search engine rankings, it’s still a valuable SEO tool. It enables crawlers to see all of the pages on your site and understand how they relate to one another.

If you do create a sitemap, and you should, take a few minutes to submit it to Google and Bing. Although their bots will probably find there way to your site by themselves in the end, giving them a little nudge in this way should help get your site indexed faster.

6. Use Heading Tags Throughout Your Content

While a sitemap is useful for helping search engine crawlers see how your site is organized, it doesn’t help them make sense of the individual content. For that, you’ll need to use heading tags.

These are formatting options you can apply to section headings within pages and posts. You can see these settings in your WordPress WYSIWYG editor, listed as Heading 1, Heading 2, and so on.

Using these headings to structure your content does two important things. It provides a visual benefit for your readers, by breaking up your text and making it easier to read.

Also, crawlers pay a lot of attention to headings, using them to understand how your content is organized and what it’s about. So when creating posts and pages, don’t forget to use WordPress’ heading options often and consistently.

7. Build Your Content Around Keywords

Chances are you’ve encountered the concept of keywords before. These are short phrases that describe your content’s topic. For example, you might choose the keyword “easy recipes” for a blog post that shares simple recipe options for beginners. By doing this, you’re predicting that a lot of people will type the phrase into a search engine when looking for this type of post.

Choosing a keyword for each post or page and using it in various places — such as the title, the headings, and the content itself — is a simple but effective way to communicate your topic to search engine crawlers and increase the chances of your content showing up in relevant searches.

Of course, you need to be smart about the way you use this tactic. For example, it’s best to avoid ‘keyword stuffing’, or forcing your keyword into too many places so that it appears unnatural or spammy. Google hates that and actually, most humans do too.

8. Incorporate Useful Internal and External Links

Google and other search engines don’t usually ‘like’ sites that live in a vacuum. Instead, they prefer sites that are well connected, both internally and to other websites.

Using plenty of links throughout your posts and pages tells crawlers how they relate to similar content. It also encourages other people to link back to your site — which in turn communicates to search engines that your content is valuable!

As with keywords, this is a strategy you need to use carefully. If you add too many links to your content or use a lot of links that point to irrelevant pages or exist only to promote products, your search engine rankings will likely suffer.
Instead, look to add links where they fit naturally, and to point readers towards high-quality websites that already rank well in SERPs.

The smart use of both internal links and external links is key to achieving the best SEO results possible and so even if it takes a little extra time the rewards you’ll reap will make that time very well spent.

9. Use Responsive Design on Your Site

More people than ever are using mobile devices to browse the internet. This means your site needs to look and perform as good on any type of device a visitor happens to be using. You can help ensure this by following the strategy of responsive design — in other words, designing your site so it reacts and adapts to each user’s device.

Responsive design also eliminates the need for a separate mobile site, something that was popular a few years ago but is rather redundant now. In fact, responsive design is now so important that it’s believed by most SEO experts that Google uses it as a ranking factor. If your site is responsive, its chances of appearing high on SERPs will be that much better.

10. Add and Update Your Posts Frequently

Along with length, Google’s algorithms consider the frequency of content when deciding how to rank your pages. Older, high-quality content will do well, of course, but a boost is given to newer, ‘fresh’ content that’s more likely to be relevant to searchers.

Therefore, if you want your site to do consistently well in SERPs over time, you’ll want to add new content regularly. Also, don’t neglect older posts and pages. Updating your existing content prompts crawlers to re-evaluate it and to give it higher prominence than pages that never change. And focus on quality.

One great blog post a week is always going to be better for your site’s SEO than terrible posts published on a daily basis.

SEO for WordPress sites covers a wide range of strategies and techniques, so it can be a little bit intimidating. That’s where Pearl Lemon can help. Our WordPress SEO experts have years of experience and understand all the ins and outs of WordPress SEO. Interested in learning more? Give us a call.

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The Big Pearl Lemon Guide to Getting More YouTube Views for Free

So, you create YouTube videos. Great idea. Done right YouTube videos can be one of the best ways to promote a product, build your brand, establish yourself as an authority on some of your favorite subjects or just make a little extra cash.

