DEPARTMENT OF INFORMATION SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING

Study Material for Academic Year 2023-24 (Odd Semester)

COURSE NAME : Digital Marketing

COURSE CODE : 20ISE752A

SEMESTER : VII A, B, C

Department of ISE, NHCE

Unit 1
 INTRODUCTION OF DIGITAL MARKETING
Digital marketing is important because it connects a business with its customers when they are
online, & is effective in all industries. It connects businesses with ideal customers when they are
on Google through SEO & PPC, on social media with social media marketing, & through email
with email marketing.

Every business needs digital marketing. It’s necessary you understand the benefits of digital
marketing for businesses, which include:

1. Affordability
Digital marketing is considerably less expensive than other marketing methods. Specific prices
vary based on what you‘re doing but ad spend tends to be lower than other forms of marketing.

2. Mobile Access
You may not know this but 77 percent of American adults own a smartphone and are likely to
use that smartphone or another mobile device for news, social networking, and countless other
activities. Digital marketing helps you reach them while they‘re doing this. With remarketing
ads, email and text marketing, and social media – you can be in front of your audience while they
use many different apps on their mobile phones.

3. Flexibility
There are many forms and uses of high quality digital marketing, including banner ads, email
marketing, content marketing, and social media posts. Thus by learning how to creatively
market yourself digitally, you open up a wide range of possibilities for future publicity
strategies. With digital marketing, you also have the flexibility of testing and stopping poorly
performing campaigns in real time.

4. Expansion
Many consumers do almost all of their shopping online. Digital marketing lets you appeal to
these people and thus expand the reach of your company. Between Google Shopping Ads and
brand awareness campaigns, you can expand your brand recognition and boost sales.
5. Multimedia
Customers tend to engage more with marketing materials that combine multiple types of content,
including photos, video clips, and audio. It is far easier to incorporate all these content types into
digital marketing than any other type of publicity – and it is very important.

Interactivity

Digital marketing lets you communicate directly with the customers who see your content,
notably through website comments, messages, reviews, and social media posts. This shows those
customers that you care about what they say and think, leading them to feel respected and part of
the community you‘re building. It also allows you to gather invaluable information on
customers‘ reactions and preferences.

6. Tracking
Besides communicating with customers, digital marketing lets you track their activities. You can
monitor which ads and types of content they have seen shortly before they make a purchase.
This tells you which marketing methods are most effective, allowing you to refine and improve
your strategy.

7. Authority
Digital marketing makes it easy to comment on issues and controversies that relate to your
product or your industry. In this way, you can establish yourself as an authority on such topics,
leading readers to trust you, come back for more information, and eventually make a purchase.
Digital marketing allows you to come off as the industry expert that you are and will instill trust
in your business.

8. Influencer Engagement
Many of the most influential figures in modern culture promote themselves online or through
social media. Digital marketing allows you to engage with these influencers and gain their
respect. If you play your cards right, you can get them to endorse you, leading their followers to
become customers and spread brand awareness.

9. Print Enhancement
Digital marketing lets you expand on your print marketing efforts. By writing online content that
explains claims you make in your print ads, you can go into greater detail, maximizing the
effectiveness of all forms of publicity and integrating your campaigns.

Digital Marketing Process

Step 1: Research

At this stage, you will collect all the information that will be required for decision making in the
next stages. Information collected during the research will become your raw material to
strategize & create your digital marketing campaign. This stage can also be called as Digital
Marketing Research. At this stage, you will research 4 sets of information:

1. About Business
2. About Your Target Customers
3. About The Product That You Want To Market
4. About Online Competition

Each set is unique & equally important. You will require multiple sources to collect the
information.

Step 2: Create
Once you collect information at the research stage, you can now start creating:

1– Digital Marketing Objectives / Goals: These are the ultimate goals that you want to
achieve through your Digital Marketing Campaign. Every business is unique; therefore their
goals will also be unique. Campaigns without clear goals will end up spending money without
the assurance of achieving goals. What goals you should set, can be answered after looking at
information collected at the Digital Marketing Research stage. Learn more about Digital
Marketing Objectives / Goals.

2 – Digital Marketing Strategy: After you set the goals, it‘s time to create a strategy to achieve
those goals. Your Digital Marketing Strategy will include Positioning Strategy, Branding
Strategy, Content Strategy, Digital Marketing Channels Strategy. What strategy should be
adapted/created, will be answered from the information collected at the Digital Marketing
Research stage.

3 – Digital Marketing Plan: At this stage, you will lay down a documented plan that will
include all your detailed Digital Marketing activities with timelines.

4 – Creating Primary Digital Identities: The 3 primary Digital Identities of business are
Website, Blog & App. These are like your online office, shops, or showrooms. These are the
places where you want your target customer to reach & ultimately buy your products & services.
Before you move on to the next stage, i.e promote, your primary digital identities must be fully
ready. For businesses that want to sell their products through major E-Commerce portals,
creating digital identities can be optional. But, it‘s better to at least have a website for
establishing some credibility of your business.

Step 3: Promote

After your primary digital identities are fully ready, you will start promoting them. That means
you want relevant people to start coming to your primary digital identities. This is also called as
generating relevant traffic. Relevant traffic is an important word here.
The more you get relevant traffic to your website, the more the conversion you can expect. Your
options to promote your website/blog / app will be:

1. Search Engines
2. Display Network
3. Ecommerce Portals
4. Social Media
5. Email
 6. Messaging
7. Affiliate

The above are also known as Digital Marketing Channels, which you need to promote your
Primary Digital Identities (Website / Blog / App). There are sub-channels & networks within
some of the channels mentioned above.Which channels, sub channels, networks to go for &
whether to do organic or inorganic promotions, these questions will already be answered at the
Digital Marketing Strategy creation stage.

Step 4: Analyze

Once you create your primary digital identities & start promoting them through various digital
marketing channels, it‘s time to start monitoring your performance. Analyzing is like looking at
the outcome of your digital marketing work. You will receive analytics for your primary
Digital identities, as well as the channels through which you have done the promotions.

The most important & ultimate analytics for any business is the analytics of your website/blog /
app. Google Analytics is widely popular to generate analytics of your primary digital identities.
The 4 major sections of Google Analytics are:

1. Audiences
2. Acquisition
3. Behavior
4. Conversion

Step 5: Optimize

Summary

To summarize, the following are the 5 steps of the Digital Marketing Process:
1- Research: At this stage, you Research about business, target customers, product/service,
competition.
2- Create: At this stage, you create your digital marketing goals, digital marketing strategy,
digital marketing plan & primary digital identities (website/blog/ app).
3 – Promote: At this stage, you start promoting your primary digital identities through various
digital marketing channels like search engines, display networks, e-commerce portals, social
media, emails, messaging & affiliate programs.
4 – Analyze: At this stage, you look the various analytics including the most important analytics
i.e Website / Blog / App analytics & compare them with your goals. You also understand where
changes must be made in order to bridge the gap between goals & actual.
5- Optimize: At this stage, based on analysis & observations, you start making changes (fine-
tuning). The changes could be in your primary digital identities or digital marketing channels.
Changes are also referred to as content & design of your identities & promotional
communication.
Digital marketing is more than putting something on the internet and hoping it reaches the right
people. Digital marketing is a strategic way to simultaneously build brand awareness and
provide incredible value to online audiences. The more targeted and intentional you are with
your digital marketing efforts, the more visibility you‘ll have online.
In this post, we’re discussing 10 steps for increasing visibility in digital marketing.

1. Establish Your Brand’s Website

2. Create a Blog
3. Make SEO a Priority
4. Don’t Forget About Off-Site SEO
5. Utilize Social Media
6. Capitalize On Email Marketing
7. Invest In Paid Ads
8. Encourage Online Customer Reviews
9. Establish Content Partnerships
10. Work With Online Influencers

1. Establish Your Brand’s Website

A fundamental step in increasing visibility in digital marketing is establishing your brand‘s
website. If your brand doesn’t have a website, you’re missing out on incredible digital
growth.
According to fitsmallbusiness.com, only 50% of small businesses have a website and nearly 90%
of people use the internet to find local businesses. That means if you don‘t have a website,
you‘re missing out on viable online traffic.
Plus, think about what it looks like to online audiences if you don‘t have a website. Not having
one can make your business look:

• Unprofessional
• Spammy
• Untrustworthy
• Incompetent
• Out of touch with modern trends

If you haven ‘t yet, set up a website for your brand right away. Here are the essentials you ‘ll
need for your website:
o Your logo
o Your branding color scheme
o An ―About Us‖ section
o Contact information
 o Hours of operation
o Descriptions of the services you offer
o Customer testimonials
o A blog

You want to put the right information on your website, but you don‘t want to overload the
site and make your digital brand look clunky. Statistics show that 38% of people will stop
engaging with a site if it has an unappealing design. Don‘t miss out on 38% of traffic.
Instead, invest in a well-designed website so visitors have a positive user experience.

2. Create A Blog
One of the most effective ways to increase visibility in the digital landscape is by
creating a blog for your brand.
Establishing a blog is a strategic way to establish a loyal following while simultaneously
boosting your online presence.

Statistics show that 77% of internet users regularly read blog posts. The demand for blog content
is out there, but it‘s up to you to create that content for your audience. How can you create that
content? By coming up with a comprehensive and strategic content strategy.
When done right, a content strategy can drive massive traffic to your blog and ultimately,
your website. The keys to a successful blog content strategy include:

• Identifying who your target audience is

• Knowing what topics they‘re searching the internet for
• Making sure topics align with your brand
• Writing content to align with your brand‘s voice
• Creating valuable content your audience wants to read

Blogging is a crucial way for your brand to grow organically online. The more valuable content
you put on your blog, the more likely you’ll get viable web traffic willing to convert from
leads to customers.
3. Make SEO A Priority
Blogging also increases your website‘s SEO (search engine optimization). Having an SEO
strategy in place is crucial for increasing visibility in digital marketing.
SEO is important because, when done right, it provides incredible organic growth for your brand.
That means you‘ll show up to more people at a faster rate online.

The better your SEO is, the more likely you’ll rank within the top pages of Google.
So, how can you boost your SEO and get your website seen by more people? You can:

• Consistently publish valuable content on a blog

• Do keyword research
 • Build content around targeted keywords
• Craft a backlink strategy for your website
• Ensure your website speed isn‘t lagging
1 0. W e b s i t e m u s t h a v e s t o d r i v e t r a f f i c & g e n e r a t e N e w
leads
Don’t Forget About Off-Site SEO
You can‘t discuss an SEO strategy without talking about off-site SEO. Off-site SEO refers to the
things you do outside of your website to boost your online rankings. Off-site SEO strategies
include:
Being responsive on social media
• Create a Google My Business listing
• Obtaining online reviews (Google Reviews, Yelp, etc.)
• Build a backlink strategy
• Guest blogging

Off-site SEO makes your brand look more legitimate and trustworthy to online audiences.
Think about it: you‘re working on building your brand online, but outside of your website. Even
if people find you online via these alternative means, they‘ll still have ways to identify your
brand and visit your website.
Utilize Social Media

Another important step for increasing visibility in digital marketing is utilizing social media.
These days, internet users expect your brand to not only have social media accounts but post on
them frequently.

