Phillipstemann

Simply the best SEO plugin for WordPress | Ep. #14

Wed, 03 Mar 2021 07:00:00 GMT

Hi, my name is Phillip Stemann, and I’ll be learning you how to succeed with your website.

Today, I’m excited to share with you my favourite SEO plugin using WordPress called Rank Math SEO, you’ve probably heard about it. It’s really, really been popular lately. And today I’ll share with you features and what I like about it. Before I dive into this, I want to share a funny story with you. One of my friends is running a small webshop where he sells accessories for iPhones and smartphones and general covers and screen protectors. And he was using using Yoast SEO.

Yoast SEO is also an SEO plugin for WordPress. However, it’s not as powerful as Rank Math. So what I simply did was I changed from Yoast SEO to Rank Math SEO on his WordPress website. Before I changed to Rank Math he had approximately a couple of orders per week after we changed to Rank Math SEO. He highered his order base and had a couple of orders per day now. And the reason by this I will explain a little bit later. Of course, I cannot guarantee that you will see the same success, but you will definitely see a peak in your visitor amounts.

When we talk about Rank Math SEO, they have a ton of features, completely free. Rank Math SEO is built of modules you can turn on and off. So basically, if there is a feature you don’t want or you don’t need, then you can turn it off. This will lighten your WordPress setup and it will make it easier for you to navigate around.

Rank Math SEO

As mentioned Rank Math SEO is simply the best SEO plugin for WordPress, you can download it completely free.

DOWNLOAD RANK MATH

The number one feature in Rank Math SEO. Is their powerful schema generator. They have a schema for almost everything you can imagine. It has for articles, for products, for videos, for even podcast. And the best thing about it is that Rank Math SEO automatically applies these schemas. If you think there isn’t a schema that matches you in the pro version, you can generate your own schema. Furthermore, still in the free version, they have an on page SEO checker. What this basically do is that it scans your entire website and checks for headings. Do you use headings correctly in the correct order?

Are you using meta descriptions? Are you using title text and all these technical aspects that you control, that Rank Math cannot control for you and then it highlights the pages for you that you need to fix. And the cool thing about this is that it’s completely free and it runs on your website. So when you have done some changes, you can basically just run it again to see if you did it correctly.

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Furthermore, WordPress out of the package is very, very SEO optimised. However, there are still aspects that can be optimised and Rank Math SEO takes care of this. It automatically overall optimises your entire website to perform as good as possible on Google if you want extra features. And when I say extra features, it’s extra features like tracking keywords. You want a more powerful schema generator because you want to generate your own schemas, then you need to upgrade to their pro version. The pro version was released in the end of last year and it has had its ups and down they are back on track and my version is running stable now.

So I would definitely recommend you if you are serious about your SEO game, to upgrade to the pro version. The pro version cost 59 US dollars per year. Of course you get the powerful schema generator, but you also get the ability to track keywords. Normally you would get out and you would find a tracking keyword tool where you would pay a fairly high fee and you would enter in your keywords and they would track it for you.

Here you can actually do it within your own WordPress setup. However, they take the data from Google Search Console. So in theory, you already have this data and you can discuss whether it creates extra value or not. Last but not least, they have a sitemap feature. Again, this is generated completely, automatically. All you have to do is you have to go into your Google Search Console and submit this sitemap to Google. A sitemap is basically a way to tell Google what pages Google should crawl and what pages Google should not crawl.

And they have a, I would say, a great feature. They have the ability to submit a page to Bing for you. You may be thinking, OK, Bing, it’s not the biggest search engine. No, it’s not. But they actually have an amount of searches every day, which makes it worth it. So what did they do basically is that every time you make a change on a page or on an article, Rank Math SEO automatically submits your page to Bing for you complete automatically.

So that’s the features. Competitors ,I have mentioned Yoast SEO. If you’re using All-in-one-seo, I would still recommend you changing to Rank Math SEO as you get a more powerful schema generator. And the thing about WordPress plugins, when we’re talking about SEO, all they have to do is they need to optimise your content, your technical aspect. Rank Math SEO also has as Yoast SEO has, and All-in-one-seo$ has they have content optimisation.

It can be discussed how powerful this is. It definitely comes with some great tips and ways for you to optimise your content, but still remember to keep your content relevant. So to sum everything up, you get very far with the free version and the update it fairly often. So what I would recommend you to do right now is to start with the free option, it’s very easy to get set up and if you feel this is the right plug in for you, you should upgrade right away.

You will not regret it. They have customised schemas. You can track your keywords and so much more. So thank you for listening. Please leave a review wherever you are listening to this podcast. And remember, consistency is key to success. Let’s catch up on the next one.

Kinsta review – 6 months of use, is it the best Managed WordPress hosting?

Thu, 25 Feb 2021 07:00:32 GMT

All right, guys, I have such a big treat for you guys today. As you know, I am a huge fan of WordPress and I have used WordPress for many, many years with WordPress to be able to run it. You need a hosting platform and there are a ton of options out there. You know that already.

I started by using very generic WordPress hostings, and lately I found out that there’s something called managed WordPress hostings and oh my God, that is amazing. It will take your WordPress to a next level in terms of speed. It’s so fast in terms of support, it’s perfect. And today I will take you through a product called Kinsta let’s get started.

I have been using it for around six months now and now I thought it’s time to give my review on Kinsta, tell a little bit about what it is, what I have experienced and why I maybe like it or not. Let’s dig into it.

So Kinsta is a managed WordPress hosting, and how it differs from a normal hosting is that it only focuses on WordPress. A normal hosting platform can host everything as long as you just keep the languages within what they support, which is basically everything. Whereas Kinsta only focuses on WordPress and it has its cons and pros, I will explain just in a second. Kinsta is known for their loading time ,and they also brand themselves as being the fastest managed WordPress hosting.

I will show my test where I tested them up against their competitors so you can see for yourself whether they are correct or not. All right.

Some of the pros, by using a managed WordPress hosting is that you get an environment where you completely get rid of have to be able to code. You can do everything either within their dashboard or within your WordPress hosting. And when you contact their support, you know, 100 percent that they know how to fix your WordPress problems because it’s basically WordPress experts you are chatting with. And that’s also why that I have experienced that my problems has gone away by within a few minutes, every single time. It’s fantastic.

Their loading time. As you can see here. What I did was I took one website and then I tested this website on five different locations everywhere, from Australia to London to the United States of America. And in general, a website hosted on Kinsta, I have to say it’s the same website, not the same URL, the same website. So it’s the same package that the browser catches and needs to load. At Kinsta it loaded in average 1.6 seconds of these five locations.

So by my test they are correct, saying that they are the fastest loading managed WordPress hosting. On a second place we have WP Engine. I personally thought the WP engine would be number one. They have always been so powerful in this game, but Kinsta has just taken over. It’s so good to see. But WP Engine loads at the same time as Flywheel in average one point nine seconds. The reason why WP Engine is above is because of some milliseconds.

But yeah flywheel on a third place, which is where I thought they would be, and then Presslabs on a fourth place. I’m a bit surprised they’re not further behind. They are only 2.0 seconds in average on the five different locations. So they’re definitely also a competitor to all this. They do, however, differs. But let’s dig in to Kinsta’s features because Kinsta has servers in 24 locations. This means that when you create your website, you can choose between 24 locations and it’s very important that you choose the server closest to your audience.

If you’re European by law, you need to choose to place your data in a server in Europe, but other than that you can choose whatever you want. Furthermore, then they have a staging area.

I love this and I use it so much. Every time I have to update a plugin or I have to do some changes in the design that might break my website.

What I do is I clone my live website to a staging area and then I basically just work on it there and then I can do whatever I want and nothing will happen to my live website. I can completely crash it and nothing will happen by working with this. And it makes me stand out more professional as my live website is never, ever down. It’s always up. Furthermore, Kinsta takes care of the more boring stuff like backups. You know, we need to take care of backups, but we hardly never do.

But Kinsta has gotten you back here. Then they give you a free CDN, which. Is perfect, a free CDN makes it possible for you to load your website fast wherever you are in the world because a CDN and make sure that the server, there is closest to the visitor is the one where your website is loaded for this means just to explain it briefly. Your website is put on a ton of different servers in the world. And if a guy from the United States of America visits your website, then the closest server to him in the United States of America will be the one loading your website.

But if a girl in Australia goes to your website, then it’s a different server that’s loading your website. Last but not least, they have Analytics on your website where you can see everything about how your server is performing to the visitors that comes to your website. I am in Kinsta here for you to see their dashboard and their are different graphs.

And furthermore. So just to show you briefly at my website here, I can see my visits, then I can see how much data transfer and so on and so on. They have a resource center. What’s important for you to see is sites, Kinsta DNS and Analytics. Kinsta has publicly said that they are making an integration to Cloudflare. Cloudflare is the fastest DNS in the world. So it’s so good news to hear this and it will be coming within the next few months.

Analytics, as mentioned in here, you can see everything from what takes a lot of requests from your website. Here you can see its often images. You can see how your website is performing in terms of PHP and MySQL. And your throughput. This is more technical. I will not dig into that. You can see the response times, how it’s going here, how many errors you have on your website this is important for SEO to go through this and much more.

When I go into my website, you can see some different details here.

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I have my environment up here where I can choose between the staging and the live in my environment. As I mentioned earlier, the staging environment makes it possible for me to work on whatever I want without I have to fear that I’m breaking anything.

Then you have some different tools out here.

Here you can see that they have site cache for you. It’s another layer of cache that just makes it faster for you to work with your website. Then they have different features, like if you experience an error, you just can’t fix it. Maybe a restart will fix it. And what I like really like is you can easily change the PHP version. PHP 8 just came out. It’s up to 60 times faster than PHP 7. So I would definitely recommend you taking a look at that.

However, a lot of plugins are not ready for PHP 8. So here a staging environment would be a perfect option to try to on the staging environment. Update your PHP version to see whether or not your website is breaking. Last but not least, they have a Kinsta APM. Kinsta APM I have not enabled on my live environment as it takes resources from the server, but here you can basically see what plugins are using a lot of resources from your server so you can either contact the plugin developers to make them fix that so your website can go faster again.

Last but not least, the Kinsta CDN. It’s super easy to set up. You basically just enable it. Then you have your DNS zone which you plug into. If you’re using a cache plugin. Otherwise, Kinsta actually enables this on your website automatically. Furthermore, they have recently released a tool for you. This tool is called DevKinsta and basically it makes it possible for you to work with your WordPress website locally on your computer.

What that means is you get a program down on your computer, whether you’re using Mac or Windows, it supports both. And then basically you have your WordPress website to work down there on your computer.

It makes it faster as it doesn’t have to load any resources online. And again, it’s just an extra layer of security. It’s like a test environment for your test environment. As I see often people use the test environment to build articles. And furthermore and then they push those articles to the production environment, which is also why a test environment before the test environment is great if you have changes you don’t want to ruin. Just to a quick note on the test environment, if you have comments or you have subscribers or you have data on your production environment, you don’t have on your staging environment, make sure to copy this data to your staging environment.

Otherwise, when you merge those two environments together, the stage environment, which is your test environment, will override your production environment and you will lose all the data. I will say DevKinsta, I have been working briefly with it and I will make another video about this, but DevKinsta it takes too much to install, if you ask me it. It requires a lot of other programs to run for this to run, whereas Flywheel, which we took a look at earlier.

They have developed a tool called Local WP, and all it requires is Local WP, then you can basically work with your website and I think it’s much easier in that tool to basically just work with your website. It’s so easy to set it up to work with it and further. But I will dig into this in another video. The support, I mentioned it briefly. Their support is so, so good at Kinsta. I took a look at their support page and they claim to have 97 percent cases closed as success, which means three percent they couldn’t solve.

They usually respond within 15 seconds or less. They mention one minute and 27 seconds on the website, but based on my test, I did 10 support tickets where I wrote in their live chat, and they in the average responded within 15 seconds. Often they respond within two seconds. It’s very great.

And all my cases has always been solved. They say they solve a case on average between on 39 minutes. I think my was solved in an average on 12 minutes. So of course some issues can take longer time.

But you really know when you chat with these guys that they know what they’re talking about, it’s really, really great.

So the competitors to Kinsta, as you also saw in the loading tab, is WP Engine, Flywheel and Presslabs. WP Engine and Flywheel, are very, very similar to Kinsta. Presslabs differs a bit in the functionality that I might dig into in another video, but Flywheel. Sorry. Presslabs is also a platform that just loads slower than Kinsta. It’s a fact we saw that.

Pricing. So when you talk about managed WordPress hosting, it’s often more expensive than normal hosting.

The reason why is they only support WordPress. They only have experts in WordPress. They only focus on WordPress. They don’t have this wide palette of different things they support and they are maybe 10 percent expert in everything. They are 100 percent expert in WordPress. And I have never experienced they couldn’t answer a question. That’s also why you see the plans can be a little steep when you compare to hosting. However, I don’t think it’s enormous. Some of the pros also by using managed WordPress hosting, as mentioned earlier, is that you just get a server that’s 100 percent optimised to run WordPress.

It’s not optimised to run all different types of CMS systems or different programming languages. It is optimised only to run WordPress. Kinsta, in their pricing plans, differs on five different elements. Here you can see 4 them, how many WordPress sites, how many visits per month, how much disk space you get, and then all of them you get free SSL and CDN. One more thing that you have to notice when you take a look at their pricing is the different amount of PHP engines.

As you can see here I am on the pricing plan. And as I have mentioned, some of the plans here they have, wordPress installs at WordPress websites, the monthly visits, how much space and the CDN, and you can see they have a lot of more plans, then they have premium migration’s, which means that if you have a website already, they will migrate it for you to the Kinsta service, completely free. But the one you need to notice is down here.

It’s called PHP workers, the more PHP workers you have, the more powerful is your server, often two is enough. If you’re running a Webshop, I would recommend you going with business one at least. But I think you can always see the more visitors you get, the more you actually need to upgrade your server to be able to still maintain a great loading time.

OK, guys, we have now been through all of Kinsta, and you probably think, wow, this is amazing. However, there are cons by using Kinsta and I’ll explain some of them right now. When you push your staging environment to your production environment, that means your test environments to your live environment, then you have to push everything.

You cannot take bits and pieces and push to the production environment. That means, for instance, if you have comments on blog posts on your production environment, then when you push a staging environment to your production is going to overwrite. And if those comments are not both places, you’re going to have a problem. Furthermore, using a managed WordPress hosting means a bit higher prices than you’re used to. The reason why is because they are only there for WordPress.

If you’re using a generic web hosting, they need to be able to support everything, which means they’re not expert within WordPress.

They don’t spend resources. And the amount of time on getting expert in WordPress, they need to know everything, but only a little bit.

Kinsta, furthermore, doesn’t have a domain provider or an email hosting, so you need to have that elsewhere. Last but not least, they do not have unlimited space and they do not have unlimited visitors. What that means for you is that when you’re on a plan, you have a certain amount of visitors there are in that plan that can visit your website. If you get more visitors, you have to pay extra. Remember that. And here in the end plugins, they do not allow all types of plugins because Kinsta have their own cache plugin, which means that some plugins will conflict with this.

And that’s why some plugins are not allowed to use when you’re hosting with Kinsta you should check this out before choosing whether you want to use Kinsta or not.

All right, guys, thank you for watching. Please like and comment the video for the YouTube algorithm, let’s catch up on the next one.

3 simple steps to gather leads | Ep. #13

Wed, 24 Feb 2021 07:00:21 GMT

Hi, my name is Phillip Stemann, and I’ll be learning you how to succeed with your website.

No matter what type of company you are, you need leads, it could be a potential buying customer. It could be a lead for your email lists, your newsletter, or it could be a lead for a product that you offer or a service. Today, I have three steps for you on how you gather leads easily, but it require an amount of work for you.

The three steps are first. You need to get to know your target group. You need to gather information about who they are, what are their pain points and more. I’ll dig into this, don’t worry. Then you need to process all of this information and data. And based on this analysis, you need to make what’s called an info product. More on that later. Let’s get started.

So you need to get to know your target group. This you do by asking them questions. It’s important you don’t ask them what they need because they don’t know what they need. If they knew, they would basically just go out and find it. You need to ask questions around that subject, you need to ask questions about their pain points. What issues do they have during the day that you maybe can solve with an info product? What do they want to learn more about based on all this data that you gather from them. You can process this and move further. But before you do so, the way you gather this information is either by calling them doing a survey or doing polls on your website.

If you choose to do polls via your website and you’re using WordPress, I can recommend the plugin called WPForms. Otherwise, TypeForm is a great alternative and it’s very intuitive and with TypeForm you can also make surveys. A protip when you start gathering information about your target group. Make sure that you save all the information even when they’re not done. We often see that people, they start on the survey and then halfway they just stop because maybe it’s too long or they got a question they couldn’t answer or they got a question they didn’t like.

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For instance, you could ask, what is your email or what is your phone number? And maybe this potential lead didn’t like that, and then they dropped out. But then you’ve basically lost all of their information. So make sure that whatever tool you’re using is saving all the information on the fly. Now, when you have all of this information from your target group, you need to process it. You need to figure out based on all this what pain points are going through each of these leads.

What do they have in common? Because based on all of this data, you need to make what’s called an info product and info product is basically a text format. It could be an ebook. It could be videos, images, infographics. And what I often recommend is that you basically do all of them. You don’t have to do an e-book videos and infographic, but the more you do, the better.

Because try to imagine you in the school images in the books. Did you did you read through all of those school books? Because I certainly didn’t. But nowadays videos works so well and I know an infographic works as well. However, it takes an amount of time and you need to make sure that you have the time to do this, because if you just go ahead and do an info product immediately, it might be a waste of time if it’s not based on data. That’s why the first step is so important.

It’s so important that you gather information where you figure out what is the pain points from your target group and how can you solve that. Of course, you don’t have to ask how you can solve it. You need to ask them around this subject. For instance, if you’re in the plumbing business, then ask them what issues do they have during the week that they would like to be able to solve themself? What is annoying them about their plumbing?

Is there an infographic you can make that’s going to solve this? Then go ahead and do it right away. And when you have these three steps, then it starts to get funny because then you put it on your website. Let’s say you have made an infographic and an e-book. Then on your website you make a landing page where you basically offer this info product completely free. The only thing you ask for in exchange is their email or maybe even their phone number.

People don’t care about giving that up. They just want the free stuff. And if it’s relevant to their problem, then it’s even better. And based on this, you can see now that you start to get phone numbers and emails and all of this is the leads that you need to process.

So just to sum up, gather information and get to know your target group. Process and analyse all of this data, make the info product. And when you have these three steps, make a landing page on your website. It could even just be a section on your website and then start to gather those leads.

Thank you for listening, guys. I hope it’s been helpful today. Remember to leave a review wherever you are listening to this podcast. Let’s catch up on the next one.

Tips to get started with your newsletter | Ep. #12

Wed, 17 Feb 2021 07:00:30 GMT

Hi, my name is Phillip Stemann, and I’ll be learning you how to succeed with your website.

Using a newsletter is a great way for you to keep your readers updated or your buyers to say. You can via a newsletter, generate sales and this is a perfect way for you to have a cheap channel to reach your buyers or your visitors. As I see it, everyone can have a newsletter based on your industry. It doesn’t matter because if you have an industry where you don’t feel people are so techy, that doesn’t matter. You can still give them news about what’s happening in the industry, what’s going to happen in the future within the industry or within your company.