The opportunity to do all of the above is certainly there. Although YouTube is now nearly fifteen years old – and has more than a few almost viable competitors in the video space in 2019 – it is still the granddaddy of video sites and the place most people – from all over the world and across almost every popular dynamic – head when they are looking for something interesting to watch.

How big is it still? Here are some facts to consider (accurate as of the time of writing and the numbers are YouTube’s own)

• Total Number of Monthly Active YouTube Users:
  1.9 billion
• Total Number of Daily Active YouTube Users:
  30+ million
• YouTube TV Paying Subscribers:
  300,000
• Number of Videos Shared to Date:
  5+ billion
• Number of Users Creating Content Shared to Date:
  50 million
• Average Viewing Session
  40 minutes, up 50% year-over-year
• Number of Videos Watched Per Day
  5 billion
• Number of mobile YouTube views per day:
  500 million
• Number of Videos uploaded per minute:
  300 hours

There is, as you can see, a huge audience just waiting to be tapped. In theory that is. Knowing all of this is very frustrating if the views on your own videos struggle to make it past double digits. So naturally you want more views on YouTube. For free. But how? Here are some pointers to get you started.

Ask People to Subscribe

That sounds very simplistic doesn’t it? And yet you would be surprised by just how many content creators on YouTube don’t actually bother to do it. They create videos that have fantastic information, are really entertaining and informative but then forget to make it clear to the audience that there is more of the same to come and so they should subscribe to be notified as soon as it does.

Once people subscribe, they can choose to be notified every time you upload new content and this will bring you instant views every time you release a new video. Add a call to action at the end of your video asking users to subscribe to your channel. And include a link in your video description that makes it easy for them to do so.

Use Playlists To Keep Those Eyeballs on Your Videos

According to YouTube’s own numbers s “top-performing brands on YouTube build and promote twice as many playlists as the bottom 25%.”

That’s because those top-performing brands understand the magic of auto-play. It’s much harder to pull yourself out of the YouTube rabbit hole when the videos just keep playing. Users might not actually be motivated enough to keep watching if they have to click play every few minutes, but if the ‘hits keep coming’ the chances are very good that they will just keep going. When you have a little more time head to one of our favourite YouTube entertainment channels – Watch Mojo UK –  and we can almost guarantee that you’ll be there for a while. As soon as one video stops the next one starts. And people are often there for hours.

So, how do you create a playlist? Here’s a video that explains it very simply:

TLDW? Here’s the quick explanation:

• Navigate to the first video you want to include in the playlist.
• Click Add to.
• Select an existing playlist, or choose Create a new playlist (and then name that playlist).
• Choose your playlist’s privacy setting. Since you’re aiming for YouTube views, you’ll likely want to keep it Public.
• Click Create.

Ten minutes, tops, and provided you are creating good content this will almost certainly increase your views on YouTube.

Make Use of YouTube Cards and End Screens

The card and end screen functionalities on YouTube offer you another way to get your viewers watching more of your videos while also helping them get more familiar with your brand every time they do.

Cards are those pop ups you see in the body of the video itself. This video explains how to add them.

Since at this point your focus is getting more YouTube views for free, you will probably get most mileage out of a channel card that just links to the rest of your videos. However you could use a video or playlist card to point viewers to specific related videos that it would make sense for them to watch next.

Making end screens for your videos is almost as simple as adding cards. Here’s how it’s done:

• From your YouTube account, click the Creator Studio link under your account icon.
• Click Video Manager > Videos.
• Click Edit on the video you want to add the end screen to, then click End screen.
• Choose whether to copy an existing end screen, create one using a YouTube template, or create one from scratch using the Add element option.
• When you’re happy with your selections, click Save.

Make Your Video Titles and Descriptions Search AND User Friendly

Before you can get new eyeballs on your videos they actually have to be able to find them, which means your YouTube SEO has to be on point. However, those efforts have to cover two slightly different ‘audiences’; YouTube’s search bots and actual human viewers.