Some social media platforms you brand should be on include:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Instagram
• YouTube
• TikTok
• LinkedIn
• Pinterest
• Snapchat

Keep in mind that your followers consume content differently on each platform. If someone‘s on
YouTube, they‘re expecting to see video content. However, if they‘re on Instagram, they might
expect to get pictures or stories.
That‘s why it‘s essential for your brand to have a social media strategy in place. A social media
strategy helps you optimize your social content for maximum engagement across all
platforms.
Create content that aims to engage followers, build a community, and provide value. The more
valuable your social content is, the more likely you‘ll build a social following that‘ll last.
Capitalize On Email Marketing

In terms of increasing visibility in digital marketing, email marketing is a viable tool that can
provide an impressive return on investment (ROI). According to benchmarkemail.com,
email marketing provides an ROI of $38 made for every $1 spent. That‘s a lot of profit made
with strategic efforts for reaching people‘s inboxes.

One of the best ways to build your email marketing list is to offer free resources as lead
generators. Examples of free resources to utilize for email capture include:

• Webinars
• Whitepapers
• Downloadable PDFs
• Product demos
• Newsletters
• Free trials

Email marketing is your chance to build a long-lasting relationship with your leads.
It‘s also a channel where you reach your leads directly. No matter how many social media posts
you create, not everyone in your audience will see it due to platform algorithms. However, if you
send an email, it directly reaches a lead by hitting their inbox.
The key to email marketing is sending relevant and valuable content to leads at the right time.
Email marketing is equal parts creative and analytical.
1 0 W E B S I T E M U S T H A V E T O D R I V E T R A F F I C & GE N E R A T E N E
W L E AD S

Invest In Paid Ads

One of the best tactics for increasing visibility in digital marketing is investing in paid ads. Paid
ads are advertisements you pay to run online. Common platforms where marketers run
paid advertising include search engines (Google Ads), social media platforms (Facebook
Ads), and paid content (sponsored blog posts).
Paid online advertising, when done right, can provide a great ROI. Statistics show that
paid advertising returns $2 for every $1 spent – a 200% ROI rate. The right paid advertisement
can bring in incredible business for your brand.
Not sure where to start with paid advertising? Be sure to put these steps on your to-do list:

• Create a list of keywords to target

• Monitor your ad campaigns
• Run campaigns across multiple channels
 • Don‘t forget about retargeting efforts

Also, don‘t forget to monitor how your paid ad campaigns are doing. The last thing you
want to do is waste your money on an ad campaign that isn’t converting. Set KPIs for your
campaigns and monitor if you‘re meeting them. If you aren‘t, adjust your campaign so you are
making those KPIs.

Encourage Online Customer Reviews

Online customer reviews can really help your brand grow online and increase your visibility.
Online reviews contribute to your brand‘s social proof, aka validation that your products
and/or services really work. Statistics show that reviews make customers 71% more
comfortable purchasing a product.

There are other perks of having customers leave online reviews. These perks include:

• Boosting your off-site SEO

• Creating a sense of trust with online audiences
• Aiding your local SEO efforts

Customer reviews also give you a chance to engage with previous customers and establish your
reputation as a customer-first brand. And, if someone were to leave a negative review, you can
take the offense by responding and resolving the problem.
Online customer reviews are ways to set yourself apart from the competition while
simultaneously building your brand. Want good reviews? Be sure to provide excellent
customer service.
Establish Content Partnerships

A unique tip for increasing visibility in digital marketing is establishing content partnerships
with other brands. A content partnership is where you work with another brand to create content
for one another‘s websites and social channels.
This strategy is beneficial for all brands, but it’s especially beneficial for brands looking to
broaden their online reach.
Examples of content partnerships include:

• Co-hosting a webinar
• Guest posting on blogs
• Making guest appearances on YouTube channels
• Being interviewed on podcasts
• Co-authoring an eBook

One of the biggest hurdles to tackle when establishing content partnerships is determining which
brands to work with. You want to target brands that complement yours, not ones you‘re in direct
competition with. You also want to pick brands that get decent website traffic and have active
social followings.

When done right, content partnerships can grow two brands tremendously at the same
time. And, content partnerships can break you out of your comfort zone and create content you
may not have before.

Work With Online Influencers

Another key way to increase visibility is to work with online influencers. Influencers are people
who have established brands online and have an impressive social media following.
One of the biggest perks of working with influencers is that you establish social proof
within a community. The whole reason people follow influencers is because they feel like
they‘re part of their community. Their values align with the influencer‘s values and others in the
community. Therefore,if an influencer promotes your product, they‘re subconsciously telling
their followers that your brand aligns with theirs.
When working with influencers, one of the first things you should do is look for influencers in
complementary industries. That way, you can work with the influencer instead of being in
competition with them. You should also make sure the influencer has the social and website
reach you‘re looking for.
An important thing to do when working with influencers is establishing KPIs to track a
campaign’s progress. This will help both you and the influencer be on the same page about the
campaign‘s expected goals and outcomes.

Getting More Eyes On Your Brand

There are many steps you can follow to start increasing visibility in digital marketing. You can
invest time in building your organic reach by creating a blog, focusing on SEO, and building
your social following. You can also invest in paid advertising and content partnerships to
broaden your online reach.
The biggest thing to remember is that it may take a little while to increase your visibility through
digital marketing efforts. It may not all come together overnight, but when it does come
together, you‘ll see a major boost in website traffic and social followers.

The Difference Between Inbound and Outbound Marketing INBOUND MARKETING

• Pulls interested readers in

• Solves consumers‘ needs
• Interactive with readers
• As helpful content is consumed, audience members become leads
• Where you see it: websites, blogs, eBooks, opt-in emails, SERP, social media

OUTBOUND MARKETING
• Pushes messaging at everyone
• Written to sell products
• One-way communication
 • Disrupts whatever content is being consumed
• Where you see it: TV ads, billboards, pop-up internet ads,
telemarketing, magazines

Conversion Tools Turn Visitors Into Customers

Every business asks how they can turn more of their web visitors into customers, and the answer
is conversion tools. With the right tools, you can turn a larger segment of your visitors into
customers. But what exactly are these tools? How should these tools be used? Converting more
traffic into customers with tools requires understanding the available tools and your specific
customer needs. Below we have outlined a few conversion tools that can help your lead
generation and conversion efforts and if you like, we can analyze your customers to match them
with the right tools to use on your website.
The conversion toolbox is large, with a wide assortment of tools and tactics, each with its
purpose and most effective uses. Some of those tools make a broad sweep and encompass
numerous other aspects of your digital presence, such as website design. Others are more specific
and targeted, like call tracking. Overall, whatever your current needs are regarding conversion,
you can find a tool that can meet your needs and improve your conversion rates.

Web Design

Good web design does far more than look clean and pretty and is an essential element of turning
visitors into customers. Here are some ways web design can increase your site‘s conversion rate.

1. Clear Unique Value Proposition – Making your unique value proposition clear to the
visitor will help your site stand out from the pack. When people visit your site, you want
to answer one of their most important questions: ―Why should I buy from you?‖ Find
your unique selling point, and make that point clear to the visitor.

2. Good Calls-to-Actions & Headlines – A simple, strong call-to- action or headline that
addresses your visitor‘s needs is key to creating a high converting website.
3. Simple, Easy to Navigate Structure – Your website should have a strong visual hierarchy
to help visitors identify the most important content on any page. Good web design
simplifies the navigation process so that users can explore your site more easily.
4. Design for Speed – Loading times and website performance are strongly correlated with
conversions, and people will leave sites quickly if they take too long to load. Your
website should be designed to minimize loading times so that people will stay on your
site longer.
5. Responsive Design – Responsive design is how well your site scales and adapts on other
platforms, such as mobile phones and tablets. Both overall mobile traffic and the number
of users who shop on mobile continue to climb, so having a responsive design is more
important than ever. People leave mobile sites extremely fast, therefore, making your site
responsive will lead to more people staying on your site, having a more pleasant user
experience, and ultimately more likely to convert.

All web design principles and techniques should augment your website‘s performance and
usability while being aesthetically pleasing. Striking that balance is vital for creating a high-
converting website.
 Chatbots

Chatbots have exploded in popularity in recent years and have become effective conversion tools
for many businesses. More and more people are willing to talk with Chatbots when searching
for information and solutions, so now is an excellent time to take advantage of this growing
acceptance of bots. Chatbots grant you further options to engage with your leads, and Chatbots
are active 24/7, meaning that your leads can engage with your business even when your workday
is over. Engaging your leads is vital to converting them into customers, with research showing
that engaged customers spend more money on companies who engage with them. Using Chatbots
on your website will help you engage with leads more often, guide them through your site‘s
content, and convert them into paying customers.

Social Proof

The Internet is a social platform, and we are not just talking about social media, but rather social
proof. Social proof, also known as informational social influence, is a psychological and social
phenomenon where people copy others‘actions to undertake behavior in a given situation. Social
proof can be a valuable asset within your conversion toolbox, and one of the most effective
forms of social proof is reviews.
Reviews

Reviews and testimonials are some of the most effective examples of social proof, and
conversion tools, businesses can use.

• Bright Local says that roughly 82% of consumers read online reviews for local
businesses, with around half of 18-54-year-olds claiming to ―always‖ read reviews.
• Online reviews are viewed as trustworthy by consumers, and consumers also spend much
time reading reviews before making decisions.

If you have good reviews, and having more positive reviews is always better, highlight them on
your website, social media pages, and you will see your leads convert more often, some studies
say even up to 34%.

Call Tracking

More than just tracking people who visit your website or fill your contact form, you want to
track the people who call your business. Call tracking significantly improves the effectiveness of
your pay-per-click, or PPC , ad campaigns, especially if you want those ads to do a better job of
converting people who do see or click on them. One example is through Google Ads call
tracking, which can track the people who called your company after seeing or clicking on a PPC
ad. Another example would be CallRail, which can track which specific keywords perform the
best, and result in the most phone calls. By utilizing call tracking tools, your ads become more
effective at targeting the demographics you want and allow you to follow up and convert a larger
segment of the people who see your ads.
Lead Magnets

A tried-and-true method for businesses to pull in more customers is an offer for sale price,
discounts, giveaways and the like. Digitally, your business can use lead magnets. A lead magnet
is a marketing tool whereby a company offers something to users in exchange for their
contact information. An example of a lead magnet would be offering a free PDF about a specific
service or product to a lead. The lead‘s benefits are obvious: the leads get free resources to help
their needs, but how do businesses improve their conversion from lead magnets?

Free guides, books, tools, and resources are incredibly alluring and appealing to people. By
offering visitors something without asking them to pay, you build trust and authority, which you
can leverage in the future as you nurture those leads into customers.
Unit 2
Website Planning Process: Introduction

A domain name is a web address consisting of a website name and a domain name extension.
The name is up to you – as long as it consists of letters, numbers, hyphens and is still available,
whereas the domain extension is usually a set combination of a few letters.
Just like a physical address helps people find a specific place, the purpose of a domain is to
help visitors find a website. Without domain names, users can only access websites using
Internet Protocol (IP) addresses.
However, IP addresses are hard to remember as they consist of seemingly random series of
numbers, making them inconvenient to share. Domain names, on the contrary, can help drive
traffic to your website.