You can write about your company if there are any news. Are you scaling? Are you hiring? Are you doing any new cool things that can benefit the reader? The newsletter is a perfect idea for this. Furthermore, it’s a great tool to promote your blog posts. So if you’re writing a blog post, make sure to set up a newsletter that’s going to promote this blog post to all your readers and your subscribers. If you have a webshop, you can send out discount codes and based on these discount code, you can actually measure how well your newsletters are performing?

Because if a lot of your readers are using this specific discount code, well, then, you know. You can also share if you have new product collections for your webshop. This is also a great way to create awareness about your webshop.

When you need to get started on your newsletter, then you need to write this newsletter extremely simple. You have probably often seen these very fancy newsletters with a fancy design, but forget about that. That does not convert.

Of course, if you are talking about a new product collection and you want to show some examples from this product collection, then you need to make some design. But based on a lot of analysis, then the simpler you make your newsletter, the better. The simpler lines the subscriber needs to read, the bigger the chance is for them to actually clicking on your CTA. The reason why is because it feels more personalised. It’s like reading an email from a colleague.

So it’s extremely important that you keep it very, very to the point and very simple. Just text, white background and maybe do maximum five sentences and then you’re good to go. Furthermore, remember to plan ahead when you’re writing your newsletter, make it a part of your marketing plan. If you’re doing a specific campaign, well, then the newsletter is a great way to create awareness about this campaign. But before you can start writing all these newsletters, you need subscribers.

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The way you get subscribers is through a newsletter form this newsletter, form you can place everywhere on your website. You can place it in the footer between blog posts, even between your pages. And it’s important you do this and remember to track where people sign up the most. If people sign up in the footer, then create more awareness about this footer and maybe make it a little bit more treated if they sign up through a blog post, well, then focus on that area it’s extremely important.

That you analyse this area, your newsletter form should also contain how often you send out and what does your newsletter contain. If you have a form that’s just says newsletter, sign up, then people don’t know what they’re signing up for. They need to know what am I getting out of this newsletter? And when you’re done with your newsletter form, it’s important you find the right platform for you. A newsletter platform is a great way for you to automate a lot of your resources and a lot of your manual processes, because who likes manual processes today?

So it’s important when you choose a newsletter platform that first of all, it can integrate your current form with this platform. Choose one where you can see in the future it won’t cost you a fortune. Because one thing that all these newsletter platforms does is that they give you a free version of their platform, but then it’s often up to maybe one thousand emails and after that it becomes extremely expensive. The reason why they do that is because when you have used it up to one thousand emails, you are very, very integrated in the system.

And changing a system is not something you just do in a day that takes a lot of time. So remember to check out, first of all, the prices of this newsletter platform. Is it okay in the future when you start growing? And then one last thing, make sure it integrates with your website, because if you choose and use the platform that has no integration to your website, you will run into manual processes in the future.

Last but not least, when you start sending out newsletters, you need to stick to your promise. If you have said on your newsletter form I am sending out once every week, then you need to stick to it, even though you have maybe only five to ten subscribers you need to keep sending out, because if you are creating value for your readers, they’ll tell about this newsletter to other people, and mouth by mouth, your newsletter will grow, but if you all of a sudden stop and send once in a while, then people don’t know what this newsletter is in the end and they will end up unsubscribing.

So that’s it for today. Thank you for listening. Remember to leave a review and remember, consistency is key to success. Let’s catch up on the next one.

Google Analytics V4 is out, should you upgrade? | Ep. #11

Wed, 10 Feb 2021 07:00:24 GMT

Hi, my name is Phillip Stemann, and I’ll be learning you how to succeed with your website.

Google has released a version 4 of their well-known Google Analytics. It’s just been released, so it’s very new, and they are still developing on it. So I will discuss today whether you should upgrade your Analytics to version 4 now or you should wait. The thing about version 4 that makes it different from the old traditional Analytics, as we know, is that in this Analytics, you don’t have views, you have sources. This means that you make a source for your website, one source for if you have an app or a source for, let’s say you have a webshop, then you would make a source for your payment gateway.

This makes it very, very easy to cross domain track over all of your different domains. Before version 4 if you had to cross domain track, which means that you track two domains as one, what you had to do in the old one was that you had to place some specific code that told Google Analytics this website, sends traffic to this website and this website maybe sends traffic back, it was not so reliable and it was very, very, very difficult to work with.

So some of the pros about this new version of Analytics is other than cross domain tracking, that you get a more precise tracking without the use of cookies. So as you know today, you’re not allowed to track a user before they have accepted your cookies. This is a law by Europe. Now you’re actually able to track the user without the use of cookies, of course, its still tracking. So the user still needs to approve that. You can track them. But this makes it a lot easier.

Some of the cons about Google Analytics version 4 is that it’s still very, very new, which means that all the plugins or the software you’re using are not necessarily ready for this version of Analytics. I personally know that a lot of the plugins and software I use, they haven’t upgraded their Analytics integration yet. They’re waiting for Google to release the final version of it, because it’s still in open beta, which means that they’re still working on it.

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They’re still making major changes. So if a plugin or a software were to make changes and integrate this Google Analytics version 4, it could be a waste of time and resources because Google Analytics could basically change it all day by day, especially because it’s in open beta. Furthermore, it’s extremely difficult to set up e-commerce tracking. And the reason why this is because there’s still no plugins supporting this. So you have to use Google Tag Manager and you need to work with something called layers.

And it’s highly difficult. You really need to be aware of this. I don’t recommend you letting go of your old Analytics just yet. However, I do recommend you upgrading your Analytics. You can actually upgrade your Analytics to version 4 without losing your old Google Analytics. This means that when you upgrade your Analytics to version 4, it will create a new entity only for version 4. So that’s completely separate from your old Analytics, which means you don’t lose your old data.

And then when you have upgraded your Google Analytics to version 4, then I actually recommend you running both Analytics on your website at the same time. This way you can easily merge over by time because it’s tough to get your old data to your new version 4 of Google Analytics. So by doing this, you will have data when you are actually deciding that now I will get rid of my old Analytics. So when all plugins and software are ready that you’re using, at least then you can easily make the switch.

And running them side by side will also make you get the new version of Analytics. And you, as a person or as a marketeer, needs to also get used to the new version of Analytics. So this is a great way without going on compromise in any way to get the new version of Analytics 4, and not losing any data for you to track your conversions, your visitors and so much more.

So that’s been it, please leave review wherever you are listening to this podcast. And remember, consistency is key to success. Thank you for listening. And let’s catch up on the next one.

The reason why I changed from Elementor to Gutenberg | Ep. #10

Wed, 03 Feb 2021 07:00:00 GMT

Hi, my name is Phillip Stemann, and I’ll be learning you how to succeed with your website. If you are using WordPress, you are probably familiar with Elementor and Gutenberg and not all say that you can compare them. However, they can be compared to some extent, I have used Elementor up to recently and I have been fantastic, happy for it. It’s a great tool. It’s so easy to design your website and do so many different things without doing any line of code.

It’s fantastic. You can build an entire website from a header to a footer, different page designs and all you have to do is drag and drop and click some buttons and change some colours and then you’re good to go. Furthermore, you can add global colours and fonts so you don’t have to needle pickle that into the different pages. Elementor one hundred percent take care of that. And furthermore, they have a ton of add-ons not developed by themselves but other plugin developers.

And this can be both a good and a bad thing because Elementor by default comes with a lot of different components like table of contents, image components, basic text components and more. But a lot of developers have seen different holes in Elementor and further by this they have developed those things they thought was missing in Elementor like integrations to different things like Twitter, Facebook and so on. The problem here becomes that for you to achieve full functionality of a website, you need add-ons to Elementor, and these add-ons are not so optimised to run on web servers that doesn’t have a lot of resources.

Download Elementor

Elementor is the most used website builder for WordPress, and there is a reason why. It’s so simple to build a beautiful website using Elementor, but be aware of your loading times.

DOWNLOAD

This means that when you’re done building your website, then the code that is compiled that needs to be run on the server is just too big. And this affects your SEO rankings. It affects your overall page experience and this is not good. So one of the reasons why I changed to Gutenberg was this. I was working on my Google PageSpeed and I just couldn’t score higher than 44 with Elementor. Now don’t get me wrong, you can score one hundred with Elementor if you have powerful servers, but that also comes with a price.

So as mentioned earlier, I know Gutenberg and Elementor is not exactly the same because Elementor is a website builder, whereas Gutenberg is a page builder. You cannot build an entire website just with Gutenberg. However, there are plugins like Qubely where you can build an entire website just using Gutenberg. Gutenberg is basically a classic editor on steroids. It has a lot of features, but it also is meant to be used for standard features like making text bold, making lists, whether it’s numbered list or normal lists.

It doesn’t have components like table of contents, which today is super important within SEO for you to break down your content and makes it easy for your reader to find exactly what the reader is looking for. So in some extent, Gutenberg limited. But the good thing about Gutenberg is that it takes no space compared to Elementor. Gutenberg is built in with the newest versions of WordPress, and I must say I’ve tried to change a lot of times, but I have just been missing all the different elements.

Download Qubely

Qubely transforms Gutenberg into a website builder, it’s as close to Elementor you get with Gutenberg. They develop their plugin fast and steady, you should check it out.

DOWNLOAD

But recently I took the change and I changed it to Gutenberg. And now if you check out my website on Google PageSpeed, you can see the scores between 95 and 100 on the computer of course, it’s 100 every time on the phone I have some minor things where I load some CSS I don’t use, but this is all tank to Gutenberg.

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The problem I had with Elementor was as mentioned earlier when I saved a page, there was just too much code. So when the page was loaded, there was too much code to be loaded and this affected my loading time, it affected my SEO rankings and of course my Google PageSpeed. But by changing to Gutenberg, I got rid of all that extra code and now it’s very, very simple, down to absolutely nothing. However, you need to know that if you change to Gutenberg, you need to have some technical skills if you want to do changes in your theme, unless you install a plugin like Qubely.

So just to sum up, Elementor is a great page builder, but if you want to achieve fast loading times with Elementor, you need to have a very powerful server. Whereas Gutenberg is built in, in WordPress and it works fantastic, loads fast and is easy to use, but you can not only with Gutenberg, build an entire website. So that’s been it. Thank you for listening. Remember, consistency is key to success. Let’s catch up on the next one.

How to succeed with the perfect internal link building strategy using WordPress | Ep. #9

Wed, 27 Jan 2021 07:00:00 GMT

Hi, my name is Phillip Stemann, and I’ll be learning you how to succeed with your website. Link building is probably one of the most forgotten strategies within SEO, it’s super easy to achieve, but people often forget it. And often when you make blog posts, which is perfect for internal link building, then you forget to go back in time and edit your blog post. But let me dig into what internal link building is.

It’s basically, if you can imagine that you have a cooking blog on this cooking blog. You have made a blog post about a sauce. You have made the full recipe of the sauce, and now you make a new blog post about a recipe of can be any recipe. But this recipe uses the sauce you made previously. So instead of duplicating the content of the recipe of the sauce, you basically just link to the sauce article and now you have your first internal link. So the difference on internal and external link building is that when you link within your site, it’s called internal link building. And when you link away from your site to another domain, it’s called external link building.

There are multiple gains by doing this. First of all, when your visitors come to your website and read your content, if they want to read more about a specific subject and you have a link, they will most likely click on the link to go and read about it to get more knowledge. And the thing is that Google sees this very positively as the user spends more time on your website.

It’s also a great way to show Google how your structure is on your website. So that’s why it’s super important that you set up your structure correct. And that you don’t link to your front page all the time or link to your contact page. You need to link to relevant pages. It’s super important if you just link like wherever. Google will not find that positively, and they will find it to be a bad user experience. And as we have mentioned earlier in these episodes, a bad user experience is bad for your SEO.

All right. If you are using WordPress, you are in for a treat. I have been using a plugin called Link Whisper. It’s a fantastic plugin to help you win in this internal link building game. There are free options because Link Whisperer costs USD 77. If you want free options, you can use either Rank Math SEO or Yoast SEO. The issue with those two are that it’s not automatic. You have to basically tell it what to link.

Download Link Whisper

Link Whisper have a free version and a premium version, I do recommend you going for the premium version, you will not regret it.

buy link whisper

They have what they call features that auto suggest you what you can interlink to. But it’s not automatic. You have to basically tell what content is important for other content and then there’s no point in it. Then you can just do it manually by yourself. What’s great about Link Whisper is that it’s completely automatic. What you do is after you buy it, you set it up and then you integrate with Google Search Console. Now you have multiple options.

First option I would recommend you is to run a link report. Basically this link report will scan all your blog posts. And what it will do is that it will look for keywords, for sentences, for phrases that matches other articles. And if you have, let’s go back to the example. You have a recipe that uses a sauce and you have an article about the sauce, then it would recommend you putting a link in the recipe that uses the sauce to the sauce article.

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And this happens completely, automatically. And it’s so easy. All you have to do is basically just click a button and then the link is inserted into your article. Furthermore, they have 404 error monitoring. This means that you will never have a link that doesn’t work. As I have mentioned earlier in these episodes, a 404 link is a very bad user experience and that affects your SEO rankings.

Furthermore, they have minor things like a domain’s report. So you can see what domains you link to the mostly hopefully it will be your own domain. They have broken links report, which shows you if you have inserted a link that’s formatted incorrectly can be that it’s missing https, or it’s missing a colon or two slashes. It can show you Orphaned posts, an Orphaned post is basically a post that has zero links to it. And that’s very bad because then you’re basically telling Google that you don’t find this blog post relevant.

Google feels like if you don’t even want to link to your own blog post, why should I even care? Furthermore, they have target keywords. Target keywords basically tells Link Whisper what you want to rank for, for this specific article. And based on that, it can recommend you other articles. You can link to this blog post to achieve better results within this target keyword. Last but not least, they have an URL changer, where you can basically change all the URL’s globally on your website.

It’s it can be relevant sometimes. For instance, if you’re changing an article, you’re changing the URL of the article, then you can basically change globally all the URLs for the old article to the new article. And last but not least, they have auto linking. Auto linking basically means that you can set it up to say whenever a keyword occurs, then you set up a link to this specific article. It can save you a ton of time, but it can be dangerous too, because you can end up with a lot of spammy links. So be careful.

All right, guys, I hope this has been helpful. I would love for you to review whereever you are listening to this podcast. And remember, consistency is key to success. Thank you for listening. And let’s catch up on the next one.

Why you should focus on link tracking – 4 tools to get started + FREE bonus tool

Thu, 21 Jan 2021 07:00:00 GMT

You have designed a fantastic digital marketing strategy or campaign, but how would you measure its effectiveness? This is where link tracking comes into the picture.

Tracking links are one of the most popular strategies used in marketing to determine the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and activities. Without link tracking, you would be clueless about where the traffic on your website is coming from.

Have you ever wondered why your traffic increased and where your new customers come from, or how effective your marketing campaign or strategy is? All your questions have one answer; link tracking. Of course Google Analytics can tell you on a high level where the traffic comes from, but link tracking narrows it down.

Why should you track links?

Link tracking can provide you with valuable analytics and data about your marketing campaigns. You can determine which of the marketing campaigns are performing best for your website and which one is not as effective so that you can improve the less effective ones or focus more on the ones that are performing.

Link tracking gives you an understanding of the activities people value more so that you can invest wisely and more effectively. Using the link tracking technique, you can yield a good ROI, even if you have a low marketing budget.

It’s always a wise idea to track your page views as well; what’s even better is getting the idea where these views are coming from. We all are aware of the power of analytics and how it helps digital marketers. Link tracking is basically providing you with these analytics so that you can plan your marketing strategy wisely.

Let’s give you an example of my own experience to make you understand better.

A few weeks ago, my blog experienced a peak in visitors, and subscriptions rose above average. Naturally, I wanted to know about the sudden boost. I visited Google Analytics to determine the peak and overall performance of my website. But I was eager to know more about the source of traffic, and because I use a Switchy.io along with Google Analytics, I was able to do it. It turned out that the main source of traffic was some specific types of tweets. So I created some similar write-ups and invested in sponsored tweets for this purpose. Since then, I’ve learned a lot, however isn’t that money spent well?

The tools which collect the most data, are the tools you want to use as data is the new oil nowadays. Therefore, one should take advantage of both link tracking and Google Analytics to analyse your website’s performance.

Who benefits from link tracking?

People related to marketing know the importance of link tracking. Here are some examples of how link tracking can help in a number of ways.

For marketing individuals working in a company

Link tracking provides valuable information to the individuals working in a company’s marketing sector, big or small. It helps take control of the marketing and in boosting conversion rates. For content marketers, link tracking gives them an idea about what type of content was most welcomed by the audience and what content falls flat.

If we talk about social media profiles, link tracking helps marketers know which profile is proving to be most beneficial, and even down to what post is endorsing the product or service the best.

You can even up your marketing game using link tracking to offer your visitors personalised experiences. Simply use the option of advance redirect while developing a tracking link, enabling you to redirect your visitor depending upon their IP location. For instance, visitors coming from France can be redirected to the French website, the possibilities are endless.

Using the tracking link, you can even send invites to visitors for personalised live chats, which can help in converting your visitors.

For marketing agencies

Link tracking helps agencies show their clients 100% accurate figures of who has visited their website. You can make it part of your multi-channel attribution analysis.

Link tracking is particularly beneficial for the ad operations team. With its help, they can determine the response rate of each campaign and make comprehensive reports to present to their clients.

For affiliate marketers

E-commerce websites nowadays use online affiliate marketers to drive traffic to their webshop and increase conversion rate. However, it is important as a webshop to know which affiliates are generating the highest number of visitors and conversions to your webshop. This analysis of individual affiliates can be done via separate tracking links given to each one of them. It is the most effective way for e-commerce website owners to know which affiliates are providing the most conversions.

Not only affiliates but also you, can see what vloggers and influencers are driving traffic to your site so that you can invest in the most influential ones next time.

Sure, link tracking can be a bit tedious and cumbersome, but it can save a great amount of money and time on marketing strategies in the long run.

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Tools to get started with internal linking

If you are a marketer, having URL shorteners by your side allows you to do so many things. For example, if someone watched your videos on YouTube and then clicks on one of your links, you can easily determine where that person has gone from YouTube and clicked which of your link, so you know what kind of products your visitors are interested in.

If you run a blog, you can retarget the people who have clicked on that specific link and show them an article they might be interested in.

If you create marketing emails, and you want to check the path which people go, you can put these little URLs inside and see where people are going on the diagram.

There are a variety of tools available in the market that will help you get started with the link tracking. However, choosing the right tool for you is the real task. I have analysed my four favourite link tracking tools so that you don’t have to go through the tedious market research.

Explore Switchy.io

Switchy.io

Switchy is one of the most powerful link management tools that helps you shorten, manage, customise and most importantly track your links so that you can retarget your visitors and boost your conversion rate. It helps you customise the appearance of a post that is shared on social networks by adding UTMs and retargeting pixels. I personally use Switchy, and I absolutely love it’s full set of functionality.

CHECK OUT SWITCHY.IO

Once you have the most clicked link in the game, you can track your users and get real-time analytics such as referrals, numbers and audience sources.

You may think that Switchy is just a basic URL shortener, but once you get to know its features, you understand it’s much more than that. Switchy enables you to customise the link completely; from description to domain and picture in a matter of minutes.