YouTube SEO is actually a discipline all unto itself, and there’s a lot to learn (which is why you might want a YouTube SEO specialist to help you at first) But here are some of the basics:

When you are writing your descriptions and titles try out your potential keyword ideas in the YouTube search box itself. As the autocomplete populates you may get ideas for related terms you hadn’t thought of. Or even ideas for new videos (score) You can also click on a few of the videos that show up for keywords right now to get an idea of your current competition.

Where can you find high potential keywords? Google Keyword Planner and Google Trends are both potentially great sources of them, but do not include anything that isn’t relevant to your video’s content just because it’s a high volume keyword. YouTube knows that ‘trick’ and they will eventually penalise you for it.

As we mentioned, you have to keep your users in mind too. According to YouTube “Titles that perform best are often those that tell a story.” Search bots are not interested in stories but humans are, so you have to figure out a way to achieve this balance. Within 60 characters, to ensure that your full description is displayed in search.

Thumbnail Images Count

Most people just don’t read when they are online, they scan instead. And when they are scanning their way through the search results of a list of videos they might want to watch they are far more likely to click on the one that has an interesting/eye catching thumbnail image to draw them in.

YouTube will, of course, auto-generate a thumbnail but why let them? Take control of the first impression you want to make and upload a custom image. Make sure that image complements both the subject matter of your video and your brand.

Your custom thumbnail should be 1280 x 720 pixels and less than 2 MB in size, in JPG, .GIF, .BMP, or .PNG format. And you probably want to know how to add one, so here’s a video that explains that:

Optimize Your Channel

Almost as important as optimizing each video you create is optimizing your channel. Yet SO many people just do not bother to do that. YouTube’s top performing creators do though, and since your ambition is to get more views and actually become one of them it is something that you should be doing as well.

Visuals are important here of course. You need to take the time to create a great channel icon, one that helps accurately portray your brand and your content, especially as this icon will be used by both YouTube and Google Search. It also needs to be an 800X800 image that will also display well at 98×98 pixels. A tall order perhaps, but there are a lot of tools and tips in the YouTube Creator Academy that can help.

Then there is the channel description. You have up to 1,000 characters to create a compelling brand pitch for your YouTube channel, letting viewers know why they should care about the videos you’re posting, what you have to offer, and how often they can expect to see new content. It’s not much, but take the time to make it count.

If you are up for a little more work you can even choose to create a channel trailer. We’ll let this video explain this (and as you watch, learn, this lady has a lot of views and subscribers!)

Understand the Way the YouTube Algorithm Works

‘A search and discovery system’ is the way that YouTube officially describes its algorithm. This is what determines which videos are seen first in a user’s search results, in the suggested videos tabs and in those trending streams.

The algorithm has an awful lot to do with watch time. Primarily this refers to how much time someone spends watching your videos, measured in cumulative minutes watched. According to YouTube itself, “each video uploaded—as well as every channel on YouTube—is ‘ranked’ by watch time.”

But “watch time” is not as simple as it sounds. Yes, it includes the actual time people spend watching your videos. But channels also earn “watch time credits” for driving viewers to watch videos on other channels.

This means that YouTube is more likely to showcase your videos when people spend more time watching your videos, and when they spend more time watching videos by other users that you refer them to. It’s complex stuff sometimes, and working with a Youtube marketing specialist can help you, but getting a better grasp on what you have to do to please YouTube – versus pleasing Google – is something it pays to do.

Take the Time to Go Through Your YouTube Analytics

One of the biggest keys to the success of any marketing strategy – on or offline – is to continuously test, track and tweak according to watch you learn as you go. And this is where analytics come in.

YouTube itself offers a pretty robust analytics panel that will tell you a lot of what you need to know. It lets you know which of your videos performs the best, how engaged your viewers really are and, to a certain extent, just who those people actually are.

These are all things that you not only need to pay attention to in order to increase the views on your current videos but also to act as a guide when creating future content. Once you know who is watching, and what seems to be resonating with them the most you can make a point of creating even more of the same kinds of content to keep them coming back for more.