Different types of websites:

1. Blogs

Blogs have been a most loved and preferred choice of websites for individuals and families who
wish to archive the huge events of their lives, for example, weddings, babies or their precious
moments. Nowadays, the cutting option; blogging has gotten on the high tide and has
become incredibly well known. Blogs are also great for presenting your personal style, sharing
your favorite recipes or showcasing your hobbies or anything in that case to the world. Blogs
are normally updated habitually, and more seasoned posts can be seen through archives. The
most common way to build a blog is by utilizing a CMS (Content Management System) like
Word Press, Joomla, Drupal, Magento, Ghost, etc. The most renowned out of these is Word
press which is used by small bloggers to high-end brands.

A fantastic example of an amazing blog is Real Mom Recs. This is an aesthetically built
blog which gives tips on pre-maternity issues, pregnancy, and other postpartum related issues.
2. Business/Corporate Websites

A business site is any site that is committed to depicting a particular business. It ought to be
branded like the company (a similar logo and positioning) and convey the sorts of items as well
as services the company/ business offers. At this point, each company out there, whether big or
small, ought to have a site. It's the need of the hour. Each potential client you come across
will simply expect that in the event that they Google your business searching for more data,
they'll discover a site. What's more, in case they don't, it makes the business look less
professional or legitimate.
The most straight forward way to build an informative website for your business is by using
business tools like Word press, Wix, Page Cloud, or Square space. However, if you're looking
for a professional site, you might want to get it developed from an experienced
Business Website Development Company. The Fool is an excellent example of an impact
business website. It provides stock investment advice and looks very alluring with it minimal
yet effective design.
3. NGO /Non-Profit Websites

Just like brands and businesses, Non –profit organisations and NGOs also require a website.
Similarly that organisations need sites to be their online nearness, not-for-profits do too. A
nonprofit website is the most straightforward path for some potential contributors to give
donations and to know more about an Organisation to make their mind about whether or not
will they make the donation. On the off chance that you are thinking about beginning an NGO,
at that point assembling a site for your association is an essential advance in
demonstrating your authenticity and contacting more individuals. You can utilise it to
advance the ventures your association handles, urge devotees to make a move, and for
accepting donations. Most of the times, the budget for building a nonprofit website is
meagre (no budget in some cases). So, you can utilise some open- source tools like the
fermium version of Wix or Wordpress.

4. E-Commerce Websites

The websites where users can shop and makes purchases are called E-Commerce Websites.
All of would have used these sites a myriad of times, and they have become a must-have
for every selling business. With the advancement in website development technology, it has
become relatively easy to build an E-Commerce site and start selling.
The best way to build an E-Commerce Site is through Shopify, which allows you to
incorporate all the essential shopping features such as an inventory display, a shopping cart
and a payment gateway into your website. Other than Shopify, you can also use tools like
WooCommerce and Weebly to build a sophisticated store with numerous products.
A groundbreaking E-Commerce website example is BeardBrand. This website is built on
Shopify and has emerged one of the most successful sites ever made on it.

5. Educational Websites

The sites of educational organizations and those providing online courses fall into the class
of educational sites. These sites have the essential objective of either giving study
materials to visitors or giving data on an educational organization to them. Some
educational sites will have ads like entertainment and media sites do. Some offer membership
models or educational items for procurement. What's more, some fill in as the digital presence
for an educational organization.
As a result of the expanding interest for these sites, numerous reasonable apparatuses offer
this utility. Ordinarily, a knowledge base feature will be incorporated as a piece of online
tools, for example, Zen Desk, Intercom, or Freshworks. Be that as it may, there are some
web builders like Wix that offer this usefulness out-of-the- crate.
6. Entertainment Website

Entertainment sites contain consistently refreshed substance on current undertakings,

climate, sports and amusement. News destinations like CNN and entertainment biggies like
ELLE both fall into this classification. The content on media locales is dynamic, which
means it's refreshed normally. Enormous media locales will distribute numerous articles and
recordings each and every day. The majority of these sites do mean to make cash like business
and e- commerce sites do, yet for the most part through the ads that appear on the page as
opposed to through selling explicit items or services. Since such websites need to be highly
dynamic, you can use platforms like Dreamweaver, WordPress, or Blogger, or you can get
it built professionally from a skilful web development company.

7. Portfolio Website

Portfolio Websites are great for showcasing your work; everyone fro photographers to models
are utilising such sites to flaunt their work to potential clients. Essentially utilised by
those in the creative business, a portfolio site can be utilised like a CV, showing
your abilities so as to dazzle customers, clients, or future prospects. To assemble a
noteworthy portfolio that enables your work to stick out, you need a powerful website
builder like Squarespace. This platform has the best apparatuses for every web designer,
letting you make a fantastic looking webpage in a few hours. Portfoliiobox, Wix and
PageCloud are some other excellent alternatives.

Website planning process

1. Define Your Goals
Start your website planning process by detailing the objectives you wish to achieve with your
website.
If you already have a functioning website, review its current performance and define areas where
there‘s room for improvement. Write down specific goals, like generating more traffic or
boosting online sales.

Once you have specific goals laid out, you can start strategizing about actionable ways to achieve
them.

2. Set Your Budget

Determine how much you can spend on your website project and be transparent about it with
your web design agency, if you choose to outsource your project.

Knowing your website budget, along with your goals and expectations, will help your digital
agency come up with the best possible solution for your needs and bank account.

To set up your budget:

 a. Define the purpose of your website (selling advertising space, lead generation,
software integration, etc.)
b. Define whether you need a custom website design or a template design
c. Create a list of must-have features and functionalities
d. Research agencies and meet with you top considerations
to transparently discuss your needs and budget
e. Find Your Platform (CMS)
If you opt for a templated website, you can choose from one of the many content management
systems (CMS) available, such as WordPress, Joomla, Magento or Kentico.

To decide which platform is right for you, make sure your CMS:

f. Is strategy-friendly: Pick a CMS solution that enables your team to focus on

implementing strategies that boost web traffic instead of spending time on
managing the technology.
g. Is scalable: As your business changes and grows, so should your website. Opt for
a CMS solution that can reflect your business‘s growth in the years to come.
h. Supports omnichannel: Content exists on many channels, platforms, operating
systems, browsers and devices. Opt for a CMS solution that is capable of
supporting a variety of new and existing channels.
i. Supports third-party integrations: Certain CMS solutions, like headless CMS
with robust APIs, allow you to connect with third- party content management
tools. This is important for easier incorporation of personalized marketing
strategies, deep insights into user behavior and integration of marketing
automation tools, business intelligence systems and other software to enhance the
website‘s capabilities.
j. Offers good technical support: Choose a CMS that allows developers to work
without interfering with the creation and management of content.
Looking to grow your brand online? LET US GIVE YOU IDEAS!
3. Secure A Domain Name

The next step in the website planning process is to secure your domain name.

Check the domain‘s availability and ensure it‘s in line with the best practices we listed above.

A successful choice will add to your brand identity, recognition and reputation, improve your
SEO, establish your unique online presence and communicate your brand‘s purpose.
GoDaddy and Name Cheap are the most popular domain registrars [Source:
Domain Name Stat]
4. Create A Design Plan

The time has come for your website design process, the moment when your strategy starts to
translate into information architecture – a strategic placement of your content in a wireframe.

Create wireframes to focus on the key elements that will define your users‘ on-site experience,
including the conversion funnel, messaging and more.

A website wireframe example by Julio Castellano on Dribbble

After creating a wireframe, it‘s time to move to the fun part — the user interface design — to
add your colors, fonts and other visual elements that represent your brand.
Whether you are designing your website in-house or with an agency, be sure that the team
working on your website follows your:

a. Brand style guide

b. Digital strategy
c. Design references, i.e. the websites you admire
Another key factor in this stage is responsive website design vs. mobile-first design.

If you opt for a responsive website design, your website will be designed for desktop devices
and scaled down to mobile devices. The layout and content will be ―repackaged‖ and contracted
to fit smartphones and tablets, but the navigation and overall UX will still be more geared toward
a desktop website.

If you decide on a mobile-first design, your website will be meant for mobile devices first and
foremost. It will focus on an excellent user experience through fast mobile page speeds, legible
content and easy navigation.

An exact opposite of the responsive design, the mobile-first layout is adapted to work on desktop
devices without numerous modifications.
 5. Create A Marketing Plan

Next, it‘s time to create your marketing plan.

List all of the website marketing strategies that will help you funnel in, nurture and retain your
website visitors, such as search engine optimization, newsletter signups, gated content, social
media sharing buttons and more.

a. Search engine optimization increases the quantity and quality of website traffic
through a series of techniques that make your website more visible in organic
search engine results.
 b. Newsletter signups capture prospects and leads and acquire contact information,
which is used to send directly personalized content and offers.
c. Gated content includes white papers, articles, videos and other types of content
that are accessible only by website visitors who fill out a form and submit their
personal information (name, email address, company, etc.)
Depending on your specific marketing goals, consider adding marketing integrations that
facilitate data sharing, reporting and more.

The most common website integrations are:

d. CRM
e. Email marketing platforms
f. Scheduling software
g. Inventory management platforms (for eCommerce)
6. Create A Content Plan

Use your strategy, approved wireframes and specific keywords to plan your website content. It
must be short, simple, on-brand and to the point, engaging and educational.

Check out your competition, including the topics they cover and the way they present
information. Think of content ideas based on your target audience, where the spend the most
time online and how they prefer to absorb information.

Depending on your audience and your offering, your content plan might include blogs, how-to
videos, social media quizzes, a weekly newsletter and more.
Quality content can support each stage of the conversion funnel

7. Create A Launch Plan

Now that you have chosen your website platform, domain name and hosting plan, follow up on
the steps to ensure a successful and hassle- free website launch.

Run quality assurance testing to evaluate the design, along with functionality testing to uncover
any flaws and issues that were overlooked during the web development phase.

QA testing ensures your end-users get a highly functional user interface and optimal user
experience.
Along with testing, before taking your website live:

a. Run website page speed tests to ensure optimal page speed

b. Run a Google Mobile-Friendly Test to establish if your website is mobile-friendly
c. Set up a Google Search Console that will show SEO issues and how the
website performs on Google
d. Set up Google Analytics that will show your website‘s traffic, on- site user
behavior and other insights
Finally, it’s time for your website’s launch campaign. Generate awareness, traffic and brand
engagement by:

e. Publishing a ―Coming Soon‖ landing page

f. Choosing the launch date and spreading the word

What is a Domain Name?

Domain name is the address of your website that people type in the browser‘s URL bar to
visit your website.

In other words, if your website was a house, then your domain name will be its address.

Now let‘s get into the detailed explanation.

Internet is basically a giant network of computers connected to each other through cables. To
easily identify them, each computer is assigned a series of numbers called IP Address.

This IP address is a combination of numbers separated with dots. Typically, IP addresses look
like this:
66.249.66.1

Computers have no problem identifying and remembering these numbers. However, it is

impossible for humans to remember and use these numbers to connect to websites on the
internet.

To solve this problem, domain names were invented.

A domain name can have words which makes it easy to remember website addresses.

Now if you wanted to visit a website on the internet, you don‘t need to type a string of numbers.
Instead, you can type in an easy to remember domain name, for example, wpbeginner.com.

Web hosting is the place where all the files of your website live. It is like the home of your
website where it actually lives.