Key features

Shorten and customise your link which can help in link tracking
Helps to retarget the visitors
Offers unlimited retargeting pixels: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora, Pinterest etc.
Provides real-time analytics report
Enables link customisation
404 Redirection

Pricing

TEAM

^$ 47 _/Month

10.000 Clicks
Unlimited links
Unlimited pixels
2 custom domains
All Analytic tools
1 User

PRO

^$ 83 _/Month

50.000 Clicks
Unlimited links
Unlimited pixels
5 custom domains
All Analytic tools
5 Users

BUSINESS

^$ 119 _/Month

100.000 Clicks
Unlimited links
Unlimited pixels
15 custom domains
All Analytic tools
10 Users

Pros

More features than its competitors
Affordable
You can make your own short links and custom domains
Provides a social preview of your website
The dashboard is easy and straightforward to use
It’s very easy to invite your colleagues

Cons

Doesn’t provide a free version, you can however try it out

Verdict

Though Switchy does not offer a free version, the features it offers in their paid versions are much more affordable than the paid versions of initially free ones. The dashboard is straightforward and hassle-free to use. Sharing access with team members is a plus point of it. With the easy retargeting feature, you can retarget your visitor and convince them eventually to use your product or service.

Explore Bitly.com

Bitly.com

Bitly is unarguably the most famous link management platform that allows businesses to track their visitor source, shorten URLs, add UTM tags etc. The main reason why it is so popular is its extensive features they’ve built over the years. They do offer a free plan, however, if you require a highly customisable URL you need to upgrade to the premium version which offers a custom domain name of your own, and much more.

CHECK OUT BITLY.COM

The premium version contains features like; link retargeting. You can easily track individual links and get the analytics report displayed on the dashboard. Bitly can even measure the performance of your marketing campaign in a specific region.

Key Features

Can connect a custom domain
Straightforward dashboard with analytics display
URL retargeting
Custom URL in a premium version
Cloud-hosted

Pricing

FREE

^$ 0 _/Month

1.000 Links
1 User Seat

BASIC

^$ 29 _/Month

1,500 Branded Links
1 User Seat
1 Custom Domain

PREMIUM

^$ 199 _/Month

3,000 Branded Links
1 User Seat 1 Free Custom Domain
Plus: QR Codes, Mobile Deep Links, City-Level Data, Device-Type Tracking

Pros

Custom URL notes
Offers free version for beginners
Easy and straightforward to use
Can create customisable links

Cons

Limited features in the free version, even the basic plan is not very comprehensive.
A bit expensive for their premium plans.

Verdict

Bitly is one of the most used URL shorteners and link tracking platforms and for all the right reasons. The free initial version provides a basic understanding of it for beginners. The free version does not allow customisable domain names, but with paid versions like basic and premium, you can easily customise your domain. If you work with Google Analytics, Bitly can prove to be very useful for you.

Explore Cutt.ly

Cutt.ly

Cutt.ly is a great URL shortener and link tracker with premium features. You know what's the best part? Cutt.ly is absolutely free, okay they do have some premium plans. With an easy-to-use dashboard, you can shorten your links in no time. However, Cutt.ly does not offer a lot of integrations. If you are looking for a straightforward, easy to use and free URL shortener, then Cutt.ly might be your best pick.

CHECK OUT CUTT.LY

The reason why Cutt.ly is becoming increasingly famous is because of its comprehensive free package. However, with paid premium Cutt.ly plans you can get access to more advanced and innovative features.

Pricing

FREE

^$ 0 _/Month

Unlimited branded links
3 branded domains

SINGLE

^$ 25 _/Month

Unlimited branded links
5 branded domains

TEAM

^$ 199 _/Month

Unlimited branded links
10 branded domains

Pros

No account required to get access to features or customise URLs, however, you can get access to real-time analytics with an account.
Shortening links can require just a click as Cutt.ly also offers a free custom shortener button that you can add to your browser toolbar.

Cons

Few features are available for enterprise-level (no custom report, no bulk creation, etc.)

Verdict

If you have an e-commerce website or blog and want to know the real-time analytics of your website, then Cutt.ly is your best choice. With free services and comprehensive premium plans that have great features, this URL shortener is becoming a favourite of many.

Do this simple free trick to higher your SEO rankings for all your content | Ep. #8

Wed, 20 Jan 2021 07:00:30 GMT

Hi, my name is Phillip Stemann, and I’ll be learning you how to succeed with your website.

I was working on my Website the other day because I wanted to get a better Google page speed score, and one of my biggest problems was that Google told me to reduce my initial server response time.

This can be caused by many things, your DNS response time plugins you have installed, if you’re using any CMS system like WordPress. It can be your theme. It can be many things.

The issue for me was definitely my DNS, I was using Namecheap and Namecheaps DNS is not the fastest compared to what I did, but I will get back to that later. So what I did was that I changed to CloudFlare, many of you have probably heard about CloudFlare in many occasions. They are a big company that offers a lot of stuff for free, completely free, and they offer a lot of features for you. And I will dig a little into those features.

So what I did was I signed up for CloudFlare and CloudFlare has this amazing feature where you can basically import your whole DNS setup with one click, I had to manually add two or three records it couldn’t import. Otherwise it had imported everything perfectly and it was awesome. It was super easy to sign up and again, completely free. So basically what I did was I went from a DNS lookup time, load time, you can say from Namecheap, which is 34.44 milliseconds, all the way down to 12.89 milliseconds.

CloudFlare is definitely the fastest DNS out there on the market. WordPress.com is the closest one to they load at 15.31 milliseconds. Even Amazon, you should think Amazon was a fast loading DNS. They take 30.57 milliseconds to load. So after this change, Google didn’t request me to reduce my initial server response time anymore because it was already lowered so much. And I had looked through my plugins and basically the DNS was my issue.

I’m using WP Rocket as my cache plugin and if you are doing that so you can easily integrate with CloudFlare. CloudFlare is giving you a free CDN and WP Rocket will also take care of this. If you go to WP Rocket under addons there is a whole CloudFlare point where you basically need to fill out some information and then WP Rocket takes care of the rest. It’s super easy. So to get back to some of the features that CloudFlare gives you, they give you a ton of features and I’ll not mention all of them, but I’ll mention the most important ones.

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One of my favorite, except for the speed, of course, is that they keep your website live all the time. Let’s say that your server is crashed down. CloudFlare has a cached version of your website that they will be able to show. So basically, you will never, ever have any downtime on your website. It’s amazing. Furthermore, they give you a lot of different features you can work with in Analytics. You can see everything from where your visitors come from. Do you have anyone trying to hack your website that CloudFlare with their firewall have stopped? Do you have crawlers? What crawlers are entering your website? Is it Google? Is it Bing is it Yahoo? And how many times do they enter your website? So basically, Analytics is just to tell you what’s going on with the visitors on your website, then they have another one, which is my favorite called, speed. We all love speed. We want our website to be as fast as possible.

In speed you can get browser insights. Does your visitors experience any issues? Are there any URLS they are trying to access that does not exist? Then you need to get it fixed of course. I recently removed a language from my website and I forgot to add some redirects. So basically by using CloudFlare, I figured that out and I got some redirects set up immediately. Furthermore, you get a free CDN, as mentioned before, completely free and its the fastest CDN on the market, you get free SSL, you get free SSL everywhere on every host now, but you also get it on CloudFlare. Furthermore, you get caching, as I mentioned earlier, if your website go down, then CloudFlare has a caching of your website, they will be able to show that if your server cannot deliver the website and the last thing they have is security, they have a whole firewall system, but they also have security set up around your website to avoid hackers from wherever they are in the world to try to hack your website.

So I have now gone around some of the most important features, if you ask me, and I hope it’s been helpful for you, I would love for you to leave a review wherever you are listening to this podcast. And remember, consistency is key to success. Thank you for listening. And let’s catch up on the next one.

How to succeed with internal link building using WordPress

Tue, 19 Jan 2021 07:00:00 GMT

Are you still struggling with your website ranking on the search engines? Ever wondered why despite applying all the SEO strategies your website isn’t ranking? It is natural after you have built up your website and content, all you would want is to drive organic traffic to it and to rank it on search engines.

However, just launching a website will not automatically rank your website on search engines. It requires meticulous effort and time to make your website rank and even get it to be visible on Google. Along with applying other ranking strategies, you might have forgotten or neglected internal link building which is one way to get your website highlighted and drive traffic. It is said, about 40% of the total organic traffic comes via internal linking. Using internal link building is a great way of telling the search engines that you find your own content important.

People always debate on the complication of internal linking. If you are working strategically, you can easily rank your website higher in the search engines.

Internal link building is complex yet simple at the same time as it requires minimal effort as compared to other ranking strategies. Let’s start with a simple definition of internal link building and how it can improve your website’s ranking in the search engines.

What is internal linking?

Internal linking means that one page of a website is connected/linked to another page of the same website. In simple words, your source and target domain in the internal link will be the same.

Source: https://neilpatel.com/blog/the-complete-guide-to-internal-linking/

Here many people can’t differentiate between internal and external linking. External links are those that lead your visitors away from your website and land them into a new website. However, external links can also be useful for ranking, but your SEO strategy should begin with internal link building.

Now you might be thinking, what is the purpose of an internal link?

Basically, it serves 5 main purposes.

Helps visitors explore your website.
Helps Google understand the structure of your website.
It distributes the page authority and ranking juice across your entire website.
Increase your rankings in the search engines.
It allows your visitors to identify the connection between your different contents.

Do you know the theory behind internal link building using WordPress?

The basic theory is that it strengthens the internal network of your website using WordPress. For example, if you are a blogger, you can link your different blogs/articles together, which allows your visitors to explore your thoughts on various niches.

I own a website where I regularly publish articles. To entertain my visitors and expand their knowledge, I always interlink my articles. For example, I wrote a detailed article on Managed WordPress Hostings and then in another of my articles, there is a small section where I talk about managed WordPress hostings. This is the point where I interlink these two articles.

This helps Google to know that I find this other article important for the current article you are reading. Besides, It also allows readers to go directly to the article if they want additional knowledge about Managed WordPress Hostings.

If you want to know the secrets of how to succeed with internal link building, continue reading as I will reveal 11 acts of internal linking that will help you achieve higher rankings.

1. Create unique content on your website

As mentioned earlier, internal links are created between different contents on your website. The more content you have on your website, the greater the chance you will link other pages under the same domain.

So you can say that an internal linking strategy starts with putting a lot of content on your website. It’s like building a network, similar to the spider’s web, where one thread finely links to another. However, you need to create unique content. If you just create content to be able to achieve internal link building, it doesn’t work.

This is the first killer strategy that will help you rank in various search engines. For example, if one of your website pages ranks well on Google, while other pages do not. You can link these pages to the already ranked page. All in all, with lots of happy links you create an opportunity for your other pages to rank in the search engines too.

Google doesn’t rank just any content; it crawls your website before ranking to see your internal links, starting with the home page. These links now tell Google about your strategy, via which Google determines the flow of your website and the relationship between your content.

Source: https://neilpatel.com/blog/the-complete-guide-to-internal-linking/

Another thing to look out for is that your internal links must be relevant, as the search engines will entertain no irrelevant interlinks and your content won’t get ranked.

2. Write an optimised anchor text

Like I have mentioned before, your internal links must be relevant to the content. To do this, you can add anchor texts to link any two pages of your website.

“Anchor texts are those clickable words that hold the link of another page of your website”.

Besides, you can use keywords as anchor texts, but if you don’t want to use them, you can use any natural, unoptimised word to interlink the texts. The best part is that you don’t have to think much about the one word/phrase text. All you need is to highlight the word and just link to whatever you want to link to. Keep your anchor text simple, not artificial.

For example, sometimes you will witness the line “if you want to know more about our awesome services, click here or visit our website” at the end of a blog post. These two highlighted words are natural, so you don’t have to spend much time thinking about a relevant anchor text, you can use any word you want, but remember that the word should play a barrier between the two pages of your website. A single click on these natural anchor texts will directly take your visitors to the page where more information about the product in question is available. It will also help Google to determine the origin of your website.

You can also use images for linking, but remember that images are not as powerful as anchor texts. Though you can use the Alt attribute on an image to gain some.

3. Interlink deeply

The deeper you link, the better.

Basically, there are two types of linking that most people use without knowing that this linking doesn’t do much.

Homepage: Many people make the mistake of using their homepage to link to the text every time. This way, they get their visitors to land on their homepage every time. The visitors then do not have the opportunity to explore your website. It is better to strengthen your internal pages to increase your website’s overall SEO.

Contact us: Many people who do content marketing often make this mistake. They link to their contact page, which is unnecessary. Adding a call-to-action when selling your product is mandatory, but that doesn’t mean you directly link the contact page to your actual content.

As I mentioned above, your call-to-action should be simple and natural, not artificial, and it shouldn’t look like you intentionally inserted the links into the content, Google will punish you for it. Only link to the contact page if it makes sense.

All in all, avoid linking pages that are already linked to the top-level page on your website — main navigation menu.

The best and most natural links are those placed deep in the structure of your website.

4. Link from Cornerstone Content

It is obvious that your website has some cornerstone content.

“Cornerstone content is the heart of your website as it contains the most important information from your website that answers the common questions, entertains, and educates your audience”.

If you want to distribute link authority evenly and show Google the relationship between your pages, it is better to start linking your cornerstone content accordingly.

For example, you own a jewellery business. On your website, you may have a page titled “Antique Jewellery Information” and also a blog post titled “Most trending antique jewellery in 2020”. It makes sense if you link your blog to the cornerstone of your website — antique jewellery information. This will help the small blog posts gain link authority.

In return, the cornerstone content will also get a better rank in the search engines, as more links will be pointing back to it.

5. Don’t make your content look like spam

Using interlinks is useful to strengthen your content, but if you put too many internal links in one piece of content, your reader will get confused, or your content would look like spam.

So if you want a better SEO ranking, try to link only where necessary. You don’t need to add the internal link every time you use anchor text, as it would be the worst experience for visitors to land on the same page every time they click on the link.

You don’t need to stuff your content with too many similar links. Use few but relevant links. Be strategic in your selection while linking your content internally.

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6. Provide value to the reader

Your readers are your priority. It is good to provide your visitors with authentic yet useful information. Adding internal links indiscriminately for ranking purposes is not good practice. If you provide helpful information, you will bind your readers more closely to your content.

As long as your internal links are engaging and visitors find them interesting, they will stay on your website longer and have a better experience on your website. If they find interesting information, they will spend a little more time to stop reading your content and click on the relevant link to get additional knowledge.

When you link your content, you also show search engines that the information you provide is relevant and important.

For example, if you have a blog about food and share cooking recipes there. In one blog post, you share a complete recipe for a sauce, while in the next blog, you use the same sauce. Here you don’t share the same recipe again but link these 2 blogs together, and the reader will go directly to the other page for the recipe.

So you can say that valuable links and references are useful for the search engines as well as for the reader. So you need to be very careful of the information you provide. However, internal linking helps your SEO, but it is also helping the readers.

7. Guide user experience

When working on the structure of your internal linking, think of your readers first. The best practice if you ask me is to browse as a visitor. Build internal links that you would prefer as a reader. Sometimes your website may have visitors who don’t know where to click for more information.

Your proper internal link structure will help your visitors understand your content. If you think of your visitor first, the interaction between your internal links will flow naturally.

Always remember that your visitors should be your priority because they are the ones who interact with your website, and if they are well guided on your website, they will keep coming back.

8. Manual link building using WordPress

WordPress offers you many link tools like internal link juicer, interlink manager and others. But, if you want to have 100% control, manual link building is the best choice for you. All you need to do is use the advanced linking option; you can now search for the post and link it to your content.

Source: https://www.wpexplorer.com/best-practices-internal-linking/

For manual linking, you don’t have to do much as you can see in the image above. All you have to do is select the anchor text, and you will be given the options of the content you can link to. Select one of them that is relevant to your content and anchor text, and you are done.

As mentioned earlier, do not link your homepage or contact page as this will distract your visitors, only link to deep and relevant content.

9. Link building plugins for internal link building using WordPress

Along with other features WordPress offers you to download SEO plugins that will help you win the internal link building game, if you don’t want to do it manually.

Link Whisper

Rank Math

Above mentioned are 2 examples of plugins that work best using WordPress. These plugins are smart enough to automatically link your keywords with the specific link.

Here I am using Link Whisper for instance:

Here you can see that Link Whisper is automatically suggesting the related content with the selected keyword. While working with plugins you don’t need to do extra work. Sometimes these plugins will suggest content which you have totally forgotten about. Therefore, if you want some advanced features and help win the internal link building game, I would suggest you find a plugin that fits your needs.

10. Use DoFollow links

If you want to rank higher in the search engines, always use DoFollow links for link building, never use nofollow links as search engines won’t count them for ranking as it tells the search engines you don’t find it important.

11. Image links must-have Alt attributes

Images having the Alt tag helps the search engines explain what the image is of, which makes it easier for the search engine to rank the image. You have to ensure that you are linking the relevant alt-texts with your images.

You can use different tools such as Image SEO Optimizer if you have several images on your website. This link building plugin will help you to create relevant image names and alt-texts automatically.

Conclusion

If you want your website to rank higher in the search engines, you need to follow all SEO strategies along with internal linking. This will rank your content higher and help your readers get as much relevant information as possible. If you work strategically on link building with WordPress and other strategies, no one can stop you from ranking higher in the search engines. I personally use Rank Math SEO as my SEO plugin and Link Whisper for link building, these link building plugins work best for me and provide the best possible relevant suggestions.

Yoast SEO also works very well when you need to work on your internal link building as they give you great suggestions, and it also works great with Link Whisper.

If you want to read more about Rank Math SEO being the best SEO plugin in my opinion, you can read my 13 reasons why you should use Rank Math SEO, I also compare it to Yoast SEO.

FAQ

Why is internal link building imperative?

If you want to successfully rank on the search engines and bind your readers with your engaging content, it is necessary to build internal links on your website.

What is broken link building?

Broken link building is when you link between pages that doesn't exist. This affects your rankings extremely negative so make sure you have no pages linking to pages which doesn't exist. You can assure this by using a free tool like Siteliner.com.

What are the benefits of internal link building?

- Your visitors can explore your website easily.
- It’s great for your SEO.
- Grabs your visitors on your website for a more extended period.
- Helps Google to crawl and understand the structure of your website.
- Improves your website structure.

Does internal link building affect the bounce rate on your website?

Internal link building helps in minimizing the bounce rate on your website. If you are linking engaging and relevant content together, the visitors will tend to stay longer on your page.

Should you use a link building service?

No, absolutely not, if we go a couple of years back, there was a huge benefit in using a link building service, as they manually found high quality links, and had guidelines to follow. Today the opportunity is right by your hand, use a tool for this, it's cheaper and guarantees better results as manual handling can bring mistakes. There are a ton of tools out there with step by step guides to help you succeed and win the internal link building game for your niche.

WordPress Staging environment — Should you use it for your WordPress website?

Thu, 14 Jan 2021 07:00:00 GMT

Ever wondered what you would do if you update a plugin or a theme on your WordPress website and suddenly you get the white screen of death? If you’re smart you have backups of your website, however you’re now in a situation where you can’t update your plugin and theme without your website being down until you fix it. And can you imagine the level of difficulty or confusion your visitors will face in the meantime? All this will end up bad for your visitors and even your SEO as your website is basically useless until you’ve fixed the issue.