Promote Your YouTube Video to the Outside World

Finally, it’s important that you promote your YouTube videos to the outside world to draw them over to you channel to watch (and hopefully keep watching) your content. Embed them on your website, share them on your social channels, include them in your emails (even in your email signatures)

All of these tips should help you increase the number of views your YouTube videos get and, for the most part, are free. There is one thing that has to be noted here though. As is the case for anything else in the world of content creation all the tips, tricks and hacks in the world aren’t much use if the content isn’t good.

Take the time to learn from others, to test and tweak and invest what you need to to ensure that what you are creating is good, not just a thirty second filler you are using to try and ‘increase your visibility online’.

The post The Big Pearl Lemon Guide to Getting More YouTube Views for Free appeared first on Pearl Lemon.

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SEO for Real Estate Agents in the UK – What You Need to Know in 2019

No matter what else is in the headlines right now the fact is that the UK property market is in as strong a position as it’s been in years, and that applies to both residential and commercial properties. Investment in commercial properties rose a whopping 88% in 2018 and entrepreneurs everywhere have begun taking notice of the AirBnb and short let phenomenon and directing their efforts into the property market in a big way as well.

Something else that is growing is the competition between agents. The available housing stock is lower in early 2019 than it has been in years, which means listings are harder to come by and those shopping for new homes have more choices when it comes to looking for a real estate agent to work with.

So how can your company stand out? One of the most effective tactics is to take advantage of everything that a structured, planned and expertly executed SEO for real estate campaign has to offer.

That said, one digital marketing agency’s idea of SEO great SEO often differs significantly from another’s. Back in the early days of real estate SEO businesses would do whatever it took to get their website ranked. The name of the game was rankings, numbers and little else, and people did some pretty shady things in order to win the game. But now that game is up. It’s Google’s game (thanks to their 88% search share) and they’ve changed the rules.

We’re getting ahead of ourselves, though. All of that is to come. Here is why SEO is vitally important for real estate businesses and real estate agents everywhere.

The Evolution of SEO

As we said, it’s Google’s game and everyone has to play it their way. Over the past few years that has meant ensuring that you keep up with the massive algorithm updates that were implemented to reinforce the mantra of ‘quality over quantity’.

This means that content with greater depth, increased relevance, and an altogether more informative approach is almost certainly going to rank highest. Those 300 word blogs about nothing in particular created only to shoehorn a few popular keywords into the mix are now useless.

What are those bots really looking for today? According to Google’s own search quality ratings, when it indexes the main content of each page, it checks factors like:

• The purpose of the page
• Expertise, authority, and trustworthiness – not just from the site and the page content, but expertise from the individual creator of the content too.
• Content quality and amount
• Website info and info about the content creator
• Website reputation and content creator reputation

These go into its ranking algorithm and help to determine SEO ranking.

Based on the rating guidelines above, Google shows searchers the most relevant, high quality results related to what they’re looking for. The most relevant are shown first, with the rest being shown over successive pages.

SEO today has far more to do with positive, enriching user experience than it has ever done in the past. Users – who are now bombarded from all sides, every day with a slew of content demands much more from content, and – in the name of those coveted conversions – content marketers must serve the user completely.

It’s important to please Google, but Google wants you to please your users. Do that and they’ll be happy too. Google rewards content that’s informative, helpful, and above-all relevant to the user consuming it and their original search query.

Effective SEO for real estate in 2019 is more about anticipating and interpreting consumer behaviour. In terms of the real estate and property sector – the value of which stood at £883 billion last year – there is massive competition, with brands and individuals fighting harder than ever before for those coveted top spots in the SERPs.

Getting Your Keywords Right

To stand a chance of competing in this intense arena in 2019, you need to constantly ‘go after’ the most relevant keywords.

Thorough keyword research is the cornerstone of all effective SEO; it allows you to focus on the areas that are of interest to your specific audience. You need to know which search terms are most relevant to your business, because without this insight, your content will fall short every time.

In terms of keyword research tools, in 2019 it’s time to think beyond the Google Keyword Planner. It’s still a good tool for minimal research tasks, but to really get the in depth results you need you need one – or often a combination of – the following more sophisticated and targeted tools; Ahrefs, SEMrush, Ubersuggest, and Moz’s Keyword Explorer.