A good way to think about this is if the domain name was the address of your house, then web
hosting is the actual house that address points to. All websites on the internet, need web hosting.

When someone enters your domain name in a browser, the domain name is translated into the IP
address of your web hosting company‘s computer. This computer contains your website‘s files,
and it sends those files back to the users‘ browsers.

How Domain Names and Web Hosting are Related?

Domain names and web hosting are two different services. However, they work together to make
websites possible.
Basically a domain name system is like a massive address book that is constantly updated.
Behind each domain name, there is an address of the web hosting service storing the website‘s
files.

Without domain names, it will not be possible for people to find your website and without web
hosting you cannot build a website.

To build a website you will need both a domain name and web hosting account.

Buying a domain name alone only gives you right to use that particular domain name for a
specific period

You need web hosting to store your website‘s files. After you get hosting, you need to update
your domain name settings and point it to your web hosting service provider.

Adding content and viewing your site

Three important buttons

1. Main menu Switch to another application like Blog or Store.

2. Add content button Add new images, text or other content to your page.
3. Publish button Make your website visible on the web.
Add content

To add content to your page:

1. Click the Add content button.

2. Drag any item from the content panel onto the page.
3. Drop the content on the page.
4. Switch between Edit and Preview mode as needed by clicking the empty spot on the
Edit or Preview toggle slider bar.
5. Select the type of device on which you wish to view your site.
6. Publish your site to make it available for everyone.
Page layout

1. Click and drag the item you want to add.

2. Drop zones are indicated in green as you drag the item around the page.

5 STEPS TO CREATING A BLUEPRINT FOR YOUR FIRST WEBSITE

It can also be overwhelming if you don‘t know where to start, and frustrating if things don‘t turn
out right. Follow these five steps when exploring how to create a website for the first time to
ensure that your very first site doesn‘t end up as an epic fail:
1. SET YOUR GOALS AND PURPOSE
What‘s your website‘s purpose? Are you trying to get publicity? Sell a service or product? Gain
new followers or supporters for your cause? Teach something? Share something? Part of
learning web design is learning your audience.

Before even trying to understand how to create a website, you should first identify your
site‘s purpose. Then you can determine who your target audience is, and set goals. Your content
needs to be customized specifically for attracting and gaining the interest and attention of your
target audience. And, your goals need to be specific and measureable—IE, ―to make at least 10
online sales per month.‖

2. CREATE YOUR CONTENT STRATEGY

The content you publish on your first website is vital to both visitors and search engines.
Visitors will read, view, watch and listen to it. Search engines will use it to determine
what search results your site belongs in, and what searchers could use what‘s published on your
site to solve their problems. No one should know from looking at your first website that you are
just learning web design! Having multiple types of content on your website helps to build
credibility.

There are numerous types of content. Some of them include:

• Articles
• Press releases
• Blog posts
• Pictures
• Cartoons
• Memes
• Infographics
• Music
 • Audio files
• Videos
• Slideshows
• Embedded feeds from social media pages
Determine the what, when and where for your publications. What type of content do you plan to
publish, how often and on what pages (or posts) of your site?

3. DECIDE ON THE SITE‘S STRUCTURE

Figure out which webpages need to be added to the site, for example: Home, About,
Contact. Then, decide which features each page needs (like your contact page should include a
contact form.)

4. CREATE A MOCKUP
You can use Fireworks or Photoshop to design an initial rough draft of your site just to give you
an idea of how it will look. If you don‘t have access to these software programs, simply draw up
a mockup webpage using the old-fashioned pen and paper.

5. DESIGN YOUR FIRST WEBSITE

When learning how to create a website, specifically learning web design for your first website,
keep the following tips in mind. Your site needs to be:

• Easy to use
• Great looking
• Responsive design
• Simple to navigate
• Have easy-to-read font
• Include background color that contrasts well with text color.
Unit 3
What is SERP?

SERP appears when an online user searches for any information. Every SERP displayed is
unique and is related to the searched query performed on any search engine. In order to provide a
great user experience, search engines customize the SERP according to the searched query.
Every search engine wants to provide a great user experience, and that‘s why they customize
SERP on the basis of the searched query. Location, browser‘s history, cache memory, and
bookmarks are some factors that any search engine considers before showing SERP.

We cannot exactly determine the appearance of SERP as search engines like Google, Bing, etc
keep doing experiments to provide a delightful and useful experience for their users. Every time
these search engines change its algorithms, the user finds something new in the SERP format.

2. Features of SERP
An SERP feature is the result of a Google Search Engine Results Page that is not a common
organic result. The common SERP Features are:

• Rich snippets – It acts as a short visual message that gives a quick result at a glance
such as movie ratings or any product specification.
• Paid results – These are paid ads done by bidding on platforms
such as Google AdWords or Google shopping.
• Universal result – It appears with an organic search such as images, featured
snippets etc.
• Knowledge graph – It appears in the form of a small bracket and contains small
information about the searched queries.
Some other commonly SERP features include ad words, image pack, site link, video, tweet, news
box, reviews, In-depth article, knowledge card, local pack, local teaser pack any many more.

3. Types of Results on SERP

4. How Does SERPWork?
SERP depends on a number of web pages that have some keywords or phrases attached to them.
SERP has the capability to display pages from zero to millions.
Example – If you search ―digital marketing quotes‖ then any search engine would display
thousands of pages containing relevant or irrelevant content like the ones in the image below.
Web designers and online marketers make sure that while doing SEO their website is displayed

at least in the top two pages of SERP. SERP consists of different ads, snippets, knowledge
graphs, and website. But they all have one thing in common i.e. keywords. All websites and
other ads are optimized keeping in mind the keywords. All SERPs appear on the basis of the
keywords chosen.

5. What is Organic Search in SERP?

Organic search is the result that appears on SERP because of search engine algorithm.
Professionals having specialization in search engine optimization (SEO) with their best skills
make sure that while doing organic search, their website appears in SERP.
Organic search is exactly the opposite of paid search and it appears when websites optimize with
perfect keywords, content and other tags.
In the below-discussed example, you can see while searching for DataFlair, pages such as its
blogs, courses, and other web pages appear that are the most relevant results.

What Is a Search Engine?

A search engine is a cornerstone of the internet. For many, a search engine is their starting place
whenever they open a web browser. If you don't know the exact address of a website you want to
visit—or if you don't know the exact website you want to find—you'll use a search engine to find
it.

At its heart, a search engine is simply an internet-based computer program. There are three main
functions of this program: collecting massive amounts of information about what is on the
internet, categorizing that information, and helping users search through that categorized
information.

How Does a Search Engine Work?

To start understanding how search engines work, break down each of its three main functions
individually.

First, search engines collect information through a process known as "crawling."1 "Web
crawlers," software designed by the search engine, methodically inspect URLs. These crawlers
take in information from hundreds of billions of websites, assessing aspects of a website like
the backend code and the copy that visitors read when they land on the webpage.

From there, the information is indexed according to keywords, how recently the site was
published, and other factors.

Once the information is indexed, users can search through that index by typing a query into the
search bar. These searches trigger complex algorithms that sift through the massive index to find
the most relevant results. When you submit a query, the algorithm simultaneously assesses the
meaning of your query, the relevance of indexed webpages, the quality of the content on those
webpages, the functionality of those webpages, and the context of your search (the location from
which you performed the search, your search history, etc.).2

Motivations Behind Search Engines

It's helpful to look at the motivation behind searching from three different perspectives.

• The searcher: This is the person who is on the web searching for information, products,
or services. They want to enter some keywords that represent that information, product,
or service and have relevant websites quickly appear that effectively meet their needs.
 • The search engine: The search engines are making money selling ad space to websites,
businesses, and marketers. The more search traffic they can generate, the more eyes on
their ads, and the more money that is made. Their goal is to have the most relevant sites
pop to the top of search results. That way, searchers find what they want and develop a
positive relationship with the search engine.
The next time they want to perform an internet search, they'll (hopefully) return to that
search engine.
• The website or marketer: They want these web searchers to find their site when they're
searching for relevant keywords so that they can promote their products or services.

HOW TO USE GOOGLE KEYWORD PLANNER

Hey everyone! I‘ve received a handful of emails and texts from bloggers who heard my
interview on the Food Blogger Pro podcast this week (so honored to have been a part of it!)
asking for more information about how to navigate the Google Keyword Planner. So I thought
I‘d pop in today with a quick step-by-step tutorial for how I use it.

As I mentioned on the podcast, I‘ve been a big fan of this resource from Google for years and
years. Why?

• Well first off, it‘s backed by Google, who has the best access to SEO research on the
planet.
• It‘s quick and easy to use, especially on days when I have
―recipe development block‖ and need some ideas for what to cook and share on
my blog next.
• As opposed to many other keyword research tools, it‘s 100% FREE!
To be clear, this tool definitely not guarantee ―instant success‖ with a keyword. I‘ve been
consulting it for years, and sometimes the stars align and it really helps with SEO, and sometimes
I never notice a difference. But if nothing else, I find that it‘s a great tool to use when you‘re:

• Searching for general recipe trends (i.e. How are people cooking broccoli lately?)
• Deciding between two different recipe options (i.e. Should I make chicken noodle
soup, or cream of chicken soup?)
• Creating SEO-friendly recipe names (i.e. chicken enchiladas vs. chicken enchilada
recipe)
• Wondering how many people actually search for a given term each month, and
how much competition exists for that term
1. Begin by visiting the Keyword Planner homepage. Since this tool is a part of Google
AdWords, you‘ll need to be signed in with your Google account information. (If you don‘t
already have an AdWords account, go ahead and sign up — it‘s free.)

Once you sign in, you‘ll be directed to the AdWords homepage (see image above), where you‘ll
need to click on the Tools dropdown menu and then select Keyword Planner.
2. Once you‘ve arrived, click on the little dropdown arrow next
to Search for new keywords using a phrase, website or category.

3. Then the fun begins! (Or my nerdy, techy, SEO-y version of ―fun‖.)
;)
In the search box, go ahead and type in whatever term you would like to research. For an
example, I‘m going to go with the word ―chicken‖.
4. And here are all of your results! Initially the Ad group ideas results will pop up, but I haven‘t
found these to be all that useful. (They are basically combined or related search terms that
Google recommends you consider, but they aren‘t always that relevant.)
5. You should now see your specific search term at the top of the page on the left, with two
important pieces of information beside it — the average monthly searches (the average
number of times people have searched for this exact keyword based on the date range and
targeting settings that you‘ve selected) and competition (the number of advertisers that showed
on each keyword relative to all keywords across Google).
6. It‘s
100% up to you how you would like to use these results. But in general, I always
recommend that bloggers focus on the terms with low competition and semi-high average
monthly searches.

Why low competition? Well, that one probably goes without saying — there‘s less competition,
so that means there‘s a much higher chance that your post may rank higher in Google searches.
It‘s not a guarantee for sure. (And keep in mind that ―low‖ is a term relative to the number of
total searches, so a term with 100K+ monthly searches may still have tens of thousands of pages
competing for page rankings.)