It is expected that after updating any plugin, you might face some problems because you don’t know how this plugin goes with your WordPress website. The main question is, how would you overcome this problem? Or is there any solution to this problem?

Luckily, creating a staging environment for your WordPress website is the best solution to this problem. Many smart website owners use this process to avoid mishaps with their website. At the same time, this might be a new terminology to you. To make it a little clearer, let’s briefly take a look at what it means to have a staging environment for your WordPress website.

WordPress staging environment
A staging environment is an environment where you test and experience any new updates on your website to check how it will work with your original website. More often it is done on an offline clone website that doesn’t affect your original website and is commonly called staging website. Basically it’s a clone of your live website, this is just placed on a different server hidden away from the public.

For instance, if a plugin on your website shows you that a new update is available and you want to update it, but without creating any hassle for your visitors. Then the best way before updating any plugin is to follow an extra step, that step is to update the plugin on your staging environment to see the effect of this update. This will show you what other changes you need to make, in order to make your website work with this new version of the plugin. The same applies for a theme update.

Who needs WordPress staging?

Everyone who is serious about their website or business should be using a staging website. You can always safely build pages and blog posts without a staging website, but everyone needs to update their plugins to stay up-to-date and secure. In this case you need WordPress staging. Remember a plugin with a bug in it, can lay down your whole website.

Being humans, we are always prepared with a backup for such situations, but you still need to solve the issue as not updating your plugins isn’t an option.

Shutting down a website (even for a few moments only) to restore a backup will badly affect your traffic. We have many famous e-commerce websites like WooCommerce, WP Rich Snippets, and others. These are the one of the top e-commerce websites, and research shows that WooCommerce powers around 42% of all the e-commerce websites.

Websites like these who face millions of visitors at the same time face many crashes but what is the reason that we never heard any complaint or reviews about their crashes? Why do these websites never go offline?

Most probably, the reason is that the developers of these websites might be using a staging environment along with a frequent backup to make an easy experience for their customers. Because without any staging environment they can’t experiment with new updates, as sometimes new updates will result in a bug and might turn away your visitors.

Should you use a staging environment for your website?

It depends on the complexity of your website if you need a staging environment or not. Besides, it also depends on how often you update your plugins, themes and more. Moreover, the more visitors you have on your website, the bigger is the recommendation for you to use a staging environment to make changes.

If you are running a small website or a blog, then it doesn’t ruin you if your website is down for a couple of minutes. However, if you want to add some additional features, which will make your website more complex, you should think about doing this in a staging environment. E-commerce websites are one of the examples of complex websites. So, in that case, it’s highly recommended using a staging environment.

So far, I have briefly discussed the WordPress staging and who needs it the most. Now let’s see why you need to create a WordPress staging site.

Check out my Google Story for the article

I show you the important things in a short format.

Reasons why I use a WordPress staging environment

As discussed above, staging sites are mirror websites. It is widely used while updating the pre-existing sites to ensure that your visitors won’t get affected while you make changes to your website. You can also use this feature while creating a new website to check how it looks when the new website goes live.

I have always used a staging environment for my projects. While working with WordPress staging, I have come across to different experiences which I am sharing below:

It gave me the area to troubleshoot the plugin’s issues without affecting my live website.
This allowed me to make many major changes without taking any risks and putting my website in maintenance mode.
The best part is while updating my website I am not worried about my website’s SEO because I am experimenting on my clone website, so my original website is still live and accessible to the visitors hassle-freely.
In the end, I always come up with a better version of my website, as I have been able to work in peace.

Besides, offering so many benefits, I want to highlight a few things using a staging website which I don’t like:

The staging site is not always an exact copy of your live website. However, it gives you the closest results.
When you push your changes from staging to live, you often override if you’ve made any changes on your live site.
If you have comments or subscribers on your live site, you don’t have on your staging site, then remember to export them first.
Some hosting companies charge extra for staging websites.

Fortunately, I know how to alleviate these potential issues, so I consider them minor and have methods to get around them, as explained above.

I hope you are all clear of how a staging environment works. Now let’s talk about the ways you can create your own WordPress staging.

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How to create a staging environment for your WordPress website

Before I proceed further, please keep in mind that the creation of a WordPress staging depends on the purpose and your hosting. If you want to use it for testing or training, you can create it in any way you want. But, if you want a WordPress staging for higher purposes like adding new pages, revising code and design changes, or implementing WordPress updates, you have to be more specific about selecting the method as in that case you want an identical copy of your live website.

Here I am going through 3 different methods, on how you can create an identical version of your WordPress website:

Manual method.
Work with your managed WordPress hosts.
Use a WordPress plugin.

Setting up a WordPress staging website manually

Pro-tip: If you are a beginner, then this method is not for you. However, this method works better with advanced WordPress users because of having knowledge of MySQL database operations.

I usually prefer the manual method because it gives me total control of the staging setup. Let’s see how this method works:

For doing, it manually, I first create a subdomain via my cPanel, if you don’t have a cPanel you have something similar, cPanel is just the most used. This subdomain allows me to create a staging website in a separate folder without affecting the primary databases and other contents.
After clicking it, I name that subdomain and then click create.
The next step is followed by creating a dedicated FTP account which will restrict me to only staging environments and prevent accidental modifications to the live site.
A new FTP account is a single step away, fill all the required fields and click create but remember keep the directory same to the sub-domain to get direct access to the specified directory only.
Now, I am all set with a sub-domain. I start copying data from the original website to the staging environment.

Note: this is an additional step and is optional. I follow this step to avoid any accidental changes for the original website.

Once I finish, my staging website is ready for all types of testing and changes without affecting the original one.

Tip: Remember to discourage search robots to index your staging website as you will be hit by duplicate content by Google.

Setting up WordPress staging using managed WordPress hosting provider

If you are a beginner and want a quick and easy process for creating WordPress staging, then managed WordPress hosting is the best fit for you.

If you want to know more about managed WordPress hosting, I have analysed the top tier, you should check it out.

Kinsta
Flywheel
WP Engine
Presslabs

Above mentioned are some of the best managed WordPress hostings that offer you a one-click staging or pre-made staging areas. All you have to do is log in to your hosting account and create a new staging website on your account.

Here your WordPress host also keeps a backup for your staging website, so you never have to worry about breaking the staging website, and have a quick way to reset it.

Unlike manual settings, you don’t have to create folders and do a lot of manual work. All the things are pre-set with managed WordPress hosts. You just have to copy the original website’s data, test your new changes, and then instantly push your changes to your live website with just a single click.

I am a frequent user of Kinsta, so here I am sharing the procedure on creating a WordPress staging with Kinsta:

I select the website first that needs to be cloned then click on the change environment button in the drop-down bar, and then I select “staging environment”.
Click on the “create staging environment” button, and then wait a couple of minutes for Kinsta’s system to create your staging environment.
I have enabled SSL on my live website so it will also enable the SSL on my staging website. Then I have to wait 10-15 mins while my staging website is creating. After that, I have my separate control panel with my connection information, backups, DNS, tools, and plugins for my staging environment.

The URL of my staging website will be something like this: https://sitename-staging.kinsta.cloud.

Now I can get started working on whatever changes I want to do, and when I’m done, I simply press “Push Staging to Live”, and after a couple of minutes, my changes are live on my live website.

Create a WordPress staging website by using a plugin

This is one of the easiest methods compared to the other 2. The WordPress admin area allows you to install a plugin that will automatically handle copying the data and information between your live website and your staging sites. Here are the 3 best, I’ll dig into each one of them:

All-in-one WP migration
WP staging
WP stagecoach

All-in-one WP migration

This is a simple plugin that allows you to export a copy of your website. Steps followed for this are mentioned below.

Download and install the plugin
Go to the plugin in the admin menu
Export from the admin area
Save the export files
Import them to a newly installed subdomain, as described earlier in this article

WP staging

It is a go-to staging plugin for creating WordPress staging sites. WP staging makes it easy for everyone to create access to their staging site. The procedure is as follows.

Download and Install the staging plugin
Click staging
Create a new staging site
Name your staging site
You will see a sub-directory for it under your WordPress website.
Click on “start cloning”.
Once the process is done you can use the admin credentials to log into the staging website.

WP staging is one of the fastest ways of creating a WordPress staging website.

WP stagecoach

This plugin will allow you to create the staging web within no time. WP Stagecoach is great in their communication and is extremely simple to use. I’ve made a small guide for using WP Stagecoach, as a great WordPress staging plugin, the step by step guide is as follows:

Install the plugin
Click on ride the stagecoach.
Select which changes you want to import.
Wait for the staging website to come into action, and WP Stagecoach has done it’s job.

With this plugin, you can also secure your staging sites by setting a password.

Note: This plugin runs on its own server. So you might encounter a difference in the environments of both original and the staging website which might lead to technical difficulties.

Conclusion

It’s evident that everyone wants a stress-free experience while working on their website. That’s why many website owners use WordPress staging, where they can experiment and test many new changes and updates without affecting the live website. In my opinion, using WordPress staging is a smart choice, and I am personally using a staging environment for my website. Overall you will also see a peak in your quality for your website, the reason being you can work more calmly with your website knowing that whatever you do, doesn’t affect your website poorly in any way.

So if you don’t use a staging environment for your website today, I would strongly recommend you getting started. And it’s not only WordPress websites, any type of website requires a staging environment to keep the quality up. If you have any questions on how you set up your staging environment let me know.

FAQ

What is WordPress staging?

The process of creating a duplicate/replica of your live website to perform and experiment with different changes and updates is known as WordPress staging. This staging environment will allow you to safely update any plugin or add any new feature on your website without affecting your live website's integrity.

Is WordPress staging easy for beginners?

There are several ways to create WordPress staging for your website. But If you are a beginner and want the simplest and easiest way to start your staging environment, then set up your staging website using a plugin or a managed WordPress hosting provider. These are the easiest yet quickest ways of creating a clone of your website.

What are the disadvantages of using WordPress staging?

If you’re not careful you will delete data, and you need to expect everything you do to take a bit longer as you need to test all of your changes. You will also encounter the comments and subscribers being overridden, so remember to export/import them before you push your staging website to your live website.

Update your content pieces to not loose any traffic | Ep. #7

Wed, 13 Jan 2021 07:00:00 GMT

Hi, my name is Phillip Stemann, and I’ll be learning you how to succeed with your website.

When you create content today, you put a lot of effort into it as it needs to be unique, but everyone else is doing the same. So it’s extremely important for you to stay updated on all your content pieces, not only a blog post, but also if you create e-books or courses or other types of content that ranks on Google, you need to stay updated. There are many ways to do this easily. You could weekly go through your blog posts and make sure that all of them are up to date.

But this is a very, very time-consuming task.

And I would say that it definitely depends on your industry, because some are in an industry that doesn’t develop as fast as others. So if you are in an industry where the development might not be so fast and you update your blog post every week, it might be a huge time waste for you unless it’s working for you, then, of course, keep on doing it. Otherwise, I would not recommend you doing it.

However, if you are in an industry where it’s updated constantly, then you need to update your content as well, constantly.

And you do this by going through your blog posts. Very simple. The way I do it is whenever I create a piece of content, I make a reminder to myself. After three months I need to circle back and look at this piece of content. Is still relevant? Do I need to update it in any way? Is any of the data points I’m using outdated? Do I need to update it? It can be that I’m talking about a plugin that doesn’t exist any more.

Well, then I need to find a replacement plugin. Unless the whole article is about that plugin, then I should take the article down as this article can hurt my other articles. It can also be that I’m referring to a company that doesn’t exist any longer. Well, again, if the whole article is about this company, then the article needs to go down. If it’s just part of the article, then I should change that part where I talk about this company and find a more relevant company.

This is extremely important to do as a bad user. Experience results in visitors, not reading your blog post and when visitors go to your website, and they fast go out again because they don’t find it relevant, Google’s see’s this very bad. Another thing you can experience is for 404 errors, 404 errors basically means that you have links that goes to a page that doesn’t exist any longer. This is again extremely bad user experience and this will also affect your Google rankings.

The way you can come around this is by using a of course, you can do it manually, but you can also use a tool. There are a lot of free tools out there. So don’t worry. I personally use Rank Math, their 404 tool is great. You can manually run reports, but they will also report to you if they find a 404 link, and then you just need to replace it immediately. It’s so important. Furthermore, the last thing I want to talk about is content Decay.

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Content decay basically means that your content is declining in traffic over the last 12 months. This means that let’s say you have written a fantastic blog post and it’s performing so well put all of a sudden it’s started to decline in visitors amount and the reason can be many.

But you should definitely check this blog post out. Why is it declining?

And often it’s because you’re using data points or similar things you’re talking about. It’s just not relevant any more. So people go to this blog post, and they read some, but then they found out that you didn’t use anything relevant for this article or for this moment. Maybe the whole industry has changed. So you need to be aware of this. And there are two ways you can do it. You can either do it manually or you can use a tool.

The manual way is completely free, but it’s not as optimised as the tool. The manual ways that you go to Google Analytics and you take a list of your pages and then you compare them the last six months to the six months prior to that, have they declined a lot in traffic or do you see other similarities? Then you should definitely check it out. And then, of course, after your changes, keep monitoring these blog posts. Are they still declining in traffic?

Then you need to circle back and look through it again. Otherwise, you have done a great job. The other part is using a tool. You can use a tool like ClickFlow. It’s a fantastic tool, especially for this. ClickFlow will basically keep an eye on all your blog posts. Of course, after you have updated the blog posts, they will still monitor it to make sure that your changes are doing what you want it to do, increase traffic again.

So that’s been it. I hope it’s been helpful for you. I would love some feedback if you have any. And I would love if you could write me a review, wherever you are listening to this podcast, I’m reading all reviews. And remember, consistency is key to success. Let’s catch up on the next one.

7 powerful ways to get customer testimonials

Tue, 12 Jan 2021 07:00:00 GMT

So you have started a small business and are all set to touch the sky. You would want your business to flourish by leaps and bounds; however, deep in your mind, you know that it would require legitimate struggle.

Sure, you have an exceptional product, but not necessarily a proper sales team to promote your product. And as a small business, you really need to be creative in your marketing as you don’t have a huge budget or team to do it for you.

This is where customer testimonials come into the equation.These testimonials help in endorsing your product or service even more than a sales team ever could.

I always say, that when a person enters your website, it’s a prospect to become a customer. As many of these leads you can turn into paying customers the better, and here you need to see the effectiveness of using testimonials. One extra customer review can be the turning point of converting your leads into becoming a buyer.

What is a testimonial?

Testimonials are recorded or written statements that prove your product trustworthy in the eyes of potential customers. They help in strengthening the reputation of your business and brings credibility to your name.

They give your website visitors a push to buy your service or product.

This means that testimonials are 89% better than any marketing content at increasing conversion rates and generating more sales.

According to a study conducted by Zendesk, positive testimonials affect 96% of the customers’ buying decisions. This is a considerable number.

I see many brands who today still don’t take advantage of building credibility by using testimonials. All brands, whatever category can benefit from this. Turning a prospect into a buyer by using testimonials including examples can be a very cheap way of doing it.

What is the difference between a testimonial and a review?

Testimonials are collected from the customers who have a good relationship with the business and good things to say about it. The main difference between a review and testimonial is that testimonial is the more detailed statement from customers about their experience with your service or product. Whereas, reviews consist of a general overview of the customer’s experience, and it can include one or two sentences or even some words. Businesses often cherry-pick loyal customers to write testimonials because they know they’ll only put up the positive testimonials.

The other notable difference is where testimonials and reviews appear. Testimonials generally are given by the customers to the company directly. On the other hand, reviews are given on third-party websites.

Finally, there is a huge content variation between testimonials and reviews. Since the company directly asks testimonials to the happy customers, they are almost always positive, whereas reviews can be both positive and negative.

What impact do testimonials have on growing your business?

The important message a testimonial conveys to your potential customer’s subconscious is that ‘Look, this person has tried this product or service and loved it.’, and this is how testimonials bring credibility to your website and thus help increase conversion rates and trust. It’s a huge advantage if you can get the majority of your customers to share their experience with you. It builds credibility, and if they can share examples of what they liked, and maybe disliked it makes you better as a person and business.

Would you buy an unfamiliar product from a new business? You would want to know what the users of this product have to say about it, whether the users are satisfied or not. This is where a testimonial comes into the picture. It makes the site more trustworthy and makes the purchase from it feel less risky for the new customers. It reassures new visitors that your product is trust-worthy and is tested by previous customers, and is, therefore, safe to purchase.

A high-quality and elaborate testimonial is all you need to attract your potential customers and boost your small business sales.

What to look for in a testimonial?

The quality is unarguably more important than the number of testimonials. Before discussing how to get more testimonials, let’s first talk about the essential characteristics a testimonial should have.

Collect honest and authentic testimonials only

Everyone can differentiate between a fake and an honest testimonial. It is highly unethical to make up a fake testimonial. It will make your website less trustworthy, and your business will lose its credibility altogether. A testimonial that shows your product as a miracle solution will only bring scepticism from the potential customers. Therefore, it’s a wise idea to never publish ‘too good to be true’ kind of testimonials.

Make testimonials specific

A testimonial that has specific data and details makes it more compelling. Let’s look at the two statements to illustrate this fact:

‘The best plugin I’ve ever used.’

‘This social proof plugin helps us increase our conversion rate by 50% over a month.’

You see, both the statements are super positive; however, the second one seems to be more effective. Why? It’s because the second one did provide specific details that help the reader relate to this statement. It helps your potential customers understand exactly how your product could be beneficial to them.

A testimonial that has specific data and details makes it more compelling.

Let’s look at the two statements to illustrate this fact:

‘The best plugin I’ve ever used.’

‘This social proof plugin helped us increase our conversion rate by 50% over a month.’

Testimonials should portray what makes your product so unique

Most of the buyers read testimonials at the decision stage. They probably have narrowed down their vendor options at this point. Therefore, it is essential for a testimonial to show how your company is different from the competitors. What features do you have that others lack? Convince your potential customer that your product has everything they need.

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The 7 ways to get you those customer testimonials

No matter what business you run, every customer would want to know about other customers’ experiences before investing in your business, which is completely fair. Why would one risk their hard-earned money on an unreliable product?

Here’s how you can generate high-quality testimonials to boost your conversions.

1. Offer free things

One of the good ways to make the first few customers give positive testimonials is to announce freebies or make special offers. You can offer discounts for a limited time only to customers who are new to your services or product. All you need to do is to request a testimonial in return.

Suppose you have launched new software recently and you need to attract new customers. All you must do is offer a free trial period in return for a positive testimonial. These free trial services will lure new customers into trying out your product because why would someone not choose a free trial for an otherwise paid software in return for some words?

All the people who have signed up for a free trial should give a response to some follow-up queries. The question customers need to respond to include:

Did you have a great time using our software?

How did you find out about our free trial offer?

Please elaborate the reasons for not choosing the paid or upgraded version?

These questions will also help you target the shortcomings in your product and help you make it better.

2. Reward a customer who give testimonials

One of the best ways to collect happy customers’ testimonials is to offer them a chance of winning a prize. The prize could be anything from vouchers, coupons or discounts, for the ones who provide honest testimonials. Just put your creative caps on and design exciting giveaways or prizes to attract the customers and encourage them to write a few words about your product or service.