It’s a matter of opinion of course, and some SEOs prefer different tools, but these are considered the most popular on the market today and the tools that the Pearl Lemon team have found to be the most effective.

The Importance of Local Keywords

Numerous studies have shown that 69% of those searching for a new home or commercial property will search making use of a local keyword first. With this in mind, you should incorporate local search terms when you optimise your business’s website. By capturing local traffic, your business stands a much greater chance of ranking for more targeted terms.

How complicated is the local search ecosystem to navigate? Take a look at the chart that Moz came up with and you’ll see: 

As the article this infographic comes from notes;“The UK features one of the most complex search ecosystems of any country in the world.”. So it takes a lot of know how to navigate and take full advantage of effectively.Make sure you choose to work with someone who can. 

Optimized Images and the Rise of Real Estate Multimedia

Home shoppers are visual creatures. Sure they might eventually get around to reading a carefully crafted property description, but it’s images – and increasingly video – that will capture their attention first. Is your site offering them enough? If not it’s something you’ll need to rethink quickly.

There is an important SEO aspect to all of this as well though. Google Image Search is a tab that many home buyers will flip to during their local search. They want to see pictures to get a feel for what’s out there. So your images, as well as your written content, need to show up in those searches.

This means ensuring that your image descriptions and alt tags are properly optimised, so that Google understands their relevance and can rank them accordingly. It really is SEO 101, and overlooking these areas will damage your website’s overall visibility, yet it is something that even ‘seasoned’ SEOs seem to do all the time.

Speed Really Does Matter

Staying on the technical end of the SEO spectrum, site speed is something that many webmasters and business owners overlook – often because it’s seen as more a web-development matter – which is techy and boring – than a more vital and exciting marketing matter.

This, of course, is a misguided way to look at it, given that your website is the centre of your marketing efforts. Slow site speed in 2019 almost always leads to disastrous results in terms of users dropping off from your webpages: studies show that users tend to abandon sites that do not load quickly. And the slower they load the worse it gets, as these figures demonstrate.

And once again, picking up on that need for speed, Google cares a lot too. If you have great content but it loads at a snail’s pace the Google bots take notice of that fact and will rank that great content in a SERP position that is probably lower than it deserved because it was served up too slowly.

This is one aspect of SEO that it is crucial to get some expert help with, because, as we mentioned, it’s the ‘boring’ techy stuff that it takes a certain mind to even want to understand, let alone spend their time implementing. But those people do exist – including here at Pearl Lemon – and failing to defer to their expertise can be a costly mistake.

Link Building for Real Estate

Ah. Link building. It’s tricky stuff. And sometimes even scary. So scary in fact that some webmasters choose to stay away from it all together. You can’t get punished by Google for bad links if you don’t have any at all right? And that’s the mindset Google’s much feared Penguin has left many with.

However, the point of Penguin is not to end the practice of link building. the bots need those links. What Penguin does is hand down algorithmic penalties that target sites with spammy link-building techniques (underhanded guest posting, inserting hidden links, and even buying links)

Google hates black hat methods, but it has no problem when the headwear is white. They still encourage ethical, valuable link building and reward those who take the time to build them. So you need to build links but do so carefully.

Yes, it’s easier – and cheaper – to spend a few quid on Fivver to buy some ‘natural looking’ links than actually work with an SEO agency to build some real ones, but there is so much at stake if the bots find those bad links – and they will – it’s one of the biggest mistakes you can make.

So what makes a good link?

Ethical, white hat link building is about engaging in some healthy outreach to secure those high-quality links on reputable, relevant sites. It’s all in the name of improving your visibility, in order to give you a better chance of being the first site that your target customers come across when they’re looking for information.

In terms of what sites your website should aim to receive backlinks from, use DA (domain authority) as a guide. The higher the DA, the more you’ll want to be ‘endorsed’ by high DA websites. Google pays attention to who you ‘hang out with’ in terms of links, so it’s more important than ever that you’re seen as ‘running with the right crowd’.