Why semi-high average monthly searches? Well, that‘s totally just a recommendation from
me. You‘re, of course, totally welcome to focus on the highest average monthly searched terms.
But in my experience, the biggest recipe sites out there (i.e. Food Network, AllRecipes, etc.)
have almost always already targeted those terms, and thus, will be very more difficult to
potentially ―outrank‖ on Google. So in general, I tend to focus on the semi-high or medium
average monthly searched terms. And then maybe include some of the highest ones as secondary
keywords within my posts.

That said, remember that getting ranked on the first page of Google for your search term isn‘t
everything! :) If you really want to make a buffalo chicken dip, for example, I think you should
totally make it. If anything, the results here just confirm that there will probably be plenty of
people already interested in that topic. And hey — why not do a quick secondary search to see if
there‘s a similar keyword that you might want to target more specifically instead?

So, for example, if you have decided you‘d like to make some buffalo chicken dip, let‘s type it in
and see what the Keyword Planner has to say…
What is search engine penalties?

A search engine penalty is an action taken against a website participating in deceptive or

black hat SEO techniques. Google's definition of a "penalty" is some manual action taken
against a site, opposed to the automated consequence of an algorithm or quality filter.

Why do search engines constantly update their algorithms?

Search Engines update their algorithm because there are some fake SEO professionals who try to
find a loophole in a particular algorithm and thus use unfair ways to get rankings. Also, there are
some new technologies coming up which people really look to see over the internet and the
search engines try to make the job of people easier through algorithm updates. These algorithms
ensure that the search engines become a better place than ever.
Unit 4
A Google Penaltymeans trouble
A Google penalty means your site is either no longer listed on search results, or that your ranking
for your targeted keywords has dropped dramatically. When your site gets a Google penalty, your
target audience can't find you. And when you are invisible to your target audience, your traffic,
and ultimately revenue, drops.

It can happen to any website. A Google penalty can be the result of well- intended and honest
efforts to improve your site's ranking. But once you receive a Google penalty, it isn't easy getting
your good ranking back, and getting back into Google's good graces.

WebFX can help you recover from a Google penalty. We have a dedicated team that will review
your site and make the changes necessary to put you on the top of search engine results again.
Haven't received a Google penalty but want to be safe? Our expert internet marketers stay
abreast of Google's constantly changing algorithms so your site is always in good standing and
not in danger of dropping out of the search results.

As a leading Google penalty recovery service, we know what search engines like to see. Our
penalty recovery service is specifically designed to get you back into Google's good graces so
your website can show up in search results and your business can keep growing.

Why do sites get a Google Penalty?

Google's job is to provide the most relevant search results. From Google's point of view, any
website that tries to manipulate the search results is harming the Google product. Google
wouldn't be Google if it
returned unhelpful results, or gave its users a negative exprience, would it?

A Google penalty is the result of a highly evolved, constantly changing algorithm that Google
utilizes to crawl and inspect websites. While there are some specific actions that can result in
immediate penalties handed down by a Google employee, there are others not publicly
advertised, or some that can result in a reduction in rankings that happens over time. This is to
protect Google from websites trying to outsmart it, or further manipulate its results.

Googlepenalty triggers

To ensure your site doesn't receive a Google penalty, make sure your site does not have:

1. Spyware, adware, or viruses

2. Hidden links or text
3. Cloaking (displaying a different version of a webpage to the search engine robots)
4. Deceptive redirects
5. Pages loaded with irrelevant keywords
6. Keyword stuffing
 7. A substantial amount of duplicate content

The list of Google penalty triggers is extensive, but they can easily be summed up: penalties are
triggered by any action a website takes to fool a search engine or harm the user experience in
some way.
How can I recover from a Google Penalty?

Google penalty removal isn't always easy. It's important to know that there are two kinds of
penalties: manual and algorithmic.

Manual penalties are handed down by a Google employee. They're most often given when your
website is found to be doing something against Google's Terms of Service. This may include a
virus infection, cloaking, redirects, or buying links. When you receive a manual penalty, you will
need to make an appeal to Google to reindex your website—that is, put it back into the search
engine results—before anyone will be able to find you again.

On the other hand, an algorithmic penalty happens automatically, without manual intervention
from Google. These are often the result of an algorithm change designed to rank websites of
value higher than those with weaker content or relevance. Algorithmic penalties, like Panda,
Penguin, and Hummingbird, may impact websites that have thin or duplicate content, keyword-
stuffed copy, slow loading times, or a lack of incoming links. With this kind of penalty, you will
still be ranking in search, but probably much lower.

If you want to learn more about diagnosing and removing your penalty, you can read our expert's
guide to penalty recovery, which is an in-depth guide to this process. It will help you identify
your specific penalty and determine what actions you need to take to remove it.

Need help? If you're not sure what you're doing or where to start, WebFX's Google penalty
recovery services may be the best choice for you. Our professional team can identify and
reverse your penalty, allowing you to focus on running your business—not inspecting links or
rewriting copy.
How Does Google Hummingbird Work?

What is Google Hummingbird?

Google Hummingbird is a new search platform introduced in September 2013. This update
revolutionized Google search because it helped to bring meaning to the words that people were
typing in their queries. Instead of just matching vocabulary in the query to vocabulary in the
search results, the new algorithm works to understand the meaning of the query and match it
with relevant results.
With Hummingbird, Google took the meaning technology that helped to power earlier
advancements, such as the Knowledge Graph, and applied it to the billions of pages available
online.

Google gave a few examples of how Hummingbird impacted search. For example, if you
searched for ―pay your bills through citizens bank and trust bank‖ before the update, your search
would bring up the homepage for the bank. After Hummingbird, you receive the link directly for
the page about paying bills.

How does the Hummingbird update impact SEO?

The clearest impact of the Google Hummingbird update on SEO was a decreased focus on
keywords. It is no longer as important that the words you use in your content directly match the
words used in the person‘s query.

While some argued that this meant keywords were obsolete, really it just means that their
importance has shifted. Now, instead of writing content for specific keywords, you need to create
content that addresses particular topics. Keyword research, like the capabilities you have through
the BrightEdge Data Cube, remains important because it sheds light on the topics that people
search for the most. Performing this research will help you align your content creation process
with what your targeted customers want to see.
How do I optimize content for Google Hummingbird?

With the Hummingbird update, Google made it even more clear that their primary concern is the
experience of the end user. To properly optimize your content, therefore, you need to follow
these tips:

• Outline your targeted buyer personas and the journey they take towards a purchase.
• Use tools, like the Data Cube from BrightEdge, to research keywords and topics that
people are regularly looking for online.
• Create content that uses the keyword naturally throughout the piece, including in the H1
and H2 tags as well as the body. The keyword should also ideally be used in the alt tags
for images and in the meta description to make it very obvious to both prospective
visitors and to Google that your site is relevant for this particular topic.
• Use semantically related keywords occasionally in your content as well to further
demonstrate your relevance.
• Track metrics for your piece, including traffic, engagement, and impact on conversions
so you gain a more accurate look at how well your piece is reaching your targeted
audience and accomplishing your goals. This will help you modify and adjust your
strategies moving forward.

The Google Hummingbird algorithm was an important adjustment in the world of SEO because
it greatly impacted how the search engine interpreted websites and found the optimal results for
users. Brands that want to remain relevant should make sure that they understand how to
optimize for semantic search while creating content that adds value for the user.

What is Google Panda?

The stated purpose of the Google Panda algorithm update was to reward high-quality websites
and diminish the presence of low-quality websites in Google‘s organic search engine results. It
was also initially known as "Farmer." According to Google, Panda‘s initial rollout over the
course of several months affected up to 12 percent of English language search results. We've
tracked 28 data updates to Panda between 2011 and 2015.

Triggers for Panda

The Panda algorithm update addressed a number of problematic phenomena in Google SERPs,
including:

• Thin content - Weak pages with very little relevant or substantive text and resources,
such as a set of pages describing a variety of health conditions with only a few sentences
present on each page.
• Duplicate content - Copied content that appears on the Internet in more than one place.
Duplicate content issues can also happen on your own website when you have multiple
pages featuring the same text with little or no variation. For example, a chimney sweep
company might create 10 pages, one for each city the business serves, with content that is
nearly identical on all of the pages with only the city names swapped out (e.g. ―We
clean chimneys in Denver‖ on one page and ―We clean chimneys in Boulder‖ on the
next, and ―We clean chimneys in Aspen‖ on the next).
• Low-quality content - Pages that provide little value to human readers because they lack
in-depth information.
• Lack of authority/trustworthiness - Content produced by sources that are not
considered definitive or verified. A Google rep
stated that sites aiming to avoid Panda‘s impact should work to become recognized as
authorities on their topic and entities to which a human user would feel comfortable
giving their credit card information.
• Content farming - Large numbers of low-quality pages, often aggregated from other
websites. For example, of a content farm might be a website that employs large numbers
of writers at a low wage to create short articles covering a vast variety of search engine
queries, producing a body of content that lacks authority and value to readers because its
core purpose is simply to gain search engine rankings for every conceivable term.
• Low-quality user-generated content (UGC) - An example of this type of low-value
User Generated Content would be a blog that publishes guest blog posts that are short,
full of spelling and grammatical errors and lacking in authoritative information.
• High ad-to-content ratio - Pages made up mostly of paid advertising rather than original
content.
What is Google Penguin?

Google Penguin Initial Release Date: April 24, 2012

Following on the heels of Panda, the Penguin update was announced by Google as a new effort
to reward high-quality websites and diminish the search engine results page (SERP) presence of
websites that engaged in manipulative link schemes and keyword stuffing.

The initial rollout of Penguin impacted 3.1% of English language search engine queries. Between
2012 and 2016, the filter went through 10 documented updates, evolving over time and
influencing the SEO community‘s understanding of the problematic practices Penguin sought to
address. As of early 2017, Penguin is now part of Google‘s core algorithm.

Triggers for Penguin

Penguin targeted two specific practices:

• Link schemes - The development, acquisition or purchase of backlinks from low-quality

or unrelated websites, creating an artificial picture of popularity and relevance in an
attempt to manipulate Google into bestowing high rankings. For example, an insurance
company in Tampa could fill Internet forums with spam comments linking to itself as
―best insurance company in Tampa‖, falsely inflating its appearance of relevance with
these unnatural links. Or, the same company might pay to have links reading ―best
insurance company in Tampa‖ appear on an unrelated third-party article about dog
grooming; content that has no relationship to the topic.
• Keyword stuffing - Populating a webpage with large numbers of keywords or repetitions
of keywords in an attempt to manipulate rank via the appearance of relevance to specific
search phrases. For example, an unnatural repetition of keywords on a given page might
look like:

“AAA Locksmith in Denver, CO is the locksmith in Denver that Denver residents trust when they
need a Denver locksmith to quickly help them with their Denver locksmith needs.”