If you have a customer loyalty program, use it to get more testimonials. Offer your customer additional points in return for an honest testimonial. This will encourage them more to share their point of view about your product. Giving these extra perks will provide your customers with an incentive to write a few words for you and engage more with your brand.

Let’s face it; no one would want to invest their time in something that has no gain. Providing these offers and freebies is a win-win for both the customer and you.

3. Create your business’ social media profiles

There is almost no one who hasn’t heard of Facebook. For the past few years, it has evolved from an interacting social website to an impeccable marketplace. You can use this platform to generate testimonials for your product or service. What you need to do is to just create your business’ Facebook page and set it as a local business.

Facebook provides an easy platform for both customers and researchers to give and read effective testimonials. You don’t even have to put an extra effort to convince people to give testimonials.

There are other social media platforms too, which you can use to generate testimonials. LinkedIn is a great social media platform for receiving testimonials. Add your services or products to the company’s page and then request a recommendation for these products and services.

What’s more effective than a customer saying nice words about your product on a testimonial video? Encourage your loyal customers to add videos praising your service or product to their YouTube account or mention your brand in any of their videos. You can even create a playlist of your customer’s testimonials on your website.

Although Twitter does not have a recommendation feature like Facebook, you can still gather words of praise and testimonials from there. You can always save the tweets and incorporate them into your website’s highlight. Each time someone gives your product a positive comment, just ‘favourite’ it and keep these in an organised form like in the testimonial page of your website.

Use your social media game wisely to generate some authentic testimonials.

4. Get creative

There are various ways that can convince your customers to leave a testimonial. All you need to do is find creative ways to make people do it. Make testimonials an interesting thing to write and read. Ask interesting yet relevant questions to your customers. ‘What is the most interesting feature of our software?’.

Also, by using open-ended questions, you can avoid one-word answers from your customers. Select those questions that not only shows their opinion about working with you but also their story about their pain that caused them to search for a solution. And how and why they chose your product or service. What was their experience along the way of using your product or service?

Other than prizes and awards, you can also send your customers ‘thank you’ cards and mails, or even discounts on their next orders to make them feel more connected with your website.

5. Get your timing right

Initially, analyse your customer’s journey with your product or service to determine the exact time to request a testimonial. Ideally, a testimonial should be asked right after the customer experience success using your product and is happy with it. Customers do not usually hesitate to take out time to write a testimonial when they are delighted by the product and its results.

For example, if you work with clients, then the perfect time to ask for a testimonial is after your client achieves their goals. Another good opportunity to ask for a testimonial from your client is in the end of a quarter.

6. Get listed

Reviews and testimonials are a crucial part in shaping the reputation of your business. Specifically, sites that display online ratings, reviews and testimonials significantly impact the visitor’s purchase decision. These local listing sites include Yelp, Google Maps, Yahoo local, etc. The customer testimonials on these websites will not only help you gain more customers but also help with your SEO and online presence. These business listings enhance your business’ visibility and thus help to increase search rankings.

To rise up your local search ranking effectively claim or create your business on as many review sites as possible. It’s always about spreading your business everywhere, as I’ve mentioned earlier with social media, and the same occurs for review sites.

Also, it’s always a wise idea to search for your own niche listing websites and create a profile on these websites. Get your website highlighted there as well because customers are more likely to visit a specific niche listing website if they want a certain product or experience any problem.

7. Try different types of testimonial

Who say testimonials have to be in the written form only? They could be audio or in video format. Sure, getting these audio and video testimonials does take more work, but they feel far more personal and authentic than the written ones. This is why they are regarded as more effective than their written counterparts.

Not only do these kinds of video testimonials look good on your website, but they also attract more audiences on social media. Remember the quote ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’ (it’s a video in this case).

Video testimonials are far more engaging than written ones. The visitors will stay on your site more, and hence the chances of them purchasing your product will increase significantly. These testimonials will also increase the SEO value and thus increase traffic to your site.

Arrange a personal interview with them, and don’t forget to follow the below-written guidelines for a great video testimonial:

Prep them first: Creating content before getting in front of the camera would be easier and quicker.

Keep it simple: Three questions would be enough. Remember, you’re making a testimonial, not a documentary.

Edit it properly: Remove the irrelevant chatter and keep your testimonial limited to the point.

Take this video as an example and make the most attractive video testimonial ever!

Testimonial page

After the collection of the adequate testimonials, there comes a step where you’ll have to organise them in one easy-to-reach page. You can also use the testimonial to back up the features of your product or service. Collect the testimonial that praises a particular service and add it on the page where that specific feature is described.

The main reason for creating a testimonial page is to make your testimonials visible to your customers on one page. This saves your customers time to search the internet about your product and help them make a decision easily.

Don’t forget to credit the original website you have derived the testimonial from. Always ask for permission before using testimonials from a listing site. Once you have the permission, flaunt your testimonial page as much as you can.

However, don’t just add your testimonials to one page, use them everywhere. Share them on LinkedIn, Instagram, use them in blog posts as quote testimonials. You have you understand that all these testimonials confirms everything you mention your product or service. By sharing it on Instagram, you might get mentions and drive in traffic. See your happy customers as ambassadors for your brand.

Analysis

Remember testimonials is data, you should conduct an analysis hereof. You get a huge insight in how your customers see your product or service. Whether its previous customers or new customers. As a business owner it’s important you reflect of this to become an even better business owner.

Do you see different comments over and over in the reviews, then maybe you should work on that part, or embrace it, if you see the mentions are positive. By going through this data you’ll hopefully also get ideas of where you need to take your brand to, what are being mentioned the most?

Conclusion

Getting testimonials from satisfied customers is an essential part of the marketing strategy in 2020. Simply claiming that you are the best is not enough to impress your potential customer to try your service or product. This is where testimonials come to the rescue. They not only bring credibility to your product or service, but also reassures your customers that they are purchasing a quality product.

Customer testimonials not only help to position your company in a reputable and positive light but are also effective in explaining how beneficial your service or product can be. Having a customer testimonial section will help in earning the trust of your potential customers. Therefore, the more the testimonials, the more trustworthy your website will appear.

Bonus tip: Using influencer testimonials or testimonials from bloggers can be an awesome idea, if you can get them to share their testimonial with their target group. Otherwise, just getting the testimonial from they create even more credibility as they’re likely between names that people know, and they are a great voice and ambassadors to have on your side.

There is no better marketing strategy than testimonials; you just need to use them wisely.

FAQ

How do you get customer testimonials?

There are a lot of strategies which will gain you valuable testimonials. Some main strategies include:
- Offer discounts and freebies
- Award the customers
- Work on your social media game
- Get more creative when asking for testimonials
- Ask for a testimonial when the time is right
- Get yourself listed in various listing websites
- Try different testimonial formats other than the written form

Where can I get a testimonial?

The best way to request a testimonial depends largely on your business and customers. You can get testimonials via:
- An email
- A text message
- Your website
- In-person
- Receipts
- Social media
- Events etc.

How do you do a testimonial?

Writing a comprehensive testimonial requires some simple steps to follow like:
1. Determine the story you want to tell
2. Ask specific questions
3. Keep it conversational and short
4. Use customer's name and picture (with permission)

Can you write your own testimonial?

It's always unethical to write a fake testimonial; however, with the customer's permission, you can write a testimonial for them and then upload it with their approval.

Is word of mouth a testimonial?

Of course, it is, and it's one of the best types of testimonials. Mouth advertising is the most reliable of all, embrace this!

Best social proof plugins for your WordPress website – 4 powerful plugins

Thu, 07 Jan 2021 07:00:02 GMT

It’s a Saturday night, and you’re walking down the street for a fantastic weekend dinner. There are eight restaurants in a line where six have people eating, and two are completely empty. Where do you prefer to go? The ones that have people in it or the completely empty ones?

You and most people would choose the ones that have people in it without even thinking much. Is it just a coincidence that people would like to try the ones that have customers in them? No! It is because of the psychological phenomena known as social proof.

What is social proof?

Simply put, social proof is a proven concept that individuals follow the masses’ actions. Its human psychology to follow a particular behaviour if masses are following it.

Let’s talk about the above example again. You would prefer the restaurant having customers because you assume that they would have excellent food to serve or the empty ones aren’t as good. Now that’s social proof!

Social proof is not a new concept. There are many studies conducted like the Solomon Asch conformity experiment that proved this human behaviour.

What is the importance of social proof in digital marketing?

The restaurant example I’ve given shows how much social proof can be effective if applied to the online setting. When you are shopping in the store physically, you have an option to compare the product directly and choose the better one. You can feel the quality of the products or see the fits and cuts.

However, when it comes to shopping online, you have two options either to trust the seller or to rely on the opinion of the masses. Say you want to buy a shirt online. Like most people, you would also consider the reviews and other persons’ experience before checking out. It’s not only you, but around 92% of the online customers look at the reviews of a product before buying one.

There is a study that states that 50% of the people watch the reviews of a product they intend to buy from their smartphones even when shopping in stores.

Source: https://www.bigcommerce.com/what-influences-a-purchase-decision-infographic/

In fact, customers trust product reviews 12 times more than the sales copy provided by the sellers.

How can social proof be used in marketing?

There are many ways social proof can be used in your marketing plans. Some tactics are stated below.

Positive reviews

What mattress would you prefer to buy from Amazon, the one with 4.9 ratings or the one with 2? Reviews are the most widely familiar form of social proof; therefore, they affect customers’ buying decisions the most.

Around 88% of people trust the reviews on the selling website as much as recommendations. In fact, people do not only count on the first review, but they check 2-3 review websites before deciding to purchase.

Source: https://www.brightlocal.com/research/local-consumer-review-survey/

So it’s up to you how to use the positive reviews in your website’s favour. If you got a good rating on some review websites, use it in your marketing and add it to your website. The takeaway lesson here is to try to get as many positive reviews as possible, and when you get enough, don’t be shy to flaunt them.

Testimonials

Just saying your product or service is excellent, won’t impress the customer more than a testimonial from a person who tried your product or service and has a positive experience. The reason why testimonials are so effective is that they add value to your product.

Endorsements from celebrities and influencers

Customers trust public opinions more than the words from the brands; similarly, words of appreciation from an influential person have a more significant effect than the public’s view.

Influencer marketing is proving to be very profitable as businesses are making almost $6.50 of revenue for each $1 spent on influencer marketing.

Social media following

People follow the crowd; it’s human nature. When they see a group of people doing something, they are likely to join the bandwagon. This is how your social media accounts support your business. People are likely to join when they see a large number is already a member. This will increase your business exposure and hence the conversions.

Recognitions and awards

People tend to buy products from the ones they trust. Just saying that your brand is trustworthy is certainly not enough; you need a shred of evidence to support your statement. That is why recognition and awards are an impeccable form of social proof. The more recognisable the recognition source is, the more value it will add to your business.

What is a social proof WordPress plugin?

WordPress is unarguably the most popular CMS, and many of the e-commerce websites are made using it. Every e-commerce site requires social proof. These social proof WordPress plugins help increase your website conversions by displaying the recent sale notifications to your customers.

Let’s have a look at the best social proof WordPress plugin.

Top 4 powerful Social Proof plugins

Explore WiserNotify

WiserNotify

People usually get influenced by what other people have to say about your business. WiserNotify performs this task for you. It displays potential customers what other people are doing on your site. It picks up live visitor activities from your website and shows them to the visitors.

CHECK OUT WISERNOTIFY

Real-time notification preview

This plugin has a pixel code install, which provides you access to live visitors’ feeds and then gives you a real-time preview of notifications coming from Google, Facebook, and Twitter.

Easy to use

WiserNotify is simple to use. It displays your visitors with the latest offers, along with video pop-ups and timers and a creative Social Proof Fomo (fear of missing out) on a deal to boost up your website’s conversions.

60 notification templates

With 60 notification templates, you can easily customise according to your brand image. It can help you control the image shown, shape background colour, add animations and a lot more. They have templates like visitor count, signups within a SaaS signup flow, and newsletter sign ups. Furthermore, sales counts, download counts and much more. If you feel highly creative and don’t want to use the templates or widgets, you can make your own custom notifications, but do yourself the favour and check out their widgets as well, they have widgets for almost everything.

Add call to actions

Lastly, it can also add a call to actions to point the visitor exactly where you want them to go. You can even choose when and how your notifications should be displayed so that you can target your potential audience with real-time data.

WiserNotify offers four packages, free, startup, standard, and premium. Furthermore they have an agency plan if you need that much.

Free

^$ 0 _/Month

1000 Visitors

Startup

^$ 12 _/Month

10.000 Visitors

Standard

^$ 21 _/Month

30.000 Visitors

Premium

^$ 30 _/Month

50.000 Visitors

Verdict

Using WiserNotify, you can increase your visitor’s engagement. It helps establish the visitor’s trust in your website. With prompt and timely notifications and a catchy template, WiserNotify is surely worth a try.

Explore TrustPulse

TrustPulse

Online selling and buying all depend upon the trust of the buyer's side. They physically cannot see and feel your product and depends mostly on the reviews and ratings. Therefore, it won't be surprising that almost 98% of the visitors leave the site without making a purchase. Obviously, that's discouraging to know that many people do not buy anything visiting your website.

CHECK OUT TRUSTPULSE

TrustPulse has come up with the best solution for this. Along with showing the real-time traffic to the visitors to build up the trust, TrustPulse uses a powerful FOMO (fear of missing out) tactic to drive conversions.

Let’s dig deeper into the features offered by TrustPulse.

On-fire notifications

This feature allows your website visitors to see the real-time actions your other visitors do. This makes your website more trustworthy. Also, it gives major FOMO to the visitors too. This feature provides an impression like ‘Oh, this piece is selling like hotcakes, grab it before it goes out of stock.’.

Smart targeting

TrustPulse uses the smart target feature to display the notification to your potential customers just when they need to see it. TrustPulse basically allows you to control the timing and targeting rules which effectively boost your conversion rate.

Real-time events tracking

TrustPulse notifies all the real-time actions happening on your website like purchases, registrations, form submission, etc., you can even display these notifications to your visitors to gain their trust.

Analytics

Tracking your progress is essential to know and target your goals. TrustPulse notifies which pages or posts of your website is generating the highest conversions and tracks your progress.

Compatibility

When it comes to compatibility with CMS systems, no one matches TrustPulse. Not only with WordPress, but TrustPulse also integrates with Drupal, Squarespace, Magento, etc.

Pricing

TrustPulse offers four packages.

Basic

^$ 9 _/Month

2500 Sessions

Plus

^$ 17 _/Month

10.000 Sessions

Pro

^$ 34 _/Month

25.000 Visitors

Growth

^$ 50 _/Month

100.000 Visitors

Verdict

TrustPulse can be easily termed as the market leader in the social proof game. The most innovative WordPress plugin is trusted by many and for all the right reasons. The efficient social proof strategies of TrustPulse will prove beneficial in increasing the conversion rate.

Explore ProveSource

ProveSource

ProveSource exactly does what its name tells. ProveSource is one of the most impeccable WordPress social proof plugins with the most robust features that can help your website generate decent sales and conversion rates.

ProveSource connects automatically to the WordPress website and displays sales pop notifications, turning your website into a more dynamic place and hence will attract more visitors' attention.

Certain striking features of ProveSource are discussed below.

CHECK OUT PROVESOURCE

Use images in pop-up notifications

Pictures catch more attention than words; therefore, ProveSource adds the customer’s picture too in the recent sale display, creating more sense of trust among the potential customers.

Page visits

ProveSource also displays how many customers are on the same page or posts at the same time. It also displays the stock amount of the product and how many visitors have looked at the product creating a sense of popularity around the product.

Easy installation

This WordPress plugin takes seconds to install and works great. All you need to do is activate the plugin, add it on the dashboard, follow the setup wizard, and voilà, your plugin is set up for success using WordPress social proof.

Time settings

ProveSource allows you to set your notification time and date. You can even control how frequently you want those notifications to get displayed. Sometimes too many notifications annoy the visitor and can have a negative impact.

Mobile-friendly

Most of the shopping is done using smartphones these days; therefore, it is essential for WordPress social proof plugins to be compatible with smartphones along with PCs and laptops. ProveSource understands the need of the time and shows mobile-friendly sales notifications for the customers visiting your website using their phones.

Multi-linguistic

ProveSource provides 15 different languages English, French, Hindi, Danish, Hebrew, etc., to show notifications in. This feature is beneficial for e-commerce websites who have a target audience all around the globe.

Integrates with various apps
ProveSource seamlessly integrates with various CMS systems like WordPress, Cloudflare, Squarespace, etc.

Pricing

ProveSource offers three packages.

Free

^$ 0 _/Month

1000 Visitors

Starter

^$ 18 _/Month

10.000 Visitors

Growth

^$ 45 _/Month

50.000 Visitors

Verdict

The most attractive part of this social proof WordPress plugin is the basic free version so that you can test this plugin’s efficiency. This plugin has a good name in the market and for all the right reasons. You can customise your social proof notifications using the innovative templates this plugin offers.

Explore Beeketing

Beeketing

Beeketing is basically an e-commerce platform rather than just a social proof plugin. Social proof is one of the features that Beeketing offers. The main concern of Beeketing is to create a marketing campaign using automation for your online store.

CHECK OUT BEEKETING

Display recent sales notifications

When customers see what others are purchasing in the store, it motivates them to make a purchase too.

Beeketing allows your customers to see real-time action like recent sales on your website, and this increases the conversions by creating a sense of FOMO amongst the visitors.

More than just a plugin

Beeketing is basically a marketing automation tool that would help your visitors turn into potential customers. This platform is backed by AI that tracks your visitors instantly. After the visitor lands on your site, this automation app finds ways to convert them into buying customers.

Various built-in features

With more than 10 built-in features like Sales Pop, Better Coupon Box, Mailbox Email Marketing etc. Beeketing efficiently analyses your customer’s behaviour and personal interests. It then sends e-mails, pop ups, social proof notifications and various other means to the visitors. This makes your visitor eventually buy your product.

Pricing

The pricing of Beeketing is drastically different to it’s competitors. At Beeketing you work with apps. An app can be “Sales Pop”, which is one type of notification. They have at the moment 8 apps, whereas 5 of them are free, it’s a great way to get started cheap.

Verdict

Beeketing is a comprehensive collection of market

Using a CDN will higher your search rankings | Ep. #6

Wed, 06 Jan 2021 07:00:14 GMT

Hi, my name is Phillip Stemann, and I’ll be learning you how to succeed with your website.

As you already know if you have listened to my previous episodes, is that Google has recently released a huge update to their search engines called core Web vitals. It means a lot of stuff, and I have already explained a lot of it. So if you want to hear more about it, go back in my episodes. So today, I will give you one simple tip on how you can optimise your website for this new update from Google. I will do more episodes within this update from Google to help you succeed in your rankings, because it’s a, it’s a rather major change from Google.

And you need to do some changes to your website if you want to succeed with your blog posts and whatever you are doing. Today, I will talk about using a CDN, a CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. And it’s basically a network of servers which are ready to deliver your website. And you can imagine this network of servers is all around the world, so let’s say that your website is hosted on a platform in Frankfurt, in Germany. If a visitor from the United States then visit your website and you don’t have a content delivery network, then the visitor needs to request your website all the way from Germany.