Local SEO … Again

Local SEO can work wonders when you’re marketing in the property sector. Local SEO is an extension of regular SEO, focusing on specific locations to ensure you rank the highest on your patch.

If there are competitors in your digital backyard, local SEO will help you outrank them. Over the years, local SEO implementation has evolved into an area of its own. It’s not the same as general SEO, and so working with someone who knows, understands and can implement local SEO first is the way to go to outrank those pesky competitors just a few streets down. And speaking of them, keep an eye on them, because it gives you a good lay of the land in terms what other businesses in your sector are up to.

Content is Still King

The phrase above has possibly become known as one of the most cliched in the SEO business. But, corny or not, it’s still true. Taking the time to invest in content creation that produces valuable, informative, helpful information – in the form of blogs, articles, videos and even podcasts and webinars – is still worth the investment every time.

The post SEO for Real Estate Agents in the UK – What You Need to Know in 2019 appeared first on Pearl Lemon.

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Why is Local SEO important to your business?

Ensuring that your business is visible in such a way that it can be seen by customers far and wide is a challenging task. In a world where businesses rely heavily on the internet and technology to be successful, marketing your website appropriately to boost your business and the opportunities you open yourself up to is incredibly important for growth. Customers need to be aware of exactly what it is that you do, where you are located and how they can approach your business offline. Whether you are willing to put in the work yourself or else want to seek the advice of SEO services or an ecommerce SEO agency, making sure that your website is suitably optimised has never been more important to businesses.

What is local SEO?

Having and running a business is a challenge in itself. Running a successful business online is all well and good and having an optimised website that allows customers to find your products is a proactive way of building a client base. While optimising your website to give your products the best chance of being found is key to building a successful business, ensuring that people know exactly where your business is based and being able to target customers in your local area is equally as important. This is where local SEO comes into the mix – if you find that you are not acquiring local business geographically despite the fact you’re actively targeting that audience on your website, you may find that you need to put a little bit of time into optimising your website for the area itself.

How can I use local SEO to optimise my website and build my business?

If you have an address in a particular area, city or county, you will probably find that it’s much easier to optimise your website for that area – the difficulty lies if you want to attract business from other areas, perhaps just outside of your city, where you are not physically located yourself. Where this is the case, enhancing your website can be done through the means of articles or blog posts. Writing about the area that you want to appeal to in an article is a simple way of optimising your website but you may find that the content you produce has absolutely nothing to do with your business – the pages themselves exist only for SEO reasons, which can often appear forced. Recycling information and repeatedly posting the same things will not benefit your business, so target your audience by producing appropriate content that will encourage them to stay on your website for as long as possible.

If your business is a plumbing business based in Birmingham, for example, you want to make sure that your website is listed towards the upper end of the search engine’s results. Your keyword needs to include what is known as a SiL – a service in location – as people searching for your service will most likely include that within their search: a possible keyword for you could be ‘emergency plumber in Birmingham’ or else ‘clogged drain Birmingham’. Including these keywords within the content of your website will ensure that your service will show up on search engine results – the more optimised keywords throughout your website, the higher the page will rank. If you are unsure about what keywords will be most suited to your business then there are a number of keywords websites out there to peruse. Otherwise, searching one of your keywords on a search engine and considering the automatically generated responses could be beneficial to you.

As well as optimising keywords within your web content, it’s important to produce meta descriptions that summarise the information on a particular page. Optimised keywords should be included within these meta descriptions.

As well as targeting the local area through keyword optimisation, ensuring that you have registered your business through the Google My Business facility is equally as important. The vast majority of searches made on Google are local searches yet still a large proportion of businesses have failed to claim their business on Google My Business – doing so will be a step in the right direction in terms of ensuring your business is optimised locally.

Mobile optimisation is equally as important as having an aesthetically pleasing desktop website – with an emphasis being placed on the use of mobile devices, people searching for a specific service or business are much more likely to contact a local business if they are able to find out all the information that they need on a mobile-friendly site. Ensuring that your mobile optimised website is quick, slick and easy to navigate is a sure-fire way of keeping hold of a potential customer- customers are much more likely to go back and find another website if your page takes an age to load up for them.