Or, the hypothetical locksmith in Denver might stick a large block of city names on one of his
website‘s pages, like:
We serve Denver, Thornton, Boulder, Lakewood, Arvada, Thornton, Henderson, Centennial,
Morrison, Golden, Aurora, Lone Tree, Castle Pines, Roxborough, Aspen, Conifer, Eldorado
Springs, Lafayette, Watkins, Altona, Longmont, Dacono, Ponderosa Park, Hudson, Coal Creek
and Jamestown.
How can I discover if I‘ve been hit by Penguin?
First, it‘s important to differentiate between Penguin and a manual penalty for unnatural linking.
In brief, Penguin is a Google index filter applicable to all websites, whereas a manual penalty is
specific to a single website that Google has determined to be spamming. These manual penalties
may be the result of a given website being reported by Google users for spam, and it‘s also
speculated that Google may manually monitor some industries (like payday loan companies)
more than others (like cupcake bakeries).
If your website‘s analytics show a drop in rankings or traffic on a date associated with a Penguin
update, then you may have been affected by this filter. Be sure you‘ve ruled out expected traffic
fluctuations from phenomena like seasonality (for instance, a Christmas tree farm in April), and
carefully evaluate whether your keyword optimization or linking practices would be deemed
spammy by Google, making your site vulnerable to an update like Penguin.
How to recover from Penguin

Unlike a manual link penalty, for which you must file a reconsideration request with Google
once you‘ve cleaned house, you do not file such a request to have a Penguin penalty lifted.
Rather, taking action to remedy problems will often earn ‗forgiveness‘ the next time Googlebot
comes to crawl your site. These recovery steps include:

• The removal of any unnatural links over which you have control, including links you‘ve
built yourself or have caused to be placed on 3rd party websites
• The disavowal of spammy links that you can‘t control
• The revision of your website‘s content to remedy over- optimization, ensuring that
keywords have been implemented naturally instead of robotically, repetitively or
nonsensically on pages where this is no relationship between the topic and the keywords
being used

In sum, Penguin was created to remedy a severe weakness in Google‘s system that enabled their
algorithm to be ‗tricked‘ by large numbers of low quality links and the keyword over-
optimization of pages. To avoid having your website devalued by Google for spam practices, all
content you publish should reflect natural language, and your link-earning-and- building
practices must be deemed ―safe.‖

Other facts about the Penguin update

• Penguin was initially launched as a separate ―filter‖ through which search results were
passed, but in September of 2016, Google announced that Penguin had become part of
the core search engine ranking algorithm.
• Google staffer John Mueller called Penguin a site-wide algorithm, meaning that the
presence of a large number of low-quality links pointing to one page of your website
could result in a reduction of Google‘s trust in your entire website. However, some SEOs
have asserted that by the iteration of Penguin 4.0, the filter may have softened a bit so
that it is no longer penalizing entire domains.

• EMD stands for Exact Match Domains. The exact match domains update is a new filter
aimed at ensuring that low-quality websites do not attain a high Page Rank (PR) and rise
high in Google‘s SERPs (search engine results pages) just because such websites have the
relevant search term in the domain names. Google states that EMD, like the other filters
(Google Panda and Google Penguin), will be updated regularly.
Unit 5
 Module 5
Local SEO & SEO Project Essentials
Local SEO & SEO Project Essentials: Google places optimization, Classified submissions, Citation, NAP,
Top tools for SEO, Monitoring SEO process, Preparing SEO reports, Create SEO Strategy for your business,
link juice, Importance of domain and page authority
Local SEO & SEO Project Essentials
What is local SEO?
• Local SEO is the process of optimizing your online presence to increase local traffic, visibility, and
brand awareness.
Common tasks include:
• Optimizing your Google Business profile
• Finding local keywords
• Creating locally relevant content.
• Any business that has a physical location or serves a geographic area can benefit from local SEO.
• Proximity, prominence, and relevance are the three pillars of local search.
• Local SEO employs a wide array of technical and creative efforts to convince search engines that a
business should be prominent in their results as a relevant answer to online searchers in
close proximity to each business location.

How local SEO Works

Local search algorithm uses three factors to help find the best match:
• Relevance (how closely related a result is to the words a searcher uses in their query)
• Distance (how far Google believes a user is to a business when they search)
 • Prominence (how important Google thinks a business is to its competitors)
For example, when you search for “nutritionist miami,” Google displays a local pack at the very top of the
results

With regular search results

For example, if you were in Los Angeles and searched for “barber shops,” Google would still display a local
pack for Los Angeles barber shops.
How To Find Keywords for Local SEO?
• Keyword research for local SEO is the process of finding keywords that people use when searching for
local products and services.
• Research Your Competitors-Seeing what your competitors are doing is an easy way to start
gathering ideas.
• Use Google Autocomplete- Its purpose is to save users time by predicting what they’re going to
search for.
• Google’s Keyword Planner- helps research keywords for paid search campaigns.
Local SEO tools help you:
• Automate rank tracking.
• Conduct local keyword research.
• Discover competitor insights.
• Monitor performance.
Google places optimization
• When someone searches for a business or place near their location, they’ll find local results across
Google in places like Maps and Search.It offer potential customers complete, accurate, and meaningful
information about your local business at the exact moment they’re searching for services or products
that you sell can lead to more traffic and sales
• Google places for business is a service that helps business owners share information about their stores,
products, and geographic locations with interested shoppers when those shoppers search for products
or types of businesses.

1. Follow the Google Places Quality Guidelines

 1. The first step in optimizing your Google Places listing is making sure you meet Google's quality
guidelines.
2. This is the basic information Google wants to see in place and the foundation for creating a good
listing.
3. Represent your business accurately online and offline
4. Use precise location information
2. Complete All Information (Even if it is Not Required)
• Make sure that you are filling out all standard information including:
• Company Name
• Address
• Phone Number
• Website
• Email Address
• Adding additional elements to your page such as photos or videos are also an opportunity to optimize
your content
3. Encourage Interaction & Reviews
• User generated content can be a very powerful optimization tool. Actual customers may be using
additional or different keywords or phrases to describe their experience with you. Reviews also add
validity to your statements and information written by your company. Nothing speaks higher of a
company than the testimonials of it’s customers.Posting video testimonials on your Google Places
page.Encourage clients to upload photos of themselves at your establishment or with your team
4. Local Keywords
• Including relevant and purposeful keywords in your Google Place profile is a strategic way to increase
optimization.
• However, you will want to avoid over stuffing your description with keywords or utilizing keywords in
your business name that are not relevant to your offering.
• Do your research up front utilizing your analytics account to determine what keywords are appropriate
for your business.Use keywords in your file names to improve optimization.Update your information
frequently to provide fresh content
5. Write Meaningful Descriptions
• When the user does see a business description, you want that description to be persuasive and drive
clicks.The goal then should be to convey your core value proposition to the customer and to think of
click throughs rather than focusing on stuffing keywords.
• Google is already using your geography and the categories that you selected to decide which Places
listings to show in response to a particular search query, so use this opportunity to communicate with
words that speak directly to your potential customer and position your business as the solution to their
problems.
6. Write Meaningful Descriptions
 • When the user does see a business description, you want that description to be persuasive and drive
clicks.The goal then should be to convey your core value proposition to the customer and to think of
click throughs rather than focusing on stuffing keywords.
• Google is already using your geography and the categories that you selected to decide which Places
listings to show in response to a particular search query, so use this opportunity to communicate with
words that speak directly to your potential customer and position your business as the solution to their
problems.
7. Include Rich Content

• consider adding as much rich content — pictures and video primarily makes sense to communicate
what your store sells and why it is special. Also, the higher quality images and video you can provide,
the better.
• You can also include other content like special offers, coupon codes, recent blog posts, or updates
from Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, or Google+.
Classified submissions:
What is classified submission in SEO?
This is another tool of SEO that can help in getting the rank of the keyword in the search results. In these
advertisements are posted on third party channels that have links and other relevant details about the
website and the business that you are promoting.
classified submission is an excellent method of online promotion.Classified submission is
basically considered as a process through which you can post ad campaign over classified submission
sites.This process enhances the visibility of your product or services in front of search engines.This
process also boost your business because people become aware about your services. classified submission
involves off-page SEO process for boosting the website traffic and ranking.This is one of the best ways by
which many of the targeted customers get to your website by clicking on the link provided on the free
classified sites in India. Classified submitting websites offers high quality backlinks apart from giving
you referral traffic.
Ex:
https://www.olx.in
https://www.quikr.com
How to submit ads on classified submission sites?
 Ways to do classified submission?
• Choose to be relevant with the category you choose for your ad.Make sure to add the contact details of
your business.Provide full information about your business by uploading logo, business name, contact
details etc.
• Don’t miss any chance to get a high-quality backlink for your website.Avoid filling up the form with
the help of any software, fill it yourself.
• Remember to renew the ad before they expire.
• Fix a call-to-action button which will serve your customers to connect with you easily.
What are the benefits of ads posting sites?
• Posting ads for your website on these free classified submission sites in India have many benefits.
• You can get to promote your website to get visible on the internet without spending a single
penny.Increasing rate in sales and gradually succeeding profits.Posting classified ads gives you result
instantly.
• If you are going to look for a paid classified then you will stop receiving traffic the second your ad
disappeared from the site. So it is advised to use a free classified ads posting sites.
• If you use a catchy headline it can give you a long-term benefit by giving you more traffic.
• This process helps to generate more leads and click rate.This increases the online presence and
popularity as well.
Citation:
What are Local Search Citations?
• Local citations are a key foundational factor for local SEO. In local search engine optimization (SEO),
citations are your business’s name, address, and phone number (commonly referred to as NAP) on a
website
• Google’s local algorithm always tries to return the best local businesses for each local query.Sites are
returned based on their relevance and prominence, and citations are a key factor for relevance.
This is known as a NAP citation because it shows the shop’s name, address, and phone number.

Why are citations important?