And it needs to go back to the United States. And as you can imagine, even though it’s data, it can take quite a while. And to solve this issue, you need to use a CDN if you have a CDN. Basically, what the website will do is that it will find the server closest to you and then it will deliver the website from this server. Now you have the explanation and this means that not all should use a CDN, because if your target group is only a local target group around where your server is, there’s absolutely no need to have a CDN.

It’s a waste of money. A CDN is perfect if your target audience is all around the world or even just all around Europe and you have your server in Europe, you would still need a content delivery network to help you load your website faster.

And the thing is, the reason why it’s going to help with your rankings is because if your server is in Frankfurt and Google in the United States, catches your website and find a certain blog post important for a keyword phrase, then if your website takes a long time to load in that certain area, Google will not like this as it doesn’t give a good page experience. It’s not a good user experience that you have to sit and wait, you know that yourself.

Therefore, it should be able to load fast wherever it is in the world with proper Internet of course.

If you want some few tips, not tips, but if you want some few plugins you can use for your website, I will dig into a few of them. There is Cloudflare, which is probably the one most of you know, they do much more than a CDN. But I think the reason why they are so popular more than they have a huge network of servers is that they have a free version of their CDN.

It’s not it’s very basic and you don’t get a lot, but it’s a good way to get started. And when you look for a CDN, there is a lot of different parameters you need to look into. It’s not only the price point, because often the lower the price, the lower the amount of servers. And as you can imagine, imagine the lower amount of servers there are around the world, the longer it will take in certain areas to load your website, let’s say a visitor is in between two servers, and they’re quite far away from each other, and they want to visit your website, then it can take a time.

So the more servers there are around the world, the higher the opportunity is for your website to load fast.

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Another option is KeyCDN. KeyCDN is to some a new player in the market, but for me it’s been around for a long time. I knew them since the beginning. They are very inexpensive. They have some servers in the world.

They don’t have as many as Cloudflare, but they have enough for you to achieve good results with your Google page ranks. So definitely check that out. They also have a trial so you can test them out. I would definitely recommend you testing out multiple to see what works best for you. Of course, you can test them out in a period of time, but you can also install a CDN, go to Google Pagespeed and see what this CDN does for you.

What CDN is making your website rank the highest in the scores from the Google Pagespeed, the last one I want to recommend you is called StackPath.

Some of you might not know it, but know it anyway, because the old name for this StackPath is MaxCDN. MaxCDN is in between KeyCDN and Cloudflare. It’s, it’s a good CDN, it has some servers around. It has more than KeyCDN and still not as many as Cloudflare. But the good thing about MaxCDN as it is with Cloudflare is that a ton of different plugins here by cache plugins and normal CDN plugins have integration to StackPath or formerly known as MaxCDN.

The same for Cloudflare. KeyCDN is not integrated with so many plugins. They have their own plugin. But this is worth taking in when you have to decide what plugin you go with. For instance, if you use a cache plugin as WP Rocket, then it doesn’t really matter because you just plug in a CDN URL, and then you are good to go. And often in the different plug ins, when you want to integrate a CDN, you can basically just choose custom and then plug in the UL for your CDN and then you’re good to go.

So that’s been it. Please leave a review wherever you’re listening to this episode and remember, consistency is key to success. Thank you for listening. And let’s catch up on the next one.

SEMrush: Here are my thoughts

Tue, 05 Jan 2021 07:00:00 GMT

When it comes to creating a strong SEO strategy for your website it is essential to increase your search rankings in popular search engines like Google and Bing. Besides blogging, if you want to promote your content/products on social media platforms like YouTube and Facebook, you also need an SEO strategy to compete with your opponents.

Above all, if you want to sell your products on the world’s leading online shopping platform Amazon, you need an SEO plan to be in the top organic search results when someone searches for the product you are selling.

Why do you need an SEO strategy?

If you want your content to be unique and also want it to rank higher on the search engines it is necessary to make an SEO strategy. The SEO strategy is needed to ensure that the content you put out there is relevant and unique, to generate the best possible amount of traffic. To get a good start on your SEO strategy, making a keyword research will help you a long way. Unique keywords with low competition but high search volume will give you the best possible results. Also, your keywords should be relevant to your brand, unique, and have high search volume.

To be honest, hiring a full-time SEO expert can be expensive. Moreover, it will be time-consuming for the marketing team to get involved in the following work:

Keywords Research: If you want to hit the target audience all you need to do is to make a Keyword research. This means to make a list of words and phrases that people search more often on, have in mind phrase matching is important. Keyword research is making a list of words and phrases according to your brand which will hit the target audience. In the end you'll end up with a list of keywords you can target.
Building external hyperlinks: It is targeting other websites and linking your existing domain with other domains to have a greater influence on search engine ranking. Competitor Analysis: To pick the right competitor and then analysing their marketing strategies by conducting a SWOT analysis.
Competitor Analysis: To pick the right competitor and then analysing their marketing strategies by conducting a SWOT analysis.

Technology has developed some standalone space-saving and all-purpose marketing tools which outshines the SEO monopoly. Thus, creating an SEO plan for your website or social media profile is no longer a headache. Thanks to technology, we now have several high-quality SEO tools (both free and paid) that will help you make your keyword research easy, and this way, you will get a better result in the end, and save time.

There are a ton of content marketing tools out there, also known as SEO tools. All these tools are different, some come with a content marketing toolkit, other doesn’t. It’s important you look into the features and find the tool that fits your need. Do you for instance need an SEO writing assistant, or instant recommendations? Well, then maybe SEMrush is the right tool for you. SEMrush is one of the few great award winning tools in my opinion.

Like other SEO tools, I have personally used SEMrush for a while now, and in this article, I will highlight the features of SEMrush that appeal to me the most.

Let’s have a brief overview of SEMrush.

SEMrush acts as a compact marketing tool

SEMrush is the most popular and accepted SEO tool in the market. SEMrush is a SaaS product used by over 6,000,000 digital marketers worldwide. It is such a useful marketing tool that does a bunch of data analysing and insights actions instantly.

SEMrush offers you the most competitive market research, which is the most helpful thing in developing new marketing strategies or revising the previous one.

It provides the complete solution needed to boost your brand across the globe. It has extensive coverage on almost all aspects of marketing, such as:

SEO
PPC
SMM
Keyword Research
Competitive Research
PR
Content Marketing
Data Insights
Ad Campaign Management

It is a pretty decent deal at a very reasonable price, which I will get back to later in the article. Once you get started using SEMrush, you will be able to find lucrative keywords, optimise your website, bring in more traffic, and even keep an eye on your competition. In this article, I will guide you on how you can analyse your competitors through the feature: Magnifying glass.

Features of SEMrush

SEMrush may not be a new name to some; most likely, many of you have used this tool before. But if you are a new SEO learner, then SEMrush is one of the best SEO tools. It is undoubtedly an all-in-one SEO tool. For example, you don’t have to search here and there to analyse backlinks, keyword ranking, gaps in your content, and competing websites because you will explore all these things in a single platform using SEMrush.

The best thing about using SEMrush is that you don’t need to be a professional, all it takes is a simple tutorial video for beginners, and you can start playing with SEMrush’s tools.

SEMrush is very well-known for their real time website analysis. They have made a ton of articles on the subject, and it’s a great way for you always to stay updated on your website’s status.

SEMrush of course supports integration with Google Analytics and Google Search Console. It’s must-have features for any SEO tool out there. There are ton of data collected by Google that SEMrush uses to make you optimise your website to the fullest and win the SEO game. Here is a short overview of what the different integrations cover:

Google Analytics:

– Position tracking

– On page SEO checker

– Backlink audit

– Organic traffic insight

– My reports

– Site audit

– Content Analyser

– SEO Dashboard

– Brand monitoring

– Marketing calendar

Google Search Console:

– On page SEO checker

– Backlink audit tools

– Organic traffic insight

– My reports

– Content Analyser

– Link building tool

– SEO Dashboard

Moreover, you can analyse both your own and your competitors’ websites. This is the beauty of SEMrush that sets it apart from the rest of all other SEO tools available online. This is something like peaking into your competitor’s SEO strategy and then designing your own content that will rank higher.

For example, if you are thinking of opening a pastry shop, you will first visit the market and check different pastry shops, especially those leading the market. You will review what makes them different from the rest of the stores, and on this basis, you will design the strategy for your pastry store.

Similarly, SEMrush gives you the authority to visit the online market (your competitors’ website) and design your unique strategy.

Now let’s dig into how I used SEMrush while working on a test website. The first and most important part I had to encounter was the niche selection.

Niche selection

I’m a web developer, so I’ve designed many websites for myself and for my clients. But before I start designing a website, I need to select the niche of the website. For this, I started from scratch. While searching for my niche, I had 3 questions in my mind.

How many websites do I need to consider as my competition?

Once I have selected the best competitor websites, how do I then offer my services?

What should I offer to stand out from the rest and make my audience ask for my services?

I also had to consider whether the topic/niche I’m working on is worthy? Will people search for the keywords related to my topics?

To create a website you have to check for many other things like colour scheme, images and videos, etc., but niche is the first thing that needs to be finalised before proceeding. While choosing a niche for the website, you need to keep in mind how people will search Google for keywords related to that topic.

For example, one of my clients wanted to help left-handed gamers, so he asked me to develop a website for “left-handed gamers”, which is a common organic search term, but people don’t search this term more often and hence at this keyword the result generated was 210 searches per month.

This got me thinking for a while. Is my client looking for the right niche? Are lefties such a big audience to make an entire website about? So I asked my client why not create a website just for gamers and create a small section for “left-handed gamers”. And believe me, it worked; as you can see, the organic search results of “gamers” alone provided 22.2K search volume results. However, it is a fact that we always look for low competition keywords but sometimes considering high competition keywords will also yield good results, when it combines with keywords having low competition. They have a great keyword research tool for you to find new keyword ideas you can rank on.

After finding the right search volume, the next step I follow is to search the top websites that perform well in terms of organic traffic on this list of keywords.
To do this, I scrolled down a bit and found the top 10 websites that have a large amount of organic traffic for the same keyword.

Once I have the top 10 results, I search for the domain that is closest to my chosen niche, and SEMrush gave me an insight that this website has organic traffic of 8.6 million.

So you can see how SEMrush made it easy for me to find the best possible niches and allowed me to take a look at the best competitor’s websites. Finding a perfect niche which can potentially give your website a bunch of traffic, is a great start.

To find more lucrative keywords and optimise the website, I prefer to look for at least the 2 best performing competitor websites within my niche. This will help me to build the website with many high volume keywords without building tons of backlinks. In short, SEMrush saves me a lot of time because creating backlinks takes much time. And as we all know, having a strong backlink profile is extremely important, as it tells Google that people find you relevant and trustworthy.

We have briefly touched it, but stealing keywords from your competitors is a lucrative way to know where to put your focus. SEMrush supports this.

Keywords stealing

This is the most valuable feature I’ve found using SEMrush, but let me elaborate what I mean by keywords stealing.

As I mentioned earlier, this amazing tool gives you insights into your competitor’s website so that you can filter out some of the best organic keywords that drive more traffic to your competitor’s website.

Here, stealing doesn’t mean doing anything illegal. It simply means that this information is already available, but tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush makes it easier to find these keywords.

Find the keywords of the buyers

SEMrush also offers you an amazing feature. You don’t need to be a web developer to use this tool. You will however use this tool more often if you are working on online shopping/affiliate websites like Shopify or Amazon. We will be looking for affiliate keywords, often called “buyer keywords”.

For example:

Best Tripod Stand
Samsung Note 11 Reviews
Best Air Cooler 2021

Here we are searching for organic buyer keywords which means the keywords which buyers use more often while buying products from an online platform like Amazon. If you are successful in finding the best organic buyer keywords, you will be able to create a list of the most popular products. Readers of this list will then go to websites such as Amazon, Walmart.com, GoDaddy, and others and get started with your. This means that you will get more commission for each sale by using the best keywords for buying products.

Source: https://www.nichepursuits.com/semrush-review/

Here you can see that I have entered the word BEST in my search bar, so this is a filtered list, and you will only see the keywords that contain the word “Best”.

Filtering with a single word BEST is a simple method to find results. However, if you want to be more specific and play with more keywords, you can add more filters by clicking on “add one more”.

SEMrush helps me find the best results

You can also minimise your filter to search for the top websites to find the keywords that give you low keyword difficulty. For example, if I combine the word “best” with the search position of the websites on Google, SEMrush will show me the results of the keywords from the top 5 websites that contain the word “best” in it.

SEMrush gives high volume keywords

As a web developer, I prefer to target high volume keywords with low competition. However, I also believe in targeting low volume keywords that fit my website, even if they deliver an organic search result of 10 clicks per month. Based on my years of experience, I have often seen that combining a low-volume keyword with a high-volume keyword delivers more effective results. So never ignore low volume keywords. Besides, always try to search for higher volume keywords to get more traffic for your website.

PPC Features

This tool kit is so beneficial for PPC marketing and analysis.
Paid search and paid social campaign performance can be gauged with this tool easily.
SEMrush offers you a feature that will provide you a brief report about your competitor’s previous advertisers and campaigns.

Offers you site audit

If you are moving your site from http to https, then SEMrush will give you insights into the performance of your web in the eyes of the search engines. Besides, you will receive reports on broken links that need to give your visitors a better experience browsing your website.

Source: https://www.nichepursuits.com/semrush-review/

SEMrush as On page SEO Auditor

This option is similar to Site Audit, but here SEMrush focuses more on individual pages and gives you a detailed analysis of keywords, word count, structure, and more. It also gives you an idea to plan your strategy to gain featured snippets and improve your search engine ranking. On Page SEO is also known as the technical seo part. As I always say it, SEO is parted in two; The technical part, and the content par.

Source: https://www.locationrebel.com/semrush-review/

Rank tracker

Your website rank on your different keywords tells you how well you are doing. So it is a must-have tool to track your position on the different search engines. Doing position tracking always tells you what you’re doing good or wrong. Thanks to SEMrush, that allows you to see how well your website is doing. Is your website ranking up or it is going down? Based on this you can plan your strategies accordingly. If you for instance experience a peak, it might be because of a new strategy you implemented, or do you experience a drop? Maybe Google released a new update you need to optimise your website to.

Keyword difficulty score

SEMrush offers you a built-in keyword difficulty score. This is based on the idea of numbers. The higher the number, the greater the keyword difficulty will be. For this purpose, SEMrush is not as effective as Long Tail Pro.

Source: https://www.semrush.com/kb/257-keyword-overview

These were the features I found quite interesting about SEMrush. However, to make it easier for you, I am sharing some pros and cons of this tool under the light of my experience.

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Pros and cons

Pros

SEMrush is a great source of exploring new keywords.
It will show you the organic keywords that your competitors are already ranking for.
With the help of SEMrush, you can discover new competitors and can also perform a gap analysis.
Not limited to SEO only but offers you way broad functions like backlink analysis, keyword difficulty scores, historical trends, PPC advertising research, and more.
Best of all, you can use it for free for up to 10 searches/day. Besides, they are offering a trial for both of their packages for 7 days.

Cons

Conclusion

All in all, SEMrush is an all-in-one digital marketing tool, focusing on SEO. As a web developer, I personally like the efficiency of SEMrush, that they offer so many features in a single tool. However, if we talk about the cost, the price is a bit high for both the plans they are offering, compared to the competitors. SEMrush is a great tool for marketers looking for the full package.

One of SEMrush’s biggest competitors is SEranking, which is another great SEO tool. I’ve written about my thoughts on SERanking, you should check it out.

FAQ

Which one is better: Moz, SEMrush, or Ahrefs?

All of them offer more or less similar features, but, if we talk about uniqueness, then Moz pro is good for beginners, Ahrefs is the best choice for backlinks and competitor’s research. In contrast, SEMrush offers you the best tools for digital marketing and SEO.

Is SEMrush worth it?

If you are working as an individual, SEMrush will be costly for you, but if you have a monetized website or work as an agency, then $99 per month with their basic plan isn’t a bad choice.

How do I find keywords in SEMrush?

After opening the dashboard, you will see a search bar at the top where you can enter the domain for analysis or keywords that you are looking for. Type your keyword there and hit the search button. You will get complete results of related keywords.

Yoast Premium: Is It Worth Upgrading? – 9 powerful features

Thu, 31 Dec 2020 07:00:00 GMT

Over time, technology has become more advanced, leading to increased use of online platforms for business purposes. It doesn’t matter if you are a blogger using WordPress, a webshop owner or a website owner, Yoast SEO has always been a popular choice when it comes to ranking your website, as Yoast SEO plugin is available for free with amazing features that you can’t resist to get your hands on, and so far it has proved to be the best choice for beginners.

However, this free SEO plugin is not limited to beginners only, but because of its advanced set of features, even pro users would like to use this plugin unconditionally. You can say this is a plugin of your choice and helps you in various different ways to improve your website’s SEO and highly compatible with WordPress.

If you are not a beginner and have been blogging for a long time and now want to take your blog/website to the next level, you need to try out the Yoast SEO Premium version. This is a paid version, and it offers you some advanced features which are not available in the free version.

How will Yoast premium help you to grow?

As already mentioned, Yoast SEO Premium offers some additional features (I will discuss these features later in this article). Because of these extras, Yoast SEO premium has become a popular SEO plugin. Moreover, it is multifunctional and ensures that you are on the right track by providing you with the right infrastructure to increase your website traffic. Before you start using Yoast SEO premium, you need to configure it the same way you configure the free version.

Before I go into the valuable features of Yoast SEO premium, let me tell you which user groups need Yoast SEO premium the most:

Marketers who manage many 301 redirects: “Redirect Manager” This tool helps your former visitors to stay in touch with you even after they click on the dead URL of your website. This tool redirects your past visitors to the valuable content of your new website. This way, visitors don’t end up on a broken page and appreciate your efforts and continue to visit your website.
Website managers compete for highly targeted keywords: Being on top is a dream for all, and Yoast SEO Premium offers “organic keywords” from your competitors’ high ranking websites. Yoast SEO Premium can incorporate many focus keywords in your posts at once, increasing the chances of your specific page or post, ranking high on multiple keywords.
New SEO users who can afford the Premium version: Many new users are unaware that every time they update the plugin, they may encounter some bugs or errors that directly affect their WordPress web. If they use Yoast SEO Premium, the Yoast team will take care of the malfunctioning and either fix the problems or show you the ways to implement it more effectively.

So once you’ve chosen the category you fall into, let’s move on, because now I’m going to explain the detailed features of the Yoast premium. Let’s get a quick overview of what Yoast Premium is offering. In general, you will get all the features available in the free version, along with some extras.

Core features of Yoast premium

Offering more focus keywords

As we all know, keywords are the building blocks in SEO. Unlike the free version, Yoast premium offers multiple focused keywords per page and post, which increases the chances for a high individual ranking of your posts/page. I have used both the free version and the premium version of Yoast, and the posts I created with Yoast premium were ranked in general higher compared to the post I created with the free version. This happened because I used 2-4 focus keywords with the premium version, and the free version was limited to only 1 focus word.

Is it worth it? As mentioned above, the keywords are the backbone of your content, so it can in some cases be better to add multiple keywords. I have found this feature to be beneficial to me. So, yes, this feature is worth it.

Advanced keyword optimisation

If you have used Yoast, either free or Premium, you must be familiar with this panel. However, this panel is not from the free version but the Premium version. Both look similar and offer the same, but you get some advanced options in the Focus Keywords section in the Premium version.