Local SEO isn’t primarily about being top of the list on search engines, although it will likely help your business if you have better search engine rankings. However, having built good relationships with your clients can lead to direct traffic to your website and social media following, effectively yet indirectly making your Google visibility all the better.

Okay… How do I go about improving my local SEO?

All of the hints and tips above are starting points as to improving your local SEO but they should not be used independently. Focusing on optimising your keywords is important, for example, but won’t be much use to you if your business isn’t registered. In combination, all of the tips will work well and improve the local business you acquire. If you worry that you don’t have the time or the confidence to approach this yourself, there are a number of agencies and consultancies out there who can help you out. If you’re on the lookout for local SEO services London based then feel free to reach out to us at the earliest opportunity – we are here for all of your SEO needs, local or otherwise.

Photo: London by szeke licensed under Creative commons 5

The post Why is Local SEO important to your business? appeared first on Pearl Lemon.

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Ultimate Guide to Local SEO for London Businesses

How to Speed Up Your WordPress Site to Boost Your SEO and Delight Your Users

WordPress is a great platform and it has come a long way from the days when it was suited only for a personal blog. Now fully functional, beautiful websites can be created using WordPress as a CMS. One weakness that it suffers from, however, is it can be quite slow. Without taking the right precautions, you could end up with a sluggish site.

That’s not only a hassle for repeat visitors and may cause you to lose new subscribers or customers. But that is not the only problem. Increasingly slow sites are being penalized in the SERPs by Google and other search engines as well.

But WordPress’ propensity towards sluggishness can be fairly easily overcome. In this post we are going to look at some of the best ways to do just that.

Why WordPress Site Speed Matters

When a person lands on your site for the first time, you only have a few seconds to capture their attention to convince them to hang around.

Get ready to lose sleep at night: according to a report by the Microsoft Bing search team, a 2-second longer delay in page responsiveness reduced user satisfaction by 3.8%, increased lost revenue per user by 4.3%, and a reduced clicks by 4.3%.

If your site takes too long to load, most people are gone, lost before you even had a chance.

Not only that, but Google now includes site speed in it’s ranking algorithm. That means that your site’s speed effects SEO, so if your site is slow, you’re now losing visitors from impatience and have reduced rankings in search engine result pages. Yikes.

So what can be done to prevent all of this horror? Let’s take a look:

Get a Good Host

For a small business just starting out it’s very common for the owners to select a basic GoDaddy (or similar) hosting plan that offers shared hosting. When starting out, a shared host might seem like a bargain (“Unlimited page views!”). It comes at another cost: incredibly slow site speed and frequent down time during high traffic periods.

The problem is, if you do that be prepared for trouble. Downtime, sluggishness, errors. You are sharing hosting with hundreds of others, so the fact that this happens often should come as no surprise. The stress of your site going down is never something anyone needs, so invest in proper hosting.

Start With a Good Theme

WordPress does come with a default theme – one that is usually updated every year – and
it is usually lightweight and quite speedy. That’s because they keep the “guts” simple; compare that to bloated frameworks which have tons of features that you will never use, slowing your site to a crawl.

However, it’s also rather limited and you do have to be very familiar with customizing WordPress themes in order to create a decent site. It’s for this reason most people look at other theme options. And there are certainly a lot of them out there to choose from.

The key to avoiding bloat is to choose a theme that meets your needs as closely as possible and then only make use of plugins that you actually need.

You should also invest in a premium theme from a trusted source – Themeforest is a good one – rather than a free option. Not only are free options limited, and often buggy, they also almost always contain links the developers that will sap at your SEO ‘juice’.

Get a Good Caching Plugin

Many WordPress plugins are quite useful, but some of the best fall under the caching category, as they drastically improve page load time, and best of all, all of them on WordPress.org are free and easy to use.

Our favorite, at Pearl Lemon is W3 Total Cache, it has all of the features you need and is extremely easy to install and use. Simply install and activate, and sit back and watch your page load faster as lots of different
elements are cached.