Citations are useful for two main things:
• Ranking higher for local search queries (maybe)
• Helping people discover your business online
Working of citation
• citations help Google verify that you’re actually located where your website says you’re located. As
Google crawls the internet and sees that a number of different reputable sites list the same business
information, including your NAP (name, address and phone) details, it’ll learn to view you as a
legitimate local business.
• With that increased trust comes a higher likelihood that Google will show your business in its local
search results.As the algorithm sees your NAP details being listed on more local sites, it’ll begin to
equate your number of listings with the prominence and popularity of your business. This can also lead
to increased local rankings.
Types of citations
1) Structured citations
A structured citation lists the name, address, and phone number (NAP) of a business. Directory listings
and social media profiles are good examples
2) Unstructured citations
An unstructured citation is a contextual mention of a business. They usually show up in blog posts, forum
posts, or as a result of press mentions.
Unstructured Citation
 NAP
• NAP is an acronym for Name, Address, and Phone number.
• The NAP for your business needs to be correct and consistent when optimizing your website and
online presence for local search because Google values accurate information for its users.
Importance of NAP for Local SEO:
▪ Correct NAP for all your listings across the internet is crucial for local SEO.
▪ Google scans all these listings when searching for information about your business.
▪ The data is stored and used when determining ranking.
▪ Incorrect information in NAP citations can lead to confusion for customers and a poor user experience.
What problems can arise if incorrect NAP listings are published?
• When all your listings say the same thing, Google can confidently display your contact information to
customers on applicable queries.
• When the search engine finds discrepancies in the listings, then it is not sure of the information.
• Since incorrect information can lead to a poor user experience, differences in NAP between your
listings can cause lower rankings.
Top Tools for SEO:
Why we Use SEO Tools?
• SEO tools save you from tedious keyword research and data analysis.The best SEO tools also provide
reports about how you measure up to competitors and allow you to measure search performance
countries, regions, or languages.
• If you’re managing more than one website, SEO tools can help you assess each site’s performance on
the fly. Many entrepreneurs with multiple websites end up putting a lot of data in spreadsheets and
analyzing it manually.
• But that soon becomes overwhelming and raises the risk of the reports being inaccurate.Fortunately,
you can use SEO software to save hours of effort and generate accurate reports at a click.
SEO TOOLS
1) Ahrefs
• Ahrefs is an SEO software suite that contains tools for link building, keyword research, competitor
analysis, rank tracking and site audits. Small business owners that do SEO for their own websitesThe
tool highlights what parts of your website need improvements to rank better in search engines. From
a competitor analysis perspective, you’ll likely use Ahrefs to determine your competitor’s backlinks to
use them as a starting point for your own brand. Ahrefs is an advanced SEO resource that examines
your website property and produces keyword, link, and ranking profiles to help you make better
decisions on your content.
Some of Ahrefs' main features are:
• Site Explorer: Shows you the performance of specific webpages on your website.
• Content Explorer: This allows you to search high-performing webpages under specific keywords and
topics.
• Keywords Explorer: Generates the monthly search volume and click-through rates of specific
keywords.
• Site Audit: Crawls specified verticals within your domain and reveals a number of technical issues at
the page level.
2) SEMrush
• SEMrush let you easily assess your rankings as well as identify changes and new ranking
opportunities.
• One of the most popular features is the Domain Vs Domain analysis, which allows you to easily
compare your website to your competitors.
• If you’re looking for analytics reports to help you better understand your website’s search data, traffic,
or even your competitors, you’ll be able to compare keywords and domains.
• The On-Page SEO Checker tool allows you to easily monitor your rankings and find some
recommendations on how to improve your website’s performance.
SEMrush also allows you to:
• Build links: Analyze backlinks from other websites to your site.
• Use the Keyword Magic tool: Identify all keywords you need to successfully build an SEO strategy.
• See your competitors' strategies: Identify the paid keywords or ad copy used in the PPC ads of your
competition.
• Receive recommendations: See how you can increase your organic traffic by optimizing your
content.
3) Google Search Console
• lets you monitor and report on your website’s presence in Google SERP.
• All you need to do is verify your website by adding a code to your website or going through Google
Analytics and you can submit your sitemap for indexing.
• As an SEO checker tool, Search Console can help you understand how Google and its users view your
website and allow you to optimize for better performance in Google search results.
• It’s especially useful for new websites as it lets site owners submit web pages for search indexing.
• Monitors, debugs, and optimizes your website.
• Google Search Console will help you optimize:
• Keywords: Learn about the keywords your webpages are currently ranking for.
• Crawl Errors: Identify any crawl errors that exist on your website.
• Mobile Responsiveness: Understand how mobile-friendly your website is and discover opportunities
to improve the mobile experience for your users.
• Google Index: See how many of your web pages are in Google’s Index
• Analytics and Metrics: The website-related metrics that matter most to you, like clicks, impressions,
average click-through rate (CTR).
4) KWFinder
• An SEO keyword tool like KWFinder helps you find long-tail keywords that have a lower level of
competition.
 • The experts use this SEO tool to find the best keywords and run analysis reports on backlinks and
SERP (Search Engine Results Page).
• Their Rank Tracker tool helps you easily determine your ranking while tracking your improvement
based on one key metric.
• Some of the features KWFinder include:
• Hidden long tail keyword insights: Find long tail keywords that give you more opportunities to
acquire traffic.
• Competitor keyword insights: See how your competitor's keyword strategy compares to your own,
plus find more keyword opportunities.
• SERP analysis tool: Analyze competition in the SERP to understand what elements readers are
looking for on your pages.
• Local keyword research tool: See what searchers are looking for locally.
5) SpyFu
• You can easily view the number of times a keyword gets searched each month while easily
determining the ranking difficulty for that keyword.
• You can also do some research on your competitors to determine which keywords they use.
• Additionally, you can search your competitor’s, or your own, website to easily see how many organic
keywords they have, how many monthly clicks they get, who they paid and organic competitors and
more.
• It’s one of the most detailed SEO analysis tools on the market.
6. Ubersuggest
• is a free keyword finder tool that helps you identify keywords and also the search intent behind them
by showing the top ranking SERPs From short to long-tail phrases,
• you can find the right terms to use on your website with hundreds of suggestions from this free great
keyword tool.
• Metrics Ubersuggest includes in its reports are keyword volume, competition and CPC.
• Great for both organic SEO and paid PPC, this tool can help you determine if a keyword is worth
targeting and how competitive it is.
Monitoring SEO process
• SEO monitoring is the act of monitoring visibility and ranking of your website and overall brand
on search engines and discovering what you can do to improve them.
• By conducting SEO monitoring, you'll know where you stand when it comes to: Organic traffic
Why is SEO Monitoring Important?
• Improve Your SEO Rankings
• Identify What’s Right about your Website
• Alert You Where You Need to Make Improvements
 • Monitor the Competition
• Avoid Penalties
1. Traffic flow
• Monitoring the SEO process starts with keeping tabs on your level of visibility from the search engine
results page (SERP).
• The amount of organic traffic you receive from ranking is significant evidence of your strategy’s
impact on users.
• To view changes in traffic flow, you can take advantage of one of the most effective SEO monitoring
tools, Google Analytics.
• Google Analytics’ custom alerts allow you to set up notifications for specific percentages of decreased
traffic.
2. Bounce rate
• The bounce rate— the measure of people who leave your site while only visiting a single page — is an
instrumental metric, because it shows how enthralling your site is for visitors.
• Since it’s the percentage of exiting visitors after a one-page session, a low bounce rate is ideal for
SEO, especially if you want to guide users toward a conversion that requires continued navigation.
• For instance, your page load speed could be slowing down, which encourages impatient visitors to run
back to the SERPs.
• When you receive an alert about a high bounce rate, you can perform an SEO audit to hone in on your
problem areas.
3. Click-through rate
• To oversee how effective your title and meta description are, you can reference the click-through rate
(CTR).
• The CTR reflects the percentage of users that see your result in the SERPs and click on it — so it’s a
good indication of your initial SEO entry point.
• If your title seems to answer the core question, users are more likely to skip higher ranked sites and
push your CTR higher.
• In Search Console, the CTR is limited to organic search results, rather than in Analytics, which uses
paid results in the CTR
• This SEO monitoring tool matches closely with organic growth.
4. Conversion rate
• Monitoring the SEO process through your conversion rate ties in with your ability to turn site visitors
into customers.
• In Google Analytics, the conversions section is one of the five major reports, and it has a detailed
breakdown of options and data visualization.
• Ecommerce stores particularly need conversion rate tracking to regulate the steady income of revenue
from their SEO optimization.
 5. Site exit points
• The pages that are lacking interesting information and useful data likely become the places visitors exit
on your site. In other cases, your visitors may simply be following links embedded in your
content.Depending on where, when, and why your page visitors leave, you can formulate a plan to
make most of their sessions and capitalize on their presence at these drop-off positions.
• Look into which pages have high percentages of exits if you want to direct visitors to a deeper place on
your site or a conversion.Exit points from certain pages are found under Google Analytics’ Behavior in
the Site Content section.
• You can also view the links that take people away from your site from the Events and Event Labels
sections.
• Referring visitors to other sites can be a reasonable move, but you need to understand if that’s
hindering your business.Examine what’s attracting them to other sites, and see whether you can
provide that service or resource from your site.
6. Crawling
• After Google has indexed your site — which you can request on the URL Inspection tool— your SEO
strategy will probably lead you to make edits, changes, and additions to your pages.
• You want to put your site’s best face forward, so it’s helpful to get Google to recognize any substantial
modifications and rank your pages accordingly.
• Recrawling allows Google to find the updates and display them with a deserving ranking in the
SERPs.
• Google Search Console lets you know the number of pages that Google has crawled. You can see the
number of pages that Google crawls regularly for the last 90 days
• Google has a crawl rate limit -If crawling slows down your server speed, you can set the maximum
number of times Google can crawl your site if the Googlebot is requesting to crawl it too many times
per second.
Preparing SEO reports:
• An SEO report is an integral part of your marketing strategy.
• Whether you work in an agency or in-house, a good SEO report is necessary to ensure that
stakeholders (usually your client or manager) can easily measure the performance and ROI of various
SEO activities.
• A quality SEO report is a concise and detailed summary of your website’s SEO performance.
• You can track everything from who visited your website and clicked your campaigns to where the user
lives and which links they clicked on.
• By creating an SEO report, you can see your website’s SEO health, the performance of your SEO
activities, and key areas to gain valuable insights that shape your future SEO strategies.
Why to prepare SEO Report?
• Most SEO analysts don’t have time to spend hours on manually creating SEO reports in spreadsheets.
So, they use a quick and better alternative SEO report templates.
• Preparing an SEO report has three-fold benefits: offers solutions to readers, helps build trust with your
clients, and improves your expertise.
• The primary goal of creating an SEO report is to understand what people are searching for online, the
words they’re using, the solutions they’re looking for, and the type of content they wish to consume.
• Once you understand the intent of your target audience, you can improve your website’s SEO and
connect to the people who are searching online for solutions you offer.
• The main features you need to remember while preparing an SEO report are:
• It should be easy and quick to create.
• It should be easy to read, but also detailed.
• It should give you an overview of your previous campaigns.
• It should give actionable insights that help you drive future SEO activities.
1.KPIs

•
Depending on your client’s goals, set the right KPIs.
• By clearly defining the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and giving context about why you’re
reporting them, you can conclusively demonstrate how you’re helping your client to make continuous
progress.
• For example, if you’re writing content or creating new pages for your client, you might want to focus
on the data related to those specific landing pages.
Important SEO KPIs you should include in your SEO report:
• Links
• Site Ranking
• Organic Search Traffic
• Organic Conversion Rate
• Inbound Marketing ROI
• Sales Revenue
• Page and Domain Authority
Step 2: Prepare a Site Health Report
• A website’s overall health has a huge impact on SEO.
• Page loading time, broken links, bounce rate and session duration are some of the metrics that impact
site rankings.
Here are the most important metrics you must include in your site health report:
• Indexed pages
• Site speed
• AMP elements
• Schema markup
• Server response time
• Crawl errors
• Missing or duplicate meta tags
• Page crawled per day
• Bad redirects
• Time spent downloading pages
• Security issues
• Domain authority and page authority
• URL Structure
• You can check the health of your website with tools like Ubersuggest, Woorank and SEO Site
Checkup.
Step 3:Organic Traffic

• Clearly mention which specific pages are getting more — or less — organic traffic, so your clients
know how your SEO efforts have had a positive or negative impact on their ranking.
few things you must include in your organic traffic section:
• Organic channel report (Google vs. Bing vs. Yahoo)
• Pageviews
• Pages per session
• Time spent on page and average session duration
• Organic visits by location and device
• New vs. returning visitors
• Organic CTR
• Bounce rate
• Scroll depth
• Exit rate and top exit pages
• The number of shares/comments
• Goal conversion and event tracking
• Consider giving a segmented view of the organic traffic across different areas of the website -
homepage, product, feature, blog, and landing pages.
• Ahrefs lets you filter incoming traffic by country so you can see where most of your traffic comes
from. You can compare week-over-week, month-over-month, and year-for-year performance for each
category, group, or page.
SEMrush lets you track the number of new users, the click-through rate, new sessions, pages/session,
bounce rate, rankings and several other metrics for your organic search traffic