In this section, Yoast premium will highlight your errors; if you use your focus keyword/keyphrase in a different order or use a singular, plural, or another verb form of your focus keyword, this premium feature will detect this.

I have found this option to be the best because we are so fast when writing that we sometimes use the wrong keywords/keyphrases, and this is not visible to us when proofreading our content. But thanks to this advanced feature, I am now able to detect my mistakes within seconds.

Yoast Premium offers another feature in this section, i.e., the possibility to optimise your content more carefully by using synonyms and related terms. You might be wondering what this feature is for? To your knowledge, Google is the most intelligent search engine of all. It easily recognises word repetitions and prefers content that is naturally written with unique words and related expressions.

The repetition of words and phrases can cause your content to be downgraded in the ranking, and I’m sure nobody wants that. So this feature will help you write naturally and also save you time because you don’t have to search for synonyms separately.

Is it worth it? This feature is useful for optimising your content in a balanced way. Yoast Premium ensures that you do not use your keywords too much, or your test is not written unnaturally. All in all, you will receive suggestions to improve your text as much as possible.

Redirect manager

Before I get into the in-depth discussion, let me tell you what a Redirect Manager is.

It is a plugin that allows your visitor to jump to your new website even after clicking on a dead URL. This feature is useful for those who frequently delete or rename their older posts/pages/tags/categories. This way, your old visitors stay connected to your new posts.

The Redirect Manager is one of the most convenient tools in Yoast Premium, and you can easily set up a redirect of your choice in the Redirect Manager.

Here you can see how easy setting up the redirection is. All you need to do is enter your old URL and the new URL. This way, you are simply allowing your visitors to follow you on the new page(s).

This tool is so efficient that when you create a new post or rename a tag/category, this tool automatically creates a redirect from the old URL to the new one. Just a single check mark in the box activates this feature, and you don’t need to do anything else. However, if you don’t want redirections, simply uncheck the box. See how easy it is?

The Redirection Manager is also an efficient tool that allows you to choose between 410 or 301 redirects. To make it easier for you to understand, let me tell you here: “410 refers to permanently removed posts” and “301 refers to content permanently being moved/modified to a different URL”. So it is up to you whether you mark your URL as permanently deleted or moved to a new URL.

Is it worth it? I often A/B test my titles and URLs on my blog posts because I regularly update my blogs according to the latest research, so this feature is simply an amazing way to keep my visitors updated about the latest research.

Previews for social media

Source: www.yoast.com

As I have discussed in my previous articles, social media plays an essential role in your marketing strategy. So if you have the social media plugins installed on your website and want to see what your content will look like when shared on any social media platform, Yoast Premium is the plugin of choice for you, because it gives you the social media preview.

As with the free version, you have the option to select your thumbnail and meta description instead of leaving a random selection to Facebook or Twitter. But the option of how your posts appear on social media will help you choose a better thumbnail or description.

Is it worth it? This feature helps save your time because you can preview your posts on social media by simply sharing it to your account, but this will take time, whereas Yoast premium will show you during the editing that how your post will look like when shared.

Suggestions for internal linking

For those who are not aware of what an internal link is? Let me be a bit clearer. “In simple words, if you link two pages together with a link, it is called internal linking, technically speaking, linking is connecting two different pages on the same domain”.

Based on the definition, you can understand how crucial internal linking is. The more links you place from your website or external sources, the greater the chances for a higher ranking on Google.

As you write a new blog post, Yoast Premium suggests other posts you might want to add on the right side of the bar. From there, you can check the box of the post that relates to your article. Remember, however, select the most appropriate post to keep the reader amused with your article and encourage him or her to read the next post.

Is it worth it? This is an amazing tool as it shows brilliant suggestions, but sometimes the random options can be useless. For example, I once wrote a post and forgot to link an important post, but the suggestions helped me to link it. On the other hand, I wrote a technical blog post, and Yoast Premium started giving me random suggestions from a fashion blog. So this option may be worthy sometimes, but stay awake as the results can vary.

Content tool for insights

If you want a better ranking on Google it is necessary to understand the demands of Google regarding your post or page. This tool is great in reading Google’s thoughts and how Google sees your content.

Yoast premium offers an insight tool at the bottom of the Yoast SEO meta box where it shows the 5 prominent words from your post. Moreover, if these words are any one of your keywords/key phrases this indicates that you are following the right way. In contrast, if these words are totally different from your keywords you need to re-read your post and focus more on the main keywords.

Is it worth it? From my perspective, I don’t find it interesting because I am an SEO writer and know how and when to place keywords. If you are not an SEO writer and have difficulties in writing SEO friendly content, this would be a great help for you.

Orphaned content tool

As the name suggests, the content is orphan, i.e., the content does not contain any internal links. Search engines are efficient in finding content with more internal links and do not consider these orphaned content, so it will be difficult for you to find the index. However, with Yoast Premium, this is not the case as it places all your orphaned content in one place.

All you have to do is select the “Orphan tab” in the left menu bar, and all your orphaned content will be lined up in a single row. This will help you link your orphaned content to any of your posts. Besides, Yoast is smart enough to detect the orphan content and send you notifications immediately.

Is it worth it? This is the most helpful feature of all. I didn’t even know how many orphan posts I had, as I always find it challenging browsing orphan content, but I no longer miss any orphan posts thanks to Yoast Premium.

Exportation of focus keywords

With this tool, you can export your CSV file with keywords along with other details such as the title and URLs of your blog posts. This will help you plan the strategy for your blog post, and you can focus more on improving and optimising your blog content.

This tool will also help you recognise overlaps when you try to optimise two posts with similar keywords. This will be extremely helpful, especially for the newbies.

Is it worth it? I would say it is a “nice-to-have tool”. For me, this tool is not very useful because I am good at keeping my blog records, but if you are new to blogging, it will be beneficial for you.

Round the clock available customer service

As a web developer and writer, I have experienced many customer services, but I must admit that Yoast premium’s customer service is very fast. I have only used it twice, and both times the response was swift. I am a satisfied customer, and their service made me feel like a valued customer.

Is it worth it? In my entire blogging career, I have only used Yoast Premium’s customer service twice. This means that Yoast Premium offers a complete package, and you don’t have to contact the company from time to time. But breakdowns are common, so this can be useful in emergencies, and believe me, you will get a quick response.

Free of advertising

I would say that an ad-free experience is the icing on the cake for me because, unlike any other plugin, Yoast Premium is Ad-free. But thanks to Team Yoast, they have created an ad-free plugin.

What is the pricing plan of Yoast premium?

$89 per year is not a big deal with so many interesting features. Also, you will get additional discounts if you are purchasing more than 1 license. If you want to try out Yoast premium, you can buy it today.

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Conclusion

Yoast Premium offers many features that no other plugin offers. Moreover, the interface is user-friendly and easy to use, and the price is affordable. But keep in mind that Yoast premium is an SEO tool that helps you rank your website but does not magically rank your website without your intervention. So if you’re ready to make an effort and want to take your blog to the next level, it’s worth upgrading to Yoast premium. However, no it’s not worth it when you look at the competition out there. Rank Math SEO has really overtaken Yoast SEO lately and are in front, they are running fast and if Yoast SEO doesn’t wake up, it’ll soon be over.

If you want a more in-depth review of Rank Math SEO, I’ve written about their awesome features within SEO using a WordPress website.

FAQ

Is Yoast premium for beginners?

If you are a beginner, you can start with the free version of Yoast since most of the features of Yoast free and Yoast premium are similar. However, if you want some advanced features and can afford the price, you can start with Yoast premium.

Which one is better: Yoast SEO or all in one SEO?

Both SEO plugins do well with so many options, but Yoast SEO is slightly better than all in one SEO as Yoast SEO offers a user-friendly interface, and tabs separate all functions.

What are the best SEO plugins for WordPress?

Yoast SEO and Rank Math are the two famous SEO plugins for WordPress because of their simplicity and free versions. However, this does not mean that these are the only two plugins available. Semrush, Ahrefs, SEOPress are also worth checking out.

Google Stories is a lucrative way for you to gain traffic | Ep. #5

Wed, 30 Dec 2020 07:00:00 GMT

Hi, my name is Phillip Stemann, and I’ll be learning you how to succeed with your website.

Google has released for some months ago what they call Web stories and what we other call Google Stories, it is, as you know it, from Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, as we have previously discussed in the podcast, it is basically a video everywhere from one second to however long you want it to be. However, it is not a video where you record yourself or you can if you do. But that’s not the purpose of it. The purpose of it is to could be make teasers.

I will get back to that. This is still a fairly new feature from Google, which means that it’s not very competitive. And if you want in on this, it should be right now you should get started and it’s not so difficult to get started. I will get back to that later.

Everyone who wants to try it out should definitely do it. I’m personally using it at the moment. I haven’t seen the biggest results yet, but I’m starting to gain some traffic from my stories and I’m trying to figure out how to do this the right way. And I think I have the right template for you guys I will share in the end of this episode. So Google Stories are meant to be used as teasers. It can be used as full story templates, but it’s meant as teasers and I personally use it for my blog post.

And if I make podcasts or videos, I make a Google Story to each one of these content types, as a teaser. So let’s say that I make a blog post about the best project management tools out there. Then I would take 50 percent, maybe less of the tools I have written about in this blog post. And then I would put them into a Google Story. I would put maybe a beginning slide where I make a short teaser for what is Google Story about.

Then I would make a slide about the first tool, second tool, if that’s it.

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And then I would end with a slide that would link to my blog post, because if they end on the last slide, it’s highly likely that they like what they have read and they want to read more.

And as you see, that’s a backlink directly in to your story sorry, your blog post from your story. So you can use these Google stories for everything. You can use it as teasers for your blog, post your videos, podcasts, actually any type of content.

These Google stories are displayed. Many places they are displayed in Google Discover they are displayed. When you open Google Chrome, you have possibly seen this news section, which is on the start page. That’s Google Stories. Google stories are also shown in between the search results when you search on the phone. So if you search on something that’s related to a Google story out there, Google will show this Google story in between exactly like we see on YouTube when we search for a video, then we see these small stories in between our video results.

It’s exactly the same lastly they are shown in the image search. Exactly. Works the same way. If you search for something that is related to a Google Story, this Google story will be shown in between the image results. Make a notice. Here it is only on the phone. So how do you create your first Google Story? It is not that difficult if you use WordPress, if you don’t use WordPress, it can be quite difficult.

But Google has made an official plugin to WordPress and it has been in beta for quite a while. But recently it was released to the public and now it’s up for everyone to use it and it’s very easy to use it. However, it is still new in the market, so it still needs a lot of work to become a very professional tool. For instance, you cannot use your own custom fonts at the moment. So they have made a lot of different templates in this plugin that you can start out of.

And when you make your first story, you will notice that it takes quite a while because you need to change all colors to be your profile. The font to be the closest to your font. You need to upload your logo. You need to make a description and so on, so on. So the first time you do it, please set some time aside to make this. However, the next times you do it, it’ll be fairly easy because you now have a template to work out for.

So when you make your stories, there are some pro tips, first of all, you need to make a very good description. It’s like a meta description as we know it from a blog post. It’s just for your Google Story. And this is used for Google to know what the story is about. And of course, you also put text in your Google Story. And Google will also use this to know what it’s about. But the meta description is like an overall description of your Google Story.

Last but not least, you should add a story image. And it’s so important in this size three to four. What that means is that, for instance, it could be width 750 pixel and then height one thousand pixels. It’s extremely important you follow these guidelines. Furthermore, when you have made your story, if you use the plugin, there is a tab called checklist. In this checklist, you can see all the recommendations from Google on how to make a Google story that is optimised fully to what it is Google are looking for.

So thank you for listening. I hope it’s been helpful. And let’s catch up on the next one.

Which is the best CDN for your website? – 3 great options

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 06:47:00 GMT

If you are a website owner, you would undoubtedly want to improve your search engine rankings. There are many ways like choosing an efficient hosting service, installing caching plugins, adding backlinks etc.

One of the quickest and most effective ways to speed up your website, is to use a Content Delivery Network also known as a CDN. The website which loads fast, has a higher opportunity to rank better and do good in terms of search results.

A well-integrated CDN works like a charm in increasing your website’s speed, overall user experience and ultimately your website’s ranking.

What is a CDN?

A CDN refers to a group of servers (Points of Presence-PoP) that are geographically located around the globe, who work together to provide fast content delivery on a website, delivered by the server closest to you.

Websites are targeting a global audience these days, and that’s why they are becoming more and more interactive, and this can slow the downloading speed. A well-integrated CDN assists in the transfer of assets like images, videos, and HTML pages across the globe much faster than the static server would.

Image source: Hostinger.com

How does CDN aid in speeding up your website?

A CDN saves cached versions or temporary copies of the static content (images, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, videos) of your website in multiple geographically located servers (PoPs). These PoPs have a lot of servers that store your cache in SSD to be able to provide the version of your website in the fastest possible way.

So, regardless of how large media files you have on your website, a CDN allows your visitors to interact with your website just as fast as the locally based ones.

Simply put, a CDN helps in closing the distance between your website and a visitor.

Why do you need CDN?

Did you know that even one-second delay in loading time of the website page can result in a 7% loss in customer conversions? So, if you are concerned with your website’s global connectivity, you must consider using CDN. Moreover, Google announced that they will be focusing on Core web vitals in 2021, and one of the bigger points is using a CDN.

Let’s have a closer look at why CDN is essential for your website’s success in the search results.

Global availability

If you have a global website, the one crucial step if you want to run a website successfully, is having a CDN. A CDN makes the content on your website globally available without any interruption or delay using servers (PoPs) that are widely located around the globe.

https://www.apicasystems.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/page-load-times-diagram.jpg

Dispersed Points of Presence (PoPs)

Suppose a visitor of your website is in a different time zone. When the visitor makes a query, the content delivery can be slow, and this can affect the overall user experience. This is where CDNs come in handy. With servers located near the geographic location of the visitor, content delivery will be swift and easy.

Fewer delays

Using the globally scattered servers, CDNs replicate the website’s content. The visitors are often closer to the PoPs than the main content delivery site (main server). The closer the visitor is to the PoPs the less the delay will be in delivering the content.

Low network congestion

Network congestion means the reduced network quality when a network or link carries more data than it can handle. It occurs mostly when a large number of users want website access at the same time. CDN redirects users to the replicated content, which then aids in reducing network congestion.

DDoS attack prevention

A DDoS or Distributed Denial-of-Service attack is an attempt to disrupt the regular traffic of a specific service or network by flooding it or the surrounding infrastructure. Assume an unexpected traffic jam, clogging the road up for the regular traffic.

This attack not only affects the availability of the website but also the reputation of the website comes into question. A CDN helps to clear this network by transferring the traffic to other servers and prevent your site from being completely unavailable for genuine users.

Improve search engine rankings

As discussed above, CDN helps in removing the unnecessary jamming of the users/visitors so this will ultimately affect your website speed and your website will load within seconds.

It’s because page loading speed is one of the main factors determining a user’s experience, and for Google, nothing is more important than a satisfied user.

Therefore, if you want to increase your website’s ranking your website should load with a blazing speed and a well-integrated CDN can be your life-saver in this regard.

Reduces bandwidth cost

To reduce the cost of hosting, CDN uses caching and other optimisations to reduce the data amount an origin server normally provides. This aids in the reduction of bandwidth consumption cost for website hosting.

How to choose a perfect CDN for your website?

There are tons of CDN options in the market, claiming to provide the best service. Choosing the one which is just perfect for you can be an arduous task because all may seem similar initially. However, with further analysis of the features, you can visibly see the striking differences between them.

Analyse your requirements

Before analysing and comparing CDNs available, you must figure out your own needs and requirements. Take a few things into account like your budget, geographic location of your visitors, and type of media (images, videos etc.) you upload on your website.

Initially decide what you want from a CDN network and then choose accordingly.

Your user’s geographic location

Take into account the geographical location of your target audience. Considering whether they are local, regional or global, choose your CDN plan accordingly. It is essential to select a CDN whose PoPs are in the geographical location of your target audience.

Before choosing a CDN service for your websites, your initial priority should be the speed and reliability. Three critical factors can help you measure speed and reliability:

Response time: How long a server takes to give a response to the browser’s request.

Latency: The amount of time a server requires processing a request for a media like image or CSS file.

Throughput: The steadiness of delivery of content.

The more the servers a CDN service has, the faster it will be delivering the content. Therefore, it is essential for a CDN provider to have a vast network.

Pricing

Always prioritise your budget. Find a CDN which is easy on your pocket and delivers similar performance compared to the expensive ones.

Security

When choosing a CDN, the security the CDN is providing should be one of your primary concerns. DDoS mitigation and encryption are some security features to consider.

The best CDNs

With so many options available, it is easy to get confused as to what CDN you should invest in. Read the detailed review about some of the best CDNs available to help you make a decision.

Explore Cloudflare

Cloudflare

Cloudflare can be easily termed as one of the best CDN providers of the world. Since its launch in 2008 at TechCrunch Disrupt conference, Cloudflare has come a long way. It now offers its services to almost 12 million domains using 164 data centres globally. All these data centres are placed in Europe, America and the rest of the world.

Some noticeable features of Cloudflare give it edge amongst its competitors.

CHECK OUT CLOUDFLARE

Swift and global CDN

With more than 150 data centres distributed across 50 countries, Cloudflare provides blazing fast content delivery. Due to the vastly distributed CDN network, it also minimises web latency.

Efficient load balancing

Distributing the traffic load and across numerous servers is termed as load balancing, and Cloudflare is proficient in it. This feature ensures that your website visitors are routed to the closest server when the server of the particular area is down. This means that your visitors can still access the content he was searching for.

Optimisation of web content

Cloudflare ensures that the websites which are optimised to provide seamless content delivery regardless of the device visitor is using. Moreover, it also removes unnecessary characters from HTML, JavaScript and CSS to reduce the file size of source code.

Top-notch security

Did you know that Cloudflare has survived a massive DDoS attack in late June in the year 2020? The efficient handling of this malicious attack speaks volume about the security Cloudflare offers. This means that this CDN can overcome even the most sophisticated attacks that not only attacks the website’s performance but also the customer information will be at stake.

https://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/huge-ddos-attack-launched-against-cloudflare-in-late-june/d/d-id/1338323

Easy setup

One of the impressive features of Cloudflare is its easy setup. It automatically caches your website’s resources, and then if you want, you can always clear them from the control panel.

Pros

Easy setup
Efficiently monitors control panel’s performance
More than 150 data centres that assist in providing fast content delivery
Best security provider
Has a great WordPress plugin they maintain

Cons

The free plan offers only limited features.
If you use the free plan, your website won’t be protected against the spam, malware and DDoS attack. You will have to upgrade your plan to get the security features.

Pricing

The basic plan is free of cost; however, you will have to upgrade to the paid versions to get the advanced features.

Pro: $20 per month per domain
Business: $299 per month per domain
Enterprise: This is a customisable plan, and you’ll have to contact the vendor to subscribe for it.

Verdict

Cloudflare undoubtedly offers one of the most efficient CDN services. The web security it provides is like no other. From web page optimisation to free WordPress plugin, Cloudflare has all the right ingredients for a perfect CDN provider.