Use a Content Delivery Network

If your site is used for online marketing in any way, which we’re sure most people reading this are doing in some way, a CDN – content delivery network – is another way to seriously boost your WordPress site speed and overall performance.

Essentially, a CDN takes all your static files on your site (CSS, Javascript and images etc) and lets visitors download them as fast as possible by serving the files on servers as close to them as possible.

A good option to try the is Max CDN Content Delivery Network, as we’ve found that they have the most reasonable prices and their dashboard is very simple to use.

Auto Optimize Your Images

Big image files KILL WordPress speed, so it a MUST that every single image needs to be optimized. There is a great optimizer, built by Yahoo! called Smush.it that will drastically reduce the file size of an image, while not reducing quality. Perfect! Except doing this to every image is a real pain, not to mention incredibly time consuming.

Fortunately, there is a plugin called WP-SmushIt which will do this to all of your images automatically, as you are uploading them. It’s free, easy to use and it really will save you both time and effort while also speeding up your WordPress site significantly.

Optimize Your Site Architecture As Much As Possible

This isn’t one thing but a number of things that you can do to ensure that your WordPress site loads quickly and does so for every page.

To get you started, implement all of the following:

• Show excerpts instead of full posts
  Reduce the number of posts on your blog page.
  Remove inactive plugins and widgets that you don’t need
  Keep in minimal! Browsers are there for information of some kind, or to buy a product, not 8,000 extra widgets on the homepage
  Optimize your WordPress database. There are plugins that can take care of most of this for you, although you may need professional help if the data bases are large.

Disable Hotlinking and Content Leeching

Hotlinking is a form of bandwidth “theft.” It occurs when other sites direct link to the images on your site from their content, creating a server load that is increasingly high.

To prevent this, but not block the backlinks you need, there is code that can be inserted to prevent this (which can be found at Github or you could simply ask a member of the Pearl Lemon team) and it really is a good idea to do so, as this way you can cut your load time significantly for your regular users.

Adjust Gravatar Images

You’ll notice on this site that the default Gravatar image is set to… well, nothing.

This is not an aesthetic choice, we did it because it improves page loads by simply having nothing where there would normally be a goofy looking Gravatar logo or some other nonsense. Some blogs go as far to disable them throughout the site, and for everyone.

You can do either, just know that it will at least benefit your site speed if you set the default image (found in “Discussion”, under the settings tab in the WordPress dashboard) to a blank space rather than a default image.

Add LazyLoad to Your Images

LazyLoad is the process of having only only the images above the fold load (i.e. only the images visible in the visitor’s browser window), then, when reader scrolls down, the other images begin to load, just before they come into view.

This will not only speed your page loads, it can also save bandwidth by loading less data for users who don’t scroll all the way down on your pages.

Turn off Pingbacks and Trackbacks

By default, WordPress interacts with other sites that are equipped with pingbacks and trackbacks.

Every time another site mentions a post on your site, it notifies your site, which in turn updates data on the post. Turning this off will not destroy the backlinks to your site, just the setting that generates a lot of work for your site.

Replace PHP with Static HTML, When Necessary

This one is a little bit more advanced, and most people will need some help here, but it can drastically cut down your load time for the page.

Use CloudFlare

This is similar to the section above on using CDN’s, and by making use of CloudFlare, along with the W3 Total Cache plugin discussed above, as they integrate seamlessly with each other can be one of the best ways of all to increase both the speed and security of your site. The security factor is an added bonus as this too is another area that Google are paying an increasing amount of attention to when ranking sites in the SERPs.

These are just some of the ways you can speed up your WordPress site. There are more, and believe us when we say that even if a tweak will only speed up your site by another couple of milliseconds, in SEO terms it’s worth it. Google – and the other search engines – are never going to penalise a site for being too fast.

The post How to Speed Up Your WordPress Site to Boost Your SEO and Delight Your Users appeared first on Pearl Lemon.

source https://pearllemon.com/how-to-speed-up-your-wordpress-site-to-boost-your-seo-and-delight-your-users/