Step 4: Prepare an Organic Conversions Report

• When preparing an organic conversions report, you’ll want to tell your client how their site was
performing before as well as what the current status is.
here are a few metrics you must include in your organic conversions report:
• Organic sales
• The number of form fills and calls
• New visitor conversion rate
• Returning visitor conversion rate
Step 5: Backlinks

• Maintaining a healthy backlink profile is one of the biggest challenges SEO professionals face.
• Mention how many backlinks the site has gained or lost recently, what were the results of
your backlinking campaigns (if any), and how do you plan to acquire more backlinks.
Here are a few things you must include in your backlink analysis section:
• Link distribution ratio
• The number of links acquired in the past 30 days
• The quality of the links you acquired
• Percentage of exact match anchor text
• The ratio of the backlink to referring domains
• Number of any links were lost
Step 6: Prepare a Ranking Report
• When preparing a ranking report, mention how many keywords your client’s website is ranking for
and how these keywords are performing in terms of engagement.
• When creating the ranking report with Agency Analytics, you can add your agency’s logo, choose
your color scheme, and even create a custom URL for your clients.
Step 7: Prepare a Featured Snippets/Voice Search Report
• This is the year that 50% of all searches will be voice searches. Therefore, preparing a voice search
report is crucial.
• Google Search Console doesn’t provide any report for voice searches yet, you can still identify voice
queries: those queries that are longer, have a conversational tone are in a proper question format.
• For example, when typing, a user may use a query like “featured snippet,” but when performing a
voice search, the user may say “what is a featured snippet?”
Step 8: Prepare a Site Content Report
• When preparing the site content report, highlight the best- and worst-performing content, as well as
what you’re doing to improve the performance of the content on the website.
Here are a few things you must include in your site content report:
• Reach
• New visits
• Inbound links
• Social shares
• Comments
• The percentage of repeat customers
• Churn rate
• Conversion rate
Create SEO Strategy for your business
• An SEO strategy (also referred to as “SEO approach”) is the process of planning and implementing
steps designed to improve organic search engine rankings.
• Essentially, it is the process you follow in order to maximize the opportunity to gain organic traffic
from search engines.
• Instead of just creating what you think people are looking for, your strategy will ensure that you’re
creating content that people are searching for.
There are three types of SEO that an SEO strategist can focus on:
• On-page SEO: This SEO focuses on the content that's actually on site pages, and how to optimize it to
boost the website's ranking for specific keywords.
• Off-page SEO: This SEO focuses on links directed to the website from elsewhere on the internet. The
number of backlinks a site has from reputable sources helps you build trust with search algorithms.
Technical SEO: This SEO focuses on a website's backend architecture, like site code. so this position is
important for rankings.
• Every business has different objectives, so it is an SEO’s job to examine their industry, determine what
their audiences care about, and develop a strategy that gives them what they’re looking for.
• Make a list of keywords.
• Make a list of long-tail keywords based on these topics.
• Build pages for each topic.
• Set up a blog.
• Create a consistent blogging schedule.
• Create a link-building plan.
• Compress media files before uploading them to your site.
• Stay up-to-date on SEO news and best practices.
• Measure and track your content's success.
Step #1: Create a List of Keywords
• Keyword research is usually the first step of any legit SEO strategy.
• And one of the best ways to find keywords that your target customers search for?
Google Suggest.
• Start typing a keyword into Google’s search field, and it will populate a list of suggestions:
2. Make a list of long-tail keywords based on these topics.
• Use your long-tail keywords to create blog posts or web pages that explain the specific topics within
the pillars you’ve selected.
• Together, all of your long-tail keywords create a cluster around a pillar topic.
Search engine algorithms depend on the relationships between clusters to connect users with the
information they're looking for.

3. Build pages for each topic

• Number of topics for which you create pillar pages should coincide with your business needs, like the
number of products and offerings you have.
• This will make it much easier for your prospects and customers to find you in search engines no matter
what keywords they use.
4. Set up a blog.
• Blogging can be an incredible way to rank for keywords and engage your website's users.
• After all, every blog post is a new web page and an additional opportunity to rank in SERPs.
• If your business does not already have a blog, consider creating one.
• As you write each blog post and expand on your clusters, you should do three things:
• Don't include your long-tail keyword more than three or four times throughout the page
• Second, always link out to the pillar page you created for your topics.
• Once you publish each blog post, link to it within the parent pillar page that supports the subtopic.
5.Create a consistent blogging schedule.
Every blog post or web page you create doesn’t necessarily need to belong to a topic cluster. There's
also value in writing about tangential topics your customers care about to build authority with the
Google algorithms.
With that in mind, make it a point to blog at least once a week. Remember, you are blogging primarily
for your audience, not search engines, so study your target market and write about things that they
are interested in.
It may be helpful to create a content strategy to remain consistent and focused on your goals.

6. Create a link-building plan.

While our first five steps were dedicated to on-page SEO, link-building is the primary objective of off-
page SEO.
Link-building is the process of attracting inbound links (also called backlinks) to your website from
other sources on the internet.
As a general rule, sites with more authority that link back to your content have a more significant
impact on your rankings.
7. Compress media files before uploading them to your site.

This is a small but important step in the SEO process, especially for mobile optimization.
As your blog or website grows, you'll undoubtedly have more images, videos, and related media to
support your content.
These visual assets help retain your visitors' attention, but it's easy to forget that these files can be very
large. Since page speed is a crucial ranking factor, it’s important to monitor the size of the media files
you upload to your site.
The bigger the file size, the more difficult it is for an internet browser to render your website. It’s also
harder for mobile browsers to load these images, as the bandwidth on their devices is significantly
smaller. So, the smaller the file size, the faster your website will load.
Sites like TinyPNG compress images in bulk, while Google's Squoosh can shrink image files to
microscopic sizes.
8. Stay up-to-date on SEO news and best practices.
Like marketing, the search engine landscape is ever-evolving.
Staying on top of current trends and best practices is an important strategy, and there are multiple
online resources that can help you do so.
Here are a few resources to check out:
Moz
SEOBook
Search Engine Roundtable
Search Engine Land
 9. Measure and track your content's success
SEO can take a lot of time and effort, and, because of this, you’ll want to know if your strategy works.
It’s important to track your metrics to understand the success of your overall process, and identify
possible areas for improvement.
You can monitor organic traffic using your preferred web analytics tool or create your own dashboard
using Excel or Google Sheets. Also, tracking indexed pages, conversions, ROI, and your rankings on
SERPs can help you recognize your success as well as identify areas of opportunity.
Link juice
• Link juice is a term in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) that refers to the amount of authority or
value that one backlink passes to the website it connects with.
• In the SEO industry, link juice is also called “link equity”.
• Backlinks from websites with higher authority and relevance on a topic will generate more link juice
and help a page rank better on the search engine results page (SERP).
• More link juice (link equity) your page has, the better chance it has of ranking for its target keywords
in Google and other search engines.

Sculpting link juice

• You used to be able to use nofollow links to preserve the loss of link juice through outbound links.
This process was known as PageRank sculpting. This was to manipulate the way link juice moved
from the page.
• In the previous diagram, you will see that with dofollow links (links that are not nofollowed) the
transfer of link juice is equally distributed to all the outgoing links from a website.
• PageRank sculpting was possible when a webmaster added a no follow attribute to one of the outgoing
links, which meant that the link juice would not transfer to the page that is no followed but would be
distributed to the other links.

• The site distributes its link juice to all three sites equally, the difference is that the nofollowed link
doesn't receive it.
• The dilution or leaking of link juice from your home page to nofollow links on your footer or sidebar.
• A good and widely used practice is to stop the flow of link juice to spam comments and links posted
on blogs with a nofollow attribute.
 • On the contrary, when it comes to internal links on a site, it is a good practice to allow a natural flow
of link juice rather than controlling it with nofollow attributes.
• The link juice obtained and distributed within your site keeps your inner pages popular on the web as
well as your homepage. This collectively enhances the PageRank of your home page.

How Do I Get Link Juice?

• Pages that have content relevant to your site.
• Pages that have a high PageRank.
• Pages that have relatively few outbound links.
• Pages that contain quality content.
• Pages that appear high in SERPs.
• Pages that have user-generated content.
• Pages that are popular with social media audiences, i.e. they are mentioned often in social media.
Link juice doesn't come from
• Pages that have nofollowed the link to your site.
• Pages with irrelevant content.
• Pages that have a lot of links; for example, ad links or site-wide links.
• Pages that are not indexed in search.
• Paid links.
• Links obtained in a link exchange scheme. (This is where you link to someone’s site in return for a link
to your site, which essentially cancels the impact.)
• Links from unranked sites with no content.
Importance of domain and page authority:
• Page Authority (PA) is a score developed by Moz that predicts how well a specific page will rank on
search engine result pages (SERP)
• Page Authority is based on data from our web index and takes into account dozens of factors.
• We score Page Authority on a 100-point logarithmic scale.
Page Authority vs. Domain Authority
• Page Authority measures the predictive ranking strength of a single page, Domain Authority measures
the strength of entire domains or subdomains.
• The metrics are, however, calculated using the same methodology — so in many ways, they're more
alike than they are different.
• Like Domain Authority, Page Authority is calculated using a machine learning algorithm and thus will
fluctuate as the data being fed into the algorithm changes.
• The best way to influence a page's Authority is to improve its link profile.
• This can be accomplished by getting external links from other high-authority pages, which in turn act
as "votes of confidence" for the authority of your page
• “PageRank,” an algorithm created by Google’s Larry Page and designed to measure the quality and
authority of a specific web page based on the number, quality, and relevance of links pointing to it.
Domain Authority Strategies and Effects
• It’s impossible to objectively increase your domain authority directly or suddenly,
• but these tactics can improve your position over time:
• Create lots of high-quality content on your website with a tight internal linking structure.
• Work on earning lots of high-quality inbound links, both in terms of external source authority and link
relevance (these can point to any page).
• Remove any bad links pointing to your site (any page).
• Give yourself time; domain authority increases slowly.
• With these practices, you’ll slowly and steadily increase your domain authority. With a higher
domain authority, all pages (including all your subdomains) will have a higher chance of ranking
for relevant queries.
• Domain authority offers a lot of flexibility in terms of how, where, and when you create content
and links.
Page Authority: Strategies and Effects
some of the ways you can influence page authority:
• Create a page on a domain with a high authority.
• Ensure the content of your chosen page is highly detailed, relevant, and original.
• Make sure your page is fully functional and optimized for SEO.
• Include internal linking to and from the page.
• Earn lots of high-quality inbound links, both in terms of external source authority and link relevance
(these must point to your chosen page).
• Remove any bad links pointing to your site (chosen page).
• Domain authority and page authority also have a mutually beneficial relationship; building more links
to your individual pages will have the effect of raising your domain authority, and raising your domain
authority in general will increase the page authority of your individual pages.
• Page authority also builds faster than domain authority,
• Domain authority deserves more attention and prioritization than page authority. Because it’s a bigger,
longer-term investment.
• Overall Website Performance Requires Both
• How to Check Domain Authority or Page Authority
• The first step is to check out the Domain SEO Analysis Tool. Once you navigate here, simply type in
the website you’re interested in researching and hit the Analyze Domain button.