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Explore KeyCDN

KeyCDN

KeyCDN is a relatively newly launched CDN on the market. However, it has built a reliable name in this short span of time. KeyCDN is considered one of the best CDNs giving fairly good competition to the top-guns in the market. Let's have a look at some of its features that have made it a favourite of many. KeyCDN has servers in europe, south america, and the rest of the world.

If you want to know more about KeyCDN, then I've written a more in-depth article about KeyCDN being the most value for money CDN.

CHECK OUT KEYCDN

Most cost-effective CDN provider

If you are looking for a CDN provider which is budget-friendly and provides the same performance as the expensive competitors, then look no more, KeyCDN is here for your rescue. Also, if you do not want to go for a monthly subscription KeyCDN offers you pay-as-you-go pricing.

Pull and Push functionality

KeyCDN offers Push and Pull functionality like any other quality CDN provider. Using the ‘Pull’ option, KeyCDN draws out the static content from the server and then distributes it online using its servers to achieve more speed.

The ‘Push’ option uploads your website’s content into the KeyCDN servers, which will then be distributed globally.

Ad-enabled video player

If you want you to monetise your videos and have no idea how, then KeyCDN has got you covered. KeyCDN offers ad-enabled video players so that you can make some bucks out of your content.

Improve website ranking

One of the striking features of KeyCDN is that it can significantly improve your search engine rankings using two SEO features.

Robots.txt: Notifies search engine algorithm which files and folders it should avoid indexing and go through.

Canonical URLs: Let the search know that the content from the CDN is just a copy by adding an HTTP header to your zone.

Easy to get started

With only a three-step setup KeyCDN is one of the most straightforward CDN providers. The three steps include:

Choose your zone
Create a zone
Integrate your website with the CDN

Security

With KeyCDN, you do not have to worry about your website’s security. If you own an SSL certificate, KeyCDN integrates it into your CDN without costing a penny. KeyCDN even provides a free shared SSL for the ones who don’t own one. With Let’s encrypt integration, KeyCDN also offers a free custom SSL certificate.

Pros

Most cost-effective CDN provider
Offers custom, shared and free SSL
Purge using key or URL
Has a WordPress plugin ready to integrate with your WordPress website

Cons

Small network as compared to others
You can experience slow response times

Pricing

Unlike other CDN providers, the pricing of KeyCDN is straightforward. You can subscribe for a free 25 GB 30-day trial plan before signing up for a paid plan. With prices as low as $0.04 per GB, KeyCDN is the most budget-friendly CDN provider.

Verdict

The easiest to use CDN provider with most flexible pricing plans, KeyCDN is fit for small businesses and beginners. The only drawback of it offers limited five zones for free.

Explore Stackpath

Stackpath

StackPath is the more advanced version of the famous MaxCDN, which means it has got even better features than the old version of MaxCDN. Unarguably one of the most innovative CDN providers, StackPath is easy to manage and set up. They have a ton of features which I've described down below.

CHECK OUT STACKPATH

Fast purge and content caching

With intuitive caching techniques and high-capacity SSDs, you can efficiently control content caching. StackPath also offers an instant purge option for removing your content from the cache.

Control content delivery using EdgeRules

If you want control over how your content should be delivered, then this feature of StackPath is designed just for you. StackPath lets you customise your content delivery, SEO and security measures.

Delivers content globally

Keep your content near to your visitor using high-performance CDN having PoPs distributed around the globe.

Easy to manage

You want a CDN that works on your terms; StackPath is the one for you. Driven by open APIs, StackPath is fully automated. With a simple-to-use customer portal, you can have direct access and complete control over your account.

Powerful analytics

With powerful analytics and reporting capacity, you can get detailed data about content delivery and network.

Security

StackPath offers impeccable security features, including blocking features for DDoS protection and load balancing.

Pros

With its basic plan, StackPath offers one TB of data per month.
Private Edge SSL service for free
Multiple servers distributed across the globe
Efficient security services

Cons

StackPath does not offer a free plan; however, you can use their free trial offer to test its performance.
The basic plan does not include EdgeRules.
Doesn’t have a WordPress plugin, they refer to KeyCDN’s WordPress plugin.

Pricing

StackPath offers different plans at different rates; however, you can opt for the CDN service only at $10 per month.

Verdict

With reasonable prices and excellent services, StackPath has earned a good word of mouth amongst web developers and website owners. It speeds up your website and reduces the server load effectively.

Conclusion

If you run a website, you must have an idea of how important it is to keep the loading time of your content as fast as possible. Content Delivery Networks (CDN) increases your website’s loading speed by minimising the physical distance between the server and a user.

The three big names in the CDN world have to be Cloudflare, KeyCDN and StackPath. KeyCDN is a favourite of most of the website owners because of its super affordable prices and decent features. However, for security concerned website owners Cloudflare is their first choice. When it comes to innovative features like free Edge SSL certificate, StackPath takes the lead. If we compare the performance of these three in November, we can see StackPath is winning with KeyCDN a little behind it.

So the big question, should you use a CDN? Well, it depends. Is your target group only around you, are you a local webshop or a service company who only operates within your own country? Then no, a CDN would be a waste, however Google are focusing on Core Web Vitals in 2021, where they really do recommend you using a CDN.

If you are a worldwide business, whether it’s a webshop, SaaS or similar, you need a CDN, no doubt. Your visitors and users will be all around the world and your website needs to be fast for all your visitors.

I like Cloudflare because it is the most secure CDN on the market, and it offers you the free WordPress plugins. The setup is easy, and they also offer a free plan for anyone who would like to try them out. However, the features are limited with this free version. But, if you run a small business and are looking for more features at a lower price point, then KeyCDN should be your choice.

Source: https://www.cdnperf.com/cdn-compare?type=performance&location=world&cdn=cloudflare-cdn,keycdn,stackpath-cdn

FAQ

Do I need a CDN for my website?

Yes, if you own a website and are concerned about the loading speed of your content, then it's a wise decision to invest in a well-integrated CDN. If you have an audience around the globe, then buying a CDN is inevitable to reduce the physical distance between the server and the end-user.

Is there a free CDN?

Yes, there are many CDNs like Cloudflare and KeyCDN that offer their basic plans for free. However, to get access to more advanced features, you will be required to upgrade to a paid plan. Many providers often offer a free trial for you to test out their performance.

What is the best CDN for WordPress?

Even a powered website requires an efficient CDN for outstanding performance. Some of the CDNs which are most compatible with WordPress sites are:
- StackPath
- Sucuri
- KeyCDN
- Cloudflare

Is Pinterest the next big social media? — 10 steps to get started

Thu, 24 Dec 2020 07:00:00 GMT

Social media is not a new thing for us. Two decades ago, when the Internet began to flourish, Google created a very popular social media platform and gave it the name Orkut. Even before Orkut, there were some other social media like My Space, Friendster, and many others but, after Facebook’s launch, all previous social media platforms were closed.

This doesn’t mean that we only have Facebook as a social media platform because, over time, several new platforms like Instagram and Twitter have emerged and have become very popular in a short period of time, with more than 1 billion users.

After that, Pinterest was launched in 2009. Initially, it had very few users, but with the growth of the online industry the number of users on Pinterest has also increased. Although it is not as popular as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, it seems to become the next big social media because of the increasing number of users.

Initially, the purpose behind the introduction of social media was to connect with friends and family around the globe. But, over time, these platforms have evolved into a hub for e-commerce and marketing, and people are making tons of revenue from these platforms.

Similarly, “Pinterest is a gold mine” this term indicates that this platform enables many bloggers, brands, and business owners to get huge traffic to their websites. This way, they create more revenue because of the increased traffic, and therefore greater the chances for higher conversions and sales.

With Pinterest, you don’t need to post 100 words under your picture to describe it, instead if you know how to utilise Pinterest properly some pictures are enough to grab your audience’s attention. This is the beauty of Pinterest that sets it apart from the rest of the different social media out there.

No doubt that Pinterest is a social media; still some people have the contradictory belief that Pinterest is not a social media platform but a visual search engine and is more close to Google and Bing.

Unlike any other social media, Pinterest offers you to share images and GIFs in the form of Pinboards. Here you don’t get the full videos, but ideas for DIY, decorations, recipes, styles and much more. At Pinterest, every idea you see is represented by a pin. These pins are basically images that Pinterest’s users search and store, and which are linked back to websites, making Pinterest an excellent source for increasing sales and traffic to your website.

I am a web developer, and I use Pinterest personally, and find it an excellent source of driving traffic to my website.

Every marketing person is looking for ways to increase their revenue, and Pinterest provides a great platform for business growth. That’s why it is becoming more popular every day, and every month, thousands of new users join Pinterest. Which is the reason for me saying that Pinterest is the next big social media.

Another reason for Pinterest’s successful journey is that people prefer visual rather than written content/posts. Take an example from any social media platform like Facebook or Instagram. If an influencer posts a 100-word travel blog without a single picture, about 70% of the total audience will show no interest in reading the post and will skip it, you will hardly find any comments or likes there.

When the same person posts a single picture with a 10-word caption, you will find 1000s comments and likes. I have even seen some queries on Facebook with a note at the end “Picture is for attention” because a single picture is enough to grab the audience’s interest. And Pinterest is all about images and GIFs.

On an average Pinterest is driving 3.8 times more sales than any other platforms, and around 87% Pinners have purchased the products due to seeing them on Pinterest.

You should by now have realised why Pinterest is becoming famous and soon it will be the next big social media, and you are thinking about getting started with it. But, at the same time, you are confused because of the following questions:

I know about Pinterest, but I have no idea where to begin?
I have already started with Pinterest, but I don’t know how to reach success?

If you are sitting with any of these questions, please continue reading the article as I now will guide you step by step on how to start with your Pinterest account and how to succeed with it for sales and business purposes.

About 66% of Pinterest users are female. So if you have a business that deals with fashion, travel, food or interior design, Pinterest will generate a colossal turnover for you. However, other businesses also flourish on this platform. Are you ready to start Pinning? Let’s see how it goes.

Things you must do when getting started

So far, we have learned that Pinterest does not connect families and friends like other social media. Although it is a social media, it is more often used for business purposes. The people at Pinterest are more keen in creating a business profile than in creating a general profile. For setting up a business profile, you need to pay attention to the following points to impress a broad audience and take your business to the next level.

You have two options for your company profile: You can create a new business profile, or you can convert your existing profile into a Business profile. To create a Business profile, simply go to Pinterest’s homepage, click on the three dots in the top right corner, go to Pinterest business and select “Join as Business”.

Here you have to enter your business information together with your preferred login details. When you are finished, simply read the Terms and Conditions and click Create Account to get started.

If you have an old account and want to switch to the business account, simply login to your profile, click on the three dots in the top right corner and click “Update your account”. Here you can change your profile to a Business profile. When you’re done, the procedure is similar to creating a new account: You need to enter your Business information and you are done.

Once your Business profile is created on Pinterest, you can take advantage of its features such as Pinterest Analytics and Ads.

With these simple steps your business profile is ready. Now you need to look for the following things to make your profile more attractive.

1. Choosing a name

Your name/company name is the first thing that grabs visitors’ attention, so you should be very careful when choosing a name. I would suggest that when you set up a company profile, choose your company name or your original name instead of choosing some codes or date of birth as if your username is not real; maybe this will turn your visitors away if they don’t find you authentic.

Now Pinterest offers you to choose two names: Username and Display name. The username is used in your Pinterest URL (www.pinterest.com/username). The Display name, on the other hand, is the name that is displayed in your profile and used by the people who want to search for you on Pinterest.

Pro Tip: Based on my personal experience, I suggest you keep your username and display name the same. This will increase your profile ranking, and your name will appear at the top of the search engine when someone searches for your name.

2. Upload profile picture

After your name, your profile picture shows how trustworthy you are. You can use your company’s logo or personal profile picture instead of a random picture to give your audience a measure of confidence that you are not a fraud but a real website owner. Your profile picture will tell your audience who you are and how you stand out from all the other profiles on Pinterest.

Since I work as a freelancer and therefore don’t own a business, I have chosen my picture as my profile image so that my audience will feel more comfortable when contacting me. Before you set up your profile picture, make sure that your picture’s size is 165×165 pixels. If you upload photos smaller than this size, the image will be stretched.

3. Attention grabbing business profile

On other social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, it is common practice for a post/image to become viral through constant sharing. Similarly, if you create an impressive profile with content that attracts your audience, you will constantly receive shares and pins.

For example, if you’re a chef and want to promote your restaurant, you can pin the latest image with freshly prepared “creamy pasta” for instance. Now a person who sees your enticing pin will eventually become your customer and repins it on his or her dashboard, where many other people who follow him or her will see it too, and some of them might become your customers.

In this way, you make perfect use of your business profile and introduce your company to many new people by telling them who you are and why they need to follow you.

4. Find businesses which are similar to yours

This is a common fact that you are not the only one with a business; you could have many competitors. So here is your chance to check out what your competitors are offering. You can search for them and work with them to get started. This way, you will get more followers, and your pins will get more shares.

It is better to look for a bigger company in your industry. You can also use the “discover” icon to explore different categories and find out what’s in vogue to inspire you.

5. Use of Pinterest tools

Pinterest has a great selection of tools. These tools are completely free to use, and using these tools will improve your chances of success on Pinterest. Let me dig into those 3 tools:

Pin it button: If you install this button in your browser, you can pin content from any website directly to your page.

Pinterest App: When you download the Pinterest app to your phone, you will be able to answer people who comment on your posts quicker, and you can easily manage your profile from your phone anytime, anywhere.

Pinterest’s integrated analysis tool: This tool allows you to track the growth rate and performance of your profile over time. This way, you can monitor the activity of your profile and the engagement of people with your pins.

6. Create your boards

You are all set to get started now, so what are you waiting for? Let’s build your boards. I would suggest that you start by creating at least 3 boards with interesting pins in each board if you really want to promote your product, brand or services.

If you don’t know how to create a board let me show you in 2 easy steps.

1. Click the Add button in the upper right corner, and a dialogue box with three choices will appear.

2. Click on the “create a board” option. Enter the basic information, like name, category of your pin, and who can pin on this board, click create board.

You need to correctly name your board after your pins so that your target audience can easily find out about your company/business.

For the first 3 boards, I would suggest that you create a board for your product or services, a board about the latest trend/technology related to your industry of business, and a board just for entertainment.

By creating these 3 boards, you will introduce your brand to your audience, making them aware of the latest fashion trends in your niche. If you have a fun board, your profile will be more easily recognised, and the audience will be more interested in these entertaining pins.

7. Use the trending keywords

The most awaited part is here. Yes, I am talking about keywords, as you all know, keywords always play an essential role in the ranking of your profile and your pages. Similarly, Pinterest is also a game of keywords. The search results of your pins depend on how correctly you have entered the keywords into your pins.

Before you choose a keyword, you must plan a strategy. First search for the keywords that are used most often between your competitors, and then name your board and description. Remember that the keyword you use in your board name must be included in your board description. This increases the chances of ranking your profile.

You can also use keywords from your website to make your pin more visible and accessible to your audience.

8. Connect your Pinterest to your website

As discussed above, around 87% of Pinterest users purchase things they have found on Pinterest. For those who own businesses, this is the best platform to promote your business by linking your Pinterest to your website.

Linking your social media to your website has always been a fruitful practice. Similar to other social media, if you add a tab of your Pinterest to your website, you can attract numerous visitors. Besides, the Pinterest logo on your site will remind your visitors to visit your site regularly to pin various content. And as mentioned in my other blog post about what social media you should focus on, the more social media you are present on, the better.

If you want more conversions or sales, it is better to include some of your Pinterest posts in your email newsletter with a strong call to action.

9. Spread your words in your network

Pinterest’s users are always looking for their favourite brands on Pinterest. So if you have joined Pinterest as a company, shout out loud and tell your network that you are here with your new ideas! You can use other social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram for this purpose. So the people who follow you there will visit your Pinterest profile, and when they see the pictures/pins of your product directly on your board, most of them will eventually become your potential customers.

10. Keep on pinning

You have created your profile, set up your board, made your first pins, and you have visitors. This doesn’t mean you have to stop here; instead, you have to keep on pinning from time to time without a break. Because your visitors and followers are looking forward to seeing what you are going to post next, so if you stop pinning or take a break, it will cause you to turn away your visitors. And as mentioned in my other blog posts, consistency is key to success.

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Conclusion

As technology grows, so does the online industry. Most people are shifting their business to the Internet, especially after the great pandemic hit. So, in my opinion, Pinterest serves well as a business platform, and according to statistics (we have already discussed above), more people are moving towards Pinterest, which shows that it has a promising future and is in my opinion the next big social media.

Besides, Pinterest is not a difficult platform and you can easily get started. I have tried to explain every single step on how to get started and kept it simple for you to understand and start your business on Pinterest today.

As mentioned, there are a ton of other options out there when it comes to social medias. I have written a thorough article about what social media you should focus on.

Follow me on Pinterest to get website tips

FAQ

Will Pinterest be the next big social media?

Every month thousands of new users are joining Pinterest. This growing number of users shows that Pinterest is becoming more and more popular (especially among women). So, yes, we can conclude that Pinterest will be the next big social media.

Which is more popular: Instagram or Pinterest?

Recent statistics predict that Instagram has more than 1 billion users and 500 million users are active. In contrast, Pinterest has 250 million active users out of 500 million. In general, Instagram is more popular than Pinterest. But Pinterest is a rising star, and depending on its popularity, this will be the next big social media.

Is the use of Pinterest free?

The use of Pinterest is free. Like any other social media, Pinterest requires only a simple registration or login. You do not have to pay for it.

Phillipstemann

Simply the best SEO plugin for WordPress | Ep. #14

Rank Math SEO

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Kinsta review – 6 months of use, is it the best Managed WordPress hosting?

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3 simple steps to gather leads | Ep. #13

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Tips to get started with your newsletter | Ep. #12

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Google Analytics V4 is out, should you upgrade? | Ep. #11

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The reason why I changed from Elementor to Gutenberg | Ep. #10

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How to succeed with the perfect internal link building strategy using WordPress | Ep. #9

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Why you should focus on link tracking – 4 tools to get started + FREE bonus tool

Why should you track links?

Who benefits from link tracking?

For marketing individuals working in a company

For marketing agencies

For affiliate marketers

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Tools to get started with internal linking

Switchy.io

Key features

Pricing

Pros

Cons

Verdict

Bitly.com

Key Features

Pricing

Pros

Cons

Verdict

Cutt.ly

Pricing

Pros

Cons

Verdict

Do this simple free trick to higher your SEO rankings for all your content | Ep. #8

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How to succeed with internal link building using WordPress

Table of Contents

What is internal linking?

Now you might be thinking, what is the purpose of an internal link?

Do you know the theory behind internal link building using WordPress?

1. Create unique content on your website

2. Write an optimised anchor text

3. Interlink deeply

4. Link from Cornerstone Content

5. Don’t make your content look like spam

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6. Provide value to the reader

7. Guide user experience

8. Manual link building using WordPress

9. Link building plugins for internal link building using WordPress

10. Use DoFollow links

11. Image links must-have Alt attributes

Conclusion

FAQ

Why is internal link building imperative?

What is broken link building?

What are the benefits of internal link building?

Does internal link building affect the bounce rate on your website?

Should you use a link building service?

WordPress Staging environment — Should you use it for your WordPress website?

Table of Contents

Who needs WordPress staging?

Should you use a staging environment for your website?

Reasons why I use a WordPress staging environment